10 of the Fastest Promotions in Geekdom Power Grid By The Mary Sue StaffOct 4th, 2011, 12:32 pm You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations. In the meantime, enjoy the html version below. I guess. If that's your thing. Allow Us To Explain It's hard to nail down a working definition of badass. Not only does the term suffer from a certain amount of over use, it's kind of nebulous. Not everybody who is awesome is also badass. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that badass is when you do great things with very little resources or perceived resources, and in that case there isn't a lot more squarely badass than unexpectedly receiving a huge promotion and then absolutely rocking the job. To that end, we present this list of folks who were never intended to rise as high as they did, or, at least, not that quickly. Some of them are battlefield promotions because everybody else was stone cold dead at the time. Some of them were promoted because of a sudden and unexpected increase in their utility to the forces that controlled their promotion. Some of them simply weren't ready for the responsibility. We tried to stay away from folks who were magically destined from the start to be specific roles (with one notable exception), and from people who lucked into power but were not part of a hierarchical structure where promotion to ranks was an issue. Runners up would include folks like Wart (from The Sword in the Stone), Neo, and almost everybody else who was ever referred to as "the chosen one." Laura Roslin INADVERTENT BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SPOILERS, because every time we talk about the series, it’s a spoiler. Laura Roslin was actually one of the inspirations behind this Grid, and it’s easy to see why; she’s a classic example of getting a position you didn’t necessarily want and never thought you would get because an unforeseen catastrophe killed off everyone in line before you. (Succession by assassination or genocide is a big theme here.) The armada of highly evolved cybernetic beings the Twelve Colonies have been at war with, who have been absent these past 40 years? Surprise! They’ve come back and killed off billions...including everyone in the Colonial government who ranked before the Secretary of Education. And that is... you. Congratulations, you’re now responsible for the fleeing, fledgling remains of the human race. Now that’s a promotion no one wants. Given one of the biggest stockpiles of lemons we can think of, Roslin makes some decent space-lemonade. It may be hard to forget, given all the crap that rained down throughout the series, but here was a mostly-unprepared low Cabinet member who was suddenly handed enormous responsibility, and some hard choices, very fast. In the miniseries alone, Roslin and Commander Adama have to choose to leave behind a score of ships packed with people, nearly half of what the infamous Fleet ends up being, because they don’t have sub-light drives. It’s not the last heart-breaking choice Roslin makes in the series, all to protect the greater good. Did we mention that, the day of the attack on the Colonies, Roslin learns she has a life-threatening cancer diagnosis? A smaller plot point that fans out later, to be sure, but the weight of such information cannot be discounted when considering Roslin’s character. Here is a steely, strong, and absolutely flawed character (a human being, if you will), who is determined to persist, no matter what. She’s not always right. She’s not always sure. But she transforms into a leader who will come after you down to her eyeteeth if it means humanity survives to fly another day. Just look at the way she watches that dry-erase board count of every living soul, and how her face lights up when she, just once, gets to add a number instead of subtracting one. She may not have asked to be a President, or a prophet (it’s hard to explain, just...watch the series), but she does her best to stand against the crapstorm flying at her, and that deserves some recognition. Aang I know what you're saying: Hey! Aang was destined to be the Avatar. You can hardly call that kind of thing fast. Our point here is not only that the promotion seemed fast to Aang, but that his perception of its swiftness actually created the plot of the entire series. See, Avatars are not normally told they are the Avatar until they turn sixteen, when they're old enough to come to terms with the immense responsibility, but still young enough assimilate it and be trained in their non-native bending disciplines before they reach adulthood. Aang was told when he was about twelve that he was the famed Avatar, and that he would have to begin training immediately if he was to evade the clutches of the militaristic Fire Nation, rumored to invade the Air temples any day now. Not only would it be his job to stop a war, subdue a nation, bring balance to the world, and be the link between reality and the Spirit World; Aang was to be immediately to be separated from Monk Gyatso, the only family he'd ever really known. And so Aang ran away. The very night after he was told that he was the fabled Avatar, he rode out into a terrible storm. Probably, if not for the storm, Aang would have eventually been found by other airbenders and Gyatso, and counseled back into his rightful role. Perhaps, given his strong reaction to their imminent separation, the other monks would have allowed Gyatso to continue his training, despite a teaching style they saw as being dangerously relaxed, given the gravity of Aang's destiny. But there was a storm. And Aang got lost. The mortal danger activated his Avatar State, and he and his faithful bison Appa became trapped in polar ice, preserved, un-aging, for a century. In his absence, the Fire Nation wiped out the Air Nomads, captured and killed virtually every Waterbender on the south pole, and conquered a significant portion of the Earth Kingdom. Without this severe change of setting, we wouldn't have the Avatar: The Last Airbender that we know today. Aang might even have actually been killed during the Firebender assault on the Air Nomads, not just presumed to have been killed, what with the Fire Nation empowered by Sozin's comet. The shock of Aang's promotion, even if predestined, is the genesis of the entire series. Captain Kirk (in Star Trek 2009) Talk about assuming the position. Look, we’re all for plot expediency. Given the source material of J.J. Abrams’ surprisingly decent 2009 Star Trek AU...I mean, reboot, it’s a given that the young characters we see are all going to take up their usual spots at the consoles sooner or later. We viewers - Trekkies and non - wouldn’t have it any other way. However, what seems like forgone audience conclusion rapidly turns into farce, as every single main character gets promoted to their classic rank in the space of a few hours in Trek time, and about 15 minutes of screentime. The most stunning is James Kirk’s turnaround from not officially being allowed onto the Enterprise in the first place, to his startling promotion to First Officer by a rapidly exiting acting Captain Pike, and, finally, his assuming command after ousting an emotionally compromised Spock. Uhura, meanwhile, relieves a guy who can’t tell the difference between Romulan and Vulcan language, a talent we assume should have been a requirement for a Starfleet communications officer in the first place. Bones makes Chief Medical Officer when the guy outranking him bites it in a classic deck breach during the ship’s first bit of action, while Scotty is “discovered” by Kirk during his involuntary stay on icy Delta Vega, in what is perhaps the briefest exile in the history of science fiction, and seems to get his job simply by showing up and being more competent than everyone else. Sulu is a last-minute replacement for a helmsman who’s contracted lungworm, while seventeen-year-old prodigy Chekhov actually leaps from his ensign post at one point and runs through the ship to do someone else’s job better than them. All of the level-ups are certainly presented in a coincidental, and, dare we say it, logical form. But the sheer amount of this sort of thing happening in such a short space begs questions about Starfleet emergency procedure. Though they’re galactic peacekeepers with a Prime Directive, they do operate as a pseudo-military organization, with all the rank, rules, and protocol that implies. Is recruitment really leaving Starfleet that shortstaffed? Surely this amount of change-up, even in a total planet-consuming crisis, is enough to make an Internal Affairs officer curious. It doesn’t seem the case, though, as everyone retains the positions they gained suddenly once the danger is well and past. Having proven themselves just the once in a series of highly unlikely events, not a single objection is raised against this very young and widely inexperienced crew helming a brand-new (if slightly battered) starship. Perhaps, just like us, Starfleet is willing to suspend disbelief on account of these guys being, you know, protagonists. Captain America/Steve Rogers (In The First Avenger) Steve Rogers, when he finally does get to enlist in the Army, is a PFC -- Private First Class. A grunt. NBD, as the kids would say today. Then, he goes through the transformative process that turns him into...well, still a PFC, but this time, a buffer, taller, stronger one with superhuman powers. Does he have better abilities to fight bad guys? Definitely. In fact, right out of the gate, he's chasing Dr. Erskine's assassin through the streets of New York. (Of course, that guy kills himself, but he had to run like heck first.) But now that Erskine is dead, Steve isn't the first in an army... he's invaluable evidence of Erskine's apparently unrecoverable formula. Too valuable to be a soldier on the front lines, and so the Army still does not promote PFC Rogers, instead making him join the USO to entertain the troops and sell war bonds using the name Captain America. But he's still technically a private. When he hears that his best friend might be dead, PFC Rogers takes it upon himself to rescue a bunch of prisoners of war, pretty much by himself. And in costume as Captain America. This kind of thing would get a PFC into some kind of trouble -- except that it totally worked, and hundreds of POWs were freed. And now suddenly people are calling him "Captain" like he's an actual Captain? Okay, the saving of POWs is nothing to sneeze at, for sure. But Peggy Carter lampshades this just before he jets off to be heroic by mentioning that she could just order him not to, she outranks him. Steve quips: No you don't. I'm a captain! But is it okay that Captain America is an actual Captain in the Army because of a stage name? Probably, at some point, someone pointed out that saying an army rank over and over does not necessarily make it so. Again, we are not knocking Cap's rescue missions or undermining his obvious victories. He's freaking awesome, we love Cap. How could you say no to this face. Margaret Valentine Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan's 2002 epic, is set in a world where every male mammal on the planet has, recently and simultaneously, died a bloody death of unknown cause. Except, that is, for Yorick Brown and his helper-monkey-in-training Ampersand. And like any good disaster movie, someone that you never expected to be president is president. The old joke that there's only a black president in disaster movies meets its sister trope here: if the disaster has already happened, one way we know it's really bad is that the line of succession has fallen so far that a woman is president. On a show like Battlestar Galactica, this kind of female president allows writers to give a female character one of the most powerful positions in government, while presenting a setting with ideas about gender roles that are still somewhat aligned with our own (though BSG was still a very gender progressive show). In Y: The Last Man it's more of a necessity of the setting, though Vaughan still manages to wring some interesting stuff out of it, for example, adherence to realism. The structure of gender divides across society in Y: The Last Man were made as true to the time as possible (barring names). Israel and Australia, for example, are among the few countries who still have functioning armed forces. Commercial airplane pilots and tractor-trailer drivers are few and far between. In 2002, in the real world of the Bush cabinet, the first three women in the line of Presidential Succession were the Secretaries of Agriculture, Labor and the Interior. The same was true for Y: the Last Man. Since every man in the line of succession was dead, it fell first to the Secretary of the Interior, who was killed in a plane crash (both pilots were male) and Margaret Valentine, the Secretary of Agriculture. Nevertheless, Valentine succeeds in gaining reelection in 2004, though she credits it to being the only woman alive who is still actually famous. Commissioner Gordon I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t like James Gordon. I’d wager a guess that most of the world knows him as Commissioner Gordon thanks to his appearances not just in DC Comics but the 1960s Batman television show but the several films and animated series and features that followed. But we're not here to talk about comic James Gordon, cartoon James Gordon, or TV show James Gordon. We're here to talk about Nolanverse James Gordon (who we would say probably has the worst time of all the Gordons... except for comic James Gordon going through an awful divorce, the Joker paralyzing his daughter and murdering his second wife, getting shot five times in the back, and then his son turning out to be a serial killer. Yeaaaah...). So, Nolanverse James Gordon. Already the straightest cop in a superlatively corrupt police force (at least he's not getting hazed with a baseball bat for it, like comic Gordon), he finds himself promoted to Captain after performing well during the events of Batman Begins. Presumably this is a universe where cops are rewarded for driving tanks, blowing up mass transit systems, and getting in touch with mysterious vigilantes... Actually, on second thought it's probably for his exemplary bravery and coolness under fire during the destruction of Arkham Asylum and the flooding of the Narrows with weaponized hallucinogen. Or... maybe because he, Rachel Dawes, and Batman were the only people in the city who had been inoculated against the chemical, but his superiors didn't need to know that, or where he got the inoculation from. But Lieutenant to Captain is only a jump of one rank. Lets talk about Captain to Commissioner, which bypasses a couple deputy positions, commander, and major. Gordon gets promoted for certainly the most terrifying of reasons: everybody else is dead. The Commissioner is dead. A prominent Judge is dead. Shortly after Gordon is promoted for capturing their killer, the killer (the Joker) murders one and a half of the city's top district attorneys, from his cell and then escapes. Talk about a job nobody wants, but ultimately Gordon remains a man of honor, who knows exactly what's best for Gotham City, which isn't necessarily the truth. Habib Ben Hassan Technically, every Doctor (of the now defunct Wildstorm continuity, not any of the other guys who are just "The Doctor") has his promotion thrust upon him unexpectedly. Each Doctor is actually the planet Earth's shaman, an unbroken line of men reaching back to prehistory and apparently containing such historical figures as Einstein, Rasputin and Jesus. Each one inherits the collective knowledge of all the shamans that came before him and the ability to mold reality to his will. Jeroen Thornedike, the first Doctor to win acclaim as a member of the Authority, Wildstorm's Justice League, used his abilities to, among other things, turn opponents into trees, to turn their bones into Chanel No. 5, and to teleport an ally into a dimension where all kinetic energy is immediately converted to music so that he wouldn't smash into an indestructible wall. But Jeroen was eventually killed, and when the powers of the Doctor found a new host, he was in a situation where he was possibly least capable of rationally assimilating the data dump of all every shaman's memories. Habib ben Hassan, a young man and Palestinian native, was just about to blow himself up in the middle of a crowded Israeli checkpoint when Jeroen died and left him a serious inheritance. Moved to tears by his sudden understanding, Habib fell to his knees, exposing the explosive strapped around his chest. But as soldiers began to fire, he instinctively turned their bullets into purple smoke and fled... by flying. Two days later, when was captured by the same folks who'd murdered Jeroen in the first place, he'd almost crafted a lasting peace in the Middle East. Jake Sully Not only does Jake Sully get promoted in human form, he gets a pretty steep promotion in his Avatar form as well. And both times, he had no business being there in the first place. First, Sully was your basic military veteran whose service had been cut short by injury -- he was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. He also happened to have an identical twin who was a genius... and murdered. So, he's tragic, for sure, but still in no way qualified to do what his Ph.D. brother was going to do -- infiltrate an alien race on a faraway planet, become one with them, learn their ways, and make it easier for the other Earthlings to take over the planet after ruining their own. Sully is just around to take orders. However, there are still these xeno-anthropologists with this Na'vi avatar all set up to only interface with his brother's DNA, so suddenly Sully is looking like a pretty decent-slash-only possible option to take his brother's place and navigate this avatar around Pandora. Because, come on, they have the same identical genetic makeup, so maybe there's a little genius hiding in that jarhead brain of his after all! So keep that in mind: If you have an identical twin, and they are a genius, people will assume that you are also a genius. Anyway, Sully is actually not that bad of a choice to take over for his brother because of the whole "moral objection to depleting a peaceful planet of all of its lush resources and spiritual significance to an entire alien race of organic, living beings" thing. He's just taking orders. But as we all know, Sully does learn to appreciate the Na'vi and even ends up in love with one of them and wants to join them. And they totally let him!...Wait, what? The Na'vi knew that there were "sky people" taking the form of their race and learning about them for years -- because Dr. Grace Augustine was doing this waaaaaaay before Jake Sully was around. But did they induct her into the tribe? No, they did not! That's the weirdest thing ever -- a female of the invading race, comes into their community, opens up schools to teach them all English, nurtures the children, outwardly cares for the Na'vi and their culture and planet -- but no promotion?? What does a girl have to do to get a promotion around Pandora? Tame a Toruk? Yeah, probably. And if anyone could have done that, if given the chance, it was Dr. Grace Effing Augustine. Sully did okay though, what with saving Pandora and the Na'vi race, leading the global war against those idiot Earthlings. He also couldn't have gotten the second, more important promotion if not for the first completely undeserved one. So we'll let this one slide. And then try to search the Earth for a possible genius identical twin that we can kill. Ellen Ripley After 57 years of stasis and a not-so-sunny report on her experience on the good ship Nostromo, Ellen Ripley is stripped of her title and her space flight license, as well as her good standing with the colony of the planet that brought us those cuddly, acid-filled aliens, LV-426. But not to fear! Her license, flight status, and LV-426 contract are returned pretty quickly -- on the condition that she go hang out with the face-gnarling, chest-busting aliens again. Naturally, she says, "No thanks, I'll just take my cat and go home." But rather than continue having nightmares, she decides instead to face her fears, thinking that will make them go away (really?), and she soon hops aboard the dropship with a bunch of go-getter marines. This is why it's hard to sometimes sell a sequel -- Ripley agreed to go back and possibly face more battles with the aliens on the same faraway planet where they were picked up the first time? In the name of...a consultancy? That's not to say that this lady can't handle herself, because boy howdy, can she handle herself. When it's Ripley vs. Aliens, Ripley is going to win. And also save terrified, orphaned little girls. And maybe the marines realized that. Or maybe the corporation that sent them all to that godforsaken planet didn't care if they came back alive either way, so Paul Reiser -- Paul Reiser! -- as the corporate weasel (see also: Avatar) just said, "Look, okay, here's your promotion, your fancy contract, and great -- you go face your fears, et cetera, et cetera, and we'll, uh, see you all on the other side. Yup. Bring back space rocks for me!...'K bye." In the end, we know how much bitchy alien ass Ripley kicked and was able to save at least some of the people who came with her. (Well, a couple of people. But not Bill Paxton.) So we're glad she had that reinstatement waved in front of her so she had an excuse to prove how well she can punch an alien in the face while wearing a robot suit, after incinerating every alien egg pod in sight. Anakin Skywalker Here's the premature promotion so quick it brought a mighty republic down with it. In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Anakin Skywalker, simply a Jedi Knight who already had several years less training then his peers due to entering the order late in life, is promoted to a seat on the Jedi Council by someone who never should have been allowed the power to do so: Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, in secret a Sith Lord. Palpatine's ultimate goal was to keep the young Skywalker near him frequently, the better to pour the seeds of dissent and mistrust of the Jedi into him. It's hard to say how much he knew about how effective the promotion alone was. For Anakin was only allowed a seat on the council, he was not, as was customary, promoted to the rank of Jedi Master, because the mandate for his promotion had come from outside the order. In addition, while Palpatine's words were full of sympathy for his problems no matter their nature, Anakin was struggling mightily against many of the strict mandates of the life of a Jedi, and the perceived insult of denying him the rank of master combined with a request from the council to betray Palpatine's trust should he ever see the Chancellor doing anything Sith-y further alienated him from the Light side of the Force. Anakin's personal commitment to reciprocal loyalty and his hot temper clashed with every person in his life, including his teacher Obi-Wan Kenobi and even his wife, until he wound up attempting to kill both of them. But by the time that came around, Anakin had already been instrumental in Palpatine's ascension from Chancellor of a Republic to living Emperor of a decidedly less democratic galactic government, which gave him another fast promotion that in turn, allowed him to kindly facilitate the fast promotion of others. Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com Filed Under: AliensAvatarAvatar: The Last AirbenderBatman BeginsBattlestar GalacticaCaptain America: The First AvengerStar Trek (franchise)Star Wars (franchise)The AuthorityThe Dark KnightY: The Last Man Follow The Mary Sue: Previous PostNext Post Previous PostNext Post
