Night Shift

[Colonel Midnight]

This is gonna sound completely ignorant but I don't remember seeing a major crew doing nights on DS9. Somebody help me out here.

It was always night on DS9.

Well, a routine watch on a (relatively) stationary space station is going to be a lot smaller than a starship, IMO. Maybe only the equivalent of an engineering/security type wandering the areas once/hour, perhaps a second individual manning the Command deck (or whatever it was called in DS9 -- can't recall off-hand), and then the OOD.

The latter is probably really only "on call", so after 2300 or thereabouts (i.e. after one last round of the spaces), they're probably in the rack.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Timo]

It always bothered me to see the ship just going about it's normal business with the 3 highest-ranking officers all together on the bridge. In alert conditions, maybe, but it seems like Picard, Riker, and Data all worked Alpha shift together.

Color me curious: when did we catch the TNG crew "going about normal business"?

It seems to me that whenever we joined the action, and the red alert klaxons weren't hooting, the ship was still at the very least about to arrive at a destination worthy enough of a Captain's Log entry that stated that this was going to be this episode's Big Assignment, or at least the Assignment to be Interrupted by the Adventure. It would be logical for Picard to be on the bridge at such a time.

There were a couple of times when the ship was in dull transit, yeah - say, "Conspiracy" (a nice example of Picard being asleep, too). But at such times, we saw Riker in charge of the bridge. Or at least on the bridge, idly chatting with his pals who paid scant attention to their consoles and mainly utilized the nice seats of the bridge for comfortable laidbackness.

I second the notion that Picard himself would never stand a watch, but would always trust a junior officer to summon him to the bridge when needed. Riker might do occasional watches solely out of the need to socialize. Normally, it would be the numerous redshirt Lieutenants that litter the backgrounds of the scenes who would be tasked with supervising bridge operations when nothing was really happening.

Timo Saloniemi