enP" and review Jim Shimoda and the moving parts of engineering in early TNG episodes.
https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp246
In the first season of TNG, the chief engineer and their leadership personnel would change almost as quickly as someone's underwear. Until Geordi gets his hands on the job, nobody could seem to keep that department running smoothly. That made for a nice corollary to the show writers getting their sea legs using many rehashed or callback scripts in the first season.
One such example is the episode The Naked Now, which of course is a similar story to what Kirk's crew faced with polywater intoxication in the episode The Naked Time. In this episode, Sarah MacDougal takes her short stint as chief engineer, and she has to deal with a crazed Wesley Crusher locking her out of engineering, as kids do. However, her most notable scene comes later in the episode thanks to a much more entertaining character, her assistant chief engineer Jim Shimoda.
You see, Shimoda was one of the crew members quickly affected by the polywater intoxication, and his way of acting out was to pull all the isolinear chips from the ship's computer and stack them in a game of tower building and Jenga. Obviously you cant run a starship without some tabletop gaming enthusiasts, and Shimoda is clearly living out a great fantasy we can all relate to. MacDougal has to try and put the chips back, but it turns out Data can do it better to restore control to the ship...which may help explain why we didn't need MacDougal much longer in charge.
QUOTE
Jim Shimoda: Never got as far as sickbay, Wes. I feel too good for that.
So here's to you, assistant chief engineer Jim Shimoda. Hopefully you were able to retire after the polywater intoxication and live out your dreams of tabletop gaming for a living...you know, just like Wil Wheaton ended up doing! It will be interesting to see if there's any department like TNG engineering that sees personnel turnover in the new Discovery show, given the similar long gap since writers had their hands on making Star Trek work.
Sarah MacDougal was played by Brooke Bundy, who had plenty of small TV roles over a 30 year career in shows like Lassie, Bonanza, and The Brady Bunch. She has been retired for 25 years, but she did appear in the Elm Street Legacy documentary a few years ago thanks to her notable roles in the 3rd and 4th films of that horror franchise.
Jim Shimoda was played by Benjamin Lum, who had many small acting roles throughout his career before death in 2002 at age 48. Shimoda did have a long recurrence on the show Guns of Paradise. We will always have isolinear chip jenga to remember him by!
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