Sleeping on the Enterprise

[Rayna]

This question has been bothering me for such a long time.. And there's probably an obvious answer for it.. But when does the crew sleep? And when they do, who takes their place?

We could assume that Spock, Sulu, and Scotty could sit in the captain's chair just like every other time Kirk is away, but the problem is they are always working at the same time. So wouldn't they need to sleep around the same time, too?

Is there some replacement crew that works the graveyard shift on NCC-1701??

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

It's a good question. Yes, presumably they did rotate shifts: in Is There in Truth No Beauty, we even heard all the "Goodnight, Jim", "Goodnight, Bones" and "Goodnight, Spock" stuff after the "IDIC dinner". Who was on the bridge?

 

[Melakon]

That's when the bridge has a soon-to-be-skeleton crew of redshirts.

Or it's when all those guys we only saw only once or twice or a few times (Leslie, Kyle, Riley, Galloway, etc.) take over. Then there's all those episodes where we only saw Chekov because George was working on The Green Beret, so maybe Sulu was waiting for his shift to start.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

...soon-to-be-skeleton crew of redshirts.

Maybe they had overlapping shifts? We have that at work: when "our guys" show up, a bunch of guys are already there doing their thing, and they leave before we do, so maybe that's what we see when the crew is all together on the bridge. This is coincidentally when all the interesting things happen, but what can ya do?

 

[Melakon]

If we assume that the 3 seasons are just the first 3 years of the 5 year mission, we can then assume that something interesting happened only 79 days (roughly) out of 1,095. Coincidentally, those 79 days were when we had the TV on.

 

[SignGuyHPW]

We saw the crew in the their quarters some times so that would be off duty/sleeping time for them. When something important was happening then the bridge crew would get recalled. That's why Kirk would be called to the bridge some times when he was in his quarters or taking a physical.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

To tell the truth, I'm not sure how anything could be scheduled on the ship. In What are Little Girls Made Of?, we see evidence of the ship's manifest, from which Korby chooses his subject planet for his scheme. Now, sleep schedules aside, how could the ship possibly keep a plan of any kind? One distress call or planetary disaster, and they'd have to accelerate the schedule to keep up. Then, suddenly comes a Klingon attack. While trying to make up the lost time from that, along comes an energy cloud with plans of it's own for the ship. They'd never, ever be able to keep up with any schedule!!

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

You know what looks awful, those bunks in VI.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Star Trek had two things going on that, taken together, lead to Rayna's question.

One is that the show assigned Star Fleet ranks in roughly the same order that the regular actors were billed. So the top actors seemed to account for the ship's whole senior staff. There were some exceptions, when a small-part guy would have commander's sleeves, but that was rare.

The other thing is that the show generally needed all its top actors already at their stations as each adventure began. This saved time getting them into the story, but it also left an unseen senior staff who ran the ship "at night."

 

[Rayna]

We saw the crew in the their quarters some times so that would be off duty/sleeping time for them. When something important was happening then the bridge crew would get recalled. That's why Kirk would be called to the bridge some times when he was in his quarters or taking a physical.

That's a good point, and it answers at least part of the mystery.

 

[Rayna]

This saved time getting them into the story, but it also left an unseen senior staff who ran the ship "at night."

I think someone should write a story about this elusive Night Staff of the Enterprise

 

[scotpens]

We saw the crew in the their quarters some times so that would be off duty/sleeping time for them. When something important was happening then the bridge crew would get recalled. That's why Kirk would be called to the bridge some times when he was in his quarters or taking a physical.

And frequently when he just happened to have his shirt off.

 

[Melakon]

What a cheat. We never got to see Uhura changing her shirt.

 

[Mario de Monti]

There probably is a watch officer that takes over when the regular command crew goes off-duty. He or she will not be qualified to really command the ship, but qualified enough to supervise its normal operation. Whenever there is an emergency or some other situation that goes beyond the capabilites of the watch officer, the captain can be called to the bridge at short notice. AFAIK this is the way it was/is handled in our real-life navies.

Mario

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

What a cheat. We never got to see Uhura changing her shirt.

We had to wait 45 years for that.

SEXISM.

 

[Lance]

Of course, we did occasionally see people other than the regular cast actually sit in the captain's chair. Or we did at least once anyway, that being Lieutenant Desalle in "Catspaw". Maybe he was part of another shift? "Catspaw" being a Halloween episode, maybe it was even supposed to be taking place at night-time?

(Of course, DeSalle was the assistant chief engineer, so maybe he was just in the pecking order behind Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Sulu.)

 

[Metryq]

We know from Kirk's driving in "A Piece of the Action" that the Enterprise did not have a shift.

 

[Mario de Monti]

 

[nureintier]

Yeah, I found myself wondering that a lot. But I guess we're only watching when (1)the main cast is awake, and (2)when something interesting is going on. They must sleep sometimes.

I think it's just that, compared to other series, you don't see their quarters as much, and you don't see them resting much, so it kind of seems like they live on the bridge (or are on other planets, etc) all day and night.

We know from Kirk's driving in "A Piece of the Action" that the Enterprise did not have a shift.

Heh. This. I enjoyed that part.

 

[J.T.B.]

It's just like cop shows or hospital shows: Interesting stuff only happens when the main characters are on duty. But there have to be others on different shifts, we just never see them.

In WNMHGB Mitchell is apparently off watch but comes to the bridge on his own when he hears an alert. He relieves someone from another watch at his station.