Star Trek: 10 Things You Need To Know About The Lost Era
9. The Harrying Of Harriman
John Harriman, the fresh-but-scared-faced new Captain of the Enterprise, was only really there to facilitate the presence of three legends (and the century-[ish]-staggered death of one of them) at the start of Star Trek: Generations. Forever stuck in his own Tuesday temporal loop, Harriman was the butt of the joke. Moreover, we've not heard so much as a comm call from Harriman in canon since!
On the Beta side of things, Harriman's thoroughly under-equipped first outing defined the beginning of the Lost Era. In the second book of the novel series, Serpents Among the Ruins, Harriman was given a lot more backstory and plenty of space to redeem himself. As the novel's writer David R. George put it in Star Trek: Voyages of Imagination,
He [Harriman] was introduced in the film Generations as something less than the cool, capable captain we saw in Kirk. The question I felt I therefore had to answer was how such a man could have risen to a starship captaincy. Did he deserve it? Would he become a good captain?
The answer is a resounding yes. Far from the echo of the Original voice, the harassed, the put-down, and the stooge, Harriman, in Serpents Among the Ruins, proves himself to be a fine captain (later, admiral) and a brilliant tactician. As the man behind the Tomed Incident of 2311, Harriman went on to do some harrying of his own, but only to prevent a war that was already on the horizon…