Star Trek: Every Character With Their Own Signature Maneuver
These Star Trek characters were so skilled in combat, they were honored with their own signature maneuvers. The season finale of Star Trek: Picard featured a throwback to a tactic used by Picard in his pre-Enterprise days whilst commanding the USS Stargazer. Faced down by an impressive Romulan fleet, the bald wonder managed to bluff an advantage by using his famed tactic, much to the excitement of the onlooking Agnes Jurati. Jean-Luc himself might not be too enamored with having his own maneuver, but the former admiral is far from the only character in Star Trek's canon to become associated with a certain military stratagem.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view. Start nowAs with many Star Trek traditions, signature maneuvers begin with the legendary Captain James T. Kirk, (star)dating back to his first year of Enterprise command. In "The Corbomite Maneuver," the Enterprise is charting an unexplored region of space and finds itself pursued by a space buoy emitting deadly radiation. Kirk orders the buoy's destruction, but another vessel quickly appears, dwarfing the Enterprise and refusing to let Kirk's ship go. The commander of this ship, Balok, is quite keen to destroy the Federation vessel as punishment for blowing up his buoy and trespassing in their space but, generously, he gives Kirk & co. ten minutes to prepare for certain death. During this understandably tense period, Kirk is inspired to try and bluff Balok, informing him that all Starfleet vessels carry a destructive substance called corbomite in their hulls - if a ship attacks the Enterprise, the destructive energy will be reversed and aimed back at its source.
Kirk’s bluff works and all ends well, with Balok and the Enterprise burying the hatchet over a glass of Tranya. Not to let a successful maneuver go to waste, Kirk would use a slight variation on the Corbomite Maneuver in "The Deadly Years." In order to prevent his ship's destruction at the hands of some angry Romulans, a recently de-aged Kirk, bluffed them with a false message to Starfleet stating that the "corbomite device" was going to be activated, destroying all matter within 200,000 kilometres and rendering the area a dead zone for 4 years. No questions asked, the Romulans ran away. The Corbomite Maneuver would become synonymous with Kirk - a solid bluff, but heavily reliant on poker faced delivery and a gullible enemy.
The Picard Maneuver was first explained in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Battle," which featured intergalactic mischief-makers, the Ferengi. During the episode, flashbacks reveal that Picard's Stargazer was once attacked by a Ferengi vessel and in a last-ditch attempt to save the ship, Picard ordered a jump to high warp directly towards the attacking vessel. This created the illusion of the Stargazer being in two places at once. The Ferengi focused on the wrong ship and were destroyed, the crew were saved and the Picard Maneuver later appeared in Starfleet textbooks. As well as an accomplished way of fooling an opponent, the Picard Maneuver also became synonymous with the character for a very different reason - Patrick Stewart’s habit of tugging down his tunic in The Next Generation. The tunic-tugging is not very useful as a military tactic.
Like Picard, William T. Riker (now a Captain at last) also has two meanings to his Riker Maneuver and, again, only one is useful in battle. The term is really only an informal one, bestowed upon Riker by Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: Insurrection. Here, the Enterprise is taking on two enemy vessels and Riker has the idea to collect up unstable gases from the surrounding area of space. The smog is expelled towards the enemy who stupidly ignite the noxious fumes, destroying one ship and disabling another. As an added point of intrigue, in order to perform precision maneuvering of the Enterprise in this sequence, Riker uses a joystick.
Riker also had two self-named maneuvers from "The Best of Both Worlds Part II" - Riker Alpha and Riker Beta. These were fairly successful in keeping Locutus on his toes and resulted in the crew being able to retrieve the assimilated Picard from a Borg cube. The other meaning of "The Riker Maneuver" in Star Trek relates to the unusual way in which the character frequently sat down, by the lifting of one leg over a chair and straddling it.
Source: screenrant.com