Which Star Trek captain is the best?
Here, we'll take a deep, objective look at six decades of Star Trek history to decide,
categorically, which Starfleet captains did and did not suck real hard.
Captain Kathryn Janeway, portrayed by Kate Mulgrew, had a long road ahead of her from
day one.
She was the first woman to headline a Star Trek series as the lead character, and nerds,
even the ones obsessed with a show about a utopian future rooted in equality, aren't
famous for loving change.
With that super unfair strike already against her, she took command of the ship just before
it was sucked through the Array and spit out 70,000 light years from everything Trek fans
had spent the last decade loving.
But how would you make lemonade if the universe didn't chuck a couple of lemons your way?
She was absolutely right that the powers in control of the Array posed a very real threat,
but instead of setting a time bomb and heading home in time for whatever the post-capitalist
version of happy hour is, she blew up her only way back on the spot.
In doing so, she condemned the hundreds of Starfleet crew under her protection to a long
and arduous journey.
It's not that Janeway was completely terrible at running a starship.
The captains on Trek are the best of the best, after all, and she was faced with difficult
decisions and squabbling factions even among her own crew.
She even had to deal with Neelix, which is a harsh punishment for any sin.
Even through all of that, she lived up to Starfleet's mission of seeking out new life
and boldly going where no one had gone before, and by bringing Seven of Nine into her crew,
she gave the Federation its best chance at understanding the Borg, if not defeating them.
Still, Everything that happened to the Voyager on its journey, including the good stuff,
was just trying to deal with the fallout of a single command decision that was made in
the face of what were probably better options.
Captain Christopher Pike, as portrayed in the original pilot episode of Star Trek, was
less than notable.
In his only appearance in command of the Enterprise, the one character trait he got was that he
didn't seem to like his job very much, complaining about the difficulties of command right off
the bat.
"You bet I'm tired.
You bet…”
“I’m tired of being responsible for 203 lives!"
But sometimes a person can shine just by not doing much of anything at all.
Look at it this way: the captains of all of the ocean liners besides the Titanic looked
pretty good the day the Titanic sank, just by not slamming into any icebergs.
Pike might not have much, and wound up mostly appearing as a nearly comatose husk in a weirdly
intense clip show, but he never got his crew lost 70,000 light years from home.
And that, if literally nothing else, puts him higher on the list than Janeway.
The rebooted Pike of the 2009 Star Trek film had a rare gift that so many leaders stumble
without: He had faith in people.
He saw the untapped possibilities of a diamond in the rough, and encouraged everyone around
him to live up to their potential.
He was the kind of boss who sought out talent and opened doors for his protégés [PRO-tuh-zhay],
the kind of figure that inspired his crew as he led them into a devastating battle.
Or that's what we heard, anyway.
In reality, he actually arrived a little bit late to the battle, which was fortunate for
him, but not a great sign of his command prowess.
As inspiring as he might've been, we only got to see him in command for about four minutes
before he surrendered to time-displaced Romulans in a beefed-up mining ship, which isn't exactly
Starfleet's proudest moment.
Plus he also put that faith in people directly into a young Jim Kirk, and while that eventually
turned out to be the right choice, it indirectly caused an awful lot of bumps in the road.
Nobody is denying that the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies were a good time.
You can say what you will about the rest of the movies, but we all have to acknowledge
that surfing a wave of exploding aliens while the Beastie Boys play is one of the raddest
things the Enterprise has ever done in over 50 years of Trek -- and it's worth noting
that Justin Lin directed that movie.
That said, Chris Pine's take on James T. Kirk's doesn't have the best track record as the
commander of a starship.
Part of the problem was always going to be that he had William Shatner's original recipe
Kirk to live up to.
Shatner Kirk had a long and illustrious career as a Starfleet captain, spanning three seasons
of the original series, a year of the cartoon, and seven motion pictures, and kept the OG
Enterprise running for two whole television shows before it needed so much as a refitting.
Reboot Kirk only got two movies before his ship wound up more smashed than Scotty on
shore leave.
Also, by virtue of appearing only in films, rather than a TV show with 70-plus episodes,
we don't get to know him as his own character in the way that we got to know the others.
He's good, but if you're not even the best Jim Kirk, you're definitely not the best captain.
Let's address the super spoilery elephant in the room: Yes, Captain Lorca was evil,
hailing from the troubling Mirror Universe, which we probably should've seen coming, since
he's played by the actor who played Lucius Malfoy.
That's a problem, but sometimes people exhibit personal characteristics that overshadow their
flaws, and Lorca had gravitas.
Not a lot of other high-ranking Starfleet officials, Machiavellian or not, could've
pulled off that "context is for kings" speech and still gotten away with having a pet tribble.
And more than that?
He was compelling.
For over five decades, Star Trek has taken place in a world where characters with more
militaristic disposition are, with very few exceptions, severe bad news.
Lorca was down to torpedo Klingons from day one and still kept you wondering whether he
was really the bad guy for the better part of a season, and that's the mark of a truly
great character.
Captain Jonathan Archer has a special place in Star Trek history.
Chronologically, he was the first captain of the Enterprise, but since there were four
decades of Star Trek out there before his show hit the airwaves, he became a hindsight-fueled
model of the traits that other commanders would strive toward.
Unfortunately, since that show also buried any attempts at another series for more than
a decade, he tends to be the audience's favorite scaepegoat for all of Enterprise's problems.
Look at the facts, though: Archer helped to create the United Federation of Planets.
He made first contact with species that would become staples of the Star Trek landscape.
He was the first Starfleet captain to take on, and defeat, the Borg, traveled through
time, fought literal Nazis, and had a pet beagle who was weapons-grade adorable, And,
well, he was also kind of boring.
But at least he tried!
Star Trek's first captain ran a loose ship and wore a tight pair of trousers, and has
the distinction of somehow being both the most underrated and overrated captain in the
franchise's history.
On the one hand, he was a surprisingly thoughtful leader, especially considering that his show
was so frequently a voyage to the planet of the heavy-handed metaphors.
"Death.
Destruction, disease, horror... that's what was is all about, Anan."
He considered his options and generally came off as hesitant to resort to violence, embodying
the spirit of Star Trek's utopian future.
On the other hand, as some of the show's more observant viewers have noted, he's also kind
of a filthy degenerate.
He had a penchant for jumping into every situation involving anything lady-shaped, then warping
off and never coming back.
Kirk's propensity for leaving in a hurry became such a trope that it wound up being the central
and secondary plot points of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
It takes a special kind of not-so-great to have an entire movie, in which you're the
hero, based solely on your gigantic flaws.
When Star Trek: Discovery started brushing up against the timeline of the original series,
it was time for an all-new, all-different Christopher Pike, brightly clad and having
a great good time.
It was sort of the shot in the arm that a frequently dour, grit-covered, Christopher
Nolan-influenced Star Trek needed.
He was thoughtful and capable, but vulnerable and easy to relate to, and brought a blue-collar
panache to his duties that took him closer to being an audience surrogate than we'd seen
from a captain in a while.
In the end, his story was one of self-sacrifice for the greater good, saving the lives of
young cadets and being exposed to delta radiation in the process.
What's more, thanks to a premonition given to him by a time crystal, he knew that it
would happen if he kept living the way he had been, and the guy just kept on going.
That, by any measure, is a real champ.
The USS Discovery has had a small army of captains, but none of them has stood out in
quite the same way as Philippa Georgiou.
Played by the celebrated yet criminally underrated Michelle Yeoh, Georgiou has a lot going for
her.
She's witty, clever, and optimistic to a fault, even when it means getting Vulcan pinched
by her favorite kid in class.
She's also a total badass.
Here we go with more spoilers: When she died in the line of duty, she went down Butch and
Sundance-style with Michael, the aforementioned neck-pincher, fighting jacked up Klingons
on an ill-advised mission to snatch their leader.
On a scale of one to ten, Georgiou goes all the way to a hard 11.
Plus, who else has a Mirror Universe doppelganger that gets sucked into our plane of existence
and winds up being offered a job?
The old tropes are dead.
Nobody's arguing over whether Kirk was better than Picard anymore.
Picard was better.
Don't let the turbolift door hit you on the way out.
Jean-Luc had it all.
He stuck to his principles.
He ran a tight ship.
He knew how many lights there were, and he wasn't afraid to say it.
He kept a whole on-again-off-again thing going with the ship's doctor for years without making
things weird, severely stunting a whole generation of nerds' expectations for what workplace
relationships should look like.
More than that, though, he was a great character to put in charge of a starship, and not just
because kids love him.
He respected other cultures, even when it wasn't easy.
He took the crew's feelings and expertise into consideration.
He was best friends with Whoopi Goldberg.
He even starred in the Star Trek equivalent of Die Hard and single-handedly rescued his
ship from space terrorists.
And in case it slipped your mind, Patrick Stewart is the only actor who's walked away
from being a Star Trek captain to have a successful movie career doing other things.
The next most successful performer on the list had to shill for cheap airline tickets
as his post-Starfleet career.
You want to know who the real heroes are?
They're the ones who show up to work every day, even when it isn't an adventure.
They're the ones who do what needs to be done because they're the ones who can.They're Captain
Benjamin Sisko, commanding officer of Deep Space 9.
"So where do you think Starfleet will be sending us next?”
“I don’t know, but if I have anything to say about the matter, we’ll be going
right back to the front lines."
Sisko kept a multi-species, post-war space station threatened by organized crime and
galactic warfare running on duct tape and wishes for the better part of a decade.
He stayed humble and did his job while being literally worshipped by a religion that included
one of his subordinates as an emissary of their gods.
He was commanding officer of DS9 for seven years with multiple holo-suites aboard and
even though this was a Star Trek show, he had a relatively small number of incidents
where said holo-suite tried to take over or kill the organics.
And he did it all as a single dad.
Most remarkably?
In Star Trek's regularly technicolor morality, Ben Sisko dealt in shades of grey.
He made hard choices.
He got things wrong.
He learned and adapted.
He wasn't the perfect human, but he was trying to get better.
And that's what Star Trek is all about.
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