When have you disagreed and thought the captain was wrong?

When did I disagree with the captain?

Well, for example in this situation:

CHAKOTAY: The urge to explore is pretty powerful.
JANEWAY: But it can't justify the loss of lives, whether it's millions or just one.

Really? So you think after the first person died in deep space, all exploration should have stopped? What are you even doing in the Captain's chair of a Starfleet ship, then? You can never guarantee exploration won't cost lives, after all (unless perhaps when you send probes only).

 

Yeah... nope. The only reason Lore was able to exact anything he did in Descent was because he'd come across Picard's band of lost & hapless Borg refugees, & seized an opportunity to turn them into a personal cyborg squad, which if it hadn't been for Hugh having basically befriended Geordi, Lore could've probably used them to conquer the Borg & maybe Starfleet, & god knows what else. That must've presented the juiciest opportunity for revenge that Lore had ever come across. I personally can't think of anything in their universe that would be more useful & devastating for that malicious android, than maybe assuming control over the entire Borg collective.

Everything they did with Hugh was an avalanche of bad decisions. Shouldn't have beamed him aboard, & risked everyone being hunted by the cube he belonged to. Shouldn't have disconnected him, such that he'd end up developing his own identity, and creating a moral issue of wtf to do with a liberated Borg refugee. Shouldn't have humored themselves into thinking some little program that Data & Geordi cooked up would be enough to destroy the entire collective, and most importantly...

They didn't even stick around & monitor wtf happened to that ship, once they sent Hugh back to it. They just went on their merry way. That's bloody unforgivable. If it's "Truly the most pernicious program of all" Then why the hell wouldn't you keep tabs on what effect it had? Let's just rig up a time bomb over there & be done with it. Bah... No need to see what kind of blowback it might create. We've got adventures to have!

 

No kidding. In many ways, the B&A timeline was better than the one we got, because it featured the characters growing and changing. It especially served the neglected characters: Chakotay was captain. Neelix had joined the crew proper. Harry had a family and more pips on his collar. And Kes had undergone a lifetime of growth and change.

If that were the case, why would he be allowed to transport living things at all? For 1013 out of 1015 of the sentient beings on the ship at the time (Data and Lore being the exceptions), being beamed into space would be just as lethal as being simply disintegrated.

Also, "Peak Performance" kind of indicates that Wes knew how to use a transporter that way, since that's what he said he was doing with the antimatter.

It was a sensible precaution regardless.

Year of Hell was one of the greatest episodes of Trek ever. It was an example of the Reset Button done right. Unfortunately, Voyager used said button way too much, and as a result didn't allow its characters to grow and change much.

We all know that Janeway, the character we followed for seven years, isn't really like that. I'm logging it off to the same sloppiness that plagued "Voyager" from start to finish.

Cruel as it seems, that's all true. The Federation and the Borg were at war, and sometimes, in war, you have to do some pretty appalling things.

 

It would take an essay for me answer this question. And my response would cover all Trek captains.

 

Sounds about right. If I really analyzed things and went episode to episode, I could probably come up with a lot more mistakes.

 

The "Equinox" two-parter is a good example of that.

Overall, Chakotay handles that situation so much better than Janeway, and attempts to counsel her to be sensible every step of the way. The crew of the Equinox did horrible, barbaric acts, but I thought they could have made the situation so much more interesting if Ransom's position was given even a moment of nuance or consideration by Janeway (e.g. I thought one of the most effective moments comes when he tells Janeway that she might feel differently if her ship didn't have bulkheads intact and the crew was starving).

The falling out between Janeway and Chakotay should have a lasting impact, but because they need everything reset to normal by the time it's all over there's no consequences.

 

I thought Captain Picard was wrong to forcibly move the native americans from the planet being ceded to the Cardassians. He should have let them make the stay/go choice on their own, even it meant their doom. I dealt with this in more detail in a different thread.

 

Regarding Wesley, at the time of "Datalore", he had been an acting ensign for only a couple months. In "Peak Performance", the penultimate episode of season 2, he was an acting ensign for over a year and a half... enough time to pass to be trained more on stuff.

 

We don't know they didn't have a brig at that time, and it's hard to imagine their state of the art Starfleet ship.not having one.

Honestly, Archer should have done something, because him just letting him go sends the wrong message to the crew.

 

For this reason this is my least favourite episode of Enterprise so far in my rewatch. Someone raped his friend, crew and fellow officer and Archer tells him to be "on his merry way". It's unforgivable.

 

Picard should have sent him to play in the bridge simulation in the Holodeck. The bridge is for authorized Starfleet personnel only. Google Aeroflot Flight 593 for why.

 

The brig was stated to be a new addition in the third season. Which would make it pretty clear they didn't have one in the first. Indeed, this is further reflected in the second season episode Precious Cargo where their captive alien pirate is being held in the mess hall.

 

Okay, fair point. I forgot about that.

But Archer could have contacted the Vulcan High Command, and they would have sent one of their warp 7 ships over, which would get there fairly quickly, and turn him over. There are places they could have locked him down in, like a quarters. No need to involve the rest of the crew of the Vulcan ship, particularly since they didn't assault T'Pol.

And the Vulcan High Command would have sent one, because T'Pol was still a member of their forces.

 

I just finished "Masterpiece Society" and disagreed with Picard at the end. His actions in the episode, more or less, were fine, but his whining at the end bothered me.

First, if a society is put in danger just from interacting with the crew, the society wasn't that great to begin with. Second, if they hadn't intervened, as Riker suggested, the core fragment could have killed them all. Third, I was left feeling that Picard didn't necessarily think the Prime Directive was the more moral choice, it really felt to me like he would rather have been able to shrug his shoulders, say, "Prime Directive, what are you going to do" and moved on. I think it was a way to try to assuage his guilt.

Especially frustrating was that the episode was basically a mixture of previous episodes. You had the world coming to an end plotline that to this point, had been used before, such as in "Pen Pals" (another time when he was on the verge of being wrong) and more recently "A Matter of Time" 4 episodes prior. In "A Matter of Time" it's another Earth colony, the only difference is they aren't trying to protect a "perfect" society. However, further eroding Picard's point is that both groups agreed to help from the Enterprise. Everything they did, they did with the leader of the colony's agreement, eventually.

Picard seems to argue that if they went back in time and replayed the events, he'd just leave them there to die. Otherwise, once he contacted them and started interacting, it was too late to do anything. He could have denied Hannah's petition for asylum, but at that point, the damage was done. If she and the 30+ others stayed, their society would still have been altered.

Another similar instance was "First Contact" where Picard ultimately agreed to leave and keep the knowledge of aliens a secret from the world. Like "Masterpiece Society" a scientist who had worked with the Enterprise crew requested and was granted asylum. Who's to argue that taking Mirasta Yale from Malcor was the right decision? What if she stayed and her work helped ease her people into accepting alien races? What if she contributed to creating a post-scarcity society for them, improving the lives of all Malcorians? Was taking her away from her planet the best thing for her society? It's not a 1:1, but it's still in the same ballpark.

The episode does have many problems (it really feels like a Season 1 or 2 plot told in season 5 in many ways), I think an easy fix would be to change the ending. I can understand with the recent death of Gene Rodenberry at the point having to be subtle, but that aside, this would have been the best place to litigate why Rodenberry's ideas of "perfect" humans without conflict isn't all that ideal, and why the TNG crew had to come across as more human and have a little conflict every once in a while.

Picard could still get philosophical, "Who are we, Number One, to determine the best course of evolution for these people?"
"With all due respect, Sir, we aren't the ones to make that call. But 30 of them said a perfect world free of conflict and full of perfect people was not worth what they had to give up for that 'perfection'. Who are we to turn a blind eye to them?"
"I suppose so, Will. I just hope we made the right decision."
"Right for whom, Sir? Those who would stifle freedom and subjugate members of their society just to perpetuate their way of life? Seems to me, we made the right decision by those who asked for the freedom to make their own decisions."
"Sometimes the right choices feel like the wrong ones."
"We can agree one that, Captain. After all, aren't you the one who constantly tells me a Captain has to make the tough calls?"
"Maybe it would be easier if the Picard line had been genetically pruned and cultivated instead of the grapes my father harvested. Then again, if that were the case, I doubt I'd be here now having this conversation with you."
"Then maybe it'd be me sitting in that chair."
"Oh, but it's not, Number One, though maybe someday, it will be."
"You can bet on that, Captain."

 

Good points, all. Food for thought for me, for sure. Picard should've allowed them to send Hugh back with that virus that would've shut the whole collective down. Sometimes the Federation is too pacifist for its own good. If you're faced with an unstoppable enemy, you do what you can to stop it. The stakes were simply too high to do anything else.

The only good decision Captain Jellico ever made was to order Troi to wear a uniform on the bridge. Every other decision he made only served to alienate the Enterprise crew.

 

I'm pretty well convinced that the unsolvable program thing wouldn't have worked either. The whole idea behind it was for it to spread like a virus to the collective, but what they did instead, by sending the self-actualized Hugh back, was also just like a virus that spread to Hugh's entire ship, BUT it didn't spread beyond that.

The Borg collective never did get infected with individuality, just Hugh's ship, which they cut loose & never even tried to reassimilate. There's no reason to think imho that any program they cooked up would have any more of a pervasive effect than Hugh's individuality did. Clearly, the collective has protections against that kind of infiltration, which would also explain why the Wolf 359 cube was destroyed by Data hacking their lower commands, but that infiltration was also only ship specific. Twice they infected or infiltrated the Borg network & it fell short. Geordi & Data's program was a pipe dream

 

Actually, Janeway's comments remind me of Ian Malcolm's own comments about the consequences of exploration and discovery in the "Jurassic Park/World" movies.

 

But as I mentioned earlier, since that entire ship was crewed by Vulcan black sheep who had their own problems with the High Command, Archer likely wouldn't want to get the High Command involved and risk them further harassing the crew, the rest of whom were innocent bystanders. Though not a perfect solution by any means, letting the guy off for assault was the only practical option.

Though, while writing this, it just occurred to me, how can we be sure the guy didn't face consequences? I'm sure Archer alerted the Vulcan captain, who would then carry out whatever disciplinary measures he saw fit.

 

Agreed. I thought the entire "dilemma" in "I, Borg" was beyond idiotic. "Oh, is it ethical for us to wipe out the Borg?" Fucking YES!!!

Every episode prior to this one showed the Borg to basically be parasites, destroying and assimilating their way through the galaxy, contributing absolutely nothing. The season 4 episode "The Drumhead" stated that 39 Starships were lost at Wolf 359, with nearly 11,000 casualties. Picard's rescue from the Borg was an extraordinary, one-time circumstance unlikely to ever be repeated. They should've introduced that nanite virus into the Collective without a moment's hesitation if it meant ending the menace of the Borg. Instead, they talked about destroying the Borg as if it were genocide, totally ignoring that multiple genocides had already occurred at the hands of the Borg. If the crew was debating wiping out the Romulans or the Cardassians, THAT would be a debate, since they were both sentient races with individual free will. The Borg were just space zombies, utterly unable to be reformed or reasoned with. There was nothing there worth preserving.

I thought Guinan was the only one in that episode who had her head screwed on straight.

 

I'm inclined to agree. Show Hugh the Escher print, and say goodbye. It's already established that there are multiple collectives, so it wouldn't erase them completely... but one fewer collective can only be a good thing.