That is, Wesley from Star Trek: TNG or Albert from Little House on the Prairie?
I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with Albert by default, since I’ve never watched much Star Trek: TNG. You remember what a shit Albert was, stealing a cancer patient’s morphine to feed his drug habit and burning down the blind school, killing Mary’s baby and Mrs. Garvey.
So, who’s worse? I take it Wesley also did some bad shit from a comment in another thread? Or did I misread?
I was thinking of including Adric from Doctor Who in this discussion, but he was really more useless than dangerous.
Wesley was an annoyance, but not much of a danger (at least not to the Enterprise). If anything his character is annoying BECAUSE he kept saving the ship in a “I’m so young and so smart” smarmy way.
Agree with sachertorte: Wesley was annoying (to some…not as much to me, but I was young then, too) because he kept saving the day when the more highly qualified adult officers of the ship could not. He was portrayed as some sort of uber-genius kid.
Wesley never would have stolen anything or ever had a drug habit. He was able to resist the charms of that addictive game that everyone, even Captain Picard, was playing in the episode with Ashley Judd, and in one episode where he is almost put to death for stepping on some flowers on a “pleasure planet”, he utters the famous words" “I’m with Starfleet. We don’t lie.”
Okay, I misunderstood. Who was more annoying then?
I found Albert annoying because he crowded out the Ingalls girls who rightfully should’ve been the center of the show. Sort of like how Elmo crowded out the far superior Grover on Sesame Street. I mean, Albert was totally made up, and didn’t even belong on the show. But we can’t have that many women characters taking up precious airtime, can we?
Feel free to offer up other annoying characters and why, if you like.
Ugh, ditto on this. Albert sucked. I never had a problem with Wesley, actually. I thought he acted exactly the way a kid he was raised would act – a sort of desperate attempt to live up to his father’s memory, his mom’s Starfleet job, and his dad/mom’s best friend and mentor, Jean-Luc Picard. Outside of the first season of TNG – which I rarely watch these days because it took them a year to find their footing – Wesley seemed pretty normal to me.
Albert, though… well, he coincided with the time when Laura was just getting into her “too old to be cute but too young to get into her romantic storyline with Almanzo” phase, and Mary was now blind, and Carrie was useless because those twins, holy cow, they were horrifically bad actors. And Grace was never more than a baby (appropriately enough for the timeline). But I didn’t like Albert or any of the plots surrounding him, from the angsty drug story to the Clown-Rapist plot … my God, just reading that sentence makes me realize how ridiculously inappropriate this crap was in a Little House on the Prairie context!
Worse were the years of Shannon Dougherty and, uh, the kid who played her brother. But by then the show was running on fumes, and at least I had Dean whatsisname’s Almanzo to lust after.
Anyway, speaking of extra characters added after the first generation of kids grew too old, how about Alex on One Day at a Time? I seriously despised that character. Glenn Scarpelli was the actor’s name, I believe, and I know my sister and I made fun of his speech patterns rather mercilessly.
I’ve heard about the whole twins playing Carrie sucking titanium, and I’ve never understood why if that was the problem Michael Landon couldn’t just do a Darren Stephens number, and get a talented player for Carrie. I mean, okay, you’d probably have to buy the twins’ parents or agents off to break the contract, but it’s not as if anyone would’ve noticed someone else playing Carrie for chrissake. Carrie in the books was troubled with illnesses, and what couldn’t the Little House writers have done with that! Carrie was a part tailor-made for that show, and Landon just threw it away.
Never really watched Little House on the Prairie so I have no idea who Albert is. And I only watched a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation so I really can’t judge Wesley either.