And now we can talk about positions…
A hospital ship, yes, but certainly not a warship or exploration vessel, and certainly **NOT **before she’s undergone a Command training course, I’d wager.
When I was in junior high, I had the hots for Rand, but even she was outclassed by Smith. GRRRRRRROWARRRRRRRRR!!!! 
Better than LaForge?
Hardly.
Better written than LaForge?
Certainly.
While Star Trek: TNG did allow an African American actor to become the most important member of the cast (Michael Dorn’s Worf) he was also not human. The writers didn’t seem to know what to do with Geordi for most episodes.
Unfortunately, the same thing occurred with Tuvok on Voyager and Ensign Mayweather on Enterprise. They assembled a diverse cast, then they simply wrote stories which didn’t exploit that diversity. If Avery Brooks hadn’t been the lead, the same thing probably would have occurred on Deep Sleep 9.
Star Trek: The “future” apparently consists primarily of White Europeans and their descendants.
And Smith was outclassed by Ross:
I don’t think there was anything significantly wrong with Barclay either. I just think that, with his anxiety level in the transporter episode, a psychiatrist probably would have given him a minor tranquilizer, especially since those seem so much safer in the future. Troi was perfectly fine using a placebo effect rather than trying to actually treat his anxiety.
I don’t think he had Asperger’s, though. He was too socially adept when he felt comfortable. I think he just had social anxiety disorder.
Barclay had holodiction, obviously.
You may recall Data donned a red uniform when Jellico removed Riker from the XO slot and substituted Data in the two-parter “Chain of Command” (third photo here): http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command,_Part_II_(episode). It was underlining the fact that he had left Operations and joined the Command dept.
LaForge was there to be Data’s foil. Data was a machine who wanted to become more human, LaForge was a human who was most comfortable with machines. This is highlighted, perhaps, by the machine he depended on to be able to see.
It’s also worth noting that while LaForge has had to do far more outlandish things as an engineer, this might be mainly because most of O’Brien’s engineering was done on a relatively small scale (he kept the transporters running) or on a space station that never went anywhere, and never had to escape from unusual situations).
I’d say O’Brien is probably a fairly typical engineer, as far as Starfleet is concerned. Recall the Dominion officer who once declared, only half-jokingly, that Starfleet engineers could turn rocks into replicators. If the Klingon Empire is built on combat prowess, and the Romulan Empire on subterfuge, then the Federation is built on industrious, brilliant engineers and problem solvers.
And God bless 'em!
There were clearly other enlisted men on DS9, at least; it’s explicit that the engineers working for O’Brien are not officers. Munoz, for instance.
Nog when he is commissioned is. Although I perfer to fanwank it as training.
Nog didn’t work for O’Brien, except maybe as a cadet. You may be thinking of his father Rom, who became a Bajoran maintenance worker under O’Brien. Nog received a field commission as a cadet to participate in the Dominion War where he was a bridge officer on the Defiant, among other things.
While TNG and the other later day Star Treks made it seem that all officers had to go throught the academy TOS McCoy did not. He went to Ol’ Miss. Naturally Abrams, et al felt that had to change for the reboot.
Quite right; he volunteered for the service. As a qualified MD with long experience and few family ties, Starfleet was probably glad to have him. He probably went through basic training and indoctrination as Hawkeye et al. did on MASH***.
My understanding was that, technically, he was in both, and thus got a choice in what color to wear. Under Jellico, he was primarily the XO and not an Operations officer, so he switched to red. (whether his choice or Jellico’s, I do not know.)
Considering what a stickler for protocol Jellico was, it was probably him. He was the person who finally made Troi wear a uniform while on duty rather than a dress or catsuit (Which she actually looked better in - the uniform, I mean).
Agreed. Though I thought it was odd that Troi’s blue uniform wasn’t the same shade as all the other blue uniforms - it was noticeably brighter. I wonder if the “regular” blue color just looked really bad on her (kind of how I look downright ill in a tan-colored shirt).
On TNG O’Brien had a ideal position: major enough that he didn’t get killed (a la crewman newman), but minor enough that he rarely was in danger (unlike the main cast)
Brian
On TNG, yes. But on DS9 he became the most tortured man in the history of Trek. He was variously (and in some cases repeatedly) injured, kidnapped, tortured, put on show trials (at least twice), imprisoned (in one case for a fully served life sentence), and threatened with execution. He suffered the humiliation of awkwardness of having his fetal child removed from his wife and reimplanted in someone else, and of being impersonated by a hostile shapeshifter who ran amok on the station for months. His young daughter became separated from him; by the time they were reunited she had become completely feral and irreversibly developmentally stunted. And to top it all off, he was chronically overworked, with station systems constantly breaking down and Sisko giving him unrealistic deadlines to fix them.