Thanks. I didn’t know the Navy still had this rank.
I’m afraid I didn’t see the last movie. But I remember now that in Star Trek: First Contact, the movie began with Picard being frustrated at being assigned to a distant sideshow frontier while the main battle was already underway with the Borg near Earth, a sign that Starfleet didn’t have confidence in him. The fact that he eventually defied his orders and went back to save the day was all well and good, but maybe also yet one more embarassment to Starfleet Command. So yeah, he clearly wasn’t ever going to get his admiral’s stripes (bars? little filled in collar circles?).
Starfleet and the British Army both call them “pips.”
I don’t think it was so much that Picard had fallen out of favor as the replacement first officer died suddenly and he needed one post-haste. Though why he didn’t simply promote Worf to commander and ask him to be his exec (presuming that Worf was no longer an ambassador, which wasn’t referenced in the movie) is beyond me.
Nemesis was horrible. Such a terrible swan-song for such a fine cast.
It was bad because about a quarter of the way in, it got too serious and dark and never tried to get fun again. Troi gets raped, Data gets killed, the E nearly gets destroyed. It just never lightened up. It did have my favorite space battle of all 11 movies though.
I can’t explain Worf’s situation at all. I took his change of career at the end of DS9 to stem from the fact that he had utterly fucked up his career by his actions shortly before Jadzia died, when he deliberately and consciously fucked up a mission to save her life. Sisko is explicit in saying that Worf is only spared a court-martial because they don’t want the publicity, but he’ll never get his own command. I’d not be surprised if a note had been appended to his file forbidding further promotion.
Except this is directly contradicted by the two part episode “Descent” where we meet Lore and his band of Borg. Starfleet put Picard in direct command of a taskforce assigned to attack and destroy the Borg they’d encountered. So if they thought he couldn’t be trusted around the Borg, why did Starfleet think that given that they’d already put him in a position where they had trusted him and it had turned out okay?
The answer: because the plot said so. Weak.
The actual idea of the movie is that, by the time of Spock Prime and Nero (which is 2387, 17 years after “Bloodlines”, the Ferengi episode you reference), Admiral Scott had figured out a way to do it safely. Scotty at the time of the movie (2258) had never successfully pulled it off. And I’m pretty sure that, even after seeing Spock Prime put in the formula, he won’t remember it well enough to use it with confidence. But it’s likely he’ll perfect it sooner in the new timeline.
All I can come up with is the people in charge being upset when he doesn’t give Hugh that virus. And although things turned out okay the next time they meet Hugh, remember that these were Borg that were not in contact with the collective.
Perhaps people like Admiral Nechayev, who didn’t trust Picard not to put his own feelings in front of fighting the Borg, were in charge. (And note that they were right, as Picard act like a vengeful captain Ahab later, due to his desire to hurt the Borg, no matter what the cost.)
But you’d think politics would be less important during a full-scale invasion like that. Sure, don’t put him in charge, maybe even make him come later. But to leave the most powerful ship in the fleet doing menial duty is asinine. I wonder if there wasn’t another, unstated reason.
ETA: I almost forgot: Tasha Yar was a lieutenant. The idea of a yeoman seems to have been retired by Next Gen.
Except that Admiral Nechayev was the one who assigned him the taskforce in Descent, soooooooooo…
Gah. Should have bitten the bullet and made a third post:
According to Memory Alpha, Yeoman is not a rank, but a title. It seems to be more like a Captain’s secretary–someone who handles the paper work and administrative tasks so the captain can stay on the bridge.
Lieutenant Yar never did anything like that, so I doubt she was a Yeoman.
Hmm. Why did she reprimand him so much, treating him like he wasn’t good enough to help with the Borg? Maybe the admiral was one of the few people pulling for him, and even she thought he made a mistake.
The only good reason I can come up with besides that is that the Enterprise-E had not been tested, and they were afraid to use it. And Picard fell on a little bit of disfavor for allowing the previous ship to be wrecked. But you’d still think they’d keep the ship nearby, just in case they needed it.
I agree with your basic point. I handwave it away by telling myself that Starfleet has adopted a system of setting up command teams that often end up working together for years. They stay together as a unit instead of having people transfer in and out, willy nilly, whenever Starfleet needs a new first officer on the USS Generic.
With regards to Picard, it’s worth remembering that just as much as Riker refused promotion, he may have done the same (at least once the movies kicked in).
Don’t forget he has a conversation with Kirk in Generations that ran like this:
Having a Star Fleet legend telling you never to let them promote you away from the Enterprise (in any of its guises) is gonna be the kind of thing that sticks in your mind.
Yeoman is a functional title (not rank) for some enlisted ratings (noncoms) in the U.S. Navy.
Star Trek is based on the assumption that a ship is a ship and a spacegoing “navy” will have the same ranks and traditions as a wet navy. To me, it seems more likely that if we ever have a spacegoing military force, the Space Force will be hived off from the Air Force as the Air Force was hived off from the Army, and, like the Air Force, it will use Army-derived ranks, etc.
Picard would have, ney, should have had desk duty forced on him - he was assimilated, captured and tortured by the Cardassians, conspired with grave robbers, went against starfleet regs - not to mention direct orders - on so many occasions its not funny - plus, he never dissassembled or atleast turned off the android crew member that kept stealing his ship and impersonating him.
It’s a wonder he wasn’t reporting to ensign Wesley Crusher for chrissakes.
That wouldn’t surprise me. Heinlein, of course, wrote his stuff assuming a wet navy tradition. I think Clarke took a poke at it in The Sands of Mars when the passenger realized that the spaceship cannot be run like a wet navy vessel and especially not a 18th/19th century sailing ship. There is simply too much training and specialization involved.
I figure it’d look more like the Prometheus et al in the Stargate universe, with the Air Force running the show, at least until, as you said, a space command is hived off. Of course, with the show you have the in-universe argument that the Stargate is a USAF program and thus all developments based on the Stargate program is under the control of the USAF. I bet the Navy would be pissed off about it, too, but unfortunately I don’t think such a conflict was ever brought up in the show. Too bad, because it’d probably make a good episode.
After what happened at Wolf 359, maybe they wanted to have one ship left if worst came to worst.
Everyone’s forgetting that Riker was a captain, and Picard an admiral, in “Future Imperfect.” Sure, it was a hallucination, but it ought to count for their service records.
The easy answer is that someone else (likely the Admiral in charge) wanted the command and the credit for the victory over the Borg and Wolf 359. Not that ‘Johnny On The Spot’ Picard.
Organization wise, you can’t rely on one man to resolve every issue.