To be fair, he wasn't really an actual captain. Just a cadet who got thrown in command because all his supervising officers were killed. Granted, he was stupid enough to get his crew killed on a half-baked plan to take out a Dominion uber-battleship using strategies from the Star Wars movies when really, he should have just gone home and given the tactical data over to the experts and let them use strategies from some old WWII movie to take the thing out. But he was a 20 year-old kid posing as a captain, so I can't consider him the worst captain. Well, maybe they'd have to be tweaked a bit. EG, maybe the Doctor recentally had been under some form of stress that made him such an irritable bastard. Maybe Tom Paris would be a bit harder to do, but I'm certain it wouldn't be impossible.
Again a doctor under stress, even a recent stress that caused change in personality would get him/her off a starship. A CMO with a bad attitude just would not survive, and would be sent back to Starfleet Medical for therapy. A ship the size of Voyager seems to need only 1 doctor and a nurse or three, and if that doctor is human with a bad attitude, I'd be calling up the EMH instead. No matter what you do to Tom, unless he's no longer Tom, would mean he'd need to be far away from his father and his father's influence.
Maybe if a doctor was really good at his job, they'd keep him regardless his attitude? Yeah, I know I'm stretching things now. I'm just stubborn and refuse to give up.
Oh, I don't know. Portraying Janeway as possibly being psychologically "uneven" makes the character interesting.
And no one complains that the leads in other shows similar to VOY (Farscape, LEXX, NuBSG) had less-than-stable characterizations either.
Well in Farscape (it's been a while since I watched that show), they're not a formally organized or trained crew, just a batch of randomers who got thrown together. You could counter with Claudia Black's character being an actual military officer, and the Maquis members of Voyager, but for the most part, Voyager was still meant to be a ship of proffessionals. Haven't watched LEXX, so can't comment. NuBSG, well we could argue competiting scales of catastrophes and how'd they'd affect people, being a lone ship far away from home (that is still there) compared to a ship where there is no home anymore isn't quite the same level of mental trauma. Though then again, I think it was safer to potray slightly unhinged characters in nuBSG, since they didn't have any recent character 'archetypes' (not sure if stereotypes is too strong a word here) to go against. To elaborate, a batch of overly unbalanced Starfleet officers all on one ship would seem odd when watched in comparison to (at the time) recent series like DS9 and TNG, unless mention was made early on that the series that Voyager was some kind of 'dumping' ground for middling officers and crewmen.
Captain Kevin Thomas RIley, from TOS episode "The Naked Time", but it wasn't really his fault that he was acting strange because he was infected with the alien virus. Too bad, because his idea about a bowling alley on the Enterprise was pretty novel.
Well, If you don't mind literature being open range then my vote is for Captain William T Riker. He made a hell of an XO but in the Titan series, a poor CO.
^ I'm glad you quoted that. I think Riker pretty much summed up Jellico to a "T". He may have been effective dealing with the Cardassians, but this other crucial aspect is a big issue... I'd never want to be in his chain of command.
Thing about Jellico is, he's realistic. A captain can't be everyone's friend, and in the end results are the only thing that really matters.
In that episode Jellico solved the cardassian problem - he showed that the federation had more value to him than his pride by begging Riker to do his duty. Riker, on the other hand, was ready to commit treason - by not piloting the shuttle and ending an imminent cardassian attack on the federation - just because he was butthurt due to Jellico bruising his ego. Jellico proved to be a FAR better man - and captain - than Riker.
the first part of that is true. The second part not so much. It's not an either/or thing. Both of them are in the wrong in COC. Jellico's rigid and inflexible, and seems to care nothing for the morale of his crew, which is a BAD quality for a CO. Riker however should not be opposing him every step of the way, as he seems to do in the episodes. As XO, he's supposed to make things easier for Jellico, not act like a spoiled child who misses his mommy.