All the "junior" officers (Scott, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov) only went up one rank grade, from the beginning of TOS to TMP.
Dating "The Cage" - When does it ACTUALLY take place?
- Thread starter Admiral Archer
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All the "junior" officers (Scott, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov) only went up one rank grade, from the beginning of TOS to TMP.
I wouldn't say that Pike was exactly backtracking. I agree that it was just idle speculation, though.
PIKE: I said that's one place I might go. I might go into business on Regulus or on the Orion colony.
BOYCE: You, an Orion trader, dealing in green animal women, slaves?
PIKE: The point is this isn't the only life available. There's a whole galaxy of things to choose from.
It seems to me that if Pike didn't mean it all, he would've said something like, "No, of course I wouldn't do that. What I meant was..." As Vina says later in the episode, the fact that he couldn't do that sort of thing as a Starship Captain was probably a large part of that fantasy's appeal. At the beginning of "The Cage" Pike pretty much wants to be anything but a Starship Captain.
You're forgetting the suede pullover field jackets from TMP.
I don't think he would feel the need to state the obvious. He says he might go to a place. Boyce ridicules the idea by evoking the stereotype. Pike feels offended and embarrassed by Boyce joking about something that factually is important to Pike. So of course he doesn't defend himself ("I'm not the pimp type, really I'm not, and I wasn't thinking of green women in the hotly erotic sense, really I wasn't") but his choice ("There's nothing silly about going civilian, on the Orion colony or anywhere else").
Yes. But all that comes after the exchange in Pike's cabin. It may be provoked by the exchange, but the opposite is unlikely to be true: in all probability, it's Boyce's joke that first makes Pike think about being a slave trader.
Heck, for all we know, there haven't been slave traders on the Orion colony for six hundred years, and Pike even gets the shade of green all wrong exactly because it's a mental image unfounded in anything real...
Timo Saloniemi
I doubt it. The whole point of the Talosians was that their illusions were so good that they could easily fool people. Kirk had no idea that the real Commodore Menendez wasn't next to him until the end of the episode.
In the scenario above, Marta would get the tone wrong, too. She's clearly just playacting, with paint that rubs off on Kirk and all...
Pike would wrongly believe in dark paint, too, and naturally the Talosians (who have never seen an Orion) would let him see exactly that.
Timo Saloniemi
Pike would wrongly believe in dark paint, too, and naturally the Talosians (who have never seen an Orion) would let him see exactly that.
Timo Saloniemi
Actually no. Aenar are the only other greenish humanoids shown in the entire ENT-TOS era, and probably all of Star Trek.
The Andorian in TNG could be thought of as a Andor-Aenar descendant as implied by the Enterprise novels.
Orions are deliberately left as the green species for that reason.
Marta is green with dark hair, like the illusory Vina, and she performs a sensuous dance, like the illusory Vina. I think it's clear that she's an Orion, even though they don't specifically say she is within the episode.
Or maybe the guy who looks exactly like an Andorian is actually some other unknown species that happens to look just like Andorians, because nobody specifically says he is an Andorian. Ditto with the Tellarite look-alike.
Kor
Or maybe the guy who looks exactly like an Andorian is actually some other unknown species that happens to look just like Andorians, because nobody specifically says he is an Andorian. Ditto with the Tellarite look-alike.
Kor
Indeed, we saw blue-skinned Orions in TAS: "The Pirates of Orion" -- perhaps the artists were assuming that, since Thelev the Orion spy from "Journey to Babel" impersonated an Andorian, that meant Orion males were also blue. And Devna from TAS: "The Time Trap" was a paler green than other Orion women we've seen -- and, yes, she was established in dialogue as an Orion.
That's part of the problem with bringing back the whole legacy cast for the movies. The other problems were plausibility (they'd all be together again?) and some rusty supporting actors who hadn't worked on their craft.
I'm honestly okay with the two-and-a-half years between TOS and TMP. The ranks make more sense, as does the people from TOS still being involved. They came home and were put into programs that trained them on the evolving technology/worked on assignments around Earth.
Eight years? Everyone should have pretty much dispersed. With both Sulu and Uhura on their own career tracks outside of Kirk's gravity. Spock would've been less in tune with what was going on if he'd been away for eight years, as would McCoy.
Why would it be an inconsistency? The stripes went up by half-steps, why would there be a 1.5 and 2.5 but no 0.5? Since it would take significantly more effort to space and sew the broken stripe segments than a single LT stripe, I have to guess it was done purposefully. There was a US Navy rank of LTJG and one later in Trek, I can't think why one would not have fit into the OS rank scheme. Also USAF Captain Christopher was given the insignia of Starfleet lieutenant, which implies that it is the third officer grade from the bottom, not the second. Even though the title of "lieutenant junior grade" was never used, it does seem there was an intention to have some grade between ensign and lieutenant.
By TWOK pretty much all of them are Commanders at the least, with Spock being a Captain, and Scott being promoted to captain in the next film. Sulu was promoted to captain after TFF. Chekov was on the command track, but either got stalled by the loss of USS Reliant under his watch as first officer, or he is only five or so years behind Sulu, and would get his own promotion after the events of Generations. McCoy was eventually promoted to Admiral. We haven't seen Uhura (in canon) since the end of TUC. She might have been promoted or she retired as a Commander after the events of TUC.
Dr. Chapel was a Commander the last time we see her.
Dr. Chapel was a Commander the last time we see her.
For one thing, because Tormolen told Sulu "You don't rank me," meaning "You don't outrank me," so he and Sulu were evidently meant to be the same rank. So it's inconsistent with the dialogue. For another, because it's the only use of that kind of rank stripe in the entirety of TOS, and no TOS-era character was ever identified onscreen as a lieutenant junior grade. Something that's used only once and never again is often just a mistake, or an idea that was tried and then abandoned. Proof requires repeatability.
Going through my old reference sources, I find that both the Concordance and Shane Johnson's Uniform Recognition Manual assert the existence of a broken-stripe lieutenant j.g. rank braid, but the Star Fleet Technical Manual jumps from ensign to full lieutenant (which is how I always believed it to go) and aridas sofia's Federation Reference Series oddly assigned the half-braid to ensign and the absence of braid (like Chekov and other onscreen ensigns had) to "ensign appointee," whatever that means. So there was no consensus that lieutenant junior grade was a rank that existed in Starfleet until TNG came along and assigned that rank to two of its leads, Geordi and Worf. (I remember watching a 1987 morning news show, I think it was, where they were talking to LeVar Burton about his upcoming series. He referred to his character as "Lieutenant j.g. Geordi La Forge," and the host laughed and echoed "J.G. Geordi La Forge?" as if she thought the "J.G." were the character's initials.)
"Inconsistency" doesn't mean "accident." It means that incompatible decisions were made in different instances, whether because they were made by different people making different assumptions, or because the same people changed their minds or forgot what they'd done before. Given how much TOS's creators were making stuff up as they went along, there were a wealth of inconsistencies in the pilots and first season (James R. Kirk, Vulcanians, lithium crystals, UESPA, "Balance of Terror"'s torpedo-like phaser effect, etc.).
You're talking about Starfleet as a conjecturally "real" entity. I'm talking about Star Trek as a television show and the intentions of its creators at the time. The point is, there's no clear proof that the creators of TOS intended a lieutenant j.g. rank to exist in Starfleet. Which is why fan references from the '70s and '80s disagreed on the question.
An interesting point, but not necessarily probative. Sometimes they just stuck guest stars in whatever uniforms were available and didn't always think through the rank. Heck, they frequently referred to Spock as a lieutenant commander in the first season even though he was always wearing full commander's stripes, so they weren't always careful about such things. (And it wasn't just them. How many times did Chief O'Brien wear lieutenant's pips in TNG before they finally invented a chief petty officer's pip?)
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