I work for a school where there are four Career Management Directors who report to the Director of Career Management. Unravel that. Having multiple people with the title of Chief Engineer would not surprise me. And in season one, Riker clearly made reference to there being more than one chief engineer.
Was Picard Grooming Geordi For Chief?
- Thread starter Mojochi
- Start date
Yes, it does hold true, especially in a military (or at least quasi-militaristic) command structure. "Co-captains" is not a thing and the chief engineer is similarly a singular position.
No. If they're below Worf in the chain of command, he's their commanding officer. That title is not reserved for top of the chain.
At the same time? When did this happen?
But there will always be one boss.
I believe it was in "Where No One Has Gone Before".
Somebody told me once that it is actually possible for a ship to have more than one officer of captain's rank in its complement, so the situation in the later TOS movies with Kirk, Spock, and Scotty all being captains at the same time wasn't quite as absurd as I'd assumed. Although, of course, captain as a rank and captain as a job position are two different things.
Sure, but each department has its own boss, and those bosses report to a higher boss. The labels used can vary from one organization to another.
I mean, look at Chief O'Brien. Chief petty officers are enlisted personnel and are thus below all commissioned officers in the rank structure, including the chief engineer. So that's already a system in which the "chief" title is used in two different contexts, one above the other. Why couldn't there be another way in which "chief" was used for more than one person?
In "Where No One Has Gone Before," when Kosinski is aghast to be working with Riker instead of Picard himself, Riker says, "Guided, of course, by one of our Chief Engineers, Lieutenant Commander Argyle in this case."
This line made me think that the "chief" in "chief engineer" refers to a specific branch of the engineering department. For instance, there's a chief engineer for the warp system and another for the life support systems, and so on.
However, Geordi, B'Elanna, Miles, and everyone else always seemed to be in charge of everything. To me, though, that's more of a production issue. Why hire more actors when you can just have one department head who knows everything? Once again, I don't think there's good in-universe logic that can satisfy our nitpicking because the issue is a real-world production one.
However, Geordi, B'Elanna, Miles, and everyone else always seemed to be in charge of everything. To me, though, that's more of a production issue. Why hire more actors when you can just have one department head who knows everything? Once again, I don't think there's good in-universe logic that can satisfy our nitpicking because the issue is a real-world production one.
Exactly. The "one of our" line was written to paper over the change from McDougal in "The Naked Now" to Argyle in "Where No One...". Since they didn't cast a regular engineer character (since the developers didn't think they'd need one), they were stuck with guest stars of the week, which meant not necessarily being able to get the same actor back. This continued until the season 2 revamp.
The short story "Meet with Triumph and Disaster" by Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann, in the TNG anniversary anthology The Sky's the Limit, said that McDougal was one of two simultaneous chief engineers, in charge of ship's systems -- with Argyle implicitly being in charge of the engines, given his role in "Where No One...". Memory Alpha reminds me that I followed this precedent in TNG: The Buried Age and mentioned McDougal and Argyle as the two chief engineers. Presumably Logan and Leland T. Lynch were replacements for one or both, and at some point Picard and Riker decided they could manage with just one chief engineer.
I'm glad they made the decision to make Geordi the sole Chief Engineer. It made sense.
LeVar Burton's delivery of technobabble is the gold standard on how to do it convincingly in the franchise.
LeVar Burton's delivery of technobabble is the gold standard on how to do it convincingly in the franchise.
They even showed this with Picard's irritatoin with Leland T. Lynch
And one is left wondering why with all these handlers running around, Logan, Argyle, & MacDougal, being in place, in one or more areas of ship function, or being replacements, in that 1st season, they still have Junior Grade Assistant Chief Singh answering for the department in Lonely Among Us.
It all just comes off so clusterf***ed compared to security or sickbay or command. Then, you have Data, who is chief of operations without being titled as such, who is arguably admin over, security, sciences & engineering.... which also begs the question... why is there no chief science officer, specifically admin over the blue suit sciences?
Thanks. But, if we look at the actual script pages, he says "chief engineer" with a small "c." So not "Chief Engineer," meaning someone with that title. But "one of our chief engineers", meaning simply "one of our top engineers."
RIKER
They are, sir. Which is why they
make their first officers directly
responsible for engine condition
and performance.
(indicating Argyle)
Guided, of course, by one of our
chief engineers, Lieutenant Commander
Argyle in this case.
Regarding Data...And one is left wondering why with all these handlers running around, Logan, Argyle, & MacDougal, being in place, in one or more areas of ship function, or being replacements, in that 1st season, they still have Junior Grade Assistant Chief Singh answering for the department in Lonely Among Us.
It all just comes off so clusterf***ed compared to security or sickbay or command. Then, you have Data, who is chief of operations without being titled as such, who is arguably admin over, security, sciences & engineering.... which also begs the question... why is there no chief science officer, specifically admin over the blue suit sciences?
Data was called the Operations Officer on screen several times. (Like in "Conundrum" when the computer was listing the senior officers.) Harry Kim was Operations Officer, too. They seem to be in charge of resource allocations and such. Very likely one reason why Data was the admin over various departments was because he was also officially the Second Officer. (Which would also explain why Tuvok would be having every department answer to him... he was next in line to command after Chakotay, so the Second Officer in practice even if not by title.)
It's a different title than Chief of Operations, like O'Brien on DS9, which would be their equivalent of Chief Engineer. (As he says in the beginning of "TRIBUNAL" to 'Boone'.)
I wish I could remember when particularly, but I'm pretty sure he'd also been referred to as "chief of operations", as well. The Conundrum screencap titles him as Operations Manager. It's one of those weird gray areas in assignments, so I don't really know
Dialogue from the computer itself said "Operations Officer", at about the 18:50 mark. The graphic does say 'Operations Manager', too, which is odd.
McDougal was in episode 1x3 and Argyle in 1x6 and 1x13, while Logan was in 1x21 and Lynch in 1x23. It's possible there was a change of personnel in the interim and McDougal and/or Argyle had already left. Although a graphic in the remastered version of "Galaxy's Child" shows an engineering log claiming that McDougal, Argyle, and Lynch were still aboard.
why is there no chief science officer, specifically admin over the blue suit sciences?
The real-world reason is that TNG's creators didn't want to duplicate TOS's crew composition, so they left out a science officer, communications officer, and (initially) chief engineer, combined helm and navigation into conn, and added a counselor and security chief.
It may also have had to do with the original intention that much of the Enterprise-D's crew would be civilian scientists rather than Starfleet personnel, so whoever was their administrative head wouldn't necessarily be part of the Starfleet chain of command. Maybe they fell under the operations manager's purview because he was responsible for management and allocation of ship resources in general. (Although of course this idea was lost in later seasons, where the only civilian scientist we saw aboard ship was Keiko.)
Sorry, that's not how it works. Per most style guides, you only capitalize a job title when you're using it as part of a proper name or address, and use lower case when referring to it generically. E.g. "President Lincoln was one of our most admired presidents" or "King Richard III was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty." So Chief Engineer Argyle would be one of the ship's chief engineers.
Also, of course, dialogue in scripts is not meant to be seen by the audience, only heard, so the typography is held to looser standards than on the printed page. Even if it had said "chief engineer Argyle," that wouldn't mean it wasn't his official job title, it would only mean the scriptwriter hadn't bothered to use the shift key.
Tell that to the Star Trek: TNG writers.
SCOTT
One of them... I actually served
on two. This was the first...
she was also the first ship I ever
served on as Chief Engineer.
MAXWELL
How are you? I had no idea you
were on the Enterprise.
(turning, to Riker)
This was my Tactical Officer on
the Rutledge. Best I ever had.
And so on....
More importantly, there is no precedent - zero! - for there to ever be two "Chief" engineers aboard any Trek ship or posting at any time in canon. Rather it has always been used exclusively to refer to one single individual who has that job, as the boss of that department.
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While the Okudas and their staff were generally huge Trek nerds with a wealth of trivia in their heads and at their fingertips, it is probably best not to take things like onscreen graphics too literally. They were created by production staff, not the writers, and those staffers were just kind of guessing in many instances and those graphics weren't meant to be anything more than visual wallpaper.
Apart from TNG season 1 where it was explicitly said there was more than one person counted as “chief engineer”
