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Who is the better captain Picard or Jellico

Who is the better Captain


  • Total voters
    48
  • Poll closed .
Even though I think that Jellico is a mediocre captain at best, I think he is a great character. He is a good sort of flawed character; instead of being an edgy sociopath like many 'flawed characters' these days, he is genuinely a good guy, and honestly tries to do his best. It just is that how he is doing it might not be the best possible approach.

Also, I have to say Riker really doesn't come across any better in this episode. Whilst Jellico's methods are questionable, and he and other officers are perfectly correct to be worried and raise their concerns, Riker takes it way too personally. I mean sure, the new boss might be difficult, but perhaps for the sake of getting this really important mission accomplished it might be the best to not let your ego get on the way and try to get the shit done. His smug attitude in the end in particularly seems quite juvenile.
Why I don’t agree with everything you said I do agree with most of it. While I don’t think jellico is mediocre he is definitely not the best captain in starfleet. And I’m certainly glad he is not a sociopath kind of guy. And Riker needed to get an aditude adjustment. He is smug a lot but he he takes to a new level.
 
When Jellico first come onto the bridge, Riker’s whole posture, and body language combined with several eye rolls and “stink eye” towards Jellico suggests open annoyance and possibly insubordination.

I think that's just how his face is, he has a bit of RBF
 
We're going to get into this again, but, no, he doesn't "run a tighter ship." He's actively stressing a ship to its breaking point burning it out before the action even begins.
No - he's prepping a previous Princess Cruise command style ship for ACTUAL (possible) war. ;)
 
No - he's prepping a previous Princess Cruise command style ship for ACTUAL (possible) war. ;)
That’s nonsense. They save the universe every week, knowing that at any time they might have to go to war with the Romulans or Borg. The Cardassians are nothing new.
 
They don't save the universe every week, and it's hyperbolic to claim they do.
Take a look at an episode guide and see what the crew of that ship did by “Chain of Command,” then put it up against basically anything any ship in the real world, even during the height of the Cold War, accomplished. It’s hyperbole to stress a point. Don’t let literalism be sophistry or ignorance and a waste of time.
 
Even still, no one ever states that Jellico's claim of the ship needing to be readjusted to a wartime tack is wrong. To be wrong about such a thing would be tantamount to dangerous amounts of complete incompetence. No one ever says that, not even Picard. Therefore , if we must accept that some examples like science stations being repurposed, make sense under the circumstances, then his plan seems reasonable, & things DO need to be altered. The only issues people have with it is that it's inconvenient.
 
It's true that Enterprise in its standard configuration is closer to a cruise-ship than a war-ship. For one thing, war-ships don't have kids on them. Even the Ferengi that attacked Enterprise in "Rascals" was scandalized by that! So Jellico's reconfiguration of the ship for war makes a lot of sense.
 
Thanks to this thread, I just rewatched the episode. It was every bit as good as I remembered, one of the best episodes in the entire franchise.

Still, it is funny how in the end when Jellico and Riker berate each other, they're both basically correct about the flaws of each other. Kudos for Troi keeping it cool in midst of all that macho posturing, and for Geordi to rising above his personal annoyance with Jellico and doing his best to actually get the mission to succeed. Riker was absolutely right that it would have ultimately been wrong to abandon Picard, but perhaps wait for couple of hours before throwing a tantrum and try to come up with an alternative plan to resolve the situation? The black mark against Riker in this episode is that it is really all about his ego from the beginning. He is instantly annoyed that Nechayev didn't give the command to him. Now other officers have their issues with Jellico too, but both Troi and LaForge do not take it personally, and try to get shit done regardless of the questionable approach of the new boss. So while I would never in million years say that Jellico would be a better captain than Picard, it is quite possible that he's a better captain than Riker would!
 
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Thanks to this thread, I just rewatched the episode. It was every bit as good as I remembered, one of the best episodes in the entire franchise.

Still, it is funny how in the end when Jellico and Riker berate each other, they're both basically correct about the flaws of each other. Kudos for Troi keeping it cool in midst of all that macho posturing, and for Geordi to rising above his personal annoyance with Jellico and doing his best to actually get the mission to succeed. Riker was absolutely right that it would have ultimately been wrong to abandon Picard, but perhaps wait for couple of hours before throwing a tantrum and try to come up with an alternative plan to resolve the situation? The black mark against Riker in this episode is that it is really all about his ego from the beginning. He is instantly annoyed that Nechayev didn't give the command to him. Now other officers have their issues with Jellico too, but both Troi and LaForge do not take it personally, and try to get shit done regardless of the questionable approach of the new boss. So while I would never in million years say that Jellico would be a better captain than Picard, it is quite possible that he's a better captain than Riker would!
Yeah I should have asked if he was a good captain. Yeah Rikers smugness annoyed me a lot in this episode and just this episode.
 
I am not sure anyone else had issues with Jellico. Noone voiced their annoyance besides Riker. Jellico asked difficult things of his crew but the circumstances are to blame for that. We don't know how Picard would have weathered the crisis because he was never confronted with a situation like that. Maybe he would have rescued the person or maybe he would have decided that doing so would have carried too much of a price. It's likely that it would have been the latter as we've seen Picard do things for the sake of the big picture, like when he tried to beam de force an entire tribe because of a treaty. He was prevented from doing so by Wesley (of all people!!).
 
I am not sure anyone else had issues with Jellico. Noone voiced their annoyance besides Riker.
Oh, both LaForge and Troi certainly had issues. LaForge complained about Jellico giving him and difficult and time consuming task and then reassigning third f his crew elsewhere. Troi certainly was not impressed by how Jellico dismissed the morale issues. They both just decided that there was no point in arguing the matter with him. Which was smart. Regardless of how they felt about Jellico, they were stuck with him so there was no point in antagonising him instead of concentrating on the mission like professionals.
 
Oh, both LaForge and Troi certainly had issues. LaForge complained about Jellico giving him and difficult and time consuming task and then reassigning third f his crew elsewhere. Troi certainly was not impressed by how Jellico dismissed the morale issues. They both just decided that there was no point in arguing the matter with him. Which was smart. Regardless of how they felt about Jellico, they were stuck with him so there was no point in antagonising him instead of concentrating on the mission like professionals.

Remember what Jellico told Troi: "I don't have time for a honeymoon with the crew" I think that's the problem, he needed to get things done quickly, he didn't have time to deal with the crewmember's moods.
 
Remember what Jellico told Troi: "I don't have time for a honeymoon with the crew" I think that's the problem, he needed to get things done quickly, he didn't have time to deal with the crewmember's moods.
Nah, that's just an excuse. The command changing ceremony would have been a perfect moment for couple of reassuring words, and generally not being an abrasive dick to everyone would have helped too. He was a bad people person, which is kinda serious handicap in a leadership position.
 
Nah, that's just an excuse. The command changing ceremony would have been a perfect moment for couple of reassuring words, and generally not being an abrasive dick to everyone would have helped too. He was a bad people person, which is kinda serious handicap in a leadership position.
Unless the team he's leading isn't looking for a people person.

I think all you Jellico haters are suffering from the same misconception: that just because he didn't get along with the Enterprise crew means there's no crew anywhere that he could get along with, which is statistically impossible. Even assholes can have friends. They can also lead others and achieve seemingly impossible goals. As has been mentioned earlier in the thread, we don't have any input on his ability to lead from his previous command or his subsequent command. All our input comes from a bunch of people too rattled by the absence of their father figure to be objective about a change in leadership. Jellico was the Captain. He just wasn't their captain, and as far as they were concerned he was never going to be their captain. That line of thinking strained relations between Jellico and the crew from the outset, and it's not the fault of Jellico's command style. I submit that if Captain Jonas Grumby came aboard and bent over backwards to be friendly with the crew - calling them all "Little Buddy" and everything - the complaints would take the nature of "Why, he's not as serious or commanding as Picard" and the crew would have done the exact same thing to him.
 
He just wasn't their captain, and as far as they were concerned he was never going to be their captain. That line of thinking strained relations between Jellico and the crew from the outset, and it's not the fault of Jellico's command style.

It was his job to bridge that gap and effectively work with them especially if they ended up at war under him. He just throws out unreasonable orders without putting in a word or two to get the crew confident in him. They certainly gave him a chance to correct that with Troi giving him advice.
 
Er...doesn't the blame for that rather go both ways?

Riker is the XO, and it's his job to facilitate relations between the captain and the crew. If he is unable or unwilling to do that then he shouldn't be serving as XO.

And none of Jellico's orders were inherently unreasonable, some people just felt they were impractical or inconvenient. I don't recall anyone saying "We can't get X done in Y amount of time", just "It's going to put strain on us to do X in Y amount of time." Well, sometimes you have to suck it up.

I would have rather enjoyed it if it had turned out that the four-shift rotation ultimately yielded better crew efficiency after an adjustment period.
 
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