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#65. Wesley Crusher

And another TNG character for my Bottom 10. How did we end up with so many of the bad TNG fodder characters but didn't end up with Ro Laren or Gowron (or even Tomalak or K'Ehleyr)? Who knows?

Sadly, though, as much as he feels like merely one of those recurring characters by the end of the series, he wasn't for a long while so it's actually kind of hard to call him "fodder". Wesley Crusher's status a series lead is largely remembered as "everything that's wrong with the early seasons of The Next Generation," and I can't entirely disagree with that. Early TNG really does make a lot of missteps, and Wesley Crusher's... Wesley-Crusher-ness... is one of the most obvious examples. But the thing about Wesley is that he does get better. Not much better, mind you, but better enough to kind of justify his existence overall.

This is in large part thanks to Ron Moore, who managed to salvage the character with "The First Duty" and "Journey's End." I will grant that two good episodes can't erase three and a half seasons' worth of bad, but especially 'The First Duty' does kind of mitigate the damage somewhat. In it, Wesley and some fellow classmates at Starfleet Academy (including Robert Duncan McNeill as Totally Not Tom Paris) fuck up royally and get a fellow cadet at Starfleet Academy killed. Wesley's dilemma throughout the episode, trying to determine what he should do in the inquiry and who he can trust, is riveting stuff, and he ends the episode in a pretty damn dark place. It's not an uplifting or optimistic hour of Trek, and it specifically takes this irritating, "perfect" creation of Gene Roddenberry's and turns him on his head by making him partially responsible for a tragedy, a mistake he can't atone for or fix. Not only that, he spends quite a bit of the episode lying to our leads about it. It's a great hour of television that goes a long way in making Wesley Crusher not totally suck.

"Journey's End" is a bit more of a mixed bag, but I have to give it credit for what it does right. In the first season, when Wesley was still genuinely one of the leads of the show, there were a lot of hints dropped about Wesley being "special" and having some great destiny. "Journey's End" finally pays off on all that, sending Wesley off on a crazy intergalactic journey to other planes of existence with The Traveler. It's an episode they definitely didn't have to do, but it's nice to get some closure on the character and it's a good example of how the writers cared about consistency and continuity, even when they totally could have gotten away with just dropping the unpopular thread. (It's also the episode that introduces the Maquis for future use in DS9 and Voyager, so that's cool too.)

So yeah, if we're just talking about Gene Roddenberry's Original Vision of Wesley Crusher from the first couple seasons, then I'll agree he's a pretty straightforwardly terrible character. But ironically, once he gets written off the show, he does get better thanks to some moments that are so good they help you consider the character's much-maligned history in a (slightly) more positive light. It helps that Wil Wheaton is a talented actor, so on the rare occasion that his material doesn't suck, he can sell it pretty hard. It's not enough to propel him out of the Bottom 10, sadly, but he would easily have been Bottom 5 material otherwise.

Best Episode: The First Duty
Worst Episode: Justice (remember this shit? Where he gets the death sentence for walking on the grass? It's probably the worst episode of the already-bad first season. I've never truly forgiven Wesley Crusher for being at the center of this thing.)