Why Wasn't Rand Court Martialed?

[Pauln6]

Listen to Rand's half-hearted plea to Starfleet to abort transport. She
is obviously faking it. She DELIBERATELY screwed up the transporter
circuit in Engineering (she had 18 months to figure out how to do it) to
ensure that it would malfunction. Why would she do this, you ask?

In the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (I know it's not canonical
but it will serve my purposes), the other person transporting aboard was
Kirk's WIFE! Janice Rand has always been trying to get Kirk's attention
(it's very hard in those bland coverall uniforms) so she decided to get
rid of the competition. Why, then, didn't Rand go after Kirk when the
dirty deed was done? Guilt. Too little, too late, Janice!

And poor Sonak! An innocent pawn in the dangerous chess game of love.

Lol - yeah a clear case of Munchausen by proxy and these were the only two kills Janice got in her entire Starfleet career! Give her a break.

I don't think Rand can be blamed for the transporter malfunction. The transporters were offline before Scotty came on board so it must have been Scotty's decision to bring them online again (possibly on orders from Decker but Decker does seem to be the more cautious type). I agree, it's odd that they didn't test the system more before greenlighting the system for humanoid transport but they may have been testing the system all day to isolate the problem. Any car mechanic knows that intermittent faults can be hard to track down.

The problem may have arisen because removing a functional module, which would normally have worked as an additional back-up, placed greater strain on the faulty module. Since it was Scotty tinkering with the system DURING A TRANSPORT after authorising the system back online, I think the buck stops with him.

Now if Rand was contacted direct by Starfleet and personally approved the transport despite the system being officially offline then the buck would stop with her instead but requests would normally be sent via the comms officer and a direct request is never implied, as Kirk's comment to Rand suggests.

What is curious is that the error raises questions about safety procedures and the nature of transporting from one pad to another, which is meant to be safer than using just one pad. It may be that the fault occurred a fraction of a second after the Starfleet pad released the signal so it was a million to one accident.

 

[Timo]

The transporter had been offline for a while -- that's the whole reason Kirk had to take the shuttle pod to the Enterprise.

From the treknological standpoint, that's the reason Kirk had to take a transporter to Scotty aboard the space station and bitch to him about it. The pod ride from there to the ship was just a nice bonus.

The dramatic purpose of the transporter accident scene seems to be twofold. One, to create the vacancy that Spock can later fill. And two, to make it clear that the ship is not ready for the mission - that she's in fact falling apart and our heroes are betting their lives on technology that is likely to kill them all. First the transporter failure, then the warp engine hiccup; the crew and Earth would clearly be doomed without Spock's timely assistance.

Regarding the general practice of pad-to-pad transporting, we have seen it happen in TOS a couple of times, perhaps the most significantly in "Trouble with Tribbles". The framing of the shot there doesn't establish which side was the active one in the transport, or whether operators were needed on both sides: the Enterprise transporter room is not shown, and the K-7 transporter may have been operated from the console of the station manager, outside the shot.

From the ST:TMP dialogue, it's equally unclear whether one or two parties are doing the beaming. Down in the engine room, it seems that the Enterprise transporter room is the "them" that's initiating the transport, without realizing that the hardware has once again failed. Next we hear Rand asking "Override us!" which may or may not have happened. And then we hear Kirk to "Boost your matter gain, we need more signal!" which may indicate that Starfleet did indeed take over but that it didn't exactly help. It's possible there was no pad-to-pad interaction going on at all, but a simple standard transport done by the Enterprise transporter room alone.

Indeed, it's possible that pad-to-pad doesn't exist as a procedure at all, and that people simply beam from pad to pad because it's practical to organize the troupe on a pad in a transporter room even if it's an "inert" one, a mere target for the active transporter to grab the transportees from. Pad-to-pad may hold no other advantages, and the procedure described in TNG "Realm of Fear" is something else altogether. Indeed, that TNG procedure sounds like an exceptional measure, even when our TNG heroes apparently regularly beam from starship pad to starship pad (despite the budgets only allowing the showing of one end of the process).

On the issue of beaming without checking, we get some of that in "And the Children Shall Lead". However, that hardly counts, as the personnel involved were no doubt under the spell of the children at the time, and wouldn't have hesitated to beam their victims to the heart of a star.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captrek]

What is curious is that the error raises questions about safety procedures

It may be that a number of safety procedures were bypassed due to the incredible time pressure.

 

[J.T.B.]

I have to question the premise: How would we know if Rand was court-martialed or not? Just because Kirk didn't have her arrested on the spot doesn't mean that there wasn't an off-screen investigation, board of inquiry, court-martial etc. down the line. I would think that the V'ger threat was urgent enough that Kirk could be forgiven for putting that sort of thing off for a while.

--Justin

 

[Pauln6]

What is curious is that the error raises questions about safety procedures

It may be that a number of safety procedures were bypassed due to the incredible time pressure.

True. We don't know from where they were beaming either but rolling out the red carpet i.e. a transport for Kirk on his own piloted by the chief engineer no less may not have been the best use of resources either.

 

[Timo]

Given the tight schedule, one would assume the Enterprise was beaming up personnel more or less directly from where they stood - or at least it seems this happened to McCoy. A call from Starfleet, pull up your trousers, gather your belongings, we're taking you in three minutes sharp, ready or not. In most cases, they wouldn't wait for the personnel to first wander to an Earthside transporter station for their pickup.

Of course, Sonak at least could be expected to be at Starfleet Headquarters, well within range of the facility's own transporters. So some sort of a two-pad setup isn't ruled out. But I have to emphasize that this movie does not require us to believe in two-pad transporting. It only requires us to believe that a transport process can be handed over from one transporter to another after a major malfunction - something we often see happen in later Trek, such as DS9 "Dramatis Personae".

We get the probably completely false impression that two sets of transporters would be needed when Kirk wants to beam up and learns that he cannot because the ship's transporters are down. But that's not evidence that Earth lacks transporters, or that Starfleet for some reason would prefer to have a transporter at each end of the process. That Kirk beams up to a space station and then takes a shuttle over to the ship is merely indication that he wanted to beam up to the space station and then wanted to take a shuttle over to the ship. Both bits make perfect sense: he needed to beam to Scotty to complain, and then he needed to get himself and Scotty to the ship but had the opportunity to take the scenic route.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Robert D. Robot]

I think she was court-martialed. That is why she was working clearing tables in the cafeteria when the damaged Enterprise enters space dock in Star Trek III....

... Just kidding. I suspect that she was eating there, not working there.

 

[Pauln6]

I think she was court-marshailed. That is why she was working clearing tables in the cafeteria when the damaged Enterprise enters space dock in Star Trek III....

... Just kidding. I suspect that she was eating there, not working there.

Since she was dressed in an officer's uniform in STIII she was actually promoted after TMP and then demoted back to a Chief Petty Officer in STIV and them promoted to Lt (or was Lt-commander in Flashback) by STVI.

I suspect that Rand was never meant to be there at all. She left Starfleet and occasionally put on some random uniform to get a berth on a ship. She had no idea what she was doing and no training in any of the equipment but she still made damn fine coffee so everybody let it slide.

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Given the tight schedule, one would assume the Enterprise was beaming up personnel more or less directly from where they stood - or at least it seems this happened to McCoy. A call from Starfleet, pull up your trousers, gather your belongings, we're taking you in three minutes sharp, ready or not. In most cases, they wouldn't wait for the personnel to first wander to an Earthside transporter station for their pickup.

You're misremembering.

UHURA: Captain, Starfleet reports our last six crew members ready to beam up, but one of them is refusing to step into the transporter.

And of course:

KIRK: Yeoman, what was the problem down there?

YEOMAN: He insisted we go first, sir. Said something about first seeing how it scrambled our molecules.

Sounds like all six crew members were in the same place, likely Starfleet Headquarters.

 

[Maurice]

It's just bad logic to move the story along. If anyone shoulda been court-martialed, it was the peeps in Engineering who allowed power to the transporter before it was fully checked and tested.

 

[BillJ]

I just thought the transporter accident was there to show the audience how new and untested the equipment was.

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

I figured it was in there just to show a transporter malfunction to the fans who would be wowed by it.

 

[Merky]

I figured it was there since they spent a couple of thousand on the effects and were trying to get their money's worth :P

 

[Captrek]

If anyone shoulda been court-martialed, it was the peeps in Engineering who allowed power to the transporter before it was fully checked and tested.

If the peeps in Engineering tell you that pre-launch preparation will require 20 hours at a minimum, and you tell them that they had better be done in 12 hours or the whole world is going to be destroyed, then it’s more than a little unfair to court martial them for not fully checking and testing every component before use. When you say, “I don’t want it right, I want it right now,” this is the kind of result you can expect.

 

[Pauln6]

When you view it through that prism, it's actually a nice moment where risk taking behaviour backfires. We see lots of occasions in NuTrek where Kirk's risk-taking pays off and TMP seems to step back from that a bit, reminding us that risky behaviour is dangerous and luck can always run out.

In NuTrek, for example, we see do Olsen meeting a fiery death because of his risk-taking but in that case he went beyond the ludicrous risks of the mission and into suicidal behaviour by failing to open his chute in anywhere near enough time because he was havig fun... We also see Scotty's submersion as being a minor, humerously inconvenient consequence of staggeringly risky behaviour. I think that it would be nice if at least one risky decision had seriously tragic consequences in the sequel.

 

[BillJ]

In NuTrek, for example, we see do Olsen meeting a fiery death because of his risk-taking but in that case he went beyond the ludicrous risks of the mission and into suicidal behaviour by failing to open his chute in anywhere near enough time because he was havig fun...

Which makes no sense because he's an engineer and would know the minimal distance from which he can deploy his chute and still safely land.

 

[Pauln6]

Promote Rand for following orders. Court martial Olsen's charred remains for not.

 

[Merky]

Yeah, but he was a red shirt and expendable to pave the way for Scotty's grand entrance. The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few... or the one. :P

 

[Pauln6]

Well if Rand killed Sonak to make way for Spock then she was doing her duty for the universe too. At this rate all she has to do is up her kill rate and she'll be an admiral in no time.

 

[Merky]

Exactly, perfect logic.