Matt Decker...Hero or fool?

[Maurice]

Your take on that line certainly differs from mine. Given that, at that point, they are discussing why the entire crew was gone, I take it to mean why would Decker and crew abandon ship with life support still functioning?

SCOTT: Captain, I've checked the engines. The warp drive is a hopeless pile of junk. The impulse engines aren't too badly off. We ought to be able to do something with them.
KIRK: Phaser banks?
SCOTT: Exhausted. They didn't give up without a battle.
KIRK: But where are they? I can't imagine a man like Matt Decker abandoning ship while his life support systems are still operative.

 

[jayrath]

Decker was neither a hero nor a fool. He was merely . . . human.

And in that lies the value of the character. The conflict, the agony, the remorse, the last-ditch hope; the last-ditch suicide.

I love Kirk, Spock and all the rest. But Decker is far more like all of we imperfect beings out here in the audience. That's why the performance is so well-remembered; for once, a starship captain reacts as any of we would when faced with impossible regrets.

 

[boobatuba]

Fool...from a simply tactical viewpoint...and I'll tell you why (I can't believe it hasn't come up yet).

What is the deal with attacking the machine from the front? If you are just going to use the Enterprise to hammer away at the thing at "point blank range," why not shoot at the thing from the rear, where it can't shoot at you? The machine obviously can't pivot around very quickly...set up shop behind it, stay behind it, and fire until your phasers are completely discharged. Then turn to Spock and say, "yeah, I guess a single starship cannot combat it, after all."

Jeez, this still drives me crazy when I watch this episode...what a moron! Honestly, I don't see how the DDM is a threat to anything more manueverable than, say, a planet.

 

[Timo]

Then again, the DDM might be able to grab hostiles in its tractor beam from multiple angles, and then force them to the front where they can be eaten.

Most of Decker's attacks are not from the front; the strafing run with the originally criminally bad phaser effects is initiated from way off-boresight, and in general the ship approaches the DDM off-axis and supposedly safe.

It has to be taken into account, though, that the mouth is the only place where the DDM might be vulnerable. Futile attacks against the side armor should have quickly convinced Decker of that.

This is one solar system away from L374.

Actually, L370 would seem to be several solar systems away from L374. After all, the only way our heroes can determine that a system has been savaged is by entering it - and by the time they reach L374, they declare that "every" system in the vicinity has been attacked, suggesting at least one stop in between, and probably several.

Then again, sometimes Trek solar systems are spaced intriguingly close to each other... And we should note that Decker's call for help could not be pinpointed to any of the L-37X systems, and that our heroes had to go from system to system in search of the point of origin. That shouldn't happen unless the systems were closely clustered (like, say, the four within the Murasaki phenomenon in "The Galileo Seven").

Still, I would consider it an internal inconsistency in the episode that the DDM can move from system to system to system within less than a year, yet cannot or will not go faster than 1/3 the impulse speed of the crippled Constellation during chase scenes. But a little bit of imagination should fix that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[boobatuba]

Timo said:
Then again, the DDM might be able to grab hostiles in its tractor beam from multiple angles, and then force them to the front where they can be eaten.

Interesting theory...no onscreen evidence. If the Enterprise had been shooting away at the DDM from behind and dragged to the front, then yeah, I'll buy it...didn't happen in the episode. Decker doesn't attack until he's in front of the machine, and the DDM doesn't initiate the tractor beam until after Decker attacks.

Timo said:Most of Decker's attacks are not from the front; the strafing run with the originally criminally bad phaser effects is initiated from way off-boresight, and in general the ship approaches the DDM off-axis and supposedly safe.

Seriously, have you seen the episode? Decker initiates two attacks that we see onscreen...one with the Enterprise, where he approaches from behind at a slight angle but ends up firing on the machine from directly in front and slightly above. That he intentionally moves the ship in front of the machine to attack, even though he approaches it from behind (and safely out of attack range) is the basis for my point that Decker is a blithering idiot. This position is apparently what Decker meant by "point blank range." He should have called it "stupid place to attack from." The machine fires repeatedly on the Enterprise, even though it is slightly "above" boresight.

Spock: You attempted to destroy it before, Commodore. The result was a wrecked ship and a dead crew.

Decker: I made a mistake then, we were too far away. This time, I intend to hit it with full phasers from a ridiculously exposed position, really close to the only dangerous part of the machine.

Spock: Security, take this idiot to the brig.

The other attack is with the Enterprise shuttlecraft, clearly from the front. What other attacks did you see, that were "not from the front?" Add to that the wrecked Constellation, which Decker obviously couldn't keep out of boresight of the DDM, and you are forced to the conclusion that this man had no tactical sense against a very offensively-limited enemy. I would hate to see Decker in battle against an enemy with 360-degree targeting ability!

Timo said:It has to be taken into account, though, that the mouth is the only place where the DDM might be vulnerable. Futile attacks against the side armor should have quickly convinced Decker of that.

Ahh...a good point...you would think that after getting the Constellation wrecked beyond repair, Decker would be aware of that...unfortunately, the Enterprise fires phasers against the "side armor" only...if they fired down the throat of the machine, perhaps I would believe you. Decker was obviously and wrongly convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary, phaser blasts to the hull of the DDM would defeat it if only they were close enough. So why not shoot at it from behind, out of range of the anti-proton beam? The Enterprise approached from behind...why not stay there and shoot from a tactically safe position?

Decker is the same guy that used to run out from behind his tactically sound, covered position into an unprotected open area to run and shoot at me in my fort when I was playing army in grade school...so stupid and predictable. And so NAILED!

 

[moogybaby]

It's clear the man snapped.

It took Scotty and two guys from damage control forty-five minutes to get the impulse engines back on line.

Decker was too twisted to even try that. Instead he beams the whole crew out.

He committed error after error, assaulted Starfleet personnel, committed suicide rather than programming the shuttle to go down the maw on it's own.

Terrible commander, terrible waste of Starfleet personnel.

He wouldn't be remembered as a hero.

 

[Maurice]

Well, to be fair to Decker, it sounds as if the Constellation was under attack when he beamed his crew down. "And then it hit again" and he lost the transporter, so it wasn't like he thought he'd have time to get the engines working.

 

[Gov Kodos]

He always struck me as a character who did all the right things, but the outcomes always came up bad. As someone pointed out pages back, he is like Kirk, but one who's lost rather than won. Like Kirk, he doesn't accept the "No win scenario" but he is too broken to think outside the box. Decker is one of my favorite characters from Star Trek because of his humanity, good and ill, wrapped together and inseperable.