This is an excellent analysis. And you are totally right about Chakotay: he is never ever referred to as “Lieutenant Commander”. I like your Watsonian explanation! That’s a really interesting take.

Of course, this is also the show that was bizarrely inconsistent with Tuvok’s rank. Interestingly, between Kes, Neelix, the Doctor, and Seven, I think VGR may have had the most rankless characters of any series up to that point. I suppose DS9 could be tied, since VGR only had three rankless characters at once, as did DS9 (Quark, Odo, Jake).

But yeah – I wonder if this reflects a larger trend. ENT definitely leaned on simplified ranks as well – instead of the TNG-era 7-rank scale, we only ever see four on ENT: Captain, Commander, Lieutenant, and Ensign. (It’s not clear to me that the costume department even designed a “hollow pip” for the ENT uniforms.) Under that analysis, we see a gradual trend toward de-emphasizing rank, from DS9 to VGR to ENT to DSC to PIC & PRO (though not LDS).

I propose that the Enterprise-E became somehow entangled in something it could not be removed from. I have a mental image of the ship somehow stuck in “spatial quicksand” or maybe an infinite timeloop – some situation where Captain Worf saved the crew and the ship but then was not given the resources needed to extricate the vessel, leaving it to be abandoned in its place.

More heroically, perhaps the Enterprise-E “saved the day” by hooking itself into, say, the mainframe and physical hull of some starbase that suffering from some sort of collapse of software and/or hardware – saving the station from imminent destruction, but irrevocably welding the ship and station together. Again, perhaps Worf thought he’d be given support from Starfleet to eventually extricate the ship, which would explain why he would later feel justified claiming that the ship’s ultimate fate “was not his fault”.

The showrunners have hinted that they’re gonna play a little loose with established canon this season – I think in particular with regard to Spock/Chapel, but also likely with the Gorn. Which honestly is an interesting choice – SNW is supposed to appeal to folks who miss TOS (and the vibe of TNG, even if LDS and PIC are more literal successors to TNG), and so I wonder if they are counting on that “credibility” to seek “forgiveness” from fans who object to continuity issues.

(On the other hand, they also seem to be doubling down on certain elements from canon; for example, they are taking very seriously this notion that 2250s Spock is noticeably greener, no pun intended, than 2260s Spock, drawing much more on “The Cage” than his later appearances. To me, this is in contrast to the Kelvinverse interpretation of the character, who, while still more emotive than 2260s Spock Prime, nevertheless seems to be drawing primarily from that version of Spock, rather than the one from “The Cage”.)

I’d argue that, in some ways, Deep Space Nine is the answer to your question. For the most part, DS9 did not utilize the “away team” concept much at all. Now, if you are asking more broadly about the effect of putting our characters “in danger”, than I suppose you could argue that all of DS9 was an “away mission”, but I think the dynamic was significantly different.

With respect to TNG, I suspect showing a wider diversity of crew on away missions would have heightened the feeling of the Enterprise-D as a “university town”, with a range of experts in different fields, but where the senior staff are seen – not as less expendable – but rather as generalists, or perhaps even more like “philosophers” (in an old-fashioned sense of the term), who must take in information from a much wider range of sources and figure out what to do with it.

Dramatically, however, I think this would have made TNG even more “talky” than it already was. Without the senior staff going planetside and seeing the strange new world for themselves, I think we would have that much less emotional involvement with the “extra of the week” doing the exploring instead. Could it have worked with, as you suggest, a subcast of “away team” characters? Perhaps, but I think you would have needed to remove some of the existing cast, or reimagine them significantly – I don’t think TNG could accommodate too many more regulars. (A rebooted TNG where Geordi, Worf, and Tasha are the “landing party” crew could be interesting, but would be very different from what we originally had.)

That all being said… I’ve long felt that Star Trek was at its best when it told stories that could be told as stageplays (or could be easily reimagined as stageplays). A TNG without away teams would work very well as a stageplay, and could serve as a way to focus the writing: the story has to be compelling through the dialogue and acting alone, and can’t lean on the tropes of the “dangerous away mission” or the “mystifying abandoned alien planet”.

Spock steals the Enterprise (again) – what more could I ask for?

Also yeah – I really love how SNW is establishing that Spock has been, in the words of Eleanor Shellstrop of The Good Place, a messy bench who loves drama, since, you know, forever. How did he put it? “I thought it was obvious. I am proposing we steal the Enterprise.” Amazing.

Reporting for duty, @williams_482