I’m thinking primarily of the Star Trek universe because it’s the one I’m most familiar with. Which actors would you have liked to see spend some time in the big chair?
I’ve mentioned before that I wish we had seen more of Sulu as captain. In STVI: The Undiscovered Country, when Excelsior was rushing toward Khitomer and the helmsman warns that the ship will fly apart, Sulu simply says, “Fly her apart, then.” It’s a wonderful line reading that communicates very succinctly Sulu’s dedication to the job, and in a way also suggests that he is respected enough by his crew that, once he tells them to throw caution to the wind, they’ll do it.
For some reason, I’ve always thought that Hector Elizondo would make for a good captain. He’s got something of a paternal manner about him that would engender devotion from a crew, but there’s real steel underneath. I think his take on a captain would be the guy that you were afraid to disappoint. If he yelled at you it wouldn’t be so bad, but if he quietly told you he was disappointed, you’d be crushed.
I know there are others I’m forgetting at the moment; I’ll try to jump back in when I think of them. Who are your candidates? Who deserved a shot at the conn of one of the Federation’s ships?
One episode of *Voyager and the film The Undiscovered Country referenced Tuvok’s early career under Captain Sulu. Many years later, I thought, “Wait, did everyone achieve the rank of Captain?”, 'cause I would have like to see more episodes of Captain Sulu, or Captain Checkov, or even Captain McCoy, Captain Uhura, Captain Scott … they must have be real hardasses, and we know their back-story, so it would have been perfectly justifiable … they’d say “Why in my day we used to …” and you go, “Oh yeah, I remember that episode.”
Yes, I know, Tuvok isn’t a Vulcan in the movie, but it’s still Tim Russ, so patayto - patahto.
Of that crowd, I think Chekov is the only one who might have been headed toward the captain’s chair, but I’m not so sure about that. Scotty was too interested in engineering; he acheived the rank of captain, but I can’t imagine him happy in the command chair (unless he was commanding a shipyard or something like that). McCoy never showed any interest in command; again I could see him heading up a medical facility somewhere, maybe even all of Starfleet Medical. Same for Uhura - I think she’d be perfectly happy teaching at the Academy.
Chekov’s a bit of a mystery. Besides getting beat up a lot in the movies, I’m not really sure what his niche or his ambition was. I suppose since he always wore the gold shirt he could wind up in command some day, but I don’t know that he really had the drive or the stomach for it. He was Exec on Grissom, but after the events of Wrath of Khan he went right back to just a sort of utility player.
Line officer vs. staff officer. (Though technically Spock and Scotty bridge the gap – more later on this). Of the TOS crew, Kirk was in command of the Enterprise, Spock his Executive Officer (second in command), Sulu an experienced line-officer crewman, and Chekov (no KH in Walter Koenig’s character’s name, unlike the Russian author) a new trainee. McCoy is senior medical officer on board, not a line officer and not eligible to command. Uhura is senior communications officer (not just "telephone operator; Nichelle Nichols made it quite clear that Uhura had advanced training in the care and feeding of subspace communications networks, etc.), and ditto for her. They’re high-ranking specialists. Each has Captain-rank (possibly Rear Admiral-rank) superiors back at Starfleet HQ to whom they report as regards their specialty. Likewise Scotty is chief engineer and Spock science officer. But these two specialties either are filled by line officers (likely in Spock’s case) or, more probably for Scotty, have line officer training as a part of their specialty so that they can assume command if and when the Captain and his Exec are both on an away party. In any case. Spock seems temperamentally to prefer being Science Officer under Kirk over having his own command. Scotty’s next promotion would be to Fleet Engineer for a complete task force of multiple ships. Sulu, on the other hand, is being groomed by Kirk for command, which he eventually gets in the feature-length movies. Chekov will presumably become chief helmsman in Sulu’s place (or transferred to another ship as helmsman) and eventually get his own command as well. Remember too that we see the Alpha crew, the ones Kirk wants in place when facing a new problem (or dealing with a recurrence of an old one); presumably there are Beta and Gamma crews working the other shifts so the lead characters get time to eat, sleep, etc.
I’m thinking of Harry and the Kobiashi Maru…“ah, ah, ah! If you fire on my ship, I’ll just have to beam these innocent little tribbles over to safety…Now, just beam those pesky Kobiashi survivors over, and we’ll be on our way…”
Scott is promoted to Captain of Engineering of the USS Excelsior in ST:III, and definitely has had command training, as he states in the novel Kobayashi Maru (not necessarily canon, but definitely explains why Scott was [usually] third in command).
Anybody who made a good captain in today’s Navy. Imagine Scott Glenn (who did a sub captain in Red October or Ed Harris (who lead a team aboard the undersea base in The Abyss) – no-nonsense tough-guy achievers.