In about 1987, after I got my aduklt job, I bought my rural parents the largest TV antenna Radio Shack had, and a 40’ pole, and a rotator, and an amplifier. When we got that sucker up, not only was the regular reception improved, but we could get Milwaukee stations.
The antenna was actually a selling point when they moved off the farm.
Really? I love that episode. Sure, it’s a “Wesley saves the day” ep, but it’d been a long while since we’d had one of those, and he doesn’t do it because he’s some wunderkind, but because he’s swooning too much over a girl. And since he’s just visiting, and not important staff anymore, he just isn’t made a priority.
I found it a nice “zombie mind control” episode, with all the right beats. The girlfriend is nice enough to want to get to know, and I bought their chemistry. The reveal with her getting turned is great, as is the reveal they repaired Data. Or the reveal that Picard had already been taken. It’s exactly the sort of thing that they would have screwed up previously.
Having him save the day too often in season 1? Yeah, that sucks. That traveler stuff? Bleh. And I guess I’m okay with them wrapping it up once they set it up (having him actually be “special”), but his ascension wasn’t great either.
But The Game? That was fun and I’m surprised people didn’t like it. There are so many worse episodes, where they just couldn’t get the plotting and pacing down.
I agree:
Yup. I can’t get past the fact that, in a ship complement of over 1000, with a large number of non-humans, that everyone is affected the same by the game. It’s invasion of the body snatchers, but not as well done.
I mean, Worf playing a game and getting hooked/brainwiped? Mott? Guinan? Deanna? Nope, not buying it.
I can see this with Scrappy Doo or the Ewoks or Cousin Oliver. Established fans might just be upset because they wanted things to stay the same and not see any new characters being introduced.
But how would it apply to Wesley Crusher? He was right there in the pilot episode. Nobody can argue that he “changed” the show.
You can if you interpret “show” to refer to Star Trek as a franchise, and not just the The Next Generation as an individual series.
I think the worst Wes-centric episode didn’t involve saving the ship at all. And that travesty is Justice. It’s just bad on so many levels, none of which are the fault of Wil Wheaton, or even Wes.
My kids are Gen Z and mostly watched Scooby-Doo on VHS. They’ve probably seen as many or more episodes as I have. My daughter has a friend with a Scooby related podcast (called Heavy Meddle; my daughter was a guest on the Creeper episode), so she watched some Scrappy episodes and said they weren’t as good. Neither has any particular hatred toward him, though.
They added Scrappy because their creative team had started running out of ideas and the formula was getting stale. But then Scooby Doo shows have been consistently coming out for the past 20 years, ever since the live action movies revived interest in the IP, and the formula has been revitalised in multiple ways without resorting to adding deliberately annoying characters. They didn’t have to retool the show in the 70s, they just needed new blood in the creative team.
The formula was born stale. The show was media matzah. Nothing wrong with matzah, but fresh is not its feature.
We’re talking about people who are upset when a favorite series changes. People like this wouldn’t be upset about Wesley specifically. They’d be upset about Picard not being Kirk and Data not being Spock and Crusher not being McCoy and Worf and Geordi and Troi not being Sulu and Chekov and Uhura.
Are we? I was ~14 or so when TNG came out, and I remember the Wesley hate, and a bit of grumbling about a Klingon being on the bridge of the Enterprise that (unlike the Wesley hate) mostly stopped once the show aired and we got to know Worf as a character. I don’t recall any widespread complaints about Picard, Data, or the rest of the crew.
Yes, that was my point.
See, I don’t find that hard to believe at all. It’s a device made by aliens for this exact purpose, and all the aliens are very very similar, with brains that seem to work in largely the same way. I have no problem believing any minor variations could be handled.
I guess I can see an issue with Worf trying it before being brainwashed. He’s not into fun. But we’ve seen him be pushed into it before. Plus he follows orders, including orders to relax.
Deanna? No way she doesn’t try it. Mott would have to be in on this new thing everyone is talking about. Guinan? Well, if they get her early enough before she notices anything weird. She loves games. And the whole idea is that they seem to have moved quickly through all the important people.
I can see how it could have gone wrong with a couple of those, but I don’t find the idea that it works for all species on board (besides Data) to be a problem at all.
It’s explained in a deleted scene where O’Brien tells him the game is better than prune juice.
Wesley fits because the people in question were the ones who grew up loving Star Trek TOS.
Wesley is not a “cousin Oliver”. However, he does tap in just a little to some of the same dynamic.
Specifically, he’s not a character brought in to extend the life of a show beyond the duration of the original characters fitting the concept. Child-oriented concept shows inherently transform as the cast, thus characters, get older. These shows have a baked-in lifespan. Shoe-horning in a new young character to extend their lives is clumsy attempt to milk the show’s popularity when the original cute children grow up.
Wesley is supposed to be more of a nod to the fact that the Enterprise is loaded with families.
But where he does sort of fit in is that he a kid given authority of adults, and at times is smarter than trained adults in their area of expertise.
That’s what annoyed people most. If he had been Beverly’s son who hung around the officers because he didn’t fit in with the other kids, maybe got to do a few simple tasks, then it wouldn’t have grated so much.
I liked Wesley, and even I thought it was overdone.
So that’s how Wesley and Scrappy Doo are similar.
But still no mention of Pavel Chekov, who was clearly added in the second season to appeal to young audiences, per Roddenberry
Roddenberry had previously mentioned, in a memo to his casting director, a desire to have someone reminiscent of one of The Beatles or Monkees on the show.
Is Chekov a Cousin Oliver or a Scrappy-Doo?
Neither, he worked.
Also he was still an adult.