There have been Intrepids in the US Navy as well, the latest examples being aircraft carriers.
Actually a good name for a Vulcan vessel when you think about it (Intrepid = Fearless). Maybe they translated it into Vulcan for their own use…
Maybe the Vulcans didn’t have much interest in actual ship names. Naming objects to personify them seems more like something those flaky, emotional humans would do. Further a ship name is arbritary? I could see a stoic Vulcan eyebrow popping up “Why do you conclude this ship is fearless, but that one is a Terran equine experiencing unsound mental health?”.
Ships might have human centric names because they were only named to humor the humans.
Some blame can probably be laid at the officers over him, and their implementation of the budget priorities imposed on them. Considering the massive political, theological, and security issues distracting them, Kira and Sisko weren’t exactly that engaged with managing the engineers. So it’s not clear how much Miles was a bad teacher (which seems most likely) and how much his department’s management interfered with him training a good backup.
But mostly it’s teh writers trying to puff up Miles O’Brien as super-genius tech guy.
His age is established in canon. We see his birthdate in “Conundrum” and we know what year it is throughout the series. Picard starts the series at 59, is thus 66 or 67 near the end, and is 74 or 75 the last time we see him in Nemesis.
This is Star Trek–we don’t need to fanwank stuff like that.
Yes, I looked at Memory-Alpha. Like I have that good a memory.
Flagship by virtue of the rest of the fleet getting destroyed, if you prefer.
Or somewhere where she can tinker around in the med labs, growing the next generation of genetically modified wheat.
The position as head of Starfleet Medical may not allow her the time to indulge in hobbies or hands-on research.
And when she did, she passed the test and, IIRC, was promoted to Commander. I think the episode ended with Data noticing that Troi now had a Commander’s insignia (thiree solid dots, instead of two solid and a ring), and she replied with something like, “From now on, you have to call me, ‘Sir!’”
However, I was under the impression that a ship’s counselor’s rank of Lieutenant Commander was honorary - in fact, in one episode, somebody says this. How you can be promoted from this, I don’t know.
Also, there may have been one other promotion that I didn’t see mentioned here; didn’t Dr. Crusher start out as a Lieutenant Commander but end the series as a Commander?
You expect Star Trek to remain internally consistent? 
It’s not entirely clear what the command structure actually is, or who is eligible, or what, if any disciplines, are excluded. Theoretically, it would make sense for specialists like doctors to be in a non-command branch. In the US military, for example, this is the case, but military doctors still get ranks, and those ranks still hold their equivalent authority. Because military structure is built on two principles, rank and command line.
So, for example, Uhura becomes a captain in Communications and Intelligence. That places her in a command structure in the technical disciplines, which could mean she has an oversight/command role over some Starfleet analysis office, staffed by junior officer technical specialists. Same way McCoy gets to be an admiral but not have to actually command a fleet of starships. He oversees some branch of Starfleet Medical, and keeps the lowly research scientists and hospital administrators in line.
So where does a friggin Ship’s Counselor fit into the picture? It’s a role created for Next Gen that appears in no other franchise. It’s presented as a special role to help officers and especially their families on the extended duration missions. Except previous SF vessels had extended duration missions. And so do later ones. Basically, someone said “Hey, we have an empath, how can we put her on a starship bridge? I know, create a new office.”
Theoretically, her ability to sense the emotions of others should be useful in first contact situations, interpreting motivations of enemies or opposing diplomats, advising the Captain on how to interpret reactions. That should be useful. Of course, the writers were so ham-handed at it that she basically stated the obvious.
Starship rocks from a dozen photon torpedo blasts
Troi: “I’m sensing great hostility.”
No shit.
In the Farpoint episode, Troi wore a regulation uniform (the “skant”). She was presumably a full officer, with SF Academy training, just in a particular assignment situated to her skillset. But then she’s counseling the families, and they decide to put her in a non-regulation outfit. But she still has bridge access and an advisory role to the Captain.
It could be either situation. I would think with her skillset and inclinations, “Ship’s Counselor” would fit under the medical discipline and be one of those supporting roles that doesn’t fit under the command line. But some writer somewhere thought it would be interesting/fun to explore Troi training, so they wrote it that way. Similarly, some novel has Doctor McCoy sitting con in the bridge. So, yeah.
A couple of nitpicks here. Ezri Dax was a (station’s) counselor on DS9, and ship’s counselors were mentioned more than once throughout the series; chew toy Miles O’Brien had to see one after one of his several mind-rapings. Voyager mentioned that their ship’s counselor (along with the rest of the medical staff) got killed in the premiere. And obviously Enterprise predates TNG in terms of internal chronology.
In the present-day US Department of Defense’s war-college system, the presidency of the National Defense University is a rotating post. A president is an active duty flag officer who serves for a term of a couple of years and then steps down, and a new one (usually from a different uniformed service) moves in. Starfleet Medical may be much the same, such that Dr. Crusher would only be expected to serve for a year.
Or, better yet, she was appointed to fill the one year remaining in the previous head’s unexpired term, after he unexpectedly went off with the Traveler. In that situation, it might be plausible that someone would be plucked briefly from the ranks as a placeholder and then put back.
Yes! One of my favorite ST novels: Doctor's Orders (Star Trek, Book 50): Duane, Diane: 9780671661892: Amazon.com: Books
I don’t have a problem with the Ship’s Counselor position existing. I can’t see the vision of humanity working so well together working without counselors. And there are always going to be people like Barclay who are brilliant but need extra care.
The problem is with it being a bridge office position. It makes no sense. You clearly do not have to be an empath to have the position. Surely the other bridge officers aren’t people so maladjusted that they might need psychological care in a moment’s notice.
I can understand someone having a bridge position who just happens to also be Ship’s Counselor, like the first officer in Star Trek: Borg. I can see dual specialization, even though you’d think that would be unnecessary due to the large crews of Starfleet ships. But I just can’t see Ship’s Counselor normally being a bridge position.
It would have been far easier for me to accept her as some sort of communications officer, so picked because of her empathic abilities. Due to the universal translator, she wouldn’t be needed for routine use, and thus could have her counseling on the side. And, even then, she’d only take the more difficult cases, having staff to help her–it is a ship of over 1000 people after all.
My take on the Counselor is that the position is really more of a political officer. She isn’t there just to make sure that everyone is well-adjusted. She’s there to make sure that important decisions are taken in accordance with Federation doctrine and philosophy. Of course, I also view the TNG era Federation as being a thinly-disguised communist dictatorship.
Alternately, she could just be Starfleet’s equivalent to a Chaplain, the sort of officer who often fills out the role of “Ship’s Counselor” in the US military. Why they would be on the bridge? I dunno, I guess it comes with getting named in the credits.
As for why Starfleet doesn’t have Chaplains, that is probably because Star Trek seems to largely sidestep the issue of human religion by just not talking about it.
Not entirely true. In the TOS episode *Balance of Terror, *Kirk is consoling a bereaved female crewman in the ship’s chapel, and she is seen genuflecting before an altar. This ship’s chapel is also used in the the TOS episode, The Tholian Web.
Trek kind of goes back and forth with religiony things.
In a lot of TNG, religion is seen as quaint or backwards. In DS9, it’s part of an ongoing arc (tho advanced aliens may be the reason). In Voyager, they go back and forth, depending on what race they meet that week. In ENT, they all worshipped Goo, goddess of the mighty decontamination routine (involves lots of rubdowns and pointy Vulcan things that aren’t ears).
Heck, in the new “Star Trek” movie, McCoy’s sitting at the con during Kirk’s devious victory over the Kobayashi Maru simulation.
It would just make sense for officers in all career paths to be familiar with the basics of things like piloting a starship, using a phaser, and stuff like that, the same way modern soldiers are all expected to master basic weapons training even if they aren’t in combat trades.
The Troi thing, however, is impossible to really make sense of because they couldn’t even keep her job straight from season to season. Which is, of course, a shame. inasmuch as there’s a dozen directions you could have gone with that character, half of which have been mentioned in this thread; the idea of her being a sort of commissar to enforce Federation rules is a cool idea, or she could have legitimately been a counselor/dispute resolution character, which would have been neat to explore. Instead she was sort of four different things, which makes her basically nothing.
The strongest characters in the show… or in ANY show… are the ones whose purpose are really, really clearly established, and they deviate from that role only over the course of time as their characters grow. The best characters in the show, IMHO, are Picard, Worf and Data, and Geordi and Riker aren’t bad. (I thought Wesley was a good character too, but they just let him take over the show too much.) The irony is that the very thing the OP complains about, them staying in the same job for more or less the whole series, is what makes their characters work. You see their personalities both help and hinder them in the role they’re being asked to perform. When a character has no clear role - Troi’s job description being bizarrely unclear, or Dr. Crusher stepping outside the limits of running the ship’s medical corps more or less three out of every four episodes - then their character has no boundaries to work within and becomes harder to define.
The only time I ever liked the Troi character was when her mother was around, which drove Troi crazy. But that’s cool because all of a sudden Troi has a position in life; the exasperated, embarassed daughter. She suddenly becomes someone with a familiar, relatable problem that she has to deal with like a real person.
Thanks for the correction. Obviously this counselor stuff really sticks in the mind.
Good comments, RickJay. When characters run around willy nilly, doing whatever they like, they don’t really fit into a world that is supposed to be structured, like a pseudomilitary starship. The best thing to happen to Worf early in the series was the death of Tasha Yar. Worf went from being a nebulous entity to having a clear role. Sure, he was also the designated alien toughness meter, but that meshed well with his official position.
With regards to Troi on the bridge, I think that is a special case where Picard is trying to make use of the unique talents of his crew. Ship’s Counselor isn’t nominally a bridge position, but because Troi is an empath, she has an advantage that Picard would like to utilize. So she gets special dispensation at the Captain’s request to sit on the side seat and state the obvious.
I don’t recall Dr Crusher running around doing things outside her purview per se. She was the Chief Medical Officer, but she was also Wesley’s mom. And she was something of a personal friend to Picard. Each of those roles was independent but housed in the same entity.
Also, I don’t think that a character’s role had to remain static for the character to be constrained to stay within his role. Sure, part of it is the mechanics of a television show, where you keep your stars around and consistent, so they seem stuck in dead end jobs. But an example of change that still worked was Geordi’s transition from helmsman to chief engineer. Both of those positions have a clear role to play, but they are different in scope. The “blind pilot” was a cute gimmick, but the writers recognized that there was an abundance of bridge personnel that left things a bit redundant (Tasha and Worf, Data and Geordi, an acting ensign running around). They had avoided casting a Chief Engineer - I presume as an attempt to be different from TOS - but found they could use the Chief Engineer to tell stories, and reduce the bridge staff overload. So it made sense to transition someone, and Geordi was better to head the department over Data, from a storytelling perspective. It allowed him more to do than just sit at the console, and kept Data in position to observe and learn from Picard.
In “Dark Mirror” a TNG-era Mirrorverse novel, Deanna is the political officer. Similarly in Charles Stross’ novelette “Missile Gap” a Soviet exploratory vessel is set up with a captain/political officer relationship very obviously modelled on Kirk/Spock.
Yeah. It makes sense to have a counselor on board; it makes sense to have an empath on the bridge at least during encounters with other vessels, etc., but it doesn’t make sense to have the counselor on the bridge - both “counselor to the psychological needs of a thousand people” and “contact with potential opponents” are full-time jobs (in fact, “ship’s counselor” ought to be the leader of a group of people).