30th Anniversary TNG Episode Discussion Marathon

[Nate the Great]

"The question will be raised as to why he [Wesley] was selected for this all-important mission rather than someone older who would have the maturity and experience which he has not, as yet, attained." Justman wrote in a memo to GR way back on November 12. "Because of his youth, Wesley Crusher has not yet had to learn to go with the herd and compromise his thinking just because compromising is easier and more socially acceptable. He has the ability to grow with the job and to devise new approaches and new capabilities for whatever unforeseen events we encounter. In effect he is a one-man "think tank" without preconditioned limitations."

Nice try, crew. Exactly the same thing could be achieved with a slightly older enlisted crewman. Someone like O'Brien who didn't go to years of the Academy but is out here after a few months of training. If it were necessary to have a youth perspective on this mission Starfleet Command would've assigned one.

Coming up with a reason for Wesley's special status that viewers would accept proved difficult for writers and producers alike.

So...hold off on introducing the character until you have a reason that the viewers would accept? There's no reason why he couldn't be bopping around belowdecks with the rest of the civilians. Maybe he hangs around Engineering for an internship for a year as a recurring character.

Roddenberry admitted that this character [Data] sprang from the Questor, a similar android seeking its creator in his weel-recieved yet unsold 1974 TV pilot movie, The Questor Tapes.

So...change Data enough to not be a blatant Questor ripoff? Put in a little more effort?

Worf, the lone Klingon in Starfleet, almost suffered from Gene Roddenberry's insistance that "no old races", that is, alien races that appeared in the original Trek, be featured at first in order to distinguish TNG from its predecessor.

So where did "Heart of Glory" come from? I agree that you can't just have reprises from TOS races, but the idea that anything TOS-related is automatically bad is ludicrous. After all, you're trying to get the TOS fans to watch the show, right? Plus doing a total rehash of a TOS episode for the first episode after the pilot makes it look like either the staff was lying, the staff is incompetent, or the staff thinks the viewers at home are idiots who wouldn't notice.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that the Star Trek creators have been bitten on the butt over and over again by the desire to do something different just to do something different, as opposed to wanting to do something different because doing something different has a lot of potential for good storytelling.

Of course it swings both ways, they wanted to be different with Voyager but the studio wanted TNG Part 2.

We start catching up with the episodes in the next post.