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Seriesdate: 4.09
Final Mission
(you wish)
Hey guys, I think Gurney Halleck's hand-crafting a thumper!
Oh, if only that were this episode's plot. Forty minutes of Stewart braiding chicken wire would've counted a blessing compared to the sad reality.
The B plot involves the Enterprise tractoring a barge full of radioactive sludge through an asteroid field to throw it into the sun... which makes absolutely no sense from any angle:
- if it orbited close enough to an inhabited planet to start giving people radiation poisoning in a single day, you should probably worry more about half the population getting cancer
- "asteroid fields" are not gravel driveways (you could shoot whole planets through our asteroid belt all day long without directly hitting anything; they're a hundred Earths' distance apart!) and if Robert Heinlein could at least nod to that idea in Space Family Stone in 1952, a bunch of scriptwriter hacks in the nineties have no excuse
- you don't really have to work that hard at aiming anything into a star because... fuck it, just open an encyclopedia to the word "gravity" - horseshoes, hand grenades and decaying orbits would certainly apply
Yet still, still(!) if that misconceived public service announcement about nuclear waste were the main story here I would still find it preferable to the A-plot. Wesley's finally leaving the ship for Starfleet Academy... not that viewers cared where he went aside from "away" and this falsely advertised final mission demonstrates exactly why. Technically there's a plot here about him and Picard getting stranded on a desert planet by an incompetent drunken impulsive shuttle pilot (to provide our boy wonder with an easily despicable antagonist) and that pilot getting killed and Picard wounded by an energy swirling glowing whooshing manifestation of speed lines protecting the only source of water inside a cave. None of it really matters because the whole episode was built around a single nauseating scene of Wesley comforting a wounded Picard, overshooting their already incongruous paternal-filial relationship into... something else:
Wesley: Sir, in the past three years [dramatic pause] I've lived more [dramatic pause] than most people do in a lifetime. I think I'm very lucky [dramatic pause] no matter what happens. How many people get to serve [dramatic pause] with Jean-Luc Picard? [exhales] Sir [dramatic pause] you don't know this. No one knows this [dramatic pause] 'cause I never told anyone. All of the things I've worked for [dramatic pause] [exhales] school, my science projects [dramatic pause] getting into the Academy [dramatic pause] [exhales] I've done it all because I want you to be proud of me. [dramatic musical pause] If there is one thing [dramatic pause] that I've learned from you, it's that you don't quit. And I'm not going to quit now. I've seen you think yourself out of worse situations than this, and I'm gonna think us out of this. [dramatic pause] You're not gonna die. I'm not going to let you die. [dramatic pause] I'll get to the water [exhales][exhales] and I'll keep you alive [dramatic pause] until they find us. I promise.
Four minutes (about two of which are basically dead air) of awkward hurt/comfort May-December homoeroticism, clasping hand in hand, clenched-teeth confessions of love and admiration, panting as though he's just run a marathon... I would sooner listen to John Galt blather on and on for sixty pages than this bullshit! There are cheesy B-grade war movies from the fifties about army buddies dying in each others' arms which still didn't drag things out this badly - and we know damn well the captain of the ship isn't going to die halfway through a season.
Having saved his captain from certain death, the promised child rides off into the sunset.
Gag.
But at least it's over, right? We finally got rid of Wesley!
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Wrong.
Seriesdate: 5.06
The Game
After a painfully overextended introduction of Riker chasing a woman in a negligee around a hotel room (who introduces him to a headset with a video game about slipping round things into holes) we proceed to ensign Robin Lefler (Ashley Judd) smiling way, waaay more than necessary at Riker, another scene of Deanna sensually caressing and inserting fudge, and if you thought that was ridiculous, in comes Wesley, on vacation from Starfleet. After several minutes of patting the promised child on the back by every member of the core cast, he treats us to some awkwardly parodied awkward teenage flirting with Lefler and then finally, fifteen minutes into the show, Beverly Crusher flips Data's "off" switch, indicating the actual plot has begun.
 |
| How did Dorn manage to look extra-smug here? |
The crew has been brainwashed by video game addiction! And only the promised child (and his latest star-crossed love interest) can save them! Try to act surprised!
From there things progress via a cheap B-movie tirade of Puppet Masters / Body Snatchers tropes: finding authority figures have been infected, uncovering a greater conspiracy, faking infection to avoid being captured, one of the two heroes finally succumbing, holding the hero still to attach the parasite, a last minute nonsensical deus ex machina-man solution... via strobe light... yeah, ok, that part's new. (Not that undoing the addiction would logically undo the brainwashing perpetrated while under that addiction anyway.) And of course the hero gets a big kiss after saving the day. The End... and good riddens to bad cheese.
This concept of biofeedback conditioning and brainwashing would've been a perfect opportunity to build continuity, claiming it to be an extension of Romulan tech from season 4's The Mind's Eye (brainwashing Geordi through his visor.) Instead we spend half the episode in overextended shots lovingly gazing upon Judd and Wheaton's magnificence and the other half in a paranoid after-school special about the evils of video games. It was 1991, quite early in the endless tirade of rabid lunatics trying to blame video games for everything from rabies to lunacy.
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Seriesdate: 5.19
The First Duty
Picard's opening narration: "I'm also looking forward to seeing Wesley Crusher again."
... heavens...why?
Anyway, problem: young Harry crashed his broom!
Which is to say, the promised child's Starfleet squadron caused a five-dogfighter pile-up on the Saturn freeway, smearing one of them across a few rings. Don't ask me why they're training in one-man fighter craft since you never saw any X-wing vs. TIE-fighter combat on this show before, but there you have it. Now the remaining four ca-dolts are being questioned, inconsistencies appear, our young hero struggles with his conscience, gets a stern talkin'-to by a wise elder (who gets a friendlier talkin'-to by a wiser elderer in turn) and comes clean in the eleventh hour to reveal they'd been attempting a flashy, suicidally risky maneuver at their leader's behest, to put their names in the academy's history books.
The story could easily have descended into the same hollow, overwrought farce as previously, but for the wider focus on an institution of learning, its pragmatic and moral standards and the values it inculcates, a glimpse of Starfleet life beyond the Enterprise. Wheaton and the others youngsters' mediocre emoting (thankfully more restrained this time) gets offset by the Starfleet officers' nuanced impression of village elders balancing their society between the extremes of superego and id. Still, a mediocre showing except for two high points, one being the pivotal scene of the captain sussing out the youngsters' suicidal stunt for attention:
Picard: "The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth - whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth!"
Truth. Not loyalty, not kindness or family or tradition or victory or mass appeal. Objective truth. What happened, happened. It was moments like this which elevated TNG's Utopianism past the TV fare of its time, moments which rose past human codependence.
edit:
Note how that phrase has been perverted by social activism. In Picard's usage, it means the factual truth of a person's involvement. In post-modern activist parlance "personal truth" means a person's imagined, fabricated, subjective interpretation, dishonestly treated as truth for political gain. If Picard had meant it in its modern definition, he would've been encouraging Wesley to lie, to impose his subjective "truth" (that nothing is ever the wonder-child's fault) on the Starfleet commission instead of admitting to his share of the guilt.
The other high point comes at the very end, when Wesley mentions his squadron leader took the blame after Wesley confessed, protecting the rest of his squadron from expulsion... including Wes. The leader (who apparently landed himself a role on Voyager for this appearance) had been built up as using and abusing his underlings all along. On any other show he would have ended as a defeated villain of the week, a punching bag, a caricature of an incompetent blowhard like Zapp Brannigan. His partial redemption, his willingness to back up his bluster about loyalty and cohesion, once again fed into TNG's optimism.
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Seriesdate: 7.20
Journey's End
The one with the... the, uhhh... hmmm. Ugh, there is no other way to say it: the one with the magic space-injuns.
HIS COMING WAS FORETOLD! (To the mystical space injuns... via vision quest in which one "talked to many animals"... Oy vey.)
Also, Picard is tasked by Starfleet with relocating the space non-native non-Americans out of their space pueblo as part of a treaty with the Hardassians. Problem: they refuse to leave their ancestral land they landed on twenty years ago because the rocks spoke to them and it just feels homey. Problem: one of Picard's conquistador ancestors participated in the slaughter of some of their ancestors back in the 1600s so they saddle him with the task of expiating his great-to-the-23rd-grandfather's sin. Or one of them anyway, since 2^23=8,388,608 ancestors, inbreeding and subsequent generations notwithstanding. Are each and every one of you going to look up your eight million ancestors' crimes to pay reparations to their millions upon millions of descendants? No? Didn't think so. Fuck off, Big Chief Selective Enforcement.
Also, for all the dramatically scored hand-wringing about "these people deserve better than to be removed from their homes" no further mention is made of the treaty being mutual with the same drama presumably being mirrored on evacuating planets in Cardassian space in preparation for Federation takeover, or that the "natives" are prepared to sacrifice presumably millions of lives in continued warfare (and they'd be first up against the wall in case of a Cardassian invasion, most likely) despite being offered free, effortless relocation to any number of similar planets, for the sake of their bullshit stone-age hocus-pocus. If this plot had substituted for the magic Indians a handful of gap-toothed yokels of European descent refusing to inconvenience themselves for a peace treaty because they claim their current planet gives them visions of the Virgin Mary in their oatmeal every morning, few of the show's target audience would've suffered any guilt calling them on their bullshit.
But in Wesley's words "These people are not some random group of colonists. They're a unique culture with a history that predates the Federation and Starfleet" except that describes literally all persons comprising The Federation and Starfleet, which were founded on pre-existing cultures like every single other grouping in history, including Pueblo Indians!
Then Wesley inhales some (implied; we've got censors to worry about) hallucinogens volatilized in campfire smoke because yes of course the promised child is going on a spirit journey. I promised myself I wouldn't fast-forward... Anyway, Wesley is unhappy at wizarding school, so instead of rationally taking stock of his options and formulating a coherent life plan he hallucinates his father telling him in a ghostly echoing voice to "find a path that is truly yours" which leads to Wesley turning against the Enterprise's crew by divulging the plan to teleport the locals off planet, leading them to revolt, despite the fact that doing so will probably lead to their entire "unique culture that predates the Federation and Starfleet" being nuked from orbit by a Cardassian warship. There follows a scene with Picard, rightfully outraged, being written as an oppressive authority figure ordering blind obedience, all the while eschewing the very salient argument that you are going to re-open a war and kill a billion people you snot-nosed little imbecile!
Wesley resigns in self-righteous indignation, wastes several minutes of air time reiterating his angst to his mother. Planetside, the logical conflict erupts, but that's ok! Because Wesley suddenly stops time by yelling at it. The shaman from before transmogrifies into The Traveler (Wesley's mentor) who offers to guide the promised child to a higher plane of existence and leave the humans and Cardassians in the lurch:
"have faith in their abilities to solve their problems on their own" - great, except they were solving those problems until you two shitheads interfered!
We finally reach the obvious conclusion that should've been put forth as soon as the Puebloans refused to leave, remaining on the planet as Cardassian citizens. So this could've been a five minute episode if not for digressing into a half hour life lesson: as long as you're "special" in some nondescript way, you can act as idiotically, suicidally, genocidally reckless as you want to act - because a space wizard will show up to lead you to another dimension!
Ta-daaaaa: "Science" Fiction!
Gah!
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It's no coincidence that almost every time Wesley returned to the show, Stewart's opening narration had to remind us it's supposed to be a joy having him back. Got that? Love the Wesley, damn you. When I previously discussed the dread malady Wesleyitis under the ST: TNG tag here, I centered on two problems:
1) He's a fantasy character in a SciFi series, Harry Potter working magic spells by furrowing his brow on a spaceship
2) As a Mary Sue, his presence infected every other aspect of the show, twisting other characters to suit his fantasy heroics and flimsy pretexts to rebel against adult authority. (See: "shut up Wesley")
It was possible to fit him into the show, so long as he remained a reasonably clever Starfleet ensign working out problems by intellectual and scientific means. The First Duty provides the best example: despite being built around Wesley's life, it maintained adequate proportions and utilized his youthful viewpoint to expand upon our knowledge of Federation life. However, everyone could smell "a Wesley episode" a mile away by the cheap drama and the convoluted justifications for treating him like a Messianic figure.
Amusingly, writers and directors seemed to throw up their hands in desperation after a certain point and started repurposing Wesley episodes as vehicles for any cheesy, half-assed script ideas they might've been sitting on: drug war parables about crack addiction, after-school specials about nuclear waste (in a society that no longer relies on fission) cute little alien girls with ham radios, an infestation of alien brain parasites, more Body Snatchers grade paranoia about the new technology of video games, space Indian vision quests, you name it. From the viewpoint of an outsider to Trekdom, they certainly seem to have decided early on that if any Wesley episode's gonna be a shit-show anyway, it may as well double up on the shit.
Wesley Crusher stepped onto the scene fundamentally flawed for being Gene Roddenberry's self-insert Mary Sue into his own series. I strongly suspect the actor's adolescent ego, easily inflated by stardom, his probable expectations of playing the hero also contributed negatively, no matter his later re-tooling of his public image as a more mature blogger and commentator. However, when Wil Wheaton complains that TNG's writers kept dumping him into ludicrous scripts... the man's got a point.
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