TNG S6E10/11 - Chain of Command
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Yes, but this was a special circumstance. The crew knew what they signed up for. You can disagree with your captain, you can voice those disagreements, but in the end an order is an order. Riker was disrespectful. It was Riker and Troi's duty to smooth the path with the crew. It was never meant to be long term. Riker could tell that whatever was going on was serious. So, get with the plan, Riker.
Plus, though he shouldn't have had to do it, he swallowed his feelings about Riker to ask him to help for the good of the mission and the crew. Jellico is an ass, but an A+ captain.
Jellico was thrown into a really tough position. They knew this was a likely outcome. He still managed to get Picard out alive. Imagine how that might be hindered if your second in command was willfully disobedient, even in front of the crew.
I'd argue that upending the duty roster in the middle of a crisis is a bad move. You want people to perform optimally and they probably won't immediately do that while adjusting to a new schedule.
Jellico's changes might've been sensible in a vacuum but I think that he tried making them at an inappropriate time.
Could be. If I was Jellico and you were Riker, I might have conceded to your point. Personally, I wouldn't have changed to 4 groups anyway. I still say it doesn't warrant Riker's behavior. Two things in particular:
Jellico might have had experience with making this change in similar timeframes with good success. I would guess it is his preference for a reason. Still not saying it's the decision I would have made.
As a final note, many of us like Riker sometimes or are at least familiar with him. Before this episode, we don't know Jellico and he comes off brash. That may be influencing our overall opinion of how the episode is perceived. We usually don't like it when someone barks orders we disagree with and we have to follow them. I've never served, but my understanding is that's a pretty common experience in the military. Riker's behavior wouldn't usually be tolerated in the military, especially in a crisis and especially from someone in a leadership role.
Fair points. I think in the end, given only what we see, neither of them seemed to have shown particularly good judgment.
Jellico was temporarily given command over the flagship of Starfleet, which had so far performed well. He immediately decided to implement his personally preferred policies across the ship, which would've been fine if he had been given a long-term posting under normal circumstances but wasn't when he was temporarily in command during a time when the crew needed to perform reliably. Heck, he even had the fish removed from Picard's office despite knowing full well that it was a temporary posting.
Riker was rightfully concerned about all this but took far too much leeway in dealing with it. Honestly, Picard wouldn't have acted much differently than Jellico by the time Riker flatly refused to do his job. Jellico might've acted unwisely in a professional sense and inappropriately on a personal level but Riker wasn't acting like an officer at all.
It's like the two of them were trying to make a case study on how many different kinds of dysfunction you can cram into just two officers aboard a single starship.
Lightening the duty load of all your crew, giving them extra R&R, reducing or elimination redundancies by ensuring departments are working with optimal manning and not having ensigns around trying to look busy, with the benefit of potentially have two other shifts on standby should Yellow or Red Alert need to be called. The E-D's biggest issue is the ship was a massive luxury liner that was effectively overstaffed. Re-allocate those resources and now the ship runs better than ever.
Again, possibly sensible in a vacuum but not a great move when you need the ship to work properly right now. Changeovers like this incur temporary inefficiency as new schedules have to be drawn up and adapted to. Showing up out of nowhere, demanding that everyone execute the changeover (planning and all) within several hours doesn't sound like a very good idea to me at the best of times, much less when the ship is going to do double duty with delicate diplomacy work and backup for a covert ops mission.
And that's not the only time he pisses people off with no explanation. He shows up in engineering and demands a two-day death march project to overhaul the warp drive for no reason other than he thinks it should be more efficient. Sure, Starfleet engineers routinely deal with such circumstances but it's usually for a well-known reason and not "because I say so" over the active objections of the department head. And overworking the engineers doesn't sound very efficient in anything but he short term.
I maintain that Jellico may have a decent understanding on how to efficiently operate a starship but he's not very good at actually leading a crew.