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.
I think he was written to come off as unlikeable but still also effective, the show was more willing to have, particularly aside from with Data, a guest star be as or more right than a main character.
It's not just unlikable but the schadenfreude at Riker and Picard is over the top.
Broadly speaking, I think I agree with the gist of your post; as written, Jellico is not making the best possible choices. Although I think there's a little more going on at a meta level which I'll touch on in a moment.
But I need to point out, the quoted sentence is only true if you add "with a shift starting at 0000." I've worked or trained for several jobs that had 24 hour coverage and none of them ever started shifts at 0000. 7-Eleven's shifts start at 7:00, 15:00, and 23:00. Alberta EMS shifts start at 5:30 and 17:30. Edmonton Fire-Rescue's shifts start at 6:00 and 16:00. (EFRS has a 10 hour/14 hour split, which is fine for the firefighters but sucks for 9-1-1 but that's a different conversation.) Heck, even the security company I worked for when I was 20 did their shifts at 6:00, 14:00, and 22:00.
Starting at midnight is especially arbitrary when your calender doesn't even use days... so there's no reason to assume the shifts are super wonky. They just don't line up with midnight. Alpha starts at 2100, Beta at 0300, Gamma at 0900, and Delta at 1500. Does this look odd to us? Sure. Is it supported by the dialogue? Yup.
Anyway, reading through this thread I was struck by the way many commenters are saying "this is how the Navy works" and how many other commenters are implying "this isn't the Navy." Star Trek has always wavered on whether or not Starfleet is the US Navy in Space, or NASA all grown up. And it occurs to me that this story is deliberately about that disconnect.
Jellico is very much a Navy type character; he'd fit in fine in a story set off the Grand Banks in 1940 or the Bay of Biscay in 1805. Riker is more of an astronaut - he'll work with immediate commands and authority in an emergency, but expects to have a discussion about options and best choices whenever time allows. The conflict between the two characters is very symbolic of the "is Starfleet military or not" discussion that's never really settled down. I can't help but think that's a deliberate choice of the writers.
I would suggest that any shift pattern that has the majority of its shifts in a "different day" makes zero sense from a time management PoV.
A more logically plausible set up based on the above timings would be: Alpha starts at 0300; Beta at 0900; Gamma at 1500 and Delta at 2100 and presumably under the old system would have been 0300, 1100 and 1900.
I don't disagree, I was just trying to work with the dialogue that appears to be saying Delta Shift was supposed to be on duty at 1500.
I’m not in a position to dig into MA and Chakoteya at the moment, but IIRC, the general impression is that the “main cast” is alpha shift, that the captain’s watch starts at around 8 in the morning, and that gamma shift is considered to be “overnight.”
I’m not sure if it was Ron Moore et al. just picking numbers out of a hat, or if the intent was actually to make Jellico seem insane (probably the former), but what we’ve got doesn’t make sense in and of itself or with the conventions used in other episodes.
I agree that Alpha shift is the main cast. I've always felt they started more at 6:00 than 8:00, but I freely confess I remember little details better from TOS than TNG, and Kirk was always showing up on the bridge and being handed a coffee, which is why it feels earlier than 8:00 to me. And of course, even if that was true for Kirk it might not be for Picard.
Something that just occurred to me about Jellico wanting Delta to start at 1500 - perhaps he was assuming the transition would involve a couple of short-length dog watches, which would result in some weird times for a day or two as everyone rolled over to the new standard?
Anyway, to me the use of Earth clocks is just a storytelling convention - if 1000 stardates is an Earth year, which seems to be the assumption even in TNG, 24 hours is 2.738 Stardate Units. So whatever the "real" Starfleet uses as a unit of time less than a day, it's probably not 24 Earth Hours. Maybe in Kirk's time when starships were 99% crewed by a single species, but surely not by Picard's. So as soon as I go "oh, it's a translation convention," I can easily step to "and they mistranslated something."
Lots of folks here can't seem to see past their affection for these characters to recognize that Riker was terribly written after "The Best of Both Worlds." This is just one instance of that awful writing. Everyone knew and acknowledged it, even Frakes. The only way to save the character was to let him leave the ship and have Frakes appear in occasional episodes while directing or kill him off in season four and replace him with Thomas Riker. It's a shame they didn't have that concept three years earlier.
Jellico remarks that he does not have the time (to attempt to get familiar with the crew...what he terms a "honeymoon") and then he proceeds to waste time - in one instance that we, the viewers, are privileged to witness - hanging up drawings/musing over the artistic skill of his children. You would think a man with so dire a mission in his hands would attempt to smoothly communicate with a well-established crew in order to ensure the success of said mission. Either the writer(s) screwed up in regards to depicting this aspect of Jellico's character or they knew what they were doing by portraying the man as a selective hardass who lacked just enough people skills. A one to two minute speech would have worked wonders, but, apparently, that wasn't in the cards.
What is bizarre is the tendency of folk to (suddenly?) treat the crew of the Enterprise-D as soft or wet behind the ears just because a new Captain comes aboard with an unnecessarily grating attitude.
What is bizarre is the tendency of folk to (suddenly?) treat the crew of the Enterprise-D as soft or wet behind the ears just because a new Captain comes aboard with an unnecessarily grating attitude.
He's the main character. We're supposed to agree with him.
For me, it's more that they just didn't know what to do with him. He was essentially throne insurance: if Picard's diplomatic and cerebral approach didn't sit well with the fans, they still had a Kirk type as backup. But once Picard did become popular, and Data became a breakout character, Riker got a bit lost in the shuffle.
I agree. BoBW was the perfect chance to retire him, because his overall arc in that episode had him emerging as a worthy captain in his own right. Having him take his own ship was the logical conclusion.
True. And Jellico was right about a lot of things... but wrong as well. As I've often said, you don't cobble together a fourth shift with combat on the horizon. You make the change the way Sisko and Kira did: during a period of routine operations.
Which is the kind of thing that could have been discussed during the discussion/briefing about the impact that Riker expected/wanted to have during their first senior staff meeting shorting after the command transfer.
Yes, he does.
We also see another example of a similar thing with Deanna where he's absolutely willing to discuss things... right up until she starts to push back on what she sees as problems... which unlike perhaps Riker is literally the reason that she's there... and then he shuts her down.
Pretty much, yes.
I like to compare how Jellico created his own problems for himself to how Picard dealt with the E-D crew rightly being unsure of him in All Good Things, particularly the "Picard Speech" towards the end:
PICARD: It may be dangerous to take the ship in.
O'BRIEN: Take the ship in where, sir?
PICARD: Into the anomaly, Chief. Lay in a course for the exact centreand transfer all available power to the shields.
TASHA: Sir? Can you give us some explanation?
PICARD: No, Lieutenant, I cannot.
TASHA: Captain, so far we've obeyed every order, no matter how farfetched it might have seemed. But if we're to risk the safety of theship and crew I think we have to ask you for an explanation.
PICARD: I understand your concerns, Lieutenant, and I know if I were inyour position I would be doing the same thing. Looking for answers. Butyou're not going to find any because I don't have any to give you. Iknow it is difficult for you to understand, but we have to take theship into the very centre of the phenomenon and create a static warpshell. Now, this will put the ship at risk. Quite frankly, we may notsurvive. But I want you to believe that I am doing this for a greaterpurpose, and that what is at stake here is more than any of you canpossibly imagine. I know you have your doubts about me, about eachother, about the ship. All I can say is that although we have only beentogether for a short time, I know that you are the finest crew in thefleet and I would trust each of you with my life. So, I am asking youfor a leap of faith, and to trust me.
TASHA: Shields up, maximum strength.
WORF: Boosting field integrity to the warp nacelles. We may encountershearing forces once we enter the anomaly.
DATA: I am preparing to initiate a static warp shell.
O'BRIEN: Course laid in, sir.
TROI: All decks report ready, sir.
PICARD: Take us in, Chief.
Jellico was more or less right about the mission, about what needed to done... it's just the how it should have been done that he fell down on.
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