"The Wounded" Why didn't Maxwells Crew stop him?

[cgervasi]

why didn't the 1st officer step in and relieve him?

Maxwell makes the case to them that the Cardassians are secretly re-arming. He can't prove it in court, but it's almost certain. The bureaucrats at Star Fleet wouldn't act and wouldn't let him conduct forcible searches to prove his claim. So Maxwell informs his trusted officers he's taking matters in his own hands to save lives. He leaves it vague to his crew as to whether his orders give him latitude to take maters into his own hands. To his trusted colleagues, though, he admits what they highly suspect: his orders do not give him leeway to attack Cardassian ships. He's going out on a limb that he'll find rock solid evidence that will save so many lives that it will vindicate him and cause him to avoid being in trouble, similar to how Kirk and crew were forgiven for steeling the Enterprise because they saved Earth.

i think the episode is saying, if I understand, that Maxwell was correct about the Cardassians rearming but incorrect that discovering that will allow him to escape the consequences of attacking them. Unlike Kirk steeling the Enterprise, Maxwell actually murders people and his actions do not save Earth from total destruction.

 

[Timo]

Maxwell never seems to care much about his own fate - what annoys him to no end instead is the failure of Starfleet to act even after he has deliberately sacrificed his own career to reveal the Cardassian duplicity.

How is Maxwell different from Kirk here? Kirk murdered, too - he killed all but one (AFAWK) of the Klingon crew. OTOH, Maxwell carefully set out to murder the guilty, but Kirk sort of stumbled upon a set of victims and then proceeded to get 'em. How about surrendering to Kruge instead? It's difficult to see a downside, as the Klingons already had as much of Genesis as they'd ever get, and would be unlikely to get to enjoy it much when the people rushing to arrest Kirk would arrive. Kirk had surrendered to Klingons before, with good results.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nakita Akita]

Like the title says....when Ben Maxwells crew realizes they have been ordered to preemtively attack a target they are not at war with and has not attacked them first, why didn't the 1st officer step in and relieve him? We know Starship crews are not made to be mindless autonomatons.....I could buy that maybe he faked recieving a transmission from Starfleet: "Oh I uh, got a private transmission from Starfleet, they said the Cardassians attacked blah blah colony and we are supposed to go in underradio silence and launch a counter attack." or something, but even after that surely his crew would have known something wasn't right when the Enterprise arrived and relieved him at that point. I don't buy that he convinced his ENTIRE crew to go along with it either, he was captain of a Nebula Class Ship, which is pretty close in mass to the Enterprise, so he had to have had a crew of several hundred.

Maybe he never gave the true information to the crew?
I was in the US Army. The higher ups don't have to tell the crew what is going on.
Or he could have fabricated stories too.

 

[Prax]

Maybe Maxwell was attacked when he approached the station and the ship, and the Cardies were just playing innocent with Picard-who is already inclined to believe them over a "rogue" Captain.

 

[GulBahana]

I thought the Cardies monitored their borders more closely than that. Did they just let Federation ships cruise around their stations?

 

[BillJ]

Anybody ever consider that Maxwell might have been working with Section 31 or Starfleet Intelligence? If he had doubts about the Carddisians he might have not been the only one. Perhaps they were wanted to expose the Carddisians and didn't think Starfleet leadership was taking them seriously as a possible threat.

I really hate Section 31. It has become the bogeyman of the Star Trek universe. Responsible for pretty much anything that doesn't color inside the lines.

 

[Jayson1]

I really hate Section 31. It has become the bogeyman of the Star Trek universe. Responsible for pretty much anything that doesn't color inside the lines.

I kind of agree in the sense that I would think Starfleet Intelligence most likely has done some not so noble things as well. In fact that jerk who was working with O'Brien, when he was undercover with the Orion Syndicate I think was Starfleet Intelligence and I figure they must have a hand in things like Tuvok going undercover with the Maquis.

Jason

 

[MAGolding]

I look at it like this. We have seen how liberal Starfleet is in allowing captains to handpick their bridge crew. Hell, Picard's crew is all kinds of unorthodox. He has a teenager piloting the damn ship, & his 2nd officer is arguably not even respected as a proper command officer by many in the fleet.

A teenager steering the damn ship has been pretty normal. I remember a recruiting ad for the US navy where the main character was a teenage sailor who was a helm operator on an atomic submarine. On ships the helmsman was and is often a very junior enlisted man while the orders of what direction to steer were and are given by more senior officers.

For example, on the fatal night 14 April 1912 on the passenger ship Titanic First Officer William Murdoch (28 February 1873-15 April 1912) was the officer of the watch. He gave the orders to try to avoid the iceberg to Quartermaster Robert Hichens (16 September 1882-23 September 1940) who turned the steering wheel.

On 20 November 1820 when a whale was seen charging at the Essex, First Mate Owen Chase (1797-1869) ordered cabin boy Thomas Nickerson (1805-1883) at the steering wheel to turn the ship away in an attempt to avoid being hit.

So in so far as Starfleet is based on navies on Earth the person at the helm could be the most junior person on the ship and it wouldn't seem very odd. Of course in Starfleet the helmsman is usually an officer and in that respect a starfleet helmsman is more like the pilot of an airplane, even though the analogy with an airplane pilot doesn't make much sense.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

So in so far as Starfleet is based on navies on Earth the person at the helm could be the most junior person on the ship and it wouldn't seem very odd. Of course in Starfleet the helmsman is usually an officer and in that respect a starfleet helmsman is more like the pilot of an airplane, even though the analogy with an airplane pilot doesn't make much sense.

Indeed.

I came to the conclusion long ago that a Crewman Crusher who gradually worked towards being an ensign or even a lieutenant by Season 7 (Crusher's guest appearance in Parallels as Tactical Officer) would have been far better received. Particularly if they cut Wesley back to the 'ideas man' rather than the one that solos 'saving the day'.

 

[F. King Daniel]

"We're under secret orders from Starfleet. No further questions."

Let's be honest, that must be how a whole bunch of Trek missions seemed to the lower deck nobodies.

 

[Herbert]

I'm not sure why we should think starship crews are not automatons. After all, Kirk frequently had his ship conduct highly dubious maneuvers, including firing on the innocent, entering forbidden zones, committing acts of war and redlining the machinery (sometimes because he himself was nuts, sometimes because he wanted to pretend to be nuts, sometimes because an alien force was in fact in control). His crew, outside the bridge, had ZERO say on such events.

I believe Picard at some point alludes to the fact that Starfleet in Kirk's day played things a lot looser and faster than in their time. There is also the line "Cowboy Diplomacy". That provides an explanation for a lot of what we now consider to be Kirk's seemingly odd behavior.

In a larger sense, there was a fundamental difference in the approaches taken for the writing of the two shows and also for the time in which they were written, 1960s as opposed to late80s/early 90s. The original trek was written as story first, without much considerations for explanations. They would frequently make things up specifically for an episode and then never mention them again. An example of this would be the transponders in Patterns of Force. Those things were created as a plot device, nothing more. General Order 24 is also nothing more than a plot device. There's also the "rod" that Kirk uses in Space Seed to beat Khan into submission.

There was also no attempt to create a universe. Certainly, no one, not Gene, not anyone could have expected that Star Trek would become the franchise that is has become.

To illustrate some of this, I just happened to watch Spectre of the Gun the other night. In Kirk's time, it's completely acceptable to ignore the wishes of a sovereign planet (Melkot) and violate their space in an attempt to establish diplomatic relations. In A Taste of Armageddon, Starfleet disregards the sovereignty of any entire system once again in an attempt to butt their noses where they didn't belong. Would these approaches to "diplomacy" ever have been considered acceptable in Picard's time? Absolutely not.

None of this would have seemed too odd if you were watching Star Trek in its original run. How could it? However, looking at it through the lens of how later shows expanded the franchise, it does look quite odd at times.

 

[Herbert]

I really hate Section 31. It has become the bogeyman of the Star Trek universe. Responsible for pretty much anything that doesn't color inside the lines.

I agree. I hate it when shows invent this kind of stuff. I'm not a big fan of all the temporal stuff either. When they have the temporal prime directive and starfleet ships showing up from hundreds of years in the future to fix things, the shark has been jumped imo. It's also needlessly complicated

 

[Timo]

It does seem natural enough that the pseudo-reality of Trek would be different at different centuries. Policies would change, sentiments would change, fashion would change.

I'm not sure things would be too different as regards the influence of the belowdecks Little People of Kirk and Picard, though. Picard had his bouts of real or feigned insanity and bizarre command decisions, and his second-in-command and doctor were no more effective at forcing him to abandon such antics than Kirk's XO and CMO were. We basically never heard Picard make an announcement to his crew about what the ship was up to, either. At most, we learned in "Farpoint" that the CMO eavesdrops on bridge proceedings to stay up to date on the events, at least during alerts.

Which one of Picard's enlisteds stood up and protested when Picard crossed the RNZ, tried to sail into a star, or fired upon assorted space beasts or civilian ships? If anything, Picard's crew was even less empowered than Kirk's in that they didn't protest Picard's numerous surprise acts of civility, mercy and noninterference, while Kirk never had such acts to test his crew's resolve on.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Prax]

I believe Picard at some point alludes to the fact that Starfleet in Kirk's day played things a lot looser and faster than in their time.

That sounds like something Janeway once said:

JANEWAY: It would seem that Captain Sulu decided not to enter that journey into his official log. The day's entry makes some cryptic remark about the ship being damaged in a gaseous anomaly and needing repairs, but nothing else.
KIM: You mean he falsified his logs?
JANEWAY: It was a very different time, Mister Kim. Captain Sulu, Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy. They all belonged to a different breed of Starfleet officer. Imagine the era they lived in. The Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored. Humanity on verge of war with Klingons. Romulans hiding behind every nebula. Even the technology we take for granted was still in its early stages. No plasma weapons, no multiphasic shields. Their ships were half as fast.
KIM: No replicators, no holodecks. You know, ever since I took Starfleet history at the academy, I always wondered what it would be like to live in those days.
JANEWAY: Space must have seemed a whole lot bigger back then. It's not surprising they had to bend the rules a little. They were a little slower to invoke the Prime Directive, and a little quicker to pull their phasers. Of course, the whole bunch of them would be booted out of Starfleet today. But I have to admit, I would have loved to ride shotgun at least once with a group of officers like that.

 

[Qonundrum]

Why didn't anyone question Sisko in "For The Uniform"?

Makes one wonder if Maxwell was onto something correct? (I need to rewatch "The Wounded"...)

 

[Timo]

Supposedly, it was illegal and against orders for a starship CO to make his ship attack folks the UFP had a formal truce with. What would be illegal about attacking an active enemy in an ongoing war, though? There was no treaty with the Maquis that we'd know of.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Samuel]

Why would the crew intervene? Maxwell had a solid very logical reason for attacking the Cardassians and it turned out he was right in the first place. He might have at the outset presented the evidence and his conclusions to his officers and they agreed he was right.

 

[Mojochi]

Why would the crew intervene? Maxwell had a solid very logical reason for attacking the Cardassians and it turned out he was right in the first place. He might have at the outset presented the evidence and his conclusions to his officers and they agreed he was right.

Then why not present such evidence to Picard on his arrival? Most things point to the fact that Maxwell had no concrete data to back his claim, even though it was correct. Even the original script reflected that a bit more. Maxwell is mostly just saying things seen & heard, & the strategic implications of said things, are enough for someone in the field to understand the situation, even if they can't fully report it well enough to get support from HQ.

If he truly is an exceptional captain, like O'Brien says, then he probably did report some stuff he saw & heard, & it got passed over by the big wigs, because they don't want another conflict, but Maxwell being who he is, with what's happened to him, could not let it rest.

I can't imagine HQ had much more to go on when they sent Picard in to investigate those stupid Krieger waves. Frankly, Starfleet is just plain gullible about Cardassians. They'll let them run around arming bases in sensitive areas, because "Not enough evidence" but then are willing to breach borders to deal with a threat, upon which they clearly had very little evidence, as it turned out to be nothing but a trap.

Honestly, Picard is being a little gullible with Maxwell's Cardies too, even if that's mostly because he's under orders to keep the peace. Heck, it was pretty blind of him to not offer up an argument about going into Celtirs III, if you ask me. I can't help but think the only guy in Starfleet who knows wtf to do with Cardassians is Jellico... & Maybe Sisko

 

[Samuel]

Remember at the end Picard openly tells the Cardassians that Maxwell is right and he (Picard) full well knows it. But that he is deliberately overlooking the Cardassians actions to preserve the peace. A peace that he thinks is in the interests of both sides. He further tells the Cardassian that the Federation "will be watching".

Maxwell probably knew full well that regardless of what he presented to Starfleet Command that they would not act in order to preserve what was at that time a pretty recent peace agreement. Also note that this was not long after the Battle of Wolf 359 and Admiral Haden says that Starfleet can't fight another sustained war at that time.

Contrast this with Admiral Haden's comments about the Romulans in "The Defector" (BEFORE Wolf-359) "No one wants a war, but we are prepared to take them on"

 

[bigglesworth]

I'm guessing most of the crew had no idea that Maxwell was operating against Starfleet orders.

As others said, either everyone on the ship had full trust in him and nobody questioned his orders or a few key people in the senior staff knew and covered for Maxwell if any questions were raised.

Personally I think it was the latter. I have to believe that someone from the senior staff would have questioned actions that could lead to a full scale war between the Federation and Cardassian Union and not just take Maxwell's "word for it".