What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

Jellico was like George S. Patton. In wartime he had few peers and you wanted his kind to be at the head of your offensive. After the surrender you pretended he wasn't in the room and wasn't saying the shit he did.

 

Jellico was just an asshole.

It wasn't his fault. The entire Jellico/Riker plotline in those two episodes is a contrived conflict that falls apart in any larger story context. So Cox is playing a thinly-motivated character who's required to exhibit a great deal of inappropriate truculence, and Riker's set up to be a jerk in other ways that make little sense either.

 

Fair enough; but he was not nearly as bad as Captain Zarlo and his incessant nuke malfunction drills. “Get it done,” indeed.

I read the comic at some point, but based on this recap, I had forgotten how much “Chain of Command” resembled it.

 

Forget Picard and Pike, give me Star Trek: Zarlo

 

He shares a lot with Lt. William Bligh, R. N. Neither really understood why the crew failed to respond to their commands.

Flogging round the fleet might have made a comeback.

 

With the Jellico storyline, I think it gets off on the wrong foot because Riker clearly is pissed he was passed over for command. So that colors his view of Jellico.

but really, I side more with Jellico than I do with the crew of the Enterprise. Jellico is an asshole sure but the crew can’t expect every Captain is going to run the ship just like Picard. He could have given just a bit and his assessment of Riker was maybe off a bit. But in the end…he is the Captain now.

 

Riker routinely turns down promotions like candy while leaving a diet clinic and then gets all huffy when Jellico comes in to take command of the 1701-D. I know Frakes didn't always get the most sympathetic writing but that was an example where he comes off as a dick who doesn't like someone else sniffing around on his territory.

 

Riker in command = defeated Borg invasion.

I mean, y'all just have to dance around that one.

 

No. Data saved the Federation.

 

With an assist from Picard. Riker was ready to just ram the Enterprise into the cube.

 

"An assist?"

There was no Picard. Riker planned and directed the kidnapping of Locutus, directs Crusher and Data to access and retrieve information from Locutus about the Borg's vulnerabilities, then orders him to plant a directive in the Borg group consciousness using Locutus as the conduit. As Data attempts to do so, Locutus finally utters one word, "Sleep," which Data correctly intuits to be a suggestion of the command that should be implanted.

You can call that "an assist from Picard" in order to diminish what Riker and his crew accomplished if you like, but as I already said, you're dancing around what happened in an attempt to make Jellico look like something other than an insecure idiot.

Not Ronnie Cox's fault, but the writers. Trek often ignores the ongoing context of its stories in order to have something happen and people behave in some unlikely way for a single episode, and then just as quickly forgets that one, too.

 

You sold me on Riker saving the galaxy. But my impression of Jellico has changed over the years (I was squarely on Team Riker at the time it first aired), and I concede that has more to do with Ronnie Cox's performance than Captain Jellico's character as written. Riker, too, is really off when compared with his adherence to chain of command in BoBW.

 

People,don't fight. Riker and Jellico are both assholes.

 

Neither deserved to follow in Picard's footsteps the way both behaved.

 

Yep. To create the conflict in this episode required manipulating characters in ways that made little sense motivationally or in terms of the previous history of the show and the regulars.

Jellico comes onto a ship with a crew that has been for years not only portrayed to the viewers as the best people performing at their peaks but so recognized within continuity by their own superiors in that way - and he immediately begins breaking things, and blaming all the conflict on them for being soft and lazy and insubordinate. At the same time, the audience is asked to go along with the notion that he's somehow terribly, terribly capable as a leader.

It makes no character or story sense for Jellico to behave so cluelessly - but a certain segment of the audience responds to it viscerally as "Tough Guy, woot woot!"

Riker, whose primary day-to-day activity for years has been using his butt to warm the seat to the right hand of the head seat-warmer is suddenly the very best qualified guy on this entire ship full of high achievers for a tricky piloting job. Sorry, not the best - the only choice that even his worst adversary is willing to accept. And his response to being asked to perform this essential mission for the sake of his ship and the Federation is to behave petulantly.

Jellico and Riker are required to bump chests here like fourteen year-old boys in the grip of testosterone-fueled anger who have not yet acquired any skill at climbing down from a problematic confrontation that's not in either of their interests.

Watch, instead, the way that Piller wrote a similar dynamic between Riker and Shelby in BOBW, and how those two characters negotiated that during an emergency.

 

If Jellico hadn't insisted on going to a four-shift rotation on the eve of battle, I'd say he was quite competent. You don't create a gargantuan shake-up in the way a ship runs when that ship could be fighting for its life in a few days. You do it when there's a long period of relative inactivity ahead. Jellico should have known that. But, his micromanaging nature couldn't handle the ship not running "just so".

 

There wasn't even any payoff for the four-shift duty system, was there? No results produced that wouldn't have occurred under Picard's (and presumably most everybody else's) three-shift way of doing things? I can't recall any.

 

Buffer time.

 

Not saying it was a bad change, just made at a bad time, and in a bad way.

 

I meant something actually mentioned in the episodes.