Star Trek and people making poor decisions once they become admirals. Name a more iconic duo. Sure you get your occasional Kirks who save the world during their post-promotion screwup, but for most admirals it seems like they turn into mustache-twirling villains the moment they get that extra pip.

Except for Admiral Satie in The Drumhead, who presents a more nuanced take on the badmiral while at the same time presenting a case study of the dangers of an entrenched bureaucracy convinced they’re doing the right thing when it’s clear to anyone observing that, to quote the famous late 20th century art historian Janosz Poha, everything they’re doing is bad.

Consider Satie at the beginning. There’s been an accident on the Enterprise-D. Rear Admiral Norah Satie Ret., a noted investigator famous for rooting out the bug conspiracy even though we never heard of her at the time and it feels like that conspiracy was rooted out at the point of a phaser Riker and Picard were shooting at a silly puppet.

She’s convinced there’s a conspiracy from the beginning. She’s so convinced her actions are correct that she dismisses anything that proves her wrong. Circumstantial evidence that she’s correct is blown up while anything indicating that the accident was just an accident is dismissed out of hand.
This quickly turns into a situation of doubling down in the face of all evidence against her. They find a possible saboteur who is cleared, but Satie is so convinced her actions are in the right that she continues on her path of self-destruction.

It’s becoming clear to everyone around her on the Enterprise crew that something is wrong, but that it isn’t sabotage. It’s a career bureaucrat so convinced of her rightness that she doesn’t care who or what she destroys to make the world conform to her belief in that rightness.

Even in the face of obvious evidence from LaForge that it wasn’t sabotage but rather an accident she still refuses to see reason and admit that maybe she was wrong.

Even more interesting are the reactions from the crew. In your typical badmiral story the Five Pip Mafia operates in the shadows until the moment they start twirling that aforementioned mustache and then everyone agrees they’re bad.

You don’t get that with Satie. She’s operating out in the open the entire time proving that old adage about the banality of evil. She thinks she’s right. You have some people on the crew who are obviously uncomfortable with what she’s doing, but they don’t say anything right away because she has the authority of her rank and her reputation.

We even have the example of Worf acting as a collaborator. It’s clear what she’s doing is wrong, but he willingly goes along with it in part to prove his own loyalty after its called into question. He’s so interested in demonstrating that loyalty that he doesn’t stop to think about the wrongness of his actions until it’s almost too late.

Eventually, of course, Picard does speak up, and at first it seems like his concerns are roundly dismissed. It seems like the establishment is against his dissenting voice calling out the wrongness of what is going on. He’s taken to task for speaking out against an entrenched bureaucrat so convinced of the rightness of her actions that she won’t listen to reason. Sure he eventually makes everything better with a stirring Picard speech, but we all know that’s not how things always work in the real world.

And this is where I think Admiral Satie rises other badmirals we’ve seen on Star Trek before and since. She’s insidious because she’s so real. I’m sure all of us have encountered someone like her in our school, work, or daily lives. Someone so convinced of the rightness of what they’re doing despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Someone who is so entrenched in a bureaucracy and high on their own supply that they refuse to listen to reason and do incalculable damage as a result.

That’s why Admiral Satie is the best of the Badmirals and why The Drumhead is still remembered to this day as one of the better TNG episodes. Picard and crew get a happy ending, but out in the real world we must be eternally vigilant to prevent the Saties of the world from doing terrible things while wrapping their actions in the cloak of the greater good.