“Where No One Has Gone Before”
Written by Diane Duane and Michael Reaves
Directed by Rob Bowman
Season 1, Episode 6
Original air date: October 26, 1987
Star date: 41263.1
Mission summary
The Enterprise accepts the assistance of a Mr. Kosinski, a propulsion specialist who claims he (along with his nameless alien assistant) can improve the efficiency of the ship’s engines. Data and Riker are not convinced–they’ve run the models, and the models indicate no improvement in speed or performance. Moreover, Kosinski is an arrogant, self-satisfied schmuck (and yet strangely not a commodore!), and both Riker and one of the chief engineers, Argyle, hesitate to allow Kosinski access to their engines at all. They eventually decide that if his calculations are gibberish no harm can come to the ship anyway, and allow Kosinski to go through with his experiment.
Beginning at warp 1.5, the Enterprise steadily accelerates–but something goes wrong. Suddenly the ship is zipping past galaxies at incalculable speeds. Picard orders an emergency reverse of the engines, and when the ship comes to a full stop they realize they are (improbably) in the galaxy M33: 2.7 million light years from home. It will take over 300 years for them to return their own galaxy.
Kosinski, meanwhile, titters over his “discovery.” He believes that his “wonderful mistake” has broken the warp barrier, and looks forward to his name going down in the history books. Though all are a little skeptical, they give him the benefit of the doubt as long as he can get them home. The exception is Wesley Crusher, who had his eyes on the assistant during the experiment–the alien who seemed to “phase” in and out of this reality at the critical moment. He believes the assistant and not Kosinski is responsible for getting them this far, and seems to understand what it is the assistant is doing–connecting time, space, and thought as different facets of the same continuum. When Wesley shares this idea with the alien, the assistant warns Wesley that this world isn’t ready for such “dangerous nonsense.” Wesley is worried, though, and tries to tell Riker what he saw of the assistant’s phasing before everyone attempts a return journey. Riker shoos him off, and Kosinski and the assistant prepare a reverse trajectory back home.
It works–too well. The ship goes hurtling backwards in space but it cannot stop. The assistant passes out on his console and by the time Picard can order a full stop of the engines, the Enterprise is over a billion light years from home, at the edge of the known universe, in a swirl of blue and white. Here thoughts become real: Worf sees his pet targ from childhood; Yar imagines she’s back on the planet of flimsy characterization rape gangs; Picard even imagines his mother serving him Earl Grey, hot. The thoughts soon become dangerous, though, as people’s fears become real.
In sickbay, Dr. Crusher wakes the assistant, who we now know for sure is responsible for the ability to travel at superwarp speed. He weakly explains to Picard that he’s a Traveler from another dimension, gaining passage on Starfleet ships with his exceptional propulsion abilities. Kosinski is merely a cover for him to travel freely. He will do his best to get the Enterprise and her crew home, as he meant no harm. He also tells Picard–privately–that he believes Wesley is a kind of child prodigy a la Mozart, and that Picard should encourage him in this way (though without telling him or his mother).
The Traveler takes his place in Engineering, and Picard orders the crew of the Enterprise to think positive, healing thoughts directed at him, to give him strength. It seems to work, and the Enterprise begins warping back home. The Traveler phases in and out–and ultimately disappears entirely just as the ship returns to the Milky Way galaxy. Picard takes the Traveler’s advice to heart and summons “the boy” to the bridge. For “conduct in the true spirit and traditions of Starfleet,” he makes Wesley an acting ensign, complete with duty roster and responsibility.
Analysis
“Where No One Has Gone Before” is most notable for two things: the Traveler, who will return twice more in “Remember Me” and “Journey’s End”; and Wesley Crusher earning his field commission (which becomes one of the few progressive character arcs in the show). It’s notable for me because it’s the first time all season the show has been worth watching.
Finally, we get a good science fiction story. I like both the mystery of what exactly is happening to the Enterprise (How did we get here? Should we stay? How do we get home?) and the answer (that time, space, and thought are all related). The ship, by way of technology indistinguishable from magic (a joke the Traveler slyly mentions), winds up in a place where imagination can shape reality, and memories can come alive in the present. What if ideas had power–real, tangible power? In a way we already know it to be true: it’s called storytelling, and Star Trek is finally getting the hang of it.
And then there’s the Traveler himself, who I have always rather liked. We get a powerful alien being who isn’t a space douche. He’s not interested in toying with lesser life forms; in fact, he’s rather polite. He’s a tourist, an explorer, just like our heroes. I find it much more realistic that a supremely advanced species would be a little more reserved, rather than go tromping around the universe being a total douchenozzle just because. The Traveler doesn’t insert himself unnecessarily in the affairs of others, and in fact, tries fairly hard to blend into the background and remain unnoticed. It’s what I would do. I think my favorite moment in the episode is when Picard asks the Traveler the purpose of his journey and he simply says, “Curiosity.” What’s more universal than that? He’s a great character, and I was pleased that they brought him back.
What I hadn’t remembered about this episode but absolutely adored was Kosinski. So far the cast and crew have been so bland and lifeless (or as the Traveler puts it, “Up until now you’ve been…uninteresting”), and finally we get a little personality injected into the mix. It’s nice to see some friction, particularly within Starfleet. I do wonder what his rank is supposed to be, though. Riker calls him “sir” at one point, but everyone else simply addresses him without rank, as Mr. Kosinski. Any ideas?
As much as I like the setup and the story and our guest characters, there are two things I hate about this episode. First, the visions the cast and crew have are sort of inexplicable. Why does Worf think of his pet targ? Can we please ditch the rape gang thing? And why does Picard’s mother have the worst French accent this side of a Monty Python skit? Second, Wesley Crusher. I know, I know, he was the internet’s punching bag for over a decade. But even watching this with fresh eyes, even acknowledging that I liked his character when I was a kid, I just cannot get over how ludicrous that whole prodigy idea is. Why is “the boy” in ugly sweaters the second coming of Isaac Newton?
This doesn’t and won’t ever work for me. One of the things I have always admired about the show is that there seems to be a place for everyone. Every person has some talent that can be put to use, because if you put people in work that’s right for them (in a society that has computers to do all the busy work so everyone has interesting work), they can excel. Anyone can. Nobody is special, because everyone is special. There’s an exceptional person in each of us. The privileging of Wesley Crusher undermines that. To take that message and say, well, okay, everyone is really awesome and all that, but this kid: lemmetellyou. I don’t buy it, it doesn’t interest me, and I don’t like the implication that his intelligence is the result of a freakish, unearned miracle rare amongst the various dimensions of reality. By that point, we really have gone where no man has gone before: the Marty Stu galaxy, where no good character ever returns.
Torie’s Rating: Warp 4 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: 
We’re adding a new feature to chronicle the horrendous fashion of the future. I suspect the first few seasons will be mostly Wesley sweaters, and today’s entry is no exception.
My favorite thing about this sweater isn’t even the color, which is admittedly impressive–it’s the absolute blindness to pattern. You have a chevron, then a ruffle, then a braid thing, and then some vertical stripes. A-maz-ing.
Best Line: WORF: It’s a Klingon targ, from home, from when I was a child!
YAR: So you’re telling me that that thing’s a kitty cat?!
Trivia/Other Notes: Eric Menyuk, who plays the Traveler, originally auditioned for the role of Data.
The story is loosely based on Duane’s novel The Wounded Sky.
The “targ” was actually a Russian wild boar named Emmy-Lou.
This episode was the Trek debut of 27-year-old Rob Bowman, who directed many other episodes early in the show’s run before becoming a producer (and prolific director) of The X-Files. He was apparently terrified and worked extra hard to make a good impression on the cast and crew.
Previous episode: Season 1, Episode 5 – “The Last Outpost.”
Next episode: Season 1, Episode 7 – “Lonely Among Us.”
I’ve been looking forward to rewatching this one. Okay, it was the only thing that kept me going through the first few episodes, really. And when it started, I was raring to give this one a Warp 5, at least. But then… the visions.
Like Torie, that aspect of the plot just pales in comparison to the overall setup, and the wonder and mystery of the premise. It instantly reminded me of TOS’s “Shore Leave,” and that isn’t an association you want. It seems another awkward attempt to infuse a bit of backstory and character development in where it doesn’t fit, or maybe it was simply filler. Though I was moved by Picard’s reunion with his mother, largely because Patrick Stewart played it so well, I wouldn’t mind never visiting Yar’s planet ever again, though I hate it for different reasons than she does.
This time around, this episode also seems more expository than most, which isn’t as deadly as it could be because the premise is so fascinating. Fittingly, it seems more like an exploration of an idea, and a way to justify Wesley’s constant presence on the Bridge. I love his relationship with the Traveler, and the character himself, even if Menyuk tends to play it a bit melodramatically at times. Kosinski is wonderful to watch though–a jerk you love to hate, and I enjoyed his barely constrained glee at being asked to help the Traveler at the end, though did he really accomplish anything? I assume the Traveler was just being kind, like when you ask your four-year-old to “help” cook dinner. As for Kosinski’s rank, I think he only has one command pip, which makes him a very junior officer, something that Picard reminds him of when he addresses Riker without his title.
Regarding Wesley’s promotion, I was surprised that Riker took it all in stride. He can’t know what the Traveler told Picard, but he plays right along. I would think any Starfleet officer should immediately suspect his captain of being replaced or possessed by an alien intelligence if he made a kid a commissioned officer, who takes a Bridge slot from an Academy graduate. I mean, couldn’t they just give him an internship? Make him a yeoman or something?
Finally, I like the idea of the thoughts of the crew saving them, but it reminds me a little of Peter Pan, with the Traveler as Tinker Bell… but perhaps that was intended.
My warp rating is 4.
I think what I appreciated most about this episode is that it made clear that arrogance and rudeness were still parts of the human condition in the 24th century. The spars between Kosinski and Argyle were just excellent, and I especially liked Agyle’s dismissal of Kosinki’s techno-babble: “It’s meaningless!”
How I wish Agyle could have been standard equipment in every ST episode that was resolved through some particle-of-the-week technobabble rerouted by Heisenberg waveguides through the contretemps of the main deflector dish.
What I also liked about this episode is it really did try to take us beyond anything known, beyond where a speculative TV series had taken us, into unknown and unsettling locales outside the galaxy, then outside the observable universe, which—at this early point in this young series—we viewers considered might be destinations from which easy return was uncertain. And there was a spookiness to the whole, where thought and mind became reality, in this truly distant place.
I remember on first viewing getting a small chill when Data confirmed (with complete accuracy) the first distance as two million seven hundred thousand light years, home hundreds of years away. It was evocative of Kirk’s remarks in a similarly named episode that without the warp drive destinations days away were now years in the distant. It was evocative of that, without being redundant to that. The special effects on the next jump, orders of magnitude beyond, were well done.
Finally, this episode gave us what we’d needed to this point, which was some rationale to suffer Wesley on the bridge. Picard had the declaration of some outré cosmic being that this brat was wunderkind of some special consideration.
@ 1 Eugene
I had remembered this as being better, too.
Kosinski has a non-standard pip–it’s like a square. That’s why I’m confused about where he is on the food chain.
Good point about Riker, and about Wesley taking a spot on the bridge. I understand battlefield commissions, but I feel like Starfleet wouldn’t take the kindest eye to Picard going around commissioning underage boys for the service when they have this whole, ya know, structure in place. He’ll be of age to apply so soon anyway, why not just put him to use outside of the officer structure?
Wow, my reactions to this episode are so different from all of yours. Maybe it’s an age thing and I was too old to identify with Wesley and accept what it did for him. But for me this was the end of Wesley Crusher as a viable character. He was now so firmly entrenched on planet Marty Stu that there was no going back. Wesley Crusher: Sooper Genius and Very Special Snowflake. It would take years for the character to become tolerable again. I also got a very creepy pedo vibe from the Traveler.
As for the whole acting ensign thing, I always said they should have reintroduced the idea of the midshipman as a parallel means of entering Starfleet. It would have provided more than enough justification for putting a teenager on the bridge.
Speculation at Memory Alpha is that Kosinski was a civilian contractor brevetted to Starfleet. I thought he might be from the science services or some other civilian organization within the Federation. Either way, Stanley Kamel’s performance is just about the only thing that redeems this episode for me.
@3 Torie:
At some point, square pips were standardized as Starfleet enlisted insignia (Chief O’Brien has some), but that might not have happened yet. Perhaps Kosinski’s from the Starfleet Diplomatic Corps or some such–it would be at least a partial excuse for being non-technical…
Kosinski seems to be some hind of civilian specialist put into a uniform to fit him somewhere in Starfleet- Riker is being polite when calling him “sir”, but his suggestions are not orders. The US military has a history of putting civilian specialists into working uniforms (i.e., khakis) without rank devices, usually when forward deployed. Probably to give them equivalent quarters, maybe paycheck access, and certainly to prevent harassment to join a working party or why-aren’t-you-in-uniform, asshole?
Lampshading Wesley’s MartyStu-ness- ugh.
—gotta give you people the credit—you got a lot of guts sitting through this season–as great as the body of work became—this first season was a dog—this episode i think was a better first season story than most—it, like some of the silliness of the first season–at least set the foundation for what later became a good show—
I liked the science fiction strength in this story. Going where no one, not even the traveler, knew for sure what to expect was a good step. And to the memories we saw them encounter. Doesn’t each of us have a dear old memory pop up at odd times every now and then?
I agree with the idea of Kosinski’s uniform and designation being for administrative purposes. He could have been from a corporation or a university. In today’s military civilians are given temporary rank – with no authority – to facilitate access to certain areas. The Air Force Art Program is an example. Artists from select professional groups are invited to observe various aspects of the service then are expected to produce a work of art that becomes a part of the Air Force Art Collection. For some assignments the temporary assignment of rank is given to facilitate issuing of clearances, quarters and dining facility access. I have not taken part in this myself but I have talked with several who have.
Gonna have to sit down with this one again, but…Wesley Crusher is the Mozart of propulsion? I mean, goddamn freaking *what*? Has he done anything in this episode or any other previous episode that comes across as true genius and not just fakey annoying “This is UNIX I know this” handwaving?
So last night with my fingers quite unable to sustain my normal writing schdule I heated a couple of cheap burritos and queued up the episode in question.
Yeah it much better than the episode before it, but man that is a very low bar indeed. An ant coulnd’t limbo under that bar.
Still I enjoyed watcing it and mostly it worked except for the few tics that drove the writer in me crazy. (I’m with you Demitrious, there would have been nothing wrong at all with ‘Mr. Midshipman Crusher.” as that is the rank of an officer in training. Acting Ensign is an insult to all those Ensign who worked hard and graduated from the academy.)
How can anyone be a professional writer and not see the usefullness of a Troi-like character in film? She should never tell us what we see and hear but she should tell us those things that characters keep secret, that would never show. (such as in this case that Mr Ashat is deeply insecure, that woudl have been interesting.) And instead of having the Traverler be avoid in her perceptions and therefore ringing alarm bells in the audiences minds, he should have been normal. Keep us focused on Mr Ashat like most of the characters and I think the drama would work better,
And wouldn’t it have been really cool if the Travler had pulled a prime Directive on them as to why thaey cant know things. Personally I’d love that.
Yeah, I’m going to side with the Irredeemable-Marty-Stu faction. The problem to me is that Wesley Crusher’s specialness is entirely 100% unearned. We’ve seen him show some substantial technical merit — in a “wacky science projects” way that basically just makes him seem like an obsessive creep, whose idea of a fun time is putting together a faked recording of Picard saying he’s cool instead of trying to meet the other kids his age who we know have to be on the ship somewhere since they’re always running through otherwise-unrelated shots. But there’s nothing other than the Traveler’s word that says he’s going to be special — it’s just the word of the alien that, no really you guys, this kid, he’s like Mozart. Get him an Ortegan Warp Violin and some staff paper STAT.
@Demetrios, yeah, there is that uncomfortable aspect of the Traveler relationship. But it seems like all of Wesley’s friends are older men with a creepy vibe to them. I think on the Traveler’s side it’s more just hero worship though — an odd sentiment when applied to a middle schooler, but strangely appropriate to a conceit that gives us no evidence outside the Traveler’s words and actions that for him it’s the equivalent of like, going to the county fair with teenage Jesus.
@9 etomlins @11 DeepThought
I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve blocked out “The Naked Now,” in which Wesley demonstrated a rare ability to visualize connections that would have taken a trained engineer weeks and the computer resources of the Enterprise to manage–while more or less inebriated even. Regardless of how plausible this was or how sloppily it was introduced, it was at least an attempt to foreshadow his specialness and as such, I’ll accept it.
@Eugene re: “Why don’t you just see it in your head?”
…yeah. That was so ham-fisted and nonsensical that I kind of summarily rejected the idea that it ever happened. And that’s without the obvious point that this was a trivial application of existing technology which had already been anticipated in TOS — basically that scene just wound up making the Starfleet engineer look incompetent, rather than Wesley look special…
but I take your point.
All right…after watching this episode again, I’m actually going to be slightly nicer about Wesley the Genius. But not much. (This is gonna be a long one…sorry.)
Successfully portraying a fictional character as a genius must surely be the one of the hardest tasks in writing, difficult even when the character is based on a real person whose works of genius are already known. I’m trying to remember how the Milos Forman movie Amadeus managed it, not very successfully because I was in 7th or 8th grade when I saw the film. From what little I do remember Amadeus made the wise decision to keep Mozart somewhat in the background and instead focus on Salieri, who is not a genius but who does have talent and who can at times glimpse what Mozart sees. There’s a great scene near the end where Salieri is assisting Mozart in his feverish composition of the Requiem and Salieri’s exhilaration at seeing Mozart’s mind at work is palpable. Maybe that’s the only way a genius can be portrayed, through the eyes of a more ordinary man.
If depicting an actual, known genius is difficult, then depicting a genius in a completely artificial setting must be even tougher. I doubt whether it’s ever possible. You can’t just have the putative genius spouting technobabble because all technobabble sounds the same–like gibberish, especially when it’s TNG babble, which made ghastly rubbish out of real and recognizable scientific terms at every opportunity. (But I must grudgingly admit that the writers managed to make Kosinki’s babble sound recognizably worse, by having him use “asymptomatically” when he plainly meant “asymptotically” and by throwing in a reference to the Bessel functions for no reason.) So maybe there wasn’t any convincing way to portray Wesley Crusher as a genius because the character inhabits an impossible Universe whose rules seem to be just made up on the fly by writers who are basically just trying to fake it. All science fiction requires some fakery and handwaving but the NuTrek universe leaned rather more heavily on it than most. And mostly I don’t have a problem with that. If I want real science I’ll read a textbook. But because of this context, because so much willing disbelief is required to accept anything that happens in NuTrek, there’s no way to make the exceptional seem exceptional.
I find myself thinking also of a real child prodigy in a field that I do know a little about, which is chess. Samuel Reshevsky was a genuine savant in chess, who was giving simultaneous exhibitions before he was ten years old. At the age of eleven he beat David Janowski, considered to be one of the game’s great masters at the time. I read the account of this game in one of Edward Lasker’s books. (Ed Lasker fulfills the Salieri role in a way; he was a strong player who could occasionally hold his own against the chess greats but who usually fell short.) What impressed me about Reshevsky’s game was, ironically, its imperfection. He was a child and it showed. He made mistakes and Janowski was almost winning at one point. But Reshevsky’s genius shone through at the crucial moment, he defended brilliantly, and eventually won the game. If you’re going to show a child genius at work you should take this into account, that unschooled children aren’t going to be perfect. Their brilliance will be alloyed with baser elements, hindered by inexperience and lack of polish.
So…what does this all have to do with Wesley Crusher? To be fair, there were TNG episodes that occasionally got it right. The “nanites” episode comes to mind; Wesley’s shown to be both smart and incredibly foolish. In more episodes, however, including “Where No One Has Gone Before”, he’s just right about everything and all the grownups are fools for not listening to him. (It occurs to me, by the way, that Capt. Picard’s supposed hatred of children, ham-fistedly asserted in the pilot, was meant solely as a way of making Wesley Crusher look good: see, here’s this child prodigy who wows even the grumpy old Starfleet captain!) So that’s already a strike against the Weasel. And how does this genius demonstrate his Wesleyan prowess? By fiddling with some meaningless computer graphics and saying vague things like, “Wouldn’t this work better?” Like I said earlier, it’s no better than the insufferable bratty girl from the Jurassic Park movie playing with
fsv(a futile novelty at best) and exclaiming, “This is a UNIX system! I know this!”But there are other reasons to loathe this episode that have nothing to do with Wesley-shilling. There’s the mystification of thought as some sort of magic that has power over the physical Universe; that bugs the hell out of me. I must confess that my own notions of the nature of thought aren’t…well…fully baked, I suppose. But I do refuse to believe that simply by travelling far enough away you can reach a place where thoughts exert supernatural powers. There’s the continuing inability of Star Trek to tell the difference between a true association of stars and what we call a constellation. The stars of Triangulum are nowhere near each other in space (I had to look it up in my copy of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook I admit) and in any case M33 is impossibly remote compared to any of Triangulum’s stars, so there’s no question whatever of going to “the far side of Triangulum”.
And then there’s the uselessness of Troi. Again. I agree with bobsandiego up to a point: it would definitely be more interesting if Troi “sensed” things that were not immediately obvious to us. I disagree with bobsandiego, however, in his assertion that such a character as Troi could ever be useful. The worst aspect of such an “empathic” (*spits*) character as Troi is that her function becomes, basically, instructing the viewer on how we’re supposed to react to a given scene. I loathe that in fiction, whatever form it takes, whether it’s clumsy musical scoring in a movie or direct auctorial interference as happens in William Goldman’s titanically overrated book The Princess Bride or by any other means. You’re not supposed to tell the audience to be anxious or frightened or overjoyed or anything else. And that’s precisely what Troi does, whether she’s “sensing” the obvious or not. Look at what she does when she says, pertaining to her inability to pick anything up from the Traveller, “Something about this concerns me. I can point to no reason yet.” That’s not Troi, that’s the writer saying, “You should be worried now. Go on, worry.” Honestly, there’s no good reason for Troi to exist at all. Her very raison d’etre is inimical to effective fiction.
One last thing at the end of an admittedly overlong and immoderate rant. Why, exactly, does Troi sense that Kosinki is very sure of himself? From all we can gather his job is pushing random buttons and stringing together meaningless gibberish. Surely any realistic con man of this sort must know that it’s a con? Or does he really have the mind of a toddler?
@14 etomlins
Very goods points in all, let me comment on some of them.
Depicting genisues in fiction is very tough and as you have said the best way is from the viewpoint of a non-genius in the story. There’s a reason why the Sherlock Holmes stories are nearly always from Watson’s point fo view. We understand the scale of the genious based on the effect on others. Another good rule is to never try ti display that genius directly unless you are a genius of that type. If I am writing about a master poet in a story I will never use a single line of his ‘poetry’, rather let others iluminat the poetry’s effect.
This can be done in science-fiction, but it’s naturally a tougher job but doal see Jack McDevitt’s writing where he has a series of novels with an Holems like character. Now print makes it easier, but it can be done. Where TNG makes this a herculean task is that *all* the characters are Geniuses and are very rarey wrong about anything, thus we are denied a reader/viewer character to witness the special genius when they come along, And I agree totallt that technobabble never sells the job, it befuddle at best and undercuts at worst.
On Troi I think we have to draw a very important distinction, the Troi as conceived and Troi as excuted. as conceived she si a character that can see the hidden, can sense the secrets and give voice the the things that would be so easy in prose but damn tough in film. as Executed she exactly what you say, a stupid character there to instruct the viewer as to the obvious, and thereby insulting the viewer. (If I were designing the character from scratch she’d never get by Roddenberry but she’d be much more interesting. She’d be the most cynical character as she is always aware just how much people do not say and just how much they decieve each other and themselves in their feelings.)
As to the science, well sadly I have low expectation from TNG on the subject of science. Clearly the writers didn;t even know that *now* space and time are consider aspect of the same thing, hence space/time. It’s sad that an episode of the animated show The Tick has had better science than Star Trek.
(If I were designing the character from scratch she’d never get by Roddenberry but she’d be much more interesting. She’d be the most cynical character as she is always aware just how much people do not say and just how much they decieve each other and themselves in their feelings.)
For some reason this reminds me of the empathic / telepathic characters in “Babylon 5”, which seemed to be better written versions of Troi. They were often hired upon to sit in on negotiations between opposing sides of business deals, so that they could tell one if the other was lying.
For me, the best empathic character in science fiction is Dr. Prilicla from James White’s Sector General series. He (I think of it as a he) is a Cinrusskin – a large insect being who is a respected micro surgeon. He is a natural empath and this assists him with his own surgical work but also enables him to assist other doctors at Sector General with tricky situations. Because of this, everybody likes him and goes out of their way to avoid negative feelings when he is around. That is, except for the Kelgan doctors, nurses and patients who are incapable of suppressing their feelings or successfully lying. The Kelgan have fur covering their bodies and that fur is their involuntary means of expressing their feelings. A Kelgan nurse trying to tell a white lie to reassure a patient would know that her lie was showing in her fur. Kelgan social conditioning being what it is, a Kelgan would tell the truth rather than get caught in a lie. This makes for some fun situations when Prilicla interacts with Kelgans.
In Dr. Prilicla, James White gave us the kind of empath Troi should have been. Someone who told her crew mates what they really needed to hear and someone who’s ability did cause conflict with other characters and that conflict could have been used for both relief and character development.
@ 4 DemetriosX
I’m not sure how you’re disagreeing… that’s exactly how I felt, at least.
@ 14 etomlins
Great responses. I watched Amadeus recently and it’s so brilliant. (I had read the play years ago, but it’s not the same without the music, and the fantastic performances.)
My problem with the boy genius is that ST is just not the right show to have a genius. ST is all about how everyone has a talent that can shine through and we’re all kind of special snowflakes if we’re given the tools, the encouragement, and the resources to pursue only that which interests us. No one in this world wants to be a biologist but you know, then her mom got sick, so she took a job just for a few years to pay the medical bills and now she’s permanently stuck in an administrative rut, and she’s too old for grad school. These people can pursue anything and everything they want to do, and be good at it. The only thing that limits them is personal ambition (I think of the episode where Picard sees his life if he had been less bold). This is not a world that needs geniuses, period. That belongs in a different show.
Re: Troi, I’m reminded of the Daniel Abraham books (A Shadow in Summer), where the characters use hand gestures to communicate emotions. It was a hamfisted way to communicate internal emotion and meaning, rather than actually showing it. I don’t think Troi could EVER be useful because she cannot read minds. She can only read emotions, which are frankly a lot less interesting.
In any case, the handful of times she is useful–like, say, sensing a foreign entity invading the ship–it’s written with no rules or continuity. In next week’s episode, an alien takes over the ship and people, and she doesn’t sense a damn thing the whole time it’s bouncing around from person to person, but of course at the very end she suddenly senses it in order for the story to work. Completely ridiculous (but I’m getting ahead of myself).
@18 Torie: You all seemed to like the episode, even giving it a decent rating. If I were being generous, I might give it a 2. To me, the whole purpose of the story is to permanently cement the Marty Stu-dom of Wesley and that overwhelms everything else. They aren’t interested in any of those sound sfnal themes you pointed out, those are just incidental to the Wesley worship. It could have been a good episode, but it just wasn’t.
#18, Torie:
I remember really appreciating Amadeus as well but it’s hard for me to gauge the Tom Hulce performance. I suppose he’s good at coming across like an irritating childish ninny but still ferociously passionate and inventive and therefore admirable. At any rate I don’t recall ever feeling as though the movie were failing to make me believe that its subject really was brilliant. I find myself thinking of another much more recent movie, Ed Harris’s biopic on Jackson Pollack, which convinced me that Pollack was passionate but not that he was a genius.
This passage speaks more to me than you’ll know, because I’ve spent some years of my life recently trying to resume a career in science after a disastrous sidestep into computer programming and many subsequent years in dead-end clerical work. It’s occurred to me more than once that just because I really think that I’m cut out for chemistry doesn’t mean that I actually have any business doing it. Isn’t the world full of people who have their hearts set on careers for which they haven’t the slightest aptitude? Take the field of writing in particular–isn’t it overflowing with passionate amateurs who write, with heart and soul devoted to an unwavering belief in themselves and their artistry, reams of atrocious rubbish and who will never, ever improve?
Dare I say it, a world in which anyone can pursue whatever calling they like still needs geniuses, or at least people who are actually good at what they think they’re good at.
#15, bobsandiego (and others addressing the writing of “empathic” characters): I don’t feel competent to comment on the discussion; you all have put more though and reflecting into the matter than I have. I do like the idea that an empathic character might tend to be more cynical than most.
Let me suggest this also, as something that could have been done to make Counsellor Troi more interesting: it would have been nice to see her touchy-feely emphasis on the importance of emotions conflict with practical reality. Troi seems to pride herself on detecting hidden motives (even though she actually sucks at it, as Torie points out, failing again and again to notice important things) but there’s also something to be said for judging a person by his or her actions and not his secret thoughts and feelings. Just because (to call on a hoary Hollywood cliche) a man became a doctor because he’s still a traumatized child who watched his mother die of leukemia or whatever doesn’t mean that he still shouldn’t be judged for how well he practices medicine and not for his ulterior motives in doing so. Imagine (say) a delicate negotiation in which Troi encouraged the captain to act upon her assessment of a diplomat’s hidden feelings and ends up making things worse.
You and me both, but really the TNG staff could have avoided some easily detectable mistakes. Like when Enterprise ends up near the M33 galaxy–would it have killed them to use, you know, an actual picture of M33 to go on? Instead they give us this weird mishmash of astronomical clip-art, hilariously including recognizable things that make no sense being there like Centaurus A and the Ring Nebula.
@Etomlins #20
sn’t the world full of people who have their hearts set on careers for which they haven’t the slightest aptitude? Take the field of writing in particular–isn’t it overflowing with passionate amateurs who write, with heart and soul devoted to an unwavering belief in themselves and their artistry, reams of atrocious rubbish and who will never, ever improve?
I think this is a very insightful observation, but also one that TNG anticipates in some ways. The example of writing is telling — in my view, people don’t (usually) become emotionally invested in the idea of being writers solely out of devotion to the craft. If you want to be a writer, all you have to do is regularly spend some (most?) of your spare time writing; no one can stop you and you need no one’s permission or approval. But slaving away at a desk in the basement every night and weekend with no recognition isn’t usually the dream… Obviously nobody dreams of being an unsuccessful anything, but I think part of why Being A Writer (or artist, or musician, or whatever) is so attractive is because of the prestige attached to the social role, and the dream of being someone people pay attention to/listen to. That doesn’t apply to being, say, a brilliant chartered accountant.
But part of the conceit of the TNG Trekverse is that society has evolved to the point that everyone’s contribution is valued and appreciated within the appropriate sphere, so that as much honor attaches to the nurse or the homesteader as to the writer or the diplomat. It’s not very believable, but it is explicitly stated. If people really were respected for the extent to which they maximized their potential, instead of for being part of certain professions, I think you’d see a lot more people taking joy and pride in their main talents rather than dreaming of success in highly competitive prestige fields.
One way the TNGverse conceit might make sense is if they basically acknowledged that society, at this point, was just Too Darn Big for anyone to have that kind of social influence. That there’s too many people spread over too many worlds for everyone to have read, or even heard of, even the greatest contemporary writers. Of course given that everyone seems to know Shakespeare and Sun Tzu, they obviously must have a lot of time to spend reading (even though almost nobody ever seems to be on-screen)… maybe they never reference history past the 1980s because that’s as far as they can get on the corpus of human knowledge in their limited time in school…?
Anyway, of course there’s more to the appeal of being a writer than just prestige — there’s having your own schedule, getting to be a reclusive genius (nominally — obviously this is untrue), getting to work in a creative field using your imagination, all that stuff too. I think TNGverse attempts to address these also — everyone gets a lot more vacation in TNG; they very rarely have to work double shifts or fourteen-hour days; people are socialized so that being a recluse doesn’t seem appealing to anyone; all work is supposed to be more creative and imaginative. I don’t know that I buy it, but I do think that they’ve at least set up a world where the skilled chartered accountant would feel more comfortable pursuing that dream…
There are so many good comments and great ideas that I just don’t know what I can say that will contribute effectively.
Overall, I think this is a relatively decent episode, compared to most of the ones that came before it. The Traveler is an interesting concept and well portrayed. It’s somewhat interesting that Enterprise ended up in a part of space where thoughts became reality but that’s also really pretty hokey. I can’t not roll my eyes at Picard ordering the crew to think good thoughts.
Wes being a super genius with special attributes that’ll allow him to transcend into a newer level of humanity (as it seemed they were suggesting) is annoying but at least it gives him something to do. I guess. I was pretty thoroughly annoyed that Picard gave him the whole acting ensign thing at the time at this point I just don’t care anymore.
Oh, and Amadeus was a great movie. I’d never thought of it in the context of Wesley before. Now my brain hurts a little. I think Torie is ultimately right: Wesley just didn’t fit in the Star Trek universe.
It should be kept in mind that this episode has a bookend in what must surely be among TNG Trek’s worst episodes, “Journey’s End”. By this time Wesley Crusher had completely failed of his promise, proven an embarrassment to Starfleet Academy, and taken refuge in the kind of vague, sullen rebellion against responsibility that must be like balm to the soul of anyone who subconsciously realizes that he’s screwed up royally. Entranced by a bit of grotesquely stereotyped Hollywood Indian mummery (that turns out to be completely orchestrated phony even though the episode doesn’t seem to notice and treats it to the end like it was a real vision) Wesley obtrudes himself dangerously into a touchy diplomatic situation, stings Capt. Picard to well-justified wrath at Wesley’s foolish interference, and then performs the astounding feat of yelling “No!” when one of the Hollywood Indians gets pushed around. Yelling “No” apparently proves to The Traveller that Wesley’s ready to ascend to a higher plane of existence or something.
And, to cap it all, Wesley gives a little speech about how he realizes he was unhappy because he’d been living for others all this time and not thinking of himself–Wesley Crusher, who’d been given every chance and latitude in the world, had the functional equivalent of a military commission handed to him on a silver platter, and threw it all away, feels like he wasn’t permitted to be himself. This…this was our Mozart.
I know, I know. It’s unfair to judge an episode by what would eventually happen six years later. And by that time I’m sure that both the TNG staff and Wil Wheaton were thoroughly sick of the character; I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of sending him off in a manner that makes him look like a selfish, irresponsible loser was completely intentional. But…yeah. Wesley Crusher, super genius, turns out to be an even dopier version of Benjamin Braddock in the end.
@23 etomlins
I still feel bad that Wil Wheaton’s cameo in Nemesis was cut, if only because that brief scene would have been a better sendoff for his character, if I’m remembering that episode correctly.
I forgot to mention that I thought this episode had better direction than most. No specific examples that I can point to this long after watching it, but I had the general sense that shots were more carefully, and more interestingly, framed than what we’ve seen on TNG before, almost up there with some of the better Marc Daniels episodes of TOS. Now that I see the director was Rob Bowman, the improvement makes sense.
I also want to point out another inconsistency in the episode: most of the time, it seems that the hallucinations are only visible to the person experiencing them, but near the end, Picard reacts to the flames a crewmember is imagining. I suppose it’s possible this is evidence that the barrier between what is real and imagined is breaking down?
@24 Eugene
Then I guess it is not too absurd for Picard to order everyone to think good thoughts, else someone wonder if the hull might rupture. Or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man might pop by for a visit.*
*He shows up later with the name of Nagilum.
I always felt bad for Wil that his cameo in Nemesis was cut but then, considering what a plate of tripe that film turned out to be, I’m not sure I feel that bad. I can’t imagine that Wesley’s send off in the movie would have really that much better than what they did with Journey’s End.
And seriously, how cruel do you have to be to write that episode in the first place? It’s like a total dig at Wil for getting upset and bitter by how hated he was and how terribly abused his character was (reasonably so, especially considering his youth at the time) and pointing to him and laughing. I’m amazed that Wil can think fondly at all about his time on Star Trek after all that. If I were him, I’d be a lot less gracious.
In other discussions here we’ve (I’ve) discussed Star Trek’s (The franchise) places in the history and development of TV. With the exceptions of shows like Leave It To Beaver, Dennis The Menace, Lassie, Gentle Ben, Flipper and Lost In Space, child characters were usually second string characters in episodic TV up to and during the run of TNG. (I guess they still are. And, I’m ignoring Jonny Quest here because it was presented as a children’s show.) I’ll not go into the factors that made Lost In Space what it became but only point out that it became primarily Will Robinson, Dr. Smith and the Robot’s show. Smart kid. Supportive Doctor. Friendly robot. (Where else have we seen this? Any ideas?) But even here, we were still seeing the boy in his traditional science fiction role – the boy who was a center of attention while still being only the friend/sidekick/son of the leader of the group/team/expedition. Even the episodes that centered on the girls (The Haunted Lighthouse, My Friend, Mr. Nobody) kept this intact.
As the show was structured, TNG should have been expected to hold Wesley Crusher to that same position in the character dynamic. Maybe it was the producers, maybe it was the writers or maybe it was all of them, but anyway, I think they felt they couldn’t or shouldn’t after being influenced by Andrew “Ender” Wiggin. Ender’s Game came out in 1985 and was making waves throughout the realm of science fiction. Did the producers try to use Wesley to pull Ender’s audience over to Star Trek? After reading the other comments in this thread, I think it’s safe to say that Ender Wiggin would not have been a comfortable lead character in the Star Trek universe at that time. Did they try to make Wesley a Star Fleet friendly version of Ender? In trying, did they rip out everything that made Ender who he was and give us a hollow shell that no talented actor could fully flesh-out?
Just my thoughts from over here in left field and I’d like to add that I think Sea Quest gave us the best post-Ender smart kid TV character (so far, but he still was not a great character.) and I think BSG made a smart decision in dropping Boxey after one or two episodes.
I dispute that Ender Wiggin or any of the other children in Ender’s Game count as child characters. Sure, they’re all supposedly eight years old or whatever, but they’re given adult dialogue with the excuse that they’re all such colossal geniuses that they come across as adults.
@ 20 etomlins
Great writing is different–it requires not just competency and skill, which can be taught, but a creative originality that cannot be. Starfleet is not like that: the jobs available (of which there seem to be an infinite number, so your being good at something does not necessarily exclude anyone else from that position) require learned skills that I think the show goes out of its way to demonstrate just about anyone could be good at if they had both the interest and the support structure along the way. I tend to believe that “aptitude” doesn’t really exist–at least, not to the extent we think it does. Training, support, criticism, encouragement, and supervision have a lot more influence on one’s success in a career (well, that and temperament/patience).
In any case, I think DeepThought makes a good point about prestige. Aside from military hierarchy, the show doesn’t seem to give more weight to any one job over another. They are all important and everyone contributes in his or own way. The only thing that comes close is the occasional flashy scientist (like Kosinski, or later, in DS9, Dr. Zimmerman) who is generally so blustering in his arrogance that you can’t really look up to him, even if he’s really a genius. The technician is as important as the doctor, is as important as the communications officer, is as important as the bartender.
@29 Torie “The technician is as important as the doctor, is as important as the communications officer, is as important as the bartender”
I would think that this sort of human society is flat out impossible. We are creature, social creature, evoloved out of species that came before us and one of the things that is deeply incoded in us, as with all social creatures, is the ‘pecking order.’ Any human society is going to have a pecking order, and not just one but many different type and scales of pecking order. (I persoanlly think one of the reason fur the fantastic success of captialism is that it is a non-familial oriented pecking order. Get enough by any means, including criminal, and you become a person worthy of respect.) A society of perfect social equality and botherhood is not a human society.
I suppose it’s nice to know that chemistry, unlike writing, will require (or would have required) of me no “creative originality”. No difference between an R. B. Woodward and a lab monkey mutely tending a GC/MS–glad I didn’t try for a Ph.D. again.
Trek doesn’t give special wait to particular jobs because it doesn’t even bother depicting people with differing jobs. We see two sorts of people: Starfleet officers of high rank (and nobody of enlisted or noncommissioned rank outside of Chief O’Brien) and civilian scientists. Where are the blue collar workers or the skilled tradesmen? They don’t even exist in the show.
@ 30 bobsandiego
Oh I’m not arguing it’s realistic–just that the show goes out of its way to depict that kind of society. Very little of ST is, to my view, “realistic,” but that’s okay with me: the point is idealism, not realism.
@ 31 etomlins
I’m not sure how you managed to find an insult in what I said, but I am sorry for the offense anyway. In any case, I am not saying other jobs don’t require creativity, just that writing seems like a bad example of “aptitude” since I don’t think that’s the primary component to success as a writer.
They tried to show more “regular Joe” types on DS9 and put some class distinctions in there (like when Rom becomes a Starfleet technician), but I never felt it really worked in this world.
@29 Torie
Aside from military hierarchy, the show doesn’t seem to give more weight to any one job over another. They are all important and everyone contributes in his or own way.
Except in “Tapestry,” when Picard ends up as an assistant astrophysics officer in another life and it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t believe that job is as useful as command.
@32 Torie
They tried to show more “regular Joe” types on DS9 and put some class distinctions in there (like when Rom becomes a Starfleet technician), but I never felt it really worked in this world.
Didn’t they also attempt this in TNG’s “Lower Decks”?
Didn’t they also attempt this in TNG’s “Lower Decks”?
For me, their doing this made it a Very Special Episode, like The One About Ambiguous Gender, or The One Where It’s Totally a Realistic Matriarchy, et c.. I really wish they’d been careful to show that there were something other than the bridge crew on the ship, or that (like any other ship in history) there were always non-officers on the bridge: the helm, for instance, could (and probably should) have been handled by a PO usually. Engineers’ mates, or yeomen, or all kinds of possibilities. This goes back to TOS, though, to be fair to TNG.
For me, one of the big strengths of the BSG reboot was that they showed a classed society, and that this included within the military: the deck crews were clearly enlisted personnel, and they had separate and different lives from those of the officers.
The thing is, in the universe they tried to paint in Star Trek with the no need for money, everyone is equal, all striving to better themselves, etc. etc. there isn’t really any room for the guy who picks up the trash or the dishwasher at the fancy restaurants in the star base.
Every now and then they’d point out a service sort of person but they’d either gloss over it real quickly or they’d make it someone who really loves to cut hair or tend bar.
Then creative pursuits, like writing or art or music is something that it seems everyone can kind of do when they have time as a sort of hobby but very few actually build careers on. But they can’t even stick to their own rules. They live in a society without money but gold-pressed latinum (sp?) eventually becomes really important to galactic commerce and everyone works to get along but you still have the fringe groups like the Maquis and common (but really smart) criminals like Vash.
You can certainly never accuse Star Trek of consistency.
@ 33 Eugene
But it’s clear in “Tapestry” that that’s the life THAT Picard would have chosen. The Picard we know and love isn’t comfortable in it, but the other Picard would be.
And man, you really love that “Lower Decks” episode, don’t you.
@ 34 CaitieCat
BSG is a different situation, though: they’re mostly people thrown into their positions by desperation, and there’s a whole plot arc about how a long-term “emergency” has essentially created a caste system in which no one can change careers or advance above his or her station. Not to mention the money aspect–I distinctly remember Callie talking about how she only joined the fleet to pay for dental school. That’d never happen in ST.
@ 35 Toryx
I always assumed the implication is that machines do all of that work (trash, dishes, cleaning), thus freeing people to pursue only self-satisfying careers. They’re also in a post-scarcity society where they can simply manifest anything they want.
The latinum thing was created later to try and give the Ferengi some sort of motivation, and none of the Starfleet folk seem to trade in it. Its use is mainly restricted to black market trade of goods (which is weird, because if you can only use latinum to say, buy banned weapons, what are you going to do with all the latinum you just made other than buy more illegal arms?). I never felt it worked. You can’t have some people use money and some people not.
I’ve been thinking about this discussion of money or no money and I’m saying this from the perspective of having watched the whole arc of Star Trek. I don’t think it’s that no one in the United Federation of Planets uses money. I think it’s that Star Fleet, the administrative components of the UFP and maybe even the elected officials are all operating on a unified electronic transfer system. I’m fairly sure I heard someone in TNG make a comment about ‘replicator credits’ and I’m sure they were mentioned during DS9 and Voyager. Transporter credits were also mentioned during DS9. Transactions are probably carried out trough the communicator insignia. Apparently duty related transport would not be charged against your account and duty related replicator use the same.
While the examples I have cited came later than this point in TNG, We do by this time already have a clue that all of the UFP is not one big happy utopia. If it was then how would explain the rape gangs on Yar’s home planet? (I know we have feelings about that story point but it does stand as a clue.) And the use of latinum at Quark’s was because Gold Pressed Latinum was the currency standard of Ferenginar and since the Ferengi conducted a lot of trade in that region it was a common currency on the station. And you can be sure that Quark’s transaction registers were able to interact with Star Fleet’s credit system as well as the credit systems for the home worlds of most of the regular customers.
@Ludon #37
Sources are a little conflicting/inconsistent. The writers made some goofs where they did some stuff that conflicted with the explicitly stated idea that humans don’t use money any more, but overall you can justify most of the money use as interactions with outsiders.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the nominal “federation credit” (and of course, the phrase “Wikipedia has an interesting article” being printed on the Internet has no doubt resulted in it immediately being listed for Speedy Deletion…)
As for Yar’s planet, at least per Memory Alpha, it was a failed colony that was splitting away from the Federation proper right around the time of her birth. I don’t remember anybody getting into any of that in the canonical TV show, but I’m pretty sure the writers could finesse around it if needed — though ultimately, I don’t think anybody thought about it enough to make it really consistent with the rest of the show’s social vision.
#32, Torie: I guess I deserved that. I can offer up only a weak excuse and a weak explanation of where I was coming from. The excuse is that I wrote what I did during the course of a shambolic set of tedious experiments (of the sort that can particularly infuriating, in which moments of actions are diluted with long stretches of waiting) and I was in poor temper. But I must also explain–forgive me, but even after looking back at what had prompted my immoderate response I can’t shake the impression that you’re saying that there’s something special about writing that isn’t special about anything else, especially when you go on to disparage the notion of “aptitude”. Training, support, criticism, and so forth–it would be nice to believe that these controllable factors, rather than any intangible and ineluctable possession (or lack) of inborn talent, are all that determines what color of collar we wear. I’d like to believe it myself, not merely on my own account but because I’ve wanted to think that I could get algebra–or basic chemistry or even calculus–into anyone’s head if I only could master the right way of doing it. But I’ve failed too many times at getting friends to even start grasping ideas that I don’t even have any clear memory of struggling with. What else can I believe but that some one of us lacks an essential aptitude; either my friend lacks the gift for mathematics or I lack the gift for teaching it. One or the other. One of us will never overcome the deficit.
And you did say, rather baldly, that great writing was “different” from the norm, the norm governed solely by training, support, and so forth. It’s not entirely clear to me from the context whether you mean that most real-life professions require only training &c. or you mean rather that it’s the NuTrek universe which implies that all that’s needed is training &c. Even now it honestly seems to me that you are saying the former, in which case I dispute the contention that creativity is required only of great writing and not other professions.
@ 28 etomlins
No worries. My roommate’s a scientist so I know how it goes. :)
To explain (and obviously these are my personal views informed by my personal experiences): I think aptitude, or inborn talent, isn’t really that essential to most jobs, and is certainly not very essential to one’s happiness in said job. You mention aspiring writers desperate to be good at something they haven’t got the talent for, but I also think of people who are very talented in something and just take no joy in it. So I don’t think that aptitude or talent should be the deciding factor in choosing a profession.
Part 2. I feel that ST believes in this, too, because as I said before, it doesn’t really rely on genius or talent as much as competency and passion (see also: creativity, as I think one can only think creatively about solutions if they’re passionate about the problems themselves). The only real genius I can think of on any show is Bashir, for reasons that become clear later, and as for everyone else: they pursued what they loved and had enough of the other things fall into place to be good at it. This world doesn’t seem to acknowledge any kind of person who is passionate about something and unable to do it competently, which may either be active fantasy or, and this is my personal view, an illustration that things like training, support, and personal interest have a lot more to do with one’s successes than just “he’s naturally good at it”. You don’t need aptitude. I’m not saying there aren’t geniuses, just that it’s not a requirement. There’s an idealism there that people can be good at anything if they just had the right tools and the right people and the right education and the right training. Granted, there’s an implicit assumption that if you have an extraordinary talent for warp engines you’re going to be an engineer, but it doesn’t really have to be a given. We learn that Sisko is a fantastic cook, thanks to his dad, but that’s not really what he wants to pursue.
As for writing: I just don’t see that as relevant to this discussion, mainly because for most people (including so-called successful, i.e. published, writers–hi, Eugene!) writing is an intense, devoted hobby–not a profession. What I was trying to explain–poorly–is that “aptitude” to me doesn’t really apply there, because you can be naturally talented at writing gorgeous prose and not be able to tell a compelling story if Gilgamesh himself sat in your lap purring. Creativity is too general a word for what I was trying to say and I regret using it.
So really, I’m not saying anything about creativity in other professions, if that makes any sense.