Posted by J L on February 24, 2013
Posted in Entertainment and Fun • Life • Opinion | Tagged With: captain, Star Trek, trekkies
Posted by Nancy Thomas
There is an on-going debate between trekkies as to whether Captain James T. Kirk or Captain Jean Luc Picard is the best captain in the whole of the Star Trek series. I really like both of them for their separate qualities in dealing with unique situations. Kirk is more action oriented, a look before you leap kind of guy. Picard is diplomatic, thoughtful, weighing all sides before making a decision. Each captain was developed for different eras in the Star Trek history and are very different because of this separation of time periods. Still they aren’t the only two captains in all of Trekdom. There’s Benjamin Sisko from DS9, Captain Katherine Janeway of Voyager and the adventurous Captain Johnathan Archer of the original Enterprise.
As a girl, I’d like to throw in my two biased cents and suggest Janeway as the archetypal and therefore, best Starfleet captain. She contains elements of action and diplomacy and displayed both in several episodes of Voyager. In Macrocosm, she pulled an Ellen Ripley with that phaser weapon. In Scorpion, Janeway forges a tense and dangerous diplomatic alliance with the Borg and later uses powers of persuasion and empathy to help Seven of Nine, the former Borg drone, integrate with the Voyager crew.
While Picard and Kirk are excellent examples for their respective time periods, when I sit down to watch Star Trek it is Voyager’s Janeway that stands out as the best of Star Trek captains.