5-19. The First Duty

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.

Previous Episode: Cause and Effect

Next Episode: Cost of Living

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1-19. Coming of Age

THE PLOT

Wesley is beamed down to the planet Relva, where he will compete against three other brilliant young men and women for a single open slot in Starfleet Academy. Wesley quickly makes friends with the friendly alien Mordock (John Putch) and the appealingly insecure Oliana (Estee Chandler), and does well with his tests. But he finds himself increasingly nervous about the final test: The Psych Test.

Back on the ship, Picard has a visit from his old friend, Admiral Quinn (Ward Costello). Speaking privately to Picard, Quinn insists on Picard's cooperation with an investigation of his ship by Remmick (Robert Schenkkan). He will not say what the investigation is about, save that Remmick is looking for "problems." As it becomes ever clearer that Remmick is specifically investigating Picard, the captain is left to wonder exactly why his old friend seems to have targeted him for a witch hunt!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: Tries to accommodate Remmick's investigation... to a point.  Once it becomes clear that what was declared necessary is descending into a hysterical witch hunt, he stands up for both himself and his crew.  When Remmick gets in his way during a crisis, he loses patience and insists the man get out of his way.When Remmick begins to sound outright paranoid in his accusations, Picard declares his intention to shut down "this charade."

Riker: Upset at having to put up with Remmick's investigation, and the disruption it creates among the bridge crew. He feels that as first officer, he should know exactly what is being investigated, and worries that it might be him under the microscope - a worry Picard can neither confirm nor deny. When he discovers that it is actually Picard being investigated, he if anything becomes angrier.

Wesley: A Wesley-centric episode. Though I normally file Wesley bits under "Shut Up, Wesley," it isn't actually warranted this time... because for possibly the first time ever, there's a full episode that actually makes good use of him! The usual points are made about Wesley's brilliance. But since he is competing against two other prodigies, and one non-prodigy who works very hard to keep on their level, we get to see Wesley genuinely insecure, particularly as he tries to prepare for the dreaded Psych Test. For a change, we are presented with a genuinely nice (rather than smug or cloying) young man, who tries to help others without calling attention to helping them. Writer Sandy Fries also makes use of character background not even mentioned since Encounter at Farpoint, by bringing up the death of Wesley's father and hinting at the circumstances of that death. The result is an episode in which Wesley is a genuinely well-written character, for the first time ever! Wil Wheaton delivers a good performance, likely thankful to actually have something to play that isn't insufferable for a change.

Data: Though not a particularly Data-heavy episode, he does get one great scene, when interrogated by Remmick. "There is nothing wrong with Captain Picard, there is nothing wrong with the ship's logs, so there must be something wrong with your original assumption." In context, with pitch-perfect delivery by Brent Spiner (and a satisfying reaction from Remmick), it's a moment geared to earn applause, and deserving of it.

Annoying Space Bureaucrat of the Week: Robert Schenkkan is Commander Remmick of the Inspector General's office, assigned with the task of finding something "wrong" with Picard's command and his logs. Schenkkan does a good job of making Remmick consistently aggravating, without actually crossing the line into being ludicrously odious. There's a nicely human bit mixed into the scene in which Picard talks a boy who has stolen a shuttle out of danger. Remmick, who starts the scene (and finishes it) by getting in Picard's way, nevertheless both smiles and applauds genuinely when Picard's maneuver succeeds in saving the boy. Moments like this help to make the ending more convincing than it might have been. He's a "villain" because he is opposed to the characters we have been watching and growing to like, not because he is Snidely Whiplash, back from the North.

Cute Student Space Babe of the Week: Estee Chandler is Oliana, the most human of the four students competing for the one open slot in Starfleet Academy. She is made sympathetic in that, unlike the other three genius candidates, we see that she is someone who actually has to struggle very hard for the right answers. Chandler's performance is somewhat flat, though not to an extent in any way unforgivable for a young actress. She is genuinely appealing, and it's easy to see why Wesley is so pleased when she dubs him "cute."


THOUGHTS

A Wesley-centric episode should be reason to run for the hills. The bulk of the season has demonstrated Wesley to be both the worst-scripted and, with all sympathy to Wil Wheaton, generally the worst-acted character on the program. Previous Wesley-centered episodes, particularly When the Bough Breaks and Justice, have been among the show's worst... and, given Next Generation's rather weak first season, "worst" means "really, really bad."

Against all odds, Coming of Age is a genuinely good episode.

The credit for that largely rests with the script, very well-crafted by Sandy Fries. Though not the first Next Generation episode to utilize an A Plot/B Plot structure, it is the first to really use it well. Given that the Picard plot is basically set-up for Conspiracy, and the Wesley plot is just a series of fairly transparent tests, neither story on its own is up to carrying an episode. Cutting between the beats of each story creates an enjoyable and satisfying episode.

Fries' script allows both plots to develop at a pace that's neither too slow nor too rushed, and the script knows, on each cut to the other plot, to allow enough time to get absorbed in that plot strand before cutting back to the other. While the plots are not actually interconnected, Fries finds ways to allow the themes of one plot to echo in the other plot. Note the line in the Academy plot, "Everything is a test, and not all tests are announced." It basically is the Picard plot in a nutshell.

The script makes good use of almost all of the characters, with only Troi and (as usual) Tasha lacking a single strong scene. Worf gets one of his best scenes to date, as he talks with Wesley about facing his greatest fear, and how that fear "is still (his) enemy." I could quibble with Dr. Crusher, Worf, and Data all getting similar verbal smackdowns of the Annoying Space Bureaucrat, and I could observe how obvious the nature of Wesley's Psych Test was... but the scenes are snappy and superficially entertaining, so I won't carp too much.

The episode ends with the plot elements of the individual episode satisfactorily tied up, but with some enjoyably ominous overtones left for a later payoff. This episode clearly sees the production team looking forward to the season finale. It's also far more confident in both storytelling and production than most of the series' previous entries. The show might still be lurching back and forth between good and bad episodes - but it's finding its voice, and its characters (most of them, at least) are finding their identities.

It doesn't entirely make up for a mediocre season, but at least it promises much better things for the future.


Rating: 7/10.

Previous Episode: Home Soil
Next Episode: Heart of Glory


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