2022-11-03

Hated? Most hated?

You misspelled "Bakula".

While the upcoming season of Picard got most of the attention during Paramount’s Star Trek panel, the producers of Prodigy (Kevin and Dan Hageman) also appeared letting on that a Star Trek Enterprise captain would be returning. They revealed that actor Ronny Cox, who played Edward Jellico (a one-time Enterprise captain), would reprise his role as a recurring character in upcoming episodes of the first season, according to a report by Trek Movie. The animated children’s series returns to Paramount+ for the second half of its first season on October 27.
I'm reminded of Rich and Mike's discussion of Jellico on one of their TNG review videos where they pointed out the thing about Jellico wasn't that he turned out to be evil but that he just had a straight up command style that the crew wasn't accustomed to.

The character is certainly polarizing (61.8% thought he was a good guy when Trek BBS did a poll a few years back, though one notes that 61.8% is a higher margin than all but three U.S. Presidential races and none in coming up on 200 years), but "most hated" captain is really a stretch. I joked about Bakula above, but other "hated" captains in Trek lore include Lorca from Star Trek: Discovery and Harriman from Star Trek Generations.

It's worth noting, as I have on many occasions before, that my assumption (admittedly a lone voice in fandom) is that Harriman wasn't the full-time future commanding officer of the Enterprise-B, but rather the guy who handled the sea trials. His job wasn't to be taking starships out to boldly go where no man has gone before but rather to just keep giving these things their shakedown cruises before handing them off to the full-time Captain. Had I been in charge of the production of that movie (and didn't feel like making any other changes), I would have made sure he was wearing Commander or even Lieutenant-Commander stripes to make it more clear. In the current U.S. Navy, the equivalent to what the Enterprise was doing was "sea trials" which do not typically feature any of the regular staffed crew.

Lorca is a bit of an edge case, but from Garth of Izar to Captain Maxwell to Captain Ransom there have been a few "bad" captains in the Trek universe. This isn't necessarily to be directly correlated with "hated" though. Gul Dukat was "hated" in the sense that in-universe he was a fairly unlikable guy, but in fandom circles he's beloved and with good reason. He did a good job of making you believe in him, which Ronnie Cox and Alan Ruck mostly accomplish while the Bakula and Issacs don't.