Was Seska Obsidian Order or Cardassian military?

[doubleohfive]

And Chakotay wore a Lieutenant Commander's pin (but in his case, 'Commander' is frequent shorthand for a LCDR).

This? Again?

Three points.

1) Voyager was notorious for fudging the rank pips throughout the series. It's like whoever was in charge of it just had had enough and gave up even trying. Tuvok, Paris, Seska all were victims of this.

2) Regardless of Chakotay's rank pin on the series, regardless that his immediate predecessor on Voyager was Lt. Commander Cavit, and regardless that "Commander" is "frequent shorthand for a LCDR," Chakotay is never, not once in the entire series, all seven seasons and 172 episodes once referred to as a Lieutenant Commander, verbally.

According to the TNG Companion, Ro makes a veiled reference to him in TNG's "Preemptive Strike" as a lieutenant commander before resigning from Starfleet to join the Maquis, but upon his arrival on Voyager and appointment as Janeway's new first officer, he's just a commander. That's all anyone ever calls him, that's all he's ever listed as. The rank pip, on a series full of rank pip snafus, is irrelevant.

Further evidence:

Robert Beltran's on screen credit early in Voyager's run:

NOTE: This same opening credits sequence also lists "Tim Russ as Lieutenant Tuvok" despite his wearing pips of a lieutenant commander.

So, in short, in summation, once and for all: Chakotay is a full Commander once he becomes Janeway's XO.

 

[Timo]

Or then not. Neither interpretation has any claim to being superior to the other; both rely on some of the onscreen information being wrong.

Seska was part of Chakotay's Maquis crew, but whether she had Starfleet background that would have prompted Janeway to give her officer brevet-rank, or whether she just came highly recommended by Chakotay, we don't know. Some novels (Brave and the Bold, Badlands) do say that she did first join Starfleet as part of her infiltration operation (an expected action for a "hothead Bajoran patriotess" at that point of history) - then "resigned/defected in disgust" and started bashing Starfleet to her Maquis "friends", an act she kept up in VOY as well. The episodes neither support or contradict this.

We certainly didn't need a detailed explanation of who the Tal Shiar were

I loved the subtle reference to the tal'shaya "death grip" in the naming of this organization - but what I liked even more was that this was never discussed by the heroes or the villains or otherwise made explicit... Not in VOY, not in DS9, not in the original TNG.

Timo Saloniemi