Then we shall go to our own thread to hate on Deanna.
But what is that truth? How was Wesley a success? You suggest that “he was successful just by being smart.” If he solved problems more easily than the rest of the Enterprise crew, what was he succeeding at? The rest of them were there on a mission: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life” etc. etc. Wesley wasn’t. He was just there by accident. As introduced on the series, he was just a kid who happened to be ON the Enterprise.
To someone who tuned into the show expecting to see the crew of the Enterprise solve problems and save the day, it was profoundly off-putting to have the show constantly shift focus to the one character who had nothing to do with their mission. There was no reason for him to be there. He didn’t actually do anything that any other character couldn’t plausibly have done, so why not just have Geordi or Riker do that stuff instead?
Contrast this with the other “exceptional” characters from the various series-- Spock; Scotty; Data; Geordi; Bashir; The Doctor-- all could be relied upon to come up with miraculous solutions in the nick of time. Why were they not resented? Data, Bashir, and The Doctor were all enormously intelligent without having “earned it”-- they were designed that way. Why were they not singled out like Wesley was? Because they were all members of the crew. They were supposed to be there. Wesley wasn’t.
All your points-- age, work, history, consequences-- serve to emphasize the big distinction between Wesley and the other characters: he was not a member of the Enterprise crew. If the character had been introduced as a young ensign from the start, with the responsibilities expected of an adult member of Starfleet, his presence would probably have been much more tolerated.
In TOS, the Enterprise occasionally encountered kids with amazing skills and abilities. Kirk understood the proper course of action: get the little bastards off the ship by any means possible.
Just out of curiosity, what “uncomfortable truth” do you think hatred of Troi reveals?
Well said, Sir, well said.
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Do you hate Wesley Crusher? No. He was pretty cute in a skinny, wimpy sort of way. I woulda.
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Are you male or female ? Male
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Do you consider yourself to be a successful person? (Successful based purely on your own standards, not anyone else’s) Sure
Hey, you can never have too many teenage boys in the media…
1. Do you hate Wesley Crusher? No.
2. Are you male or female? Male.
3. Do you consider yourself to be a successful person? Yes.
I just want to add that, entirely coincidentally, I just watched Journey’s End for the first time… and man, did it suck. That was abysmal.
While I thought Code of Honor was well-executed, in a way it ruined Wesley’s character. But Journey’s End was an insult even to that ruined character. I thought the kid was totally likeable when he was earnest, smart, and eager to please… then he just devolved into this whole convoluted mess after he attended the academy. Him leaving Starflleet makes no sense at all. The kid was practically born to be in Starfleet, you can tell from the beginning. They’re asking us to forget 6 episodes of that kid’s only dream being to be a part of the Federation. Not to mention he just walked away from a conflict that moments before he’d been insisting was morally wrong to ignore.
Major copout.
Seriously, that was an awful episode. I’m not often very critical of Star Trek as a whole… but yeesh. What a way to go out.
No no no. They don’t even use money anymore. Everybody has exactly the job they wanted, and nobody has any material needs. People work just 'cause it’s fun and fulfilling. It is in this world where Wesley fits just fine. The traveller too.
I don’t hate Wesley. I hate the way the writers used him. It’s not about his success, or mine, it’s about the dramatic needs of the script: audiences will happily swallow a big lie, but choke on a tiny fib. This is especially true of science fiction, I think, and Wesley was the little fib people choked on.
Spaceship? Faster-than-light travel? Teleporters? Super-sensors? Communicators? Psychics? Sure.
A brainy kid who can do it all, who never gets punished? Get real!
We laugh at Wesley for the same reason we laugh at the highly improbable stunts in a Bond movie. We can believe that James Bond has a nuclear fallout shelter built into the heel of his shoe and can achieve escape velocity with his hat, but when his car flips over twice and keeps driving, we scoff.
It’s called the willing suspension of disbelief, and frankly Wesley was written to do things easily that the rest of the show was trying to make look hard. Gosh, captain, why don’t I rig up the warp drive with this schoolwork experiment I was tinkering on in my spare time? Gosh, Wesley, why don’t you go into the holodeck and ask it to make you some fans?
(bolding mine)
This is a really convenient clause for your theory. Wes was not my peer as I’m much older than him. So your setup is that I should enjoy him as the student. But to rationalize your theory of my irrational hatred of the character, you go ahead and change that I would compare my childhood to his. Why wouldn’t I compare myself to characters my own age, find myself lacking, and irrationally hate them? I should do that, according to your theory but I don’t.
Again, it was a concentration of episodes, early in the series, that set Wes up for this. The fact, that if you considered the episodes as only a small fraction of the whole, is irrelevant. When the episodes occurred, there hadn’t been 178 episodes. We started hating Wes when there had only been a single season, less than a single season. Are you saying we should have waited until after the entire run of the show to make our decision?
I think, you theory is based upon the idea that you like Wes. And you’ve listened to people running your favorite character down and you’ve decided that anyone who disagrees with you must be deficient in some fashion. Sorry but Wesley Crusher does not make me feel inadequate as a man.
- Not really.
- Female.
- Dunno.
I don’t think I disliked Wesley any more than I disliked the entire show. I thought the whole show was poorly conceived and executed, with so many Chekhovian gun moments that it drove me insane.
Eureka follows the same damned line. Only the Wesley in Eureka is Henry. Grr.
Interesting distinction between Wesley and the Crew. I shall think about this. Hell, this is complex enough I could ask a mod to move it to GD.
**But **If your points explain the very general dislike of the character Wesley I wonder why it wasn’t raised till post 82.
If it’s the plot and scripts people dislike why do they not yell about the writers instead of giving Wesley a hard time ?
Did you mean to say “what “uncomfortable truth” do you think hatred of Wesley reveals?” Because I like Troi. Boobies are great.
I shall refine my theory to say that I think some people are sitting watching Wesley and thinking “Look at that. He’s got a job others on that ship would kill for. That I would love to have. The bastard didn’t even go to the academy to earn it. I’m smart like him and I’ve had no such lucky breaks.”
Wes is by no means my favorite character. I have no ulterior motive for this theory and no reason to defend him. I just spotted a pattern and wanted to explore it. Picards speech (Ironically to Wesley) about the first duty being to the Truth effected me deeply at the time I first saw it. That’s all this is about.
Your point about the first season is very fair, but doesn’t it also follow that the dislike of Wesley would fade later as more seasons were made? I’m not sure because I’ve never experienced the dislike so many people have, and so far I’ve yet to find a solid cause of the bad feelings.
If you check out my diagram above, only 13 out of 34 respondents said they disliked Wesley so it’d be very wrong to say that my theory could apply to everyone, even if it does hold true for some people.
Perhaps I should have worded it “Some people who disliked and still hold a dislike, for the character Wesley Crusher had their feelings effected by uncomfortable reminders of elements of themselves they were unhappy with”
My answers as well.
Well I kind of did say it back in post 37: " I have great sympathy for the child prodigy character in general. But such a character doesn’t belong on a starship."
Others have also said much the same thing throughout the thread:
WhyNot: " I find (found) Wesley Crusher irritating and bizarrely out of place,"
Alessan: “the wrongheaded belief on behalf of the ST producers that the starship Enterprise needs a teenage boy onboard.”
Bryan Ekers: “Even his presence in many of the episodes was a contrivance, undercutting the plausibility of the show.”
Larry Borgia: “the idea of a teen on the bridge, no matter how gifted, is just dumb.”
RickJay: “he doesn’t belong on the bridge. He CAN’T.”
Again, throughout this thread people have also been blaming the writers. Look again and see how many times this is mentioned, starting with posts 4 and 5:
Wile E.: “I do not hate Wesley Crusher, he’s a fictional character. I do however extremely dislike what the writers of TNG did with his character.”
WhyNot: “I also think the writers gave him absolutely nothing worthwhile to work with, so I didn’t really blame him all that much.”
No, since others had mentioned that Troi was also hateable, I thought you might have a theory for that as well. Something about people being jealous of Troi because she’s psychic and successful and gets to sit by Picard and everything, not because the character was poorly written and insufferably vague and annoying.
Well, now it seems like you’re suggesting that he wasn’t disliked because he was appreciated for his intelligence, but rather because he was lucky. Yes, he was extraordinarily lucky to be on board the Enterprise; he was lucky to have just the right science project on hand to save the day; he was lucky that the entire crew of the Enterprise was willing to drop everything to save his ass whenever he got into trouble. Wesley was quite lucky indeed, there is no arguing that point. He was way too lucky to be remotely plausible as a character. It’s as if the star of a crime drama let his 12-year old kid tag along with him on drug busts and shootouts and such.
I’m sure that kids were probably supposed to identify with Wesley: “Hey, here’s a smart nerdy kid who magically gets to live on the Enterprise and save the day! Isn’t that cool, little Trekkie? It’s just like all the fan fiction you’ve been writing!” But the thing is, I watched TNG because I liked the original series, and wanted to see more adventures like that. And there was no miracle kid in the original series. Whenever Kirk, Spock et al. ran into a miracle kid, they blew him out the airlock. And this was good, because miracle kids don’t belong on the Enterprise.
Well until about four hours ago I would have held Troi up as a counter example to your point.
I would have said “Troi was every bit as badly used by the writers, and as a character she was often laughable , but people don’t hate her”
Of course now there’s a thread tearing into her worse than a pack of drunken Rikers I don’t think it’d be fair to say that.
This whole discussion puts me in mind of another TNG character: Barclay. He was sort of the anti-Wesley in many ways. A bona fide Enterprise crewman, he was the first character written as a genuinely flawed personality. Even Wesley made fun of him, which is pretty harsh; when Wesley feels free to mock you, you know you’re at the bottom of the pecking order. He had ongoing therapy issues; he was regarded as weird by the rest of the crew; he was plagued with self-doubt and neuroses and phobias and hypochondria. He managed to save the day a couple times, but it didn’t seem to help his insecurity much. He even wrote embarrassing fan fiction in his spare time. If Wesley was a “Mary Sue” type character, the wunderkind who effortlessly overshadowed the crew with his genius, Barclay was more like a stereotypical nerdish Trekkie who had somehow managed to wind up on the Enterprise.
If I were going to resent anyone on board the Enterprise, it ought to be Barclay: he’s as big a goof as I am, and yet he gets to hang with Geordi and Picard! He gets to program his own porn on the holodeck! He has access to a phaser and Wesley Crusher! I’m not saying he WOULD, but he has that opportunity… At the very least he could program a holoWesley for target practice. If he wanted to, that is.
Although as portrayed by Dwight Schultz, Barclay could also be impressively annoying, he wasn’t quite as out of place on the ship as Wesley. Even in the future, it’s probably still possible to hold a position of responsibility and yet also be a colossal dork. And as the one character who actually needed counseling, he also gave Troi a reason to exist.
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Well, Commodore wasn’t a Commodore in the RN Naval usage, and I presume the USN. QUOTE]
I believe that Commodore was in U. S. Navy usage at the time. (exceeding minor point, not worthy of the trons I’m sure)
Nope. It was used temporarily during World War II but had fallen into disuse again by the Korean War.
And was also a rank again in the mid-1980s at least. At that time, the Navy was attempting to get away from two ranks of Rear Admiral (one lower half and one upper half) and tried Commodore for a time, albeit a very short time.
The RN Commodore was a Captain in temporary command of a group of ships, as I presume was his USN counterpart. The Trek Commodore was apparently a permanent rank more like a rear admiral as I understand it.