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| Wesley's flight group faces an inquiry. |
THE PLOT
The Enterprise is approaching Earth when Picard is informed of a flight accident involving Wesley Crusher and his Starfleet Academy flight group. Wesley is fine, but one of the cadets - Joshua Albert, son of Lt. Commander Albert (Ed Lauter) - was killed.
Initially, the incident seems very clear-cut. Nicholas Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill), the group leader, testifies that they were practicing standard formations when Josh attempted to pull out of formation too quickly, resulting in the collision. But when a satellite image is displayed, showing the squadron in a completely different configuration just prior to the crash, it becomes clear that there is much more to this story than the flight group is telling...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Is able to empathize with Wesley at the end, apparently because he had some incident of his own during his Academy days. Boothby (Ray Walston), the gardener he previously told Wesley to befriend, helped him through that - help he didn't appreciate at the time, but now recognizes as vital. He echoes Boothby's own words to him when talking to Wesley at the end: "You knew what you had to do. I just made sure that you listened to yourself." I hope Picard's past indiscretion is revisited at some point, as I suspect that would itself make for an interesting story.
Wesley: Is torn between two father figures as well as between two duties: Picard and Locarno, loyalty to the truth vs. loyalty to his friends. That he ends up picking Picard and the truth is inevitable, but it doesn't make the character's dilemma any less absorbing. The script plays to Wil Wheaton's strengths as an actor. I particularly appreciate how well the script uses Wesley's silence. He does a lot of listening - to Picard, to Locarno, to the dead man's father - and does as little talking as he can get away with. Given that Wesley has never been exactly taciturn, his silence itself becomes a demonstration of his shame, and it's clear from the looks exchanged between Picard and Dr. Crusher at the start that this does not go unnoticed.
Tom Paris: OK, so it's Nicholas Locarno." But this is basically the character who would become Tom Paris in Voyager, with the name change and a few fudges to the backstory existing presumably to keep Paramount from having to pay royalties. Something I'd be more indignant about if I wasn't of the opinion that characters created for an ongoing series should belong to the series in any case.
Whatever the character name, Robert Duncan McNeill's Trek debut is a good one. Locarno is clearly the villain of the piece. His personal ambition created the incident, and he uses his influence over his flight group to cover up the truth even at the cost of the dead man's good name. Still, he doesn't come across as a pure villain. He prioritizes the good of the team over the truth - and he makes good on that at the end, protecting the team as a whole at the cost of his own career. McNeill is suitably charismatic, and it's easy to see why he was brought in as a regular when Voyager was launched a few years later.
THOUGHTS
Between the impressive guest cast and the co-writing credit for Ronald D. Moore, it's no surprise that The First Duty is a particularly good episode. More than that, this may well be the best Wesley-centric episode of the entire series - a bit ironic, as it comes more than a year after Wesley ceased to be a series regular!
The First Duty is a character-based episode. There's no real external threat. The major conflict is the internal one Wesley faces. That conflict is personified by Picard and Locarno, but even then it's kept mostly low-key. Locarno makes impassioned speeches about the good of the group, while Picard makes a similarly impassioned speech about duty to the truth, but in the end the story comes down to Wesley and the decision he must make.
The surrogate father/son relationship between Picard and Wesley was something The Game didn't have time to address, so it's good to see that followed up on here. Picard's frank words for Wesley, both in his ready room and at the episode's end, are well-chosen. Picard doesn't try to sugar-coat Wesley's situation. He freely acknolwedges that the cadet has some "hard times" ahead of him, and that Wesley should feel bad about what happened. He's supportive of Wesley's decision, but his words at the end offer the young man hope, not absolution. These scenes see Patrick Stewart and Wil Wheaton in excellent form, and are highlights of the episode.
The First Duty is a change of pace for the series, and a successful one. It's a distinctive episode within the Trek canon, and it's a carefully-written script that works extremely well. For the character of Welsey and for the actor Wil Wheaton, the episode stands as a vindication, proof that the problem with Wesley in the early seasons truly did lie in the writing. Had he received scripts of this caliber at the time, then the character would be far better remembered than is generally the case.
Overall Rating: 9/10.
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