Retroactive justification for Riker's friction towards Jellico?
- Thread starter Ragitsu
- Start date
That's what Riker did. He raised the issue the next time they spoke, hours ahead of when Jellico had wanted the change implemented. Jellico essentially said "It's not my job to give clarification, it's your job to read my mind" and moved up the deadline without providing any of the needed guidance. What if the "significant personnel problem" was, "Engineering only has three officers qualified to ensure the warp core doesn't explode when we redirect main power, if we add a delta shift, we're all going to die during the first one"? Jellico don't know, Jellico don't care.
Are there any other problem-spaces Jellico doesn't want to be told about? Damage reports during space battles? Those fuel consumption clipboards Kirk always had to sign?
"Why are we dead in space?"
"Well, sir, when I tried to tell you we'd been pushing the engines too hard lately and needed to restock on antimatter en route to Korvis II but we could still make our scheduled arrival time, you interrupted me at 'before we head to Korvis II,' told me the ship would now be arriving there in two days instead of three, and to 'Get It Done™.' Thus, we no longer had time to refuel."
For just a moment, I imagined if it had been Picard issuing exactly the same orders and getting his back up at being questioned, and wondered whether the command staff and audience's reactions would have been the same.
I suppose Our Heroes would have assumed Picard had been possessed by an alien lifeform or such and tried to relieve him of command.
I suppose Our Heroes would have assumed Picard had been possessed by an alien lifeform or such and tried to relieve him of command.
Obviously non-canon, but IDW went with the full-blown villain Jellico by having him, along with Nechayev, illegally blackmail Worf, Ro Laren, and some others into some shady black ops program between Insurrection and Nemesis. Picard confronts Nechayev and Jellico and cites all the regulations they violated, saying he'll let Jellico and Nechayev decide which of them will take the fall for this (considering that Prodigy had already aired showing Jellico as Admiral after Nemesis, the implication by the comic writers seems to be that Nechayev takes the fall)
He wouldn't have needed to read Jellico's mind, just to do what he asked, without needing clarification, like a subordinate is often called upon to do. He also didn't move the deadline up. He kept it the same, and simply didn't allow for the failure in implementing the ignored order to alter his plans. If there's a greater rush on manning it now, that's on Riker for stepping out of line.
Between the moment when Jellico gave him the directive to add the shift, & the next moment when he later wanted something done BY that shift, Riker had decided an additional briefing about exactly why it was being ordered was merited, before carrying it out, where he could have say about its specifics. He was wrong. The captain was not interested in hearing those specifics... likely because he'd already considered & dismissed them. The captain doesn't have to tell anyone why he's not doing something, like waiting on the department heads' feedback.
Have you ever noticed when Picard is at a loss for a course of action, he'll call out "Suggestions?". So yeah, that's him saying "Let me hear what you got". Ever noticed situations where he doesn't say that? No. Because if he doesn't need to hear it, he won't say that, or even maybe want it. lol
My favorite scene in Yesterday's Enterprise is right when Picard briefs everyone that he's sending the 1701-C back. Riker butts in grumpily (as he's wont to do) "Sir, if you want my opinion.. " and Picard slams the door on him, with something like "I think I'm well aware of your opinion, #1. This is a briefing. I'm not seeking your consent" & Will just has to swallow that shit. (Poorly BTW)
Will's always got opinions about what decisions should be made, & to his GREAT fortune, he has a captain who will not only humor them frequently, but in some ways encourages them, & that's his prerogative, but it's NOT what everybody has to do. You want that privilege? Go get your own ship.
He did hand Jellico a smoothly operating ship, it's just Jellico was inexplicable invested in underminding and destroying the smooth running of said ship in every way possible, because... it wasn't the way he wanted.
Between the time that Jellico requested the person who was currently in legal command of the ship (Riker) change the shifts, Riker met with the affected department heads and requested their feedback on the changes... which is part of his job (Data confirms this while privately reprimanding Worf for other lapses as Acting XO)... and he has (except in very rare "crunch" scenarios, which this wasn't) been given the opportunity to do so, because again, that's literally half of his job as XO... so it's Jellico who is being the bad commanding officer here, not Riker being the bad XO... because at the end of the day he does follow Jellico's orders once he properly confirms that he has no interest in hearing about potential moral or safety issues that his changes will cause (a theme that reoccurs several times with various people throughout the two-parter.
That was a very different scenario which IMO did qualify as a "crunch scenario" and realistically Picard shut Riker down there because there weren't any options that Riker could have suggested that would have improved more than the very immediate term, so discussing them was a waste of time, whereas we're never given any explanation why it's super-urgent that the shift pattern is changed that day (I suspect that Riker would have suggested phasing it over the 2-3 days they had available if Jellico had allowed suggestions on how to implement it)
Given that his last two COs have respected his opinions enough to allow him to air them when time permitted, he has zero reason to expect this not to be the case with Jellico.
He didn't explicitly say he was moving the deadline up, but Jellico doesn't explicitly say anything. That's why no one likes working for him. He gives orders impossible to follow without compromise, gets angry if you try to ask which compromise he'd prefer, then gets angrier when the compromise you made isn't the one he wanted, and that a compromise was even required in the first place; he's not giving unreasonable orders, after all, it's that everyone else on the ship is too incompetent to carry them out.
Here are Jellico's first orders to Riker:
"I'd like to change that to four [shifts] starting tonight. I'd also like to examine the duty roster and the crew evaluations as soon as possible. I want readiness reports from each department head by fourteen hundred hours, and a meeting of the senior staff at fifteen hundred."
And then he follows up with, "I'll see you at thirteen hundred hours," presumably for the change-of-command ceremony.
The ceremony might've taken longer than the minute or two we saw in the episode, but it was certainly over by 1400, when Jellico expected to start reading department reports (or, perhaps more accurately given his command style, when he expected to start ignoring the reports as an ego trip after having everyone rush to finish them). So Riker brought up the issue no later than 1400 (apparently having intended to find out what trade-offs Jellico preferred in working out "significant personnel issues" at the senior staff meeting at 1500, when all the stakeholders were present), at which point Jellico said the change is to be implemented immediately, with the all-new shift coming on in two hours, at no later than 1600. Possibly as early as 1500.
I know time is an affectation in deep space, but clear communication is essential, and there's no rational way anyone would expect "tonight" to mean "at three in the afternoon." Possibly "one in the afternoon," depending on if you consider the new schedule to have "started" during the final, abbreviated shift of the old schedule.
Nor is there a reasonable way to divide up a 24 hour day into four slices where the last piece begins at 1500 or 1600, unless Jellico is being willfully arbitrary to put Riker in his place for not having anticipated that Jellico would be micromanaging him based on a shift schedule that he knew full-well only existed in his head and had not yet been checked against reality. What if Riker had already implemented the transition in such a way that there were four shifts, but it was actually going to be Beta on duty when they dropped out of warp, because it made more sense to reset the cycle at a different part of the day? Was Jellico going to still chew his ass about that, make him go do an announcement that since the new Captain is senile and becomes belligerent when his assumptions conflict with reality, Beta shift is now Delta shift, ex-Delta is now Gamma shift, and the ship now cycles in the order of Beta (0400-1000), Alpha (1000-1600), Delta (1600-2200), Gamma (2200-0400)?
There's no "additional" briefing Riker is making up; Jellico explicitly told him they're meeting at least twice more before he wants the new shift schedule to begin. If Jellico meant "I want to be on a four-shift schedule ASAP, do whatever it takes to make that happen," he should've said so. Instead, he said, "by tonight," and followed it up with a bunch of requests for details on the operation of the ship down to how Riker preferred to be addressed, giving every impression that he, you know, cared about how the ship would operate, and would've rather been consulted on which compromises to the ship's operation he'd prefer rather than being surprised with his trousers around his ankles when Riker told him during the senior staff meeting that they can't flush toilets during Gamma shift anymore because there aren't enough people rated on the new waste reclamation plant to split four ways.
Which leads me back to my suspicion that Jellico was setting up Riker to fail to put him in his place. It doesn't fit for him to specify that Delta shift needs to be the one to launch a probe when they dropped out of warp, especially not with his Get It Done™ philosophy, which is consistently uninterested in that kind of minutiae when giving orders. The man who is repulsed by the idea that Riker might want to consult with him on the tradeoffs he'd prefer in the operation of his ship suddenly feels the need to hold Will's hand and walk him through the process of giving an order to the correct person? "We need to launch a probe when we drop out of warp. That'll be during Delta shift. You should tell the person who will be at the tactical station, responsible for launching probes, during Delta shift, the time during which the probe needs to be launched, to do so."
Now, Jellico knows the shift change isn't due to happen by how own words until "tonight" (probably no earlier than 1800), he knows Riker hasn't finalized the new rotation by 1300 (since there would've been some kind of shipwide bulletin with the new schedule), and he knows he and Riker are going to be meeting at 1300 and again at 1500, possibly continuously through the whole period if Jellico expects to have Riker on-hand while he goes over the department reports and familiarizes himself with the ship, so he knows that Riker knows he'll have the opportunity to consult with Jellico if he has any questions for hours before Jellico expects the new schedule to start. He also knows Riker has an independent streak and is known for overruling his captain if he thinks they're making a mistake.
Thus, it is likely that Riker has an opinion or issue to discuss about allocating the crew, something Jellico has no interest in and a habit he's inclined to repress; he doesn't want a first officer to present him with issues and options, he wants a yeoman who writes down whatever he says and disseminates it to the crew without any thought. Solution? Bring up Delta shift as soon as possible. If Riker doesn't have the new schedule ready ahead of time, he can chew him out for that, if he does and he's going to implement it differently than Jellico imagined, there's a three-out-of-four chance he can chew him out for that instead, and if Riker just accepts the order without comment, drill deeper then accuse him of insubordination when it turns out the new schedule hasn't started yet and Delta shift is still hypothetical.
The bottom line is, Jellico doesn't know or care what's going on on his ship. He's actively hostile when someone tries to inform him. He would rather there be "significant personnel issues" that he is ignorant of or are mitigated without his consultation. If he's deferring all his decisions to Riker, and expecting Riker to defer them all to the department heads, what is he even there for?
Riker knows the ship and the crew. He's a critical resource if Jellico wants to operate effectively with no settling-in time. Rather than exploiting that resource, Jellico discards it immediately, and takes the fact that he's coming into an existing crew of people who know their ship and their jobs as a personal insult to his authority, because they dare try to tell him what the hell is going on.
Sure, he doesn't have to listen to anyone, he's the captain, but that's getting into philosophy of leadership questions about if Jellico can count on the moral authority of his captaincy being respected if he doesn't conduct himself as worthy of it by respecting his ship and crew. Literally his first act as captain is to tell the first officer that he refuses to be informed of what's going on with his ship, and that he can't be trusted to keep his word or provide necessary information for the crew to do their jobs to his satisfaction. Which would be fine if he were going to be hands-off and phoning it in, but that's not it, he definitely has opinions about the right way to do things, he just won't tell you what they are in advance.
If anything, he's giving Riker more responsibility with none of the authority by refusing to be consulted about operational details. Riker never says, "We shouldn't go to four shifts," he just thinks there are relevant decisions about how that's executed that the captain should know about (or, rather, that Riker doesn't yet know Jellico well enough to anticipate and make those decisions the way he'd like on his behalf), rather than assuming, as you would, that Jellico already knows all possible concerns and tradeoffs, finds them all equal, and has total equanimity about however Riker chooses to Get It Done™.
Good old Edward "Equanimity" Jellico, that's what we call him, famous for his light-touch approach to command. No reason to double-check anything with him, it's all good.
Like for example, most of the potential issues that would have been highlighted by the Department Heads could reasonably have been addressed by waiting less than twenty-four hours so that working time could be adjusted after all of the affected had had a rest cycle.
Do I think that the above is what Riker would have lead with...? Probably not, I suspect that his first suggestion would be to leave things the way they are because only a few days from potential combat is not when you want to be making non-essential changes. However, I'm pretty convinced that the above or something very similar would have been his second recommendation once Jellico confirmed that not changing wasn't an option.
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