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:
Not making a change directly ordered by your captain and instead waiting to see if he’d enforce it later. If the order was potentially bad for readiness, delaying only made that worse.
Sulking about it and making your captain jump through hoops to get your assistance.
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.
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.