I guess I confused her with the OTHER blonde officer running back and forth between some off-camera station and the "pool table"...

--Jonah

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"It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."

--Col. Edwards, ROBOTECH

Obviously, the line cannot refer to Rand at first being an NCO in Starfleet service for three years and the immediately becoming Ensign. Apart from the unlikeliness of that kind of career development, we watched the NCO Janice for more than three years - the early TOS years and the TMP appearance are rather well established, even if nobody ever explicitly said Rand was a petty officer in those appearances.

How realistic would it be to say that a "mustang" has to spend three years in special training to gain a commission? Not completely unrealistic to me - O'Brien may be an experienced engineer (and a former infantryman or something), but he hasn't spent four years in the Academy learning ancient cultures and Federation law and all those finer academic points of officerdom. A down-to-earth Starfleet officer is a contradiction in terms...

Flashback was a pitiful, Absolutely PITIFUL, excuse to get a Guest Stint for George Takei.

According to the Star Trek Timeline (or so I think), when Sulu obtained command of the Excelsior in 2287, he made Rand his First officer.

And She's a Lieutenant here? Absolutely B*&*sh^&!!!! A lieutenant won't reprimand Tuvok after his verbal objections to Sulu crossing the Neutral zone.

And Sulu doesn't seem to be the type that would actually cross the Neutral Zone smack-dab into a bunch of Klingons and blowing half his ship up in the process. If he wanted to do that, he would have done it the way Spock did. A guy with Charisma like Sulu does wouldn't abandon his brains and charge into the battlefield with a blindfold on.

No, don't believe a damn thing about it. Absolutely Pitiful.