I really didn't understand Archer's Highlights. He's a bloke with a deathwish, not some sort of namby pamby artsy fartsy type. Sure he could have been covering up a lot of grey, but that ungraduated blond in the beginning was a shade shy of frosted tips. It's just a really, really vain 20th century thing to do to yourself.
Of course I have never noticed this. But didn't MU Archer have a lot of grey in his buzz cut? Maybe that's why he was hotter?
Rollins? Anyone can read his conn reports for any number of reasons, who do not need to be Tom's immediate superior. For instance he sends his con reports to stellar cartography to help them map where Voyager has just been. (To everyone else, who is not Exodus, this is part of the triptych where Tom pretends to be a dick until Janeway kicks him off the ship, so that they can find the spy.) However Memory Alpha agrees with you that Rollins was (probably) the "Flight Controller" (Which is what this department was called apparently.) but he was never heard of or seen again after Dreadnought. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Rollins Occums razor? Bah!
Rollins was an Ensign when we first see him in 'Caretaker', but when he appears again in 'Dreadnought' he's a Leiutenant (presumably so he can outrank Tom). So compared to Harry "Operations Manager" Kim, Ensign Rollins was obviously an engine on the fast-track. Harry wasn't even a caboose.
Although Rollins is only exposition in Dreadnought. In ENT Twilight, a little bit in the future, where T'Pol is his Steward, John is over come with grey. I had thought that this is because T'Pol couldn't be bothered to humour the silly human's vanity by periodically dying his hair... But the opposite could be true. She was frakking him. Sex. Maybe she was dying his hair more grey so that it wasn't so bloody embarrassing to be intimate with a fricking child?
^ I forgot he wasn't actually in 'Dreadnought'. So some Ensign nobody who only appears *ONCE* in the series manages to get a promotion to Lieutenant off-screen and doesn't even appear again ever, but Harry was a regular character and the so-called Operations Manager on the ship for seven years and he was still getting mommy to tie his shoe-laces after he got home from the DQ? Janeways must've really hated Harry for that "ma'am" faux pas he made in the pilot episode. Unless Leiutenant Rollins is just Ensign Rollins' ball-breaking older brother? Or maybe his life-partner. Surely those continuity-savvy Voyager writers wouldn't just use the same name to mean two different people, right?
Do we see both Ensign and Lt Rollins on screen at different times? If not then I'm assuming it's the same guy with a promotion. The possibility of their being brothers, or married are both fun options though. And Guy, that bit about T'Pol bleaching Archer's highlights for him is hilarious.
The Collins might not be the same guy. I mean, we had racist Lt Stiles in TOS and then the smug Captain Stiles in The Search for Spock. No indication they were the same guy.
I was assuming that they got married on Voyager after Caretaker to (in part) stop the sluts like Tom Paris continually trying to take them to the holodeck. The writers frakked up twice, that I saw on a crew list, that they changed the genders of a recurring character in exposition. From this it was supposed that Janeway liked twins, and grabbed as many as she could for her little crew... But these goofs by the writers could as easily be because of marriages.
On the subject of crew screw ups, I remember that Tuvok and Vorik say there were no Vulcan females on Voyager despite the fact that we see one. I read somewhere the writers tried to explain it away by saying the woman just looked Vulcan but was some other species. Possible, yes, but still sloppy storytelling. Anyone watching would naturally assume she was a Vulcan, which was obviously the intention of the time.
The word "Vulcanoid" was used in TNG Who Watches the Watches. Pointy eared and medieval. Of course Vulcans have been in space for at least a million years (TOS Return to Tomorrow.) so who knows how many failed colonies they misplaced in that time... but specific environmental features probably create Vulcanoids and others create humanoids, given the original genetic material seeded by the Preservers (TNG The Chase.).
There is enough wiggle room that what looked like a Vulcan woman could just be a Vulcanoid woman. That's how I choose to interpret that situation too. But it was still clumsy of the writers. I liked Vorik's pon farr story, I just hate the holodeck solution. It's such an easy fix that going forward solves any pon farr story. I also think there's supposed to be a telepathic component to pon farr, or else couldn't they just pon farr themselves? It's about more than release, and a holodeck simulation is just one big elaborate sex toy in that situation.
What always bugged me about that story was that even the Doctor, who was programmed with all of the Federation's medical knowledge, didn't know about the Pon Farr. I get the whole cultural taboo "we don't talk about this" thing, but it stretches credibilty that a race as prominent as the Vulcans could keep something so big so much of a secret that nobody has heard of it.
You need to watch the episode again. Spoiler Vorrik rejected the holograms, probably because their was no telepathic component, although it wasn't out right said in the episode (later it is Tuvok who has sex with a hologram.), he hunts down Tom and B'Elanna (She needed Tom to Frakk her, or she was going to die, but he said "no I can't save you from certain death with my penis because I like you too much, and I want our first time to be real".) on the planet, deciding that if he can't rut with the girl, then he's going to murder her champion. B'Elanna on a feministic rant says that she can fight her own battles and sticks her foot up Vorriks ass.
Vulcan lawyers on behalf of the Vulcan Government could have redacted the information from a beta test of his program.
Yeah, I'm mixing that up with Tuvok's pon farr. Vorik's story with B'lanna was pretty good now that you jogged my memory. Paris's unhelpfulness aside.