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Yeoman Rand's Tower of Hair

Pauln6 said:
There were quite a few episodes where Rand could have contributed to the story by adding character to filler dialogue but apart from that, why replace her at the helm with an extra in the very next scene in the Naked Time?
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You make some good points. The thing with the helm was, this was still 1966, and the Star Trek mindset was that you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers. She takes the wheel in a moment of emergency, but a man had to take over ASAP.

Women drove all over the place in real life, but the first season hadn't caught up. It wasn't the picture the producers wanted to paint.

We see a woman helmsman in "That Which Survives" I guess because American culture was changing so much, and Star Trek was trying to acknowledge it a bit. But not to overdo it. The show was behind the times on Women's Lib. For instance, there was no way they'd show a woman piloting the shuttlecraft while Kirk sat passively in a back seat.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
You make some good points. The thing with the helm was, this was still 1966, and the Star Trek mindset was that you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers. She takes the wheel in a moment of emergency, but a man had to take over ASAP.

Women drove all over the place in real life, but the first season hadn't caught up. It wasn't the picture the producers wanted to paint.

We see a woman helmsman in "That Which Survives" I guess because American culture was changing so much, and Star Trek was trying to acknowledge it a bit. But not to overdo it. The show was behind the times on Women's Lib. For instance, there was no way they'd show a woman piloting the shuttlecraft while Kirk sat passively in a back seat.
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I dunno - there were lots of female drivers during WWII - maybe that was a British thing. I think Trek sexism was more rife with engineering than command/helm - the only engineer we hear about nearly blew Scotty up (hey wait, did Rand transfer to engineering by the time of TMP? Maybe she got her wig caught in the optical refractor.) That said, Spock was very nit-picky with Ensign Rhada, almost like he was expecting her to be twice as good as the men who had previously shouted at him, questioned his orders, and got drunk on duty.
 
Wasn't there something shady going on behind the scenes that led to Grace Lee Whitney departing the series?
Or do I mix that up with Gates McFadden?
 
ZapBrannigan said:
You make some good points. The thing with the helm was, this was still 1966, and the Star Trek mindset was that you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers.
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IIRC that was more of a 1950s TV schitck. After all, Jane Hathaway drove Milton Milburn Drysdale around all the time and you even had Betty Jo Bradley running the Hooterville Cannonball.
 
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BK613 said:
IIRC that was more of a 1950s TV schitck. After all, Jane Hathaway drove Milton Drisdale around all the time and you even had Betty Jo Bradley running the Hooterville Cannonball.
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Ah, but The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction were sitcoms (and more specifically, the kind of sitcoms targeted in the "Rural Purge").

And it's Milburn Drysdale.
 
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Pauln6 said:
There were quite a few episodes where Rand could have contributed to the story by adding character to filler dialogue but apart from that, why replace her at the helm with an extra in the very next scene in the Naked Time?
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If the extra was in a yellow command shirt, probably because it was easier to edit in reverse shots with the helmsman's shoulder in front of the viewscreen. (I mean shots where George Takei's face wouldn't have been visible, of course.)
 
Danja said:
Rick Berman wanted a Janeway/Chakotay 'ship on Voyager, but Kate Mulgrew wouldn't have it (she thought that it would've been inappropriate for a Captain to have a sexual relationship with their first officer).
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Really, this should be much more of a "Duh-DOY" thing across television than it is. But TV shows have people getting romantically and sexually involved with their coworkers and direct subordinates all the time, both because it's more dramatic and easier.
 
hbquikcomjamesl said:
Was there anything in BH or PJ (or Green Acres, for that matter) that wasn't done for comedic effect?
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Missing the point; Hathaway is presented as a competent driver that chauffeured Drysdale around, no doubt intended to a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the Clamplett's rustic behavior. Which is the opposite of what was claimed by the poster I responded to: "you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers."
 
My father never learned how to drive, but my mother did. So when I was a kid my mother drove us everywhere.

So I was quite familiar with women being competent drivers.
 
BK613 said:
Missing the point; Hathaway is presented as a competent driver that chauffeured Drysdale around, no doubt intended to a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the Clampett's rustic behavior. Which is the opposite of what was claimed by the poster I responded to: "you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers."
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I was the poster, and with all respect, I think you missed my point. :) What I said (bold added) was:
You make some good points. The thing with the helm was, this was still 1966, and the Star Trek mindset was that you simply wouldn't show a woman driving when men were available but sitting back as passengers. ... The show was behind the times on Women's Lib.
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The Beverly Hillbillies (a fantastic series) had its share of sexism, but letting Miss Hathaway drive her boss around was an up-to-date thing they did. More so than Star Trek. And for all the time Gene Roddenberry spent hyping himself as a feminist, you wouldn't know it from his artistic decisions or his personal behavior.

In fairness to Star Trek, just putting women on a Navy-like ship at all, just having them on board as crew rather than passengers, was a big deal in 1966. And having done that much, it must have seemed like going too far with female empowerment would alienate traditional male viewers.
 
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ZapBrannigan said:
I was the poster, and with all respect, I think you missed my point. :) What I said (bold added) was:


The Beverly Hillbillies (a fantastic series) had its share of sexism, but letting Miss Hathaway drive her boss around was an up-to-date thing they did. More so than Star Trek. And for all the time Gene Roddenberry spent hyping himself as a feminist, you wouldn't know it from his artistic decisions or his personal behavior.

In fairness to Star Trek, just putting women on a Navy-like ship at all, just having them on board as crew rather than passengers, was a big deal in 1966. And having done that much, it must have seemed like going too far with female empowerment would alienate traditional male viewers.
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Its true, how quickly we forget that just 20 years ago women being CEOs, aeroplane pilots, working in the armed forces in combat positiions was extremely unusual or not permitted at all..
I actually think that if there had been a female captain of say the Lexington, that viewers wouldn't have dropped off in droves. The big so called controversy of the "first" inter-racial kiss didn't have any deterimental effects.
In retrospect the lack of femaie senior officers probably was a combination of reality in the 60s, sexism and GRs interactions with his ex-wife and grlfriends.
GR wasn't totally sexist though. He promoted DC Fontana, had female writers on the show and some friends amongst the guest actreses that he actually didn't actually sleep with (I think)
 
BK613 said:
@ZapBrannigan Then why is Uhura here instead of Leslie?
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x14hd/balanceofterrorhd620.jpg
I sometimes think people are too busy doing the deconstruct-the-myth routine to actually see what is on the show.
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She's must have trained as a command officer, since she wears gold in her first two episodes, so she would have put time in at navigation as an ensign. That said, every crewman would be trained. Someone like McCoy would probably still have to take regular refresher training on key systems.

But I think the issue rings true if you examine trends across a large number of episodes. If you strip out main recurring characters you would have to ask why, if a third of the crew is female why a third of security, engineers, navigation, and helm personnel are not women. I think only shore Leave had a landing party that was a third female. The only other times women make up a significant part of a landing party is where they are kidnapped into landing parties, where the whole crew beams down, or where the landing party is only 3 people, one of whom is a woman.

But it's a trend that cuts across most iterations. In TNG half the crew was female officially but it was more like a third onscreen. After Wesley left, they did place a series of women at the helm but they never had a landing party that was more than 50% female. I think Orville did that in episode one (although it has since reverted to the 2:1 ratio more regularly. I guess old habits die hard.).

So, I don't think the point is specific to the helm. I think it is more that they just had women floating around the set as secretarial or medical staff, regardless of the colour of their uniforms in TOS.
 
Pauln6 said:
...before they decided not to renew her contract - an episode in which her lines were cut.
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They would not know the lines were to be cut until the editor started working on the episode.

Grace told me that she was in a very poor health situation. She was addicted to diet pills and alcohol, her face was often puffy and the makeup people worked hard to keep her looking good. The scriptwriters were free to use Rand in every episode of her 13-episode contract.

The production saved a lot of money by switching to more day-players, who were only paid when they appeared in a script.
 
Therin of Andor said:
They would not know the lines were to be cut until the editor started working on the episode.

Grace told me that she was in a very poor health situation. She was addicted to diet pills and alcohol, her face was often puffy and the makeup people worked hard to keep her looking good. The scriptwriters were free to use Rand in every episode of her 13-episode contract.

The production saved a lot of money by switching to more day-players, who were only paid when they appeared in a script.
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Mind you, i don't think those lines were ever filmed were they? Lenore mentions her but their only interaction is when Rand steps out of the lift.

With hindsight, I think in the opening scenes of Miri set on the planet, you can see that she is bloated and was wearing a girdle. That said, she looked fantastic for the rest of the episode. That Monday morning feeling probably did not endear her to the producers.

Female characters were often considered superfluous or decorative in these kinds of shows. If Nichelle had not been a symbol and Majel had not been banging the boss, one cannot help but wonder if we would have seen a succession of beautiful day players as comms officers or nurses.

I've toyed with the idea of using rotobrush to fan edit Rand's beehive at the engineering station for some of the season 2 and 3 episodes. i think it would be fun to assume Rand was still around as a CPO performing engineering duties right up until TMP. It is tempting to make it Rand who annoys Scotty by blowing up his engines in Wolf in the Fold :-D

More fun would be to add her to the landing party in a Piece of the Action using one of her gum chewing gangster's moll type characters from one of her many other appearances but I think most of them were in black and white.
 
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