They may have ignored Kira since she was not a starfleet officer?
But she'd probably find some way to takeover the ship against their will anyway, or sabotage it requiring them to return back, something like what she did in "Defiant".
And those cadet actors were really really awful.
Especially, Courtney Peldon.
At least, she was actually wearing clothes in this episode. Unlike real life.
Yeh but Waters was hot
I would hope that if someone like Worf or Riker had come aboard they would have seen the sence to give them the chair as they had far more experience than the whole ship of cadets put together, Riker fought the Borg for cryin out loud.
I can imagin in their delduded minds they would have still thought their field commissioned chain of command would mean Watters would still be in charge, but again with Riker being the XO of the federation flagship would the Valiant XO stand asside?
More of an interesting question, what if it had been Picard or Sisko (or any other Starfleet Captain) on that Runabout.
If Picard was on the runabout he would have chewed Waters out of it like he did with Crusher over the Nova Squad incident, for going AWOL, and probably would have taken the ship back and demanded Waters be expelled.
They should have had a refrence to Nog being able to take command, the Arsnel of freedom was involving commissioned officers not cadets and a full officer, though it's a good point.
He was just too in awe of them, he didn't consider himself superior to them, even though he outranked them he still didn't see himself as senior, he was probably too afraid to challenge Waters.
As for Red Squad the fact that they were an elite unit meant they had so much smoke blown up their assess by other cadets and by the brass that they did not recognise the limits of their own abilities.
Giving them control of an advanced warship even with supervision was a very bad idea, as it just fed this problem even more.
There are some real errors in judgment on the part of everyone. I think Jake may have unwittingly done Watters a favor by giving the crew a hesitant enemy to rally against.
For myself, I'd surely like to think that Starfleet stopped with the super-cadet thing. I once went after the post-Valiant events in a fic (needs revising) but I'd buy a pro-novel that made a stab at all this as well. I think Nog was in for another disappointment, though. His urging that Jake 'just tell the truth' about what happened I found a little insulting. Jake has faults, but sugar-coating or bending the truth didn't seem to be among them, as far as I ever saw. If the truth be told, then Jake's article would not be very kind to Red Squad at all.
Exactly, if you'll recall during that Klingon seige Jake was able to do something Waters was not: recognise his own limits and weaknesses, and own up to them.
The way Waters was going on I wonder if he would even have stopped if he had destroyed the dominion ship, he probaly would have kept going untill he got the crew killed, all for the sake of unit prestege, very Nick Locarno of him.
"Oh, the folly of youth." 'Nuff said.
BTW: Who else hates the Valiant's XO?
Yes, she was the XO, yet when Waters is killed she just looks around and sits there sayng almost nothing untill shes killed, when she was supposed to immediatly take command, look at "Tears of he Prophets" when Sisko suddenly collapses Kira jumps up and takes over right away.
