Another Star Trek example is from Enterprise: Ensign Harry Kim. Other people got promoted on the same ship, and yet, he didn’t. Garrett Wang, the actor who played Harry, said he asked the writers about it, and was told, “Someone has to be the ensign.”
Yeah. Holding the same (junior) rank for seven years never looks good to the promotions board, either.
Bet he had to get Janeway to pull some strings for him after they got back.
And he wasn’t even TREATED like an ensign in most ways. There were lieutenants both in the bridge staff and in Engineering, but he was clearly afforded more authority than they were, being regularly left the conn and assigned to cover for Torres in Engineering occasionally. And Paris got demoted to ensign at one point, which, to my mind, should have meant that he’d have to start over from a seniority point of view; but inside of a year the demotion was undone and he again outranked Harry.
That was emblematic of Voyager’s basic problem: for whatever reason, the producer’s refused to follow through on their premises. I mean, if Harry is, effectively, fifth in command, either give him an officer’s rank that makes sense with the dialogue, or use enlisted ranks for the mass of the ship’s company. I could have dealt with the idea that Voyager, with a company of about 150, had fewer than a dozen officers.
Going back to Gomer for a second, I just giggled from the thought of a marine platoon made up of balding PFCs in their forties.
Werner Klemperer took the role with the specific condition that Klink never wins.
Klink was bitching about still being a colonel when the rest of his class were all generals, Hogan comforts Klink with the questions:
How many were lost on the Russian front?..quite a few
How many were shot by the Führer?..quite a few more
Klink has the better deal.
Does anyone else think that Klink was in fact an Allied agent, and Hogan’s true boss, and that Hogan suspected it but was unsure and, of course, knew better than to try to find out?
When did other people get promoted on Voyager? (I could well have missed it, but I don’t remember it happening, aside from Paris getting busted down and then re-instated.)
I think I remember a bit of dialog with Janeway or one of the other ranking officers telling Kim, “We’re not in the Federation anymore, we don’t have any opportunity for people to retire out or take other assignments, we don’t have much opportunity to pick up new trained recruits. So the only thing that makes sense is to call a general halt on promotions unless maybe there’s a REALLY good reason somebody needs to be at a higher rank to keep the ship working well.”
On the other hand - well, it sort of seems to me as if Kim became a defacto member of the bridge crew ‘inner circle’, either simply because he was a main character on the show, or else because he happened to be the Ensign on bridge duty at the time that Voyager got stranded in Delta Quadrant. Also, Janeway liked him and came to rely on him.
If they’d stuck to their original 75-year trip home and everyone got promoted on the usual schedule, they’d have 2 admirals, 130 captains, 10 commanders, and any offspring and offspring’s offspring filling in the lieutenant and ensign positions.
Even Tom Paris got demoted back to ensign (“30 Days”), then promoted to LTJG instead of poor Kim getting his props.
I remember at the time in an interview Frakes was asked why his character declined promotions and he jokingly said “Bad writing.” That’s why the Melbourne and “every other ship he was offerered” (this was the way the story was told at two of the Trek cons I attended) was seen destroyed in that episode.
I always found Riker’s reasoning for staying on the Enterprise to be sound. Would you rather be the second in command of the flagship or Captain of “some other Federation vessel.”
Except that in Starfleet officers have always appeared to greatly out number enlisted personel (at least when enlisteds are acknowleged to exist at all). Miles O’Brian and Janice Rand are the only non-officers I can remember having any kind of recurring role at all. Starfleet has been portrayed as less & less military ever since TOS. Hell even when TOS era characters got promotions they still ended up doing the exact same job. Lieutenant Uhura was the Enterprise’s Chief Communications Officer; Commander Uhura was also the Enterprise’s Chief Communications Officer. Kirk did get promoted to rear admiral and changed jobs, but when he was demoted back to captain and given command of a new Enterprise Captain Spock was his First Officer and Captain Scott was his Chief Engineer. Only Sulu (& possibly McCoy & Checkov) had anything resembling a normal career progression (much to Shatner’s dismay).
The rebood was even weirder considering how Kirk not only now has less senority than Spock; he has less than Chekov, and went straight from Cadet to Captain. :smack:
All the members of House’s team.
This kind of assumes that promotions are a normal part of life. Imho, there are very capable people who fit their level of responsibility perfectly, but for whatever reason, everybody knows they don’t want or won’t fit into a higher position.
A good case in point is being a store manager for Pizza Hut (something I had experience with.) You go to work in the same place every day, you have good relationships with your underlings, and you often work with the same people for years. The next step up is district manager. In this case, you spend most of your day commuting from stores in your area to the home office to your home, and several times a year you have to fly to franchise meetings or help open stores in other areas. While the pay is maybe 30-50% higher than store manager, it’s much harder to do and to do a good job.
As you can imagine, some people make careers out of being store managers, and will stay at that level for 10-20+ years.
An Enterprise example would be the original Bones or Spock. Why didn’t they get promoted? It’s because they do what they do well, and they’re a good fit for their positions.
On the other hand, I can think of a lot of people who obviously would be better at a lower level than a higher level. For example, police detectives spend most of their time following a trail of evidence and interviewing people. The skill set necessary here is completely different than what the captain of the police station would need.
Ben Cartwright’s boys on Bonanza. They were practically middle aged and still living with dad and Hop Sing. Those “kids” Shoveled horse manure in the barns forever.
You never got any sense that Joe or Hoss were actually managing the ranch. Parnell Roberts had to leave the show before all his hair fell out. 
IIRC Joe finally married in the last season.
I imagine in the case of what the US Navy would call non-line officers, i.e. non command officers like engineering, science and communications, there are probably a limited number of billets available for say… Lt Commanders, and they’d be department heads on a major ship, like a Enterprise.
I’m not sure how they handle that in real life; perhaps the pool of qualified applicants is smaller, so they don’t have to worry so much about needing to promote qualified officers up to non-sea desk jobs (what I suspect non-line Captains do).
That’s where the shows go wrong; Unless I’m wrong, the engineering head of a ship like the Enterprise would be a specific rank or below. If you got promoted past that, you’d end up riding a desk in a Starbase somewhere, working on specifications and procedures, etc…
I suspect it’s dramatic license that lets people end up way out of grade one way or another; I suspect Kim would have been promoted over the Maquis folks in the crew early on- even if Chakotay was 1st officer, Kim & Paris would likely have been somewhat elevated in grade somewhere along the line vs. Maquis crew, if only because they’re already Starfleet officers and the ship was a Starfleet ship.
Werner Klemperer, Howard Caine, Leon Askin, and John Banner, who play the chief Germans Klink, Hochstetter, Burkhalter and Schultz, were in fact all Jewish. Klemperer especially enjoyed making the Nazis look like fools.
Additionally, Robert Clary, who played LeBeau, was actually a survivor of the Holocaust.
I am one pissed of Trekkie about this “reboot”. It just throws 4 series’s continuity out the window. I, for one, do not consider “Star Trek” (2009) to be canon.
Maybe if someone had written the screenplay that had actually watched the TV show… :dubious:
Klink, Schultz and the other officers in the POW camps were considered old men filling jobs normally held by younger men.
Klink and Schultz were World War I veterans. Schultz owned (or worked at?) a toy factory. He was recalled back into the military for WWII. Schultz complained often about being recalled into service.
Indeed, just like it seems Dagwood should either be fired or management by now. “Funny” comics tend to exist in time stasis.
The thing that makes Riker such a great case of this in ST:TNG is that the show had such a strong progression of time. There’s big events happening, and there’s a definite sense of time passing.
But it would work okay on a ship that lost most of its officers.
Also, Tuvok was the only person promoted (other than Paris’s reinstatement.) The reason given was that it took an official act of Starfleet to promote from Ensign, but a Captain had discretion after that. An ensign is just barely an officer.
In fact, if you had no rank at all, it seems a technicality let her assign a rank, like to Chakotay, Paris, and Torres. But, one you’re an ensign, her hands are tied.