Ranking Every Captain In The 'Star Trek' Universe

TV & Film

Dec 11

Ranking Star Trek captains is an age-old tradition. For the longest time the question was always framed as Kirk or Picard (it’s neither). If people take a closer look, though, most of the Star Trek captains are worthy. They almost all deserve serious consideration. I’ll be looking at things like degree of difficulty, the threats they faced, and how successful they were.

For the purposes of this article, I am only counting the main captains from the TV shows. We just don’t have enough information about all the one-off captains. Captain Solok appeared in one of the best DS9 episodes, but all we know about him is that he is Sisko’s nemesis, and he and his crew are better at baseball than the crew of DS9.

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That’s not enough to go on. We also see little bits of Spock, Sulu, and Riker as captains, but, again, we don’t see them enough to rank them. Although, I’d imagine they’d all be in the middle of this list. Let’s get started.

11: Captain Michael Burnham (Discovery)

Michael Burnham was one of those convicts that Lorca let onto his crew. She mutinied in the very first episode of Discovery. I thought about putting her at the bottom, but at least she was convinced the mutiny was for the greater good. It’s outrageous that a mutineer ever got a captaincy, let alone ending her career as an admiral.

10: Captain Dal (Prodigy)

Captain Dal might not be familiar to all Star Tek fans. He is from the cartoon Prodigy. He is this low on the list for a very simple reason.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s just a kid who stole a ship to escape a life of slavery. Dal wants to do a good job, but, as I said, he doesn’t have a clue about how to be a captain.

9: Captain Philippa Georgiou (Discovery)

I almost left Georgiou off this list altogether. She’s really a one-off. She dies at the end of the premiere of Discovery. However, she is talked about an awful lot, and everyone says how good a captain she was. I’m not sure if I buy it, though. Her most trusted crewmember did mutiny on her, after all.

8: Captain Carol Freeman (Lower Decks)

I really want to put Captain Freeman higher on this list. I like her, and her show, a lot. It’s a testament to those ahead of her, not a knock on her abilities. Keeping control of the Cerritos has to be a harder job than almost any other captain on this list.

If she can broker peace between the cubes and the spheres, she can pull off almost anything. She has an unusual captaining style, but it works.

7: Captain Saru (Discovery)

Basically Saru exudes competence. That puts him right in the middle of this list. There are two things keeping him down. First, he is only captain for a very short time. Second, he doesn’t know when to break the rules. All of the truly great captains have broken the prime directive on occasion. Saru plays it too safe.

6: Captain Christopher Pike (Strange New Worlds)

Pike has the distinction of being in three and a half Trek series. He was in the original pilot as the captain of the Enterprise before Kirk. He was also in the original series as a paraplegic who winds up on the planet from the original pilot where they can make him whole again.

Then, he was in Discovery for the whole second season. Finally, he got his own show, Strange New Worlds. He knows when to trust his crew, when to break the rules, and when to trust his gut. He has a sense of humor, but he balances it with seriousness. It’s a good combination.

5: Captain Jonathan Archer (Enterprise)

Pike is probably a better captain than Archer, but Archer gets points for degree of difficulty. He captained the first warp five ship. In other words, he was the first captain to really explore deep space. He had no rule book to follow. In fact, he created a lot of the rulebook himself.

4: Captain Jean Luc Picard (The Next Generation)

Two, three, and four are all incredibly close. We can flip their positions and still have a good list. The reason I put Picard fourth is he had it pretty easy. Yeah, he defeated the Borg a couple of times, but he was on the most advanced starship in the fleet, and it seems like his entire crew was made up of commanders.

3: Captain Katherine Janeway (Voyager)

Any way you look at it, Janeway had the greatest degree of difficulty of any of the captains on this list. She was all alone in the Delta Quadrant. Half her crew was made up of Maquis. There was no backup, no reinforcements.

Yet she got her crew home while upholding Starfleet’s mission. She negotiated a treaty with the Borg. And she knew when to break the rules, like when she murdered Tuvix.

2: Captain James T. Kirk (Star Trek)

Kirk is the most famous captain in Starfleet history. This ranking isn’t based on fame, though. He saved the Galaxy more than any other captain. Plus, he’s the template. He’s the one that all the other captains are measured against.

He also ran a finishing school for other captains like Spock and Sulu. And he’s the only captain to pass the Kobayashi Maru.

1: Captain Benjamin Sisko (Deep Space Nine)

A lot of people may be surprised at Sisko landing in the top spot. But he’s the only captain to punch Q in the face. He also led the fleet in the Dominion War. That was more of an existential threat to the Alpha Quadrant than the Borg ever were. He formed an alliance with the Klingons and Romulans. He managed a large civilian population and kept them safe throughout the war. And, finally, he was the emissary of the prophets. He juggled being an important religious figure on Bajor with his Starfleet duties. Sisko was the whole package.

Like I said at the beginning, almost all of these captains are excellent at their jobs. It’s just that some are a little more excellent than others. As new shows come out, it will be interesting to see where their captains land on the new list.

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