The Traveler!
Susie and I were watching the utter genius that is ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘ (1978) and who should show up as ‘Brute’ but Carel Struycken? And I thought of ST:TNG … and for a moment I confused him with the Traveler … then I remembered, he was Troi’s mother’s luggage lifter, so to speak.
But I digress.
The Traveler.
I never hated Wesley as much as others did, perhaps because I was 12 when TNG began and Wesley seemed clearly to be modelled as a Mary Sue cum audience surrogate for me. And I love how a ‘mythology’ of sorts is started here … Wesley, a fate, and so on … but like so many potential arcs, this one remains halfbaked … and only shows up a couple more times throughout the series.
But you know what is awesome about Wesley? His sweaters. Sure, the Traveler was the ‘Alien in the Striped Pajamas,’ but episode to episode Wesley has amazing 80s sweaters. He gets an episode here whether ‘the adults’ (Riker & Picard both) ignore him until it’s nearly too late, where he has dazzling techno-babble talk with a soulmate of sorts, and so on. And by the end he is promoted to Acting Ensign.
Emphasis on … acting! (cue: Jon Lovitz)
And this might be the first TNG episode that does not feel like it’s a recycled TOS episode … I hate to say that it’s here where TNG starts coming into its own, because there are going to be more misteps along the way, but ‘all’ the mythology here is TNG-centric (Picard’s ancestor, Yar’s rape gang, the Wesley stuff, going far beyond the Milky Way and then the known universe). This is the second episode in a row to suggest the boundaries of the previous Star Trek fictional universe and suggest moving beyond them.
And, finally, it’s worth noting, I think, that while Geordi has always been ‘main crew’ and Burton a main cast member, the show still doesn’t know what to do with him except use him as Data’s emo straight-man … he’s still not head (or even any kind of) engineer.
Links:
- Where No One Has Gone Before (Wikipedia)
- Where No One Has Gone Before (Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki)
- Where No ONe Has Gone Before (A.V. Club)
