11 Starfleet Officers Who Gave Good Reason to Hand Over the Uniform

Starfleet will trust you with a ship that can destroy a city, but apparently taking your badge away requires a little more paperwork. Here are 11 officers who gave somebody a very good reason to say you're done, hand over the uniform. Some actually faced consequences. Others went right back to work.

My number one is somebody I actually love. But loving the character doesn't make the incident report disappear.

11. Tom Paris stole the Delta Flyer and still got off with 30 days

Apparently 30 days in the brig is the going rate for stealing a shuttle and trying to torpedo somebody's infrastructure. In Voyager's "Thirty Days," Tom learns that oxygen mining operations are putting an ocean world at risk. Its leadership refuses to make the necessary changes, and Janeway won't authorize him to force the issue. So Tom takes the Delta Flyer and attempts to destroy one of the facilities. Voyager has to stop the torpedo. His punishment is a demotion to ensign and 30 days in the brig.

His concern is legitimate, and I understand why he wants to help. But there's a pretty significant jump between disagreeing with a government's environmental policy and borrowing your employer's spacecraft to launch an unauthorized attack. That's not a disagreement in the staff meeting. That's your pilot deciding he has his own foreign policy.

Voyager needs Tom, and they're a long way from a replacement crew. Fine. But once they get home, somebody should at least ask whether this man can be trusted with the keys. Being a really good pilot only carries you so far when the captain has to intercept your environmental activism with explosives.

10. William Riker kept Picard in the dark about the Pegasus

Before anybody starts, this is specifically about the Pegasus. Riker's old captain, Admiral Pressman, comes aboard the Enterprise to recover their former ship and its secret experimental technology. That technology is a phasing cloak developed in violation of the Federation's treaty with the Romulans. Riker knows the history, but orders from above keep him withholding the truth from Picard. Eventually he comes clean and helps him escape.

That last part matters. Riker ultimately makes the right choice, but I want to know why it takes getting the Enterprise trapped inside an asteroid for the truth to become urgent enough.

I can give young Ensign Riker some understanding. He's inexperienced, he's loyal to his captain, and he's caught in a situation he doesn't fully understand. Commander Riker has considerably fewer excuses. He's Picard's first officer. His captain needs accurate information to protect the ship, and Riker is sitting on the detail that explains the entire mission. At minimum, you're temporarily off duty while somebody reviews your judgment. You don't get to keep the flagship's captain in the dark about a treaty breaking experiment and then fix the paperwork with a sufficiently sincere look.

9. Worf helped sabotage Risa's weather grid

The Risa incident. I wish we could forget it too, but we can't. In "Let He Who Is Without Sin..." Worf goes on vacation with Dax and becomes involved with a group convinced that the Federation is too soft. He helps sabotage Risa's weather control system, bringing storms down on people who were just trying to enjoy their holiday.

Worf, you could leave. That was an option the entire time. You could have stayed in the room, read something, or told Dax you weren't enjoying yourself. Instead, a Starfleet officer uses his technical knowledge to help a political group interfere with a planet's infrastructure because other people are relaxing incorrectly. Imagine getting back to DS9 and explaining that to Sisko. How was your leave? Well, I compromised the weather grid. There should not be a second question after that, just a very long silence while somebody contacts personnel.

And yes, Worf eventually turns against the group when things escalate. Good. But realizing you joined the wrong group does not undo the part where you joined the wrong group. I love Worf. This version of Worf had problems.

8. Commodore Matt Decker was in no condition to command another ship

I think this one is tragic, but somebody still needed to take command away from him immediately. In "The Doomsday Machine," Decker has lost his crew to the planet killer. When he gets aboard the Enterprise, he pulls rank on Spock, takes control, and tries to attack the machine despite the danger. Kirk eventually orders Spock to relieve him.

I'm not putting him here because his crew died. He made a desperate decision to try and save them, and the result devastated him. I'm putting him here because he is clearly in no condition to command another ship, and the system lets him do it anyway. McCoy sees the problem. Spock sees the problem. You can see the problem from the couch, but apparently the rank is still doing all the thinking.

Decker needed medical care and immediate relief from duty. Instead, he gets another bridge full of people to put at risk. Starfleet should have had a very clear policy that higher rank does not override an obvious crisis. It was a great episode. The command procedure inside it was a nightmare.

7. Captain Benjamin Maxwell was right about the Cardassians and still unfit to command

Being right about your suspicions does not give you permission to start a war. In "The Wounded," Maxwell attacks Cardassian targets because he believes they're secretly rearming. Picard is sent in to stop him. Maxwell eventually agrees to return, then breaks away to confront another ship, and O'Brien finally talks him down.

The important wrinkle is that Picard recognizes Maxwell's suspicions about the Cardassians were correct. That makes the episode interesting, but it doesn't make Maxwell's conduct acceptable. You cannot have individual captains deciding which peace treaties count based on their personal assessment, or the Federation doesn't have a foreign policy. It has several hundred heavily armed opinions traveling at warp speed.

Maxwell's history and grief do explain his behavior, and they give Starfleet a reason to get him help. But he's demonstrated that he will disregard orders, attack targets and risk another conflict because he believes leadership won't act fast enough. That man cannot keep a starship. You can respect what he did during the war and still recognize he is no longer fit to command in peace. Those two things can exist at the same time.

6. Admiral Erik Pressman got far too far before the consequences arrived

We talked about him earlier in this piece. If your secret project ends with your ship stuck inside solid rock, maybe you need to stop trying to bring it back. Pressman oversaw the Pegasus phasing cloak experiment, concealed what happened, and years later wanted to recover the technology and resume his work. His confidence comes partly from having supporters higher up in Starfleet. Picard ultimately has him arrested.

So yes, this is one where the episode actually delivers consequences. My complaint is how far the man gets before those consequences arrive. The original disaster should have ended his command career. Instead he becomes an admiral and returns with enough authority to make the Enterprise clean up his unfinished business. I like the logic of telling Riker that important people support the project. Bring them to the hearing too. That doesn't make your experiment less illegal. It just makes the guest list longer.

Pressman represents one of Starfleet's recurring problems. Somebody decides protecting the Federation means secretly ignoring the rules that hold its agreements together. Then everybody else gets to deal with the diplomatic crisis when the secret inevitably stops being a secret.

5. Admiral Dougherty tried to quietly relocate the Ba'ku in Insurrection

The Fountain of Youth apparently comes with a relocation department. In Insurrection, Dougherty cooperates with the Son'a on a plan to remove the Ba'ku from their planet so its regenerative properties can be exploited. I didn't like this movie at all. Picard refuses to accept the forced relocation, while Dougherty tries to justify it through the benefits to the wider Federation.

You can debate the film's larger ethical question, and I know people do. But secretly moving a community out of its home because you've decided somebody else can make better use of it is an enormous thing to authorize. And the concealment tells you everything. If your humanitarian project needs its intended victims kept unaware of what's happening, come on.

Dougherty keeps leaning on authority, necessity and the number of people who might benefit. Meanwhile, Picard is looking at the people who actually live there. That's exactly the kind of situation where you want someone willing to challenge the admiral. You take his authority away before the removal operation proceeds. If the plan is defensible, you defend it openly. We hoped nobody would notice until afterward is a terrible opening statement.

4. Lieutenant Valeris betrayed Spock's trust to sabotage peace with the Klingons

We've now moved well beyond a bad performance review. In The Undiscovered Country, Valeris participates in the conspiracy to sabotage peace with the Klingons. She helps implicate Kirk and McCoy and kills two people who could expose her as the Enterprise crew closes in on the truth. At this point, firing her is just something you do while arranging her arrest.

What makes it worse is the trust placed in her. Spock sees her potential. She has access, credibility and a future, and she uses those advantages to help people destroy a peace process. Her opposition to the Klingons is presented as something she considers rational, but dressing up a conclusion in logical language doesn't make it sound good, especially when your plan requires assassination, framing your captain and murdering the people who can expose you. Valeris is a really good reminder that being smart doesn't automatically make somebody trustworthy. Sometimes it just means the cover up is more complicated.

3. Admiral Leyton attempted a military takeover and only had to resign

Starfleet promotes a man, and then he decides the presidency should come with the job. In DS9's "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost," the changeling threat creates fear on Earth. Leyton exploits that fear, engineers a crisis and attempts a military takeover. He even has the Lakota intercept the Defiant and falsely claims its crew has been replaced by changelings. His scheme ends with his resignation, and the word resignation feels a little gentle for attempting to take over the government.

This is the danger of somebody deciding they alone understand how serious the threat is. Every objection becomes weakness, every limit becomes an obstacle, and eventually protecting the Federation means putting himself in charge of it. We've heard that before. Now Starfleet ships are fighting each other because an admiral has decided civilian leadership is inconvenient.

And who benefits from that? The enemy he's supposedly protecting everybody against. The Dominion doesn't need to replace every officer if one real officer can manufacture enough panic to do the damage himself. Leyton needed to lose his authority, his access, and any expectation he would ever give another order.

2. Captain Rudolph Ransom turned living beings into a shortcut home

Awesome name. But you cannot put first contact into the fuel tank. In Voyager's "Equinox," Ransom's crew has endured horrific losses. Desperate to get home, they discover they can use the remains of a nucleogenic life form to enhance their engines, and then they deliberately summon and kill more of those beings. When Voyager uncovers it, Ransom's crew escapes with the shielding technology and leaves the rescuers exposed.

Their suffering was real. The smaller ship, the losses, the starvation all give context. None of it makes it acceptable. They turned living beings into a shortcut home, and when another Starfleet crew offered help, they betrayed that crew to keep the operation going. Ransom eventually tries to put things right, and that does matter for his character, but it doesn't change how long he allowed this to continue. You can feel sympathy for a desperate captain and still say he should never have been left in command once it was discovered.

1. Benjamin Sisko poisoned a planet to catch Eddington

Yes, my guy. The Emissary, the captain whose ship I would very much like to have in a fight. But we have to discuss Solosos III. In "For the Uniform," Sisko is pursuing Michael Eddington, who has been using weapons to make Cardassian colonies uninhabitable to Cardassians. Sisko retaliates by firing trilithium resin into the atmosphere of a colony, making it uninhabitable to humans for 50 years. He gives an evacuation warning and threatens to continue against other colonies until Eddington surrenders.

I know the defense. Eddington started it, Sisko forces the crisis to end, and the displaced populations can exchange planets. I understand the episode's logic, but describe the action without saying Sisko's name first. A captain poisons an inhabited planet's atmosphere to force a fugitive to surrender. Are we still comfortable leaving him in command while we review that?

The issue isn't whether Sisko is an effective captain overall. He is. The issue is whether we excuse an extraordinary abuse of power because the person doing it is somebody we like, and the personal element makes it harder to defend. Eddington has humiliated him, escaped him and challenged his identity as a Starfleet officer. So Sisko decides to become the villain in Eddington's story, and an entire colony gets dragged into that. At the very least, you take him off the bridge immediately and conduct a review. You cannot treat altering a planet's habitability like an aggressive parking maneuver because the target finally gave himself up.

That's why he's number one. Ransom and Leyton are easy to condemn. Sisko makes us confront where our own loyalty starts doing the explaining for us. That's the fun, and sometimes uncomfortable, part of this list. Great characters can make terrible decisions, and great episodes can show conduct that could end somebody's career. I don't need every Starfleet officer to be perfect, but I do need somebody in that organization to occasionally remember that a uniform doesn't equal immunity.

So who would you have fired first, and who did I miss?