Rand's Rank

Agreed. I appreciate fan works more to expand those details. I don't need to stop the story to explain those ranks.

 

What I hadn't realized before is that he also subconsciously gave her a wig that's far more Vulcan-like than the TUC 'do. Oh, the perverse depths of his dark mind...

Timo Saloniemi

 

There is litle information about Rand's age.

In "Charlie X" the age difference between Rand and Charlie Evans, age 17, is considered to be too great.

When Kirk tries to discourage Charlie's interest in Rand:

And earlier:

So Rand clearly considers herself to be significantly older than Charlie.

If Tina Lawton is 17, the same age as Charlie, then maybe Rand might be only about 5 years older and thus about 22.

If Tina is a year or two older than Charles Evans, 18 or 19, then Rand would probaby have to be more years older than Charlie to make the difference between Tina's and Charlie's ages seem insignficant to her. Thus in that case Rand could have been maybe 10 years older than Charlie, aged about 27. And possibly older than that.

Grace Lee Whitney was born 1 April 1930 and died 1 May 2015.

She appeared as Janice Rand in TOS episodes from "The Corbomite Maneuvr" to "The Conscience of the King", filmed between 24 May 1966 and 21 Septembr 1966, and thus when she was age 36.

She appeared as Janice Rand in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, filmed between 7 August 1978a nd 26 Janaury 1979, and thus when she was age 48.

She appeared as "Woman in Cafeteria" in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, filmed between August i5, 1983 and 20 October 1983, and thus when she was age 53.

She appeared as "Commander Rand" in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, filmed in 1986 and thus when she was age 55 or 56.

She appeared as "Commander Rand" in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, filmed in 1986 and thus when she was age 55 or 56.

She appeared as "Janice Rand" in the Voyager episode "Flashback", filmed 27 March 1996 to 4 April 1996 and thus when she was about agee 56.

As a gneral rule, movie and television characters usually apper to be about the same age as the actors who portray them. Still, there is enough variation between the ages of characters and their actors that the actor's age can sometimes be misleading about the character's age.

In "Flashback" Rand talks to Tuvok as he prepares for his shift on tthe Bridge.

One interpretation of Rand's line is that she happens to know Turkok's age from his official records, and that it took her three years to make ensign from an enlisted rank she had when she was Tuvok's age.

It is a little odd that Tuvok was still an ensign age 29 (Earth or Vulcan years?). But with greater Vulccan longevity maybe the typical career track of a Vulcan officer involves remaining in one rank for longer periods than human officers do.

So possibly Rand meant she was an enlisted crew person when she was 29 and it took her three years to become and ensign, thus becoming an ensign at about age 32. If so, Rand shoud have been 32 or younger during her latest appearance as an enlisted crew person, in either TOS or Star Trek: The Motion Picture, I think.

 

Highly satisfactory reasoning there - too bad that we don't really know when exactly TMP happened...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I would say that Janice Rand was possibly around the same age as Kirk in the original series, give or take a few years! If she was 22 then I doubt there would have been comments like the years are wrong to be honest!
JB

 

...What a writer wrote in the sixties and how the episode reads in context are such wildly different things, especially regarding anything having to do with sexxx, that we probably should approach these things from the direction of context. Is it plausible that Kirk would believe in a certain code of age differences? Is it more likely that he'd lie about that in order to manipulate Charlie? Do Rand and Kirk believe in the same code? Etc.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I have a hard time imagining why there would be no need for insignia to differentiate enlisted grades. Something that was addressed in the movies, then re-established in TNG!

 

In the novelisation of Miri, Rand stated she was 24 but this never made it into the episode. The novel the first adventure had her as 16 but that version was clearly written for Smith, since we know canonically that she was older than Charlie. I prefer that she was about Kirk's age. Grace was older than Shatner, although his line in Miri about older women could suggest that Rand was slightly younger.

I say PO 1St class in TOS. CPO In TMP. Borrowed an officer uniform to get the best view of the Enterprise returning in TSFS. Master CPO in TVH. LtJG in TUC although one could argue that Valeris and Rand needed to swap uniforms. Dream sequence definitely inaccurate as a YouTube analysis of the two sequences will reveal.

 

I always thought Rand to be in her 30s. Thats why it puzzled me why they tried to make her out to be a poor confused innocent in Enemy Within.
They had plenty of other yeomen of the week for that role.
I'd have preferred her to be sassy like she was in Charlie X or Corbomite
To be honest until I got the series on DVD and did a 3-day binge didn't realise that Rand was actually a regular until I saw all the episodes in order. She didn't make that much of an impact on me.
I wish she had. I wish she wasn't just there to crush on Kirk.
I think the idea that she was intended to be a friend of Spock would have been great. I could see them conspiring to keep Kirk safe from himself.
Did anyone really think she was in her early 20s?
BTW If a 22 year old woman took interest in my 16 year old boy I would not be happy

 

Did they have Yeomen of Week when Rand was on the show?

 

Being brainwashed and mindmelding with a murderer take their toll...

 

Sassy Rand is a gold mine IMO. I'm trying to add a few lines of sass to my fan edit of TMP but I'm too stupid to understand the error messages I'm getting from my vocoder. I am having to muddle along with the demo version and pre-trained model, which isn't great.

Do the TOS dvds have separate music tracks? I'm positive I'd get much better results if I could load speech files with no background music.

Before anyone is too hard on Rand in Charlie X can I remind them of Kirk in Miri and Conscience of the King. Lenore was 19.

 

Is is just me, or was Harlan Ellison being ridiculous in his attempt to shoehorn Rand (his friend Grace) into the role of an action hero? Much like the minidress, Rand's basket weave seems tailor-made to impede action, and cast her as more sedate and even decorative.

When a Red Alert sounds, you can't leap out of bed from a sound sleep, spend 45 minutes primping, and then dash to your battle station. The hair alone makes it impossible for Rand to be an action-oriented character.

 

Grace certainly had problems with her beehive when filming The Enemy Within but she was tossed around quite forcefully so normal action scenes might not have been as much of a problem.

Ellison certainly wasn't being ridiculous. The official line was that all crew members were trained astronauts. In fact Yeoman Colt makes that point in the pilot. Further, Helen Noel's part was originally for Rand and she got stuck in.

If anything the script revisions seemed to marginalise the women, and Rand in particular, more than originally intended. In the Naked Time, is there any reason to take Rand off the helm so quickly? Spock even delivers a line to Eddie Paskey in one scene (not sure if it's the same episode but if it is, it is early on) and calls him Rand. Seems unlikely they named an extra after a main character. Apparently, in one early draft, Roddenberry nixed a suggestion that Rand should man the science station, saying let's keep her as Kirk's valet. Good enough for Chekov but not Rand.

In the final version of CotEoF, Uhura is in charge of the security team. It would not have been a stretch for Rand as long as none of them had officer braids.

So to summarise, not a ridiculous notion and a real shame. If Rand, the space waitress, had been allowed to demonstrate more versatility, I think that would have carried forward to other female characters as the show went on.

 

To clarify, when I wrote that the basket weave alone disqualifies her as an action hero, I meant the character, not the actress. With hair like that, she simply could not swing into action on short notice. She needs too much mirror time.

In an unrelated matter, isn't it just fanon to say Uhura was in charge of the COTEOF security squad? I don't recall any dialogue or gestures on her part that put her in command of those men.

 

From what I recall, she's the only lieutenant amongst them and, given that Rand was expressly put in charge in the original script, it seems a fair extrapolation. They certainly were not going to state outright that this black woman is in charge of these white men but the strong implication is there on screen. I admire their guile in sliding it under the radar.

As far as Rand's hair goes, Uhura and Chapel got new wigs. If the hair was a problem, s he could have just changed the wig.

 

Her hair was terribly unflattering. I agree with you that she couldn't have been ducking phaser fire with that target on top of her head.
Whenever she went planetside she should have donned pants, a shiny new phaser and the hair-do she had in the promo photos. When safe aboard ship serving coffee and helping Sulu in the labs she could keep her space-do and short skirt.

 

Even Majel said that the crazy ornate wigs the actresses had to wear was the product of sexism but I suppose they did help make the show more memorable. In TMP, Wise gave all the women smart, professional, functional hairstyles, with long hair tied out of the way.

 

In the absense of Kirk and Spock, Scotty would have been in charge. Never got the impression that Uhura was in charge of the two security guys.

Didn't stop her from taking them home.

 

Many characters on TOS were portrayed as younger than the actors. Assuming TOS occurred exactly 300 years in the future (please, no rebuttals on this assumption, there are many other threads on that topic):

• Walter Koenig was 30 when he filmed Who Mourns For Adonais?, while his character Chekov was 22 years old, so, the difference was about 8 years younger.
• Deforest Kelly was born in 1920 while his character Doctor McCoy was established to be born in 2227 in TNG, so, the age difference was about 7 years younger.
• William Shatner was 36 when he filmed The Deadly Years, while his character Kirk was 34 years old, so, the difference was about 2 years younger.
• Jimmy Doohan was born in 1920 while his character Scotty was established to be born in 2222 in TNG: Relics, so, the difference was about 2 years younger.
• Grace Lee Whitney was 36 during the first half of TOS:S1. If her character Rand was 24, then she would be about 12 years younger. 12 years younger may be a bit of a stretch even for a science fiction show.

• By the way, Mark Leonard was 42.945 when he filmed the reception scene in Journey to Babel, while his character Sarek was 102.437, so the difference was precisely 59.492 years older!