"The Wounded" Why didn't Maxwells Crew stop him?

[Tribble puncher]

Like the title says....when Ben Maxwells crew realizes they have been ordered to preemtively attack a target they are not at war with and has not attacked them first, why didn't the 1st officer step in and relieve him? We know Starship crews are not made to be mindless autonomatons.....I could buy that maybe he faked recieving a transmission from Starfleet: "Oh I uh, got a private transmission from Starfleet, they said the Cardassians attacked blah blah colony and we are supposed to go in underradio silence and launch a counter attack." or something, but even after that surely his crew would have known something wasn't right when the Enterprise arrived and relieved him at that point. I don't buy that he convinced his ENTIRE crew to go along with it either, he was captain of a Nebula Class Ship, which is pretty close in mass to the Enterprise, so he had to have had a crew of several hundred.

 

[Tosk]

Maybe there was no crew...we never actually see any of them, do we?

 

[Timo]

I'm not sure why we should think starship crews are not automatons. After all, Kirk frequently had his ship conduct highly dubious maneuvers, including firing on the innocent, entering forbidden zones, committing acts of war and redlining the machinery (sometimes because he himself was nuts, sometimes because he wanted to pretend to be nuts, sometimes because an alien force was in fact in control). His crew, outside the bridge, had ZERO say on such events.

There's no such thing as "peacetime" for Starfleet, it seems. Ships get to fire their phasers and torpedoes basically twice a week even in the quietest of weeks. When have we heard Kirk or Picard actually address their crews and tell what is going on? Theirs is but to do.

Beyond that, it should be easy going for Maxwell. Why should any of his officers object to what he is doing? They are his friends and comrades - he, Picard and Jellico all seem to be saying that Starfleet allows skippers to handpick their teams, and only Picard has volunteered to handpick a contrarian.

Maxwell's argument is easy to make, too. Cardassians are evil. But they are wimpy, too, so killing them has no downsides: if they choose to go to war over the killings, all the better, because then Starfleet can trivially kill them all and be done with that. OTOH, not killing them has no upsides, other than perhaps keeping Maxwell employed - but he's selfless enough to not let that count. So that's one bridgeful of adherents convinced.

Once Starfleet steps in, the crew will certainly be alarmed. But it's ship against ship, word against word, and Picard is just as likely to be in the wrong as Maxwell on the first glance. The legal experts on Deck 13 will probably prepare to make their case, but immediate mutiny is a highly unlikely outcome in comparison. And we never got to see what would have happened beyond the immediate.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The automatic bridge defense system is a bitch, if you know how to program it.

 

[Sakonna]

This is one of those episodes I don't like as much as the general consensus, and this is one of the things that throws me every time -- I need some explanation of what is going on with that crew to go along with this, I know it's hard to find airtime but it's too weird the way their existence is pushed aside entirely.

 

[gillmanjr]

I think the assumption is made at the beginning of the episode that Maxwell's crew is absolutely loyal to him and that he earned that loyalty, as Picard says at the end of the episode. But I agree it does go a little too far. Once Maxwell is beamed aboard the Enterprise the first time and basically chewed out by Picard its hard to believe that his crew would continue to follow him when he chooses to disobey the order to return to Starbase. But maybe he's earned his crew's loyalty to the point where they are willing to jump off a cliff with him, who knows.

 

[Forbin]

Nobody else knew that song.

 

[JesterFace]

If Maxwell was best buds with his first officer and 2nd in command was close to them, it's hard to see the rest of the bridge crew stopping what they're doing, especially if Maxwell and buds all say "we're under orders to do all this".

Maybe some of the bridge crew was with or without Maxwell on Setlik III and don't like the "Cardies" either.

 

[Mojochi]

You assume he lied to them, about the nature of their orders, about their first strike go ahead, & then about the nature of his encounter with Picard. If you couple that with the fact that it's fair to assume the majority of his senior staff served with him in the Cardassian War, & were not only loyal & unquestioning of him as a result, but perhaps also equally suspicious of Cardassians, or sympathetic to his motives, then it's not absurd to expect they might go along with it.

In truth, we don't even know that only Maxwell stood accused at the end of this. Some of his command crew may have been complicit, & equally to blame. I look at it like this. We have seen how liberal Starfleet is in allowing captains to handpick their bridge crew. Hell, Picard's crew is all kinds of unorthodox. He has a teenager piloting the damn ship, & his 2nd officer is arguably not even respected as a proper command officer by many in the fleet. By the conversation about selecting 1st officers Picard has with Pressman, we see just how much leeway they have. Pressman all but tells Picard that he prefers a "Yes Man". I personally wouldn't even think that should be possible in an XO, but in Starfleet, it apparently is.

So, is it so much of a leap to suggest that Maxwell could've selected a senior staff that were like minded to himself where Cardassians are concerned? I don't think so. Nothing bonds like war. People stand together behind those grudges a long time

 

[Tribble puncher]

Well, this is a fictitous SciFi universe, so anything is possible really, I mainly brought the point up because I felt like Maxwells crew going along (or not going along) with an unprovoked attack unilaterally cooked up by Maxwell himself I felt was a missed opportunity in the episode, I think this episode would have made a great two parter actually and could have used the extra time to really get into Maxwells head and see things from he and his crews angle....Instead the whole thing was played off as a "Whoops, sorry about that Cardassians...our bad!" The whole story should have been played up as a MAJOR incident where the Federation was clearly in the wrong, and how uncomfortable Picard and Co. are as they are trying to deal with it. I think it would have been more interesting to Find out Maxwell had been wrong all along, which would have served as a cautionary tale about seeing something and having it be what your psyche needs it to be for your worldview to make sense instead of whats actually there.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

None of them have any names. You need a name to mutiny.

 

[RAMA]

Two theories:

1) They go through the trouble of showing how close-knit Maxwell is with his crews with the time he spent with O'Brien. If Maxwell picked most of his crew or half his crew, this might be why.

2) As seen in "Pegasus" the composition of a well-meaning crew may well fight for their captain out of loyalty. It's also possible as with "Hunt for Red October" that some crew members were not completely informed of what was going on or the intent.

 

[Mojochi]

It's also possible as with "Hunt for Red October" that some crew members were not completely informed of what was going on or the intent.

I'd say it's almost certain that you could pull off something like this with only minimal officer involvement, from basically the senior staff. Just look at Lower Decks. They are literally infiltrating Cardassian territory with a spy, for no reason that any officer not on the command crew would ever know about. How easily could that have been done with ulterior motives, if the captain & some or all of his senior staff were colluding on taking action outside the chain of command?

It's the same reason it's acceptable to overlook Riker's role in the Pegasus mutiny. All he had to do was miss a couple key briefings, & he'd never have known they were outside legal boundaries. They easily could've kept him in the dark on most everything (Until the inquiry cover-up that is. He played a little ball there & colluded to keep certain things from coming out. Pressman probably conned him into thinking he was preserving the dead officers' honor in hiding the fact that they'd mutinied)

 

[Jayson1]

Anybody ever consider that Maxwell might have been working with Section 31 or Starfleet Intelligence? If he had doubts about the Carddisians he might have not been the only one. Perhaps they were wanted to expose the Carddisians and didn't think Starfleet leadership was taking them seriously as a possible threat.

Jason

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Anybody ever consider that Maxwell might have been working with Section 31 or Starfleet Intelligence?

No, but I always thought he'd be a prime target for recruitment by the Maquis.

Even if Maxwell was in a Federation prison, I wouldn't put it past the Maquis to try and break him out so they could exploit his hatred of Cardassians for their own ends.

 

[Jayson1]

No, but I always thought he'd be a prime target for recruitment by the Maquis.

Even if Maxwell was in a Federation prison, I wouldn't put it past the Maquis to try and break him out so they could exploit his hatred of Cardassians for their own ends.

It's also possible the Cardassians wanted a war. Why send a ship to fight the Enterprise when it doesn't stand a chance in battle, according to Worf. Like they were being set up to be destroyed and the info could easily be leaked by the Obsiden Order to Maxwell about the buildup. I imagine there are plenty of war hawks who might not have liked the end results of the Border Wars that could have resulted in the issues, years later that would create the Maquis.

Jason

 

[Mojochi]

It's also possible the Cardassians wanted a war. Why send a ship to fight the Enterprise when it doesn't stand a chance in battle, according to Worf. Like they were being set up to be destroyed and the info could easily be leaked by the Obsiden Order to Maxwell about the buildup. I imagine there are plenty of war hawks who might not have liked the end results of the Border Wars that could have resulted in the issues, years later that would create the Maquis

Then there's the fact they used this whole thing to play victim, worm their way into Starfleet confidence. I mean, look what just a few hours on the D got them. An aid poking around their computer consoles, Picard begrudgingly divulging that they could determine Cardy transponder codes. They literally flaunted a weapons transport in front of them, to test them. That they have to admit that keeping peace was a bigger priority than sousing out aggressive tactics, tells an adversary everything they want to know about your current readiness

If you're going to sit there at the end & actually say that Maxwell was right, then everything that happened takes on an entirely new & suspect spin. It actually isn't a big leap to think they might have baited Maxwell deliberately, not all that dissimilarly from how they baited Picard some time later in CoC

 

[JediKnightButler]

Like the title says....when Ben Maxwells crew realizes they have been ordered to preemtively attack a target they are not at war with and has not attacked them first, why didn't the 1st officer step in and relieve him? We know Starship crews are not made to be mindless autonomatons.....I could buy that maybe he faked recieving a transmission from Starfleet: "Oh I uh, got a private transmission from Starfleet, they said the Cardassians attacked blah blah colony and we are supposed to go in underradio silence and launch a counter attack." or something, but even after that surely his crew would have known something wasn't right when the Enterprise arrived and relieved him at that point. I don't buy that he convinced his ENTIRE crew to go along with it either, he was captain of a Nebula Class Ship, which is pretty close in mass to the Enterprise, so he had to have had a crew of several hundred.

Talking about this episode makes me think that the Cardassian's later embrace of the Dominion and warring for control of the AQ somewhat vindicates his (and O'Brien's) suspicions of them- though of course this occurs years before then......

 

[The Wormhole]

The novels say Maxwell lied to his crew and said they were under Starfleet orders to attack the Cardassians. His XO, another veteran from Setlik III was okay accepting this at face value without prying any further. In light of any other info, that seems a good enough explanation to me.

 

[Timo]

I don't think it's plausible for this to literally have been a one-man show.

Theoretically possible, yes: Maxwell could have gathered intelligence on Cardassian movements in his spare time, clandestinely rerouting data feeds to his cabin and quickly covering his console when his XO entered and whatnot. But surely Maxwell would wish to share this hobby project of his with like-minded individuals, before he came to realize that ultimately he would have to take action? And surely he would then find it difficult to keep the fellow hobbyists in the dark (although I'm sure he - and they - would make every effort at establishing deniability)?

It's not even dramatically satisfactory for Maxwell to have acted utterly alone. Most Trek adventures are ensemble actions, after all: Maxwell being a guest star rather than a hero shouldn't yet create a drastic difference in how starship skippers go through adventures like this.

Timo Saloniemi