Star Trek Captains Log – Jellico: The Hard Weight Of Meritocracy

Captain Jellico will be remembered as kind-of-a-jerk for that episode in which he took command of the Enterprise on Picard’s absence. He did some good things: he carried his mission, he put Riker on his place, Data and him got along in their strict following of protocol. But he also represented an authority approach to Starfleet, one that diverged far from utopian visions and was rigid, conservative, sexist (looking down at Troy’s choice of clothes – let’s leave aside the clothes weren’t really the most comfortable for the actress cause of other sexist decisions made by the producers -), and getting extremely defensive of any enjoyable activity in what he saw as a “to-protocol” job.

Some say he made some points. Starfleet is an organization that runs on protocol, but he also made us see some points from the outside. The authoritarian and workplace approach sits weird with many of us viewers, mostly cause we were reminded Starfleet is a job, and even in a future supposedly without capitalism, it followed work shifts, routines, tiredness, and all the awful things we don’t want to see in a TV job. In this case, the comic makes a point of that perfectly, from the eyes of a First Officer who conforms to these standards, and also showing us how standards of protocol, code, and adjustment to Starfleet are actually another meritocratic way of measuring people.

With a beautiful and with a very realist approach art (teased by a less effective cover), whose design reinforces the ideas exposed, showing the concern for their work on characters’ faces, the way they laugh and look down at their workmates, and their “whoever gets to the goal” approach to Starfleet. And with some beautiful drawings of spaceships, explosions, battles and just showing space in a very Trekky way, the art drives us to the bittersweet end. One that gets to reinforce that meritocratic idea in our characters, while at the same time making us question further: it makes us think of Jellico not only as a person but as ideas we thought wasn’t on our future utopia: burnout, exhaustion, dismissals, low tolerance to failure. This is not exactly an escapist comic, even if it’s a good Star Trek one in the way that, like series like Picard or Deep Space Nine, makes us question what really is Starfleet and if it’s that perfect. Just in a more mundane way.