Worst command decisions by Captain James T. Kirk

He found a way.

 

Bill Theiss saved TOS budget money by using less cloth and showing more skin on actresses.

 

Careful my Lord! You too will be classed as pervy and drooling like I was for agreeing with a few points on a fellow posters remarks!
JB

 

I'm the founding member of the Pervy Club, JB.

 

I'm not sure when they learned WHO Khan was (before or after the tech manuals), but I doubt anything Kirk allowed access to was classified or Top Secret information. It's the sort of thing one could look up on the web, so to speak. The danger isn't in the knowledge - it's in the access to the equipment. Like you can look up how to make a nuclear bomb these days. So what? You don't have access to enough fissile material to make that dangerous. And Khan was expected to live in the current century, so I don't really think it was a mistake. Treating everyone like a prisoner or an enemy before you even know who or what they are, however, seems like a bigger a mistake.

Even going into a room full of Klingons isn't that bad an idea when you have red shirt back ups in the corridor. It's not like they can grab Kirk and demand the red shirts surrender or they kill Kirk. Weaponless, the Red shirts would just stun everybody in the room, Kirk included, and sort them out later. The klingons know this, so even that attempt would only likely lose them privileges and make it harder on them.

What is this attitude that Kirk was wrong for not playing it safe? They aren't out there to play it safe. They will take risks. It's part of their job. They are explorers – they're gonna look. And it's gonna be a manned look whenever possible and practical.

Rendezvous just keep ships in their own assigned sectors. It's not faster. But if one ship takes it all the way, you leave one sector undefended - not just on the out going trip, but the return trip, too. Relays are better and more efficient.

Sure Kirk, you've got the deck stacked against me anyway, so I'm screwed either way. If I have to die with you, your ship, and your 430 other men, fine with me. But I think you'll deal with me LONG before that happens, or my name isn't Harcourt Fenton Mudd.

Kirk knows the ship almost as well as Scotty, and commanders in genernal know the limits, test the limits, of both men and equipment. The very FACT the ship didn't blow up demonstrates Kirk was right and still within the ship's limits.

The only good reason I can think why Kirk wanted to check out the "Indians" before deflecting the moon-sized asteroid was to insure they were primitive enough and oblivious enough that they wouldn't alert them to their activities and show space life existed, perhaps violating the prime directive. So, pretty primitive? No telescopes or anything like that? O.K. No way they'll know what we did, so let's go. Otherwise, it was a VERY bad move. Not that ANY of the numbers in that episode really bear close scrutiny.

 

I think Kirk should have bargained with Apollo, telling him many people doubtlessly would wish to come and visit him, maybe even live the simple life there, and they could be friends. Far better to have willing, obedient, loyal, loving subjects there of their own free will than unwilling, disobedient, disloyal, hateful subjects imprisoned there against their will. Just send out the word, and soon Apollo would have more subjects than he probably knew what to do with. But noooooooo, Kirk is such a stubborn hard ass he wouldn't bend a knee one damn little bit and had to take him out.

He could have been far more persuasive with Marcus (IIRC) in Bread and Circuses. Keeping them there would lose a few men and draw a lot of unwanted attention to the planet. Letting them go with the request to stay away would be kept the planet safe from outsiders. Even captain Merik could confirm that is likely what would happen.

 

Yes, it seems like the whole conflict with Apollo happens because Kirk doesn't know how to respond to people who demand that the whole crew spend the rest of their lives in the nutty utopia of the week.

All Kirk had to do was say: "No, we are explorers, always moving on to the next star. We don't want to stay here with you. But there are billions of humans back on Earth. Not one in a hundred or one in a thousand would want to stay here, but that still leaves thousands or millions who would. And there would be many others who would want to visit here for a vacation. So if you try to force us to stay, you will either fail and be alone again, or else succeed and have a few hundred people who hate and resent you. But if you lets us go on our way we will report your existence and others will come who want to."

I don't see why Kirk would have even needed to be persuasive with Marcus. I can see why Marcus wouldn't have wanted Beagle crew members interacting with society and trying to change it. It seems reasonable that if Marcus feared change, or the type of change the "Beagle boys" advocated, he would try to stop it with bribes, imprisonment, or death in the arena.

But what he learned about Starfleet from Merik would seem to remove all desire for conflict with Starfleet crews. He would say "Okay, those undisciplined civilian crew people contaminated our culture from both your and my viewpoints. But if you take them away with you and don't contact us until we are much more advanced - in accordance with your prime directive - that will be fine with us."

 

Pretty much, yeah. There's no guarantee the reasoned approach would work with either, but I object to the apparent fact Kirk didn't even try. Now, granted, it's not much of a story if he goes that way and Apollo or Marcus agree, but some show he made the reasoned attempt is lacking, IMO. Given that it must fail for dramatic license, the trick is to incorporate the reasoned attempt without burning up too much screen time.

Tricky.

 

Fun. But the holes in that grill behind Kang keeps changing proportions... which I figure makes it 100% TAS accurate.

 

I don't know what Kirk was doing in 'All Our Yesterdays'.
Having the three top officers of the Enterprise beam down to a planet minutes from explosion seems crazy.
They didn't even seem to be on a rescue mission.

 

I'm sure it's been mentioned - allowing Lokai and Beale freedom of movement around the ship. Especially the wanted criminal who stole a shuttlecraft who should have been in the brig the whole time.

 

Season 3 silliness - by that time the producers were only having the three stars do anything. Everyone else was background.

 

Not even background most of the time - the S3 corridors were mostly deserted. I think the scene at the end of Mark Of Gideon is one of the rare exceptions!

 

It was 3.5 hours, and scanners showed nobody was around – no sapient life forms could be detected. The danger was minimal, and I think some people make too big a deal about risking the top officers as if the ship would be lost if those guys died. Kirk's time had a more Starship Troppers mentality – everybody fights – there's always the next guy to take their place should they fall. And hey, he's an explorer, and so are his friends, so they went.

Anyway, they just wanted to have a quick look around and see if they could figure out what happened to the entire humanoid civilization they knew was there according to last reports. Even a nova will just kick stuff out at SLT speeds or at most light speed, so at warp 1 they can easily get away – and there's nothing wrong with the engines and they can take off at warp 1+ the minute they beam up.

So they went. Oops, they got tangled up in a little time tripping, but that's hardly a foreseeable danger Kirk should have avoided - unless you never go anywhere since it might be dangerous.

Beale was a police commissioner and official from the planet Sharon, so locking him up would hardly be appropriate (at first). Lokai, OTOH, probably should have been put in the brig, but Kirk doesn't want to treat new comers like criminals, preferring to judge for himself based on what others do instead of what others said they did. Even taking the shuttlecraft may have been excusable in some ways, and they had it back undamaged - but that's for others to judge - Kirk's not a judge. I might have done the same. After they started duking it out with energy and showed they couldn't be subdued with phasers, it was far more difficult to try to force the issue. If Kirk had tried earlier, however, all he might have found was he couldn't easily force them to do anything they didn't want to do a bit earlier. They may even have had the ability to walk through the brig's force field.

 

I'm not against Kirk beaming down. That's his style.
And looks like the style of his contemporaries - Captain Tracey and Merrick and maybe Matt Decker too. Yeh I know they are pretty much failures but not because they go on landing parties.

I just think its dangerous to beam down with a nova just hours away. He wasn't doing anything that was worth risking his own life and his friends Whats to say a solar flare isn't going to burst out or something? I'd say at least keep Spock on board.
Hours is just too short a time to be safe, Its not like Kirk's landing parties every not have issues.

 

Stellar flares rarely go directly toward a particular planet even when they occur, which isn't that often, and the normal nasty effect takes days to get there (unlike the light which only takes minutes). In 3.5 hours, it won't make a difference, so flares are the least of their worries.

3.5 hours is a narrow window - not as bad as checking out the natives in The Paradise Syndrome when they had to deflect that moon-sized asteroid - but even there he may have needed to confirm the natives were too primitive to notice their space shenanigans lest they violate the prime directive. In All Our Yesterdays, it might be highly useful to know what could make a whole population disappear. It could happen to you, too, if it's another unknown danger sneaking around the galaxy, so best to find out if you can. You have 3+ hours. For a quick look, that's not so bad. And he wasn't risking the ship - just 3 guys. Risk IS their business.

I'm more amazed that Kirk and the Enterprise is always showing up in these incredibly tight situations in the nick of time, right at that moment of crisis, and after crossing light years of space, it's always so improbable.

At least there, they went to see the nova, probably, and when they noticed the population was gone - well - that's a hell of a thing. We got 3+ hours and a safety margin. Let's go see.

YMMV, of course, but of all the things Kirk has done, this one didn't rank too high on my WTF was he thinking moments.

 

A planet gets hit by the electromagnetic portion in the same amount of time the light takes to reach the planet. The Enterprise clearly has FTL sensors, so they'd have some warning, even if not much. But that's just the radiation, and supermova shockwaves have been clocked at only a bit over 4% of light speed (about 8K miles per second), so at a distance from the Sun to the Earth, from the moment you got zapped by the radiation to the point where your planet gets blown apart is on the order of a little over 3 hours. Still, a foolishly small safety margin, especially given how often Kirk gets bonked on the head or something fucks with the transporters.

 

Ya gotta remember, 99.99% of the time, Kirk doesn't get bonked on the head and the transporters work just fine.

Yeah, their FTL communications and information exchange is a bit of a mystery. But the dangerous stuff from a nova (I don't think this one was a super nova but just a nova) is much slower than the light signals or other EM waves, so warp 1 ought to do it. Of course, there is probably subspace stuff coming off most everything that they use to detect stuff light years away and see it, etc., but in this case, I don't think anything too dangerous will be coming out at FTL speeds, so I think 3 hours to look around a place sensors say has no sapient life to threaten you, and the fact the ship and its systems are working just fine, doesn't seem too big a stretch.

 

In the episode "Dagger of the Mind," Kirk decides to stay "overnight" at the Tantalus facility with Dr. Noel.

I really could not see any good cause for him to do so. What tangible, plausible reason could there be? Adams showed himself to be perfectly normal and gracious. From all that transpired up to that point, he didn't give Kirk any cause for suspicion. The issues with Dr. Van Gelder checked out with McCoy.

On top of that, he decides to undertake first hand exposure to the Neural Neutralizer device, at the hands of Dr. Noel, who never had any experience with this device. Stupid. Why? Well, if Dr. Van Gelder was abused with this device, one would have to intentionally do it. So was he going to take a chance at risking his own sanity to see how far the device could be pushed?

Just a critical note on the episode... Dr. Adams must've been a functional lunatic. Did he really think he could kidnap Captain Kirk? Or perhaps brainwash him to do his bidding at remote distances? What's weird is that it was all predicated on Kirk a) deciding to stay overnight, and b) voluntarily (and without permission) taking the risk of experimenting with the Neural Neutralizer. What if Kirk and Noel decided to stay for just one day? Or... what if Kirk didn't bother to take any chance on experimenting with the device?

Lastly, the sort of "icing on the cake" for how weird this episode was... Kirk gives the "take us out of here, warp factor 1" command to Mr. Spock, not the helmsman. I don't think he ever does this again in other episodes. At least this episode did give us some decent entertainment with Morgan Woodward and Marianna Hill.