I don’t think it was her miltary rank that would have been the main factor, surely it would have been her prowess as a doctor that would be more important? To be fair she was good enough to be ship’s doctor on the fleet’s flagship so it wouldn’t surprise me that she could be head of SF medical too.
As you say though, we’re overthinking this as it was just a line to explain the actress being away to have a baby.
Or a pump-action shotgun.
“Captain, I sense that they are in need of an ass-kicking.”
Worf: A direct hit. Our aft shield is down to 25 percent.
Troi: Captain, I sense great anger…
Picard: Oh, do you REALLY?
I thought that there was a line somewhere that said she was working on curing the common cold.
I remember the line about heading SF medical, but maybe it was a research team or something. Maybe they rotate. “Hey, it’s Dr. Crusher’s turn to be in charge for 8 months. Dr. Zimmerman will be in charge in February.”
Am I the only one who noticed that just about everyone on that planet was white and blond-haired? I called it the “Aryan Paradise Planet.”
It couldn’t be worse than that all black people matriarchal society planet with lots of chick fighting.
I just watched BOTH of those episodes last night! I have to say that the blonde planet with people who RUN every where (WTF?) made no sense. I mean the plot of the show made no sense. Picard spends most of the show bemoaning the fact that they can’t upset the Prime Directive, only to do so at the end, with NO consequences to himself from “god”. :rolleyes:
And I truly didn’t get the black people planet where women are not valued, but somehow, somehow, the woman gets to choose which man wears the special necklace and she owns all the property. How does that work again? 
:rolleyes:
And Lt Yar is one irritating character. Either she’s traumatized from her childhood in the rape camps or not. She seems (how shall I put this?) “good to go”, except for those pesky PTSD flashbacks. And yes, another :rolleyes:
No, that episode made absolutely no sense. It’s no coincidence it’s named as one of the worst of the series by Wil Wheaton in his blog.
And you’re right about the Aryan planet too, it’s pretty much like Sweden. 
The main question here would be whether Star Fleet would be up in arms about it. My take on it is that the eloquence of Picard with Riker putting in his two cents swayed the quasi-deity. An unlikely climax to the episode? No doubt. But if “the planet” conceded, it wouldn’t be too much to expect of Star Fleet to dismiss any questions it had about it. It still would have been very interesting to view the hearing, or questioning.
(With the conspiracy episode, Picard was “confronted” with having raised quite a few P.D. issues in his missions. This no doubt made him uncomfortable, since apparently all of them had been sufficiently answered. If they had not, he probably would no longer have his rank and position. Of course the grillings of Picard and crew were really to test whether they had been compromised by the aliens and lacked normal recall of past events.)
This seems to me a comparatively small problem for a very problematic series, especially the first season. But keep in mind that I like to look for solutions for these things.
Your other points were well taken. 
Riker’s ding-a-ling is worth two cents? That explains a lot.
The use of the Prime Directive in TNG is odd, to say the least. On one show they were sneaking around a technologically advanced planet, not making their presence known, (until Riker screwed up) which seems to make sense. In most other cases they interfere by contacting the natives, which never seems to cause the kind of shock it would do for us. In TNG they even apply it to more or less advanced civilizations, which is like us not putting a USIA office in Ghana to not interfere.
Respecting their laws makes a lot more sense, and it seemed a rigid rule for SF until it wasn’t. I’ve been watching TNG in order, since I missed quite a few, and the Nordic Goddess show was a particular mess.
Yeah, maybe the best thing said about the P.D. was by (I believe) David Gerrold, referring to what the writers no doubt eventually thought:
(Paraphrased.) <<The Prime Directive is a pain in the ass. Let’s just forget about it.>> 
Not quite. On the plus side, it has better weather. On the negative side, it has, um, a more draconian criminal code.
And its inhabitants all speak English, I mean Federation Standard.
My experience of Sweden is that everyone there speaks English too - what am I missing?
If you follow USN traditions, the chief medical officer should be a Vice Admiral. Then again, there are USN medical officers ranking at Captain and both levels of Rear Admiral.
Then again , Starfleet doesn’t always follow USN or RN traditions.
Has it ever been established when Vulcans, Klingons, or Romulans achieved warp speed? I assume the Vulcans had to have done it a very long time ago to be related to the Romulans.
From Memory Alpha: Warp drive | Memory Alpha | Fandom
It is not clear in this article (nor in the one on Memory-Beta) when the Romulans developed it. In the TOS episode “Balance of Terror”, the Romulan Warbird was are shown to NOT have warp drive. Later in the series, in the episode “The Enterprise Incident”, the Romulans were shown to be using Klingon D6/D7 type battlecruisers. Many fans assumed that the Klingons gave the Romulans warp drive theory and technology in exchange for cloaking technology, and a temporary alliance.
Agreed. I had no idea how far away from USN traditions it was until I did a little online research a few weeks ago. Until then, I just assumed that they played a little fast-and-loose with what USN folks were used to, but were essentially following along. I was aware of a few “complaints” made by folks in person or online. But I was really surprised when I looked up Executive Officer and First Officer.
Fanwanking time!
The fact that the Romulan warbird in BoT did not have warp drive doesn’t mean the Romulans as a whole did not. Clearly they had to have had faster-than-light travel to have established colonies so far from Vulcan that the Vulcans entirely lost track of them. I’ expect that the warbird had been detached from a mothership with FTL drive of some sort.
(This isn’t entirely my idea, but one that comes from a Trek novel. I would specify which if I remembered the title or author, but, obviously, I don’t. It was one of the Pocket Books “giant” novels–the one with Jim Kirk considering leaving the Enterprise after the Keeler incident as a frame story, and the main tale being about George Samuel Kirk’s forgotten adventure on the Enterprise twenty years earlier.)
Why does it look like they’re passing all kinds of stars when they go into warp? Zephram Cochrane went into warp in First Contact and, as usual, it looked like he was passing all kinds of stars. When he pulled out of warp, he looked back and wasn’t that far from Earth. I could see if it was just the light from the stars being skewed as they approached the source of light, but they actually pass the stars.
Maybe it was particulate space matter reflecting the glow from the warp nacelles?
That, or sub-atomic tachiardic cosmic rays being red-shifted into the visible spectrum by the high relative increase in newtonian velocity?