1x05 Where No One Has Gone Before

[6.3/10] We’re only six episodes into Star Trek: The Next Generation, so it’s too early to make any ground pronouncements. But returning to the show, I’m tempted to call this first season “the almost season” for TNG. If you look, you can find the roots of what the show would eventually become. This story is almost good. This character pairing almost works. This conclusion almost clicks. But it’s not quite there yet, and the portentously titled “Where No One Has Gone Before” exemplifies that.

The episode sees an egotistical Starfleet engineer and scientist named Kozinski beam aboard with promises that he can tune-up the Enterprise’s engine but with equations that make no sense to Riker or the ship’s chief engineer. What Kozinski says he can do to the ship shouldn’t work based on his schematics and plan, and yet it does, something that seems connected to his mysterious alien assistant who takes a shine to Wesley.

There’s a good premise there. The dynamic of a self-fluffing charlatan who’s making fantastical promises to skeptical Starfleet officers, seemingly making good on them, only to demonstrate that, unbeknownst to Kozinski, it’s his assistant who’s doing all the work leaves plenty of room for character and storytelling. The fact that these experiments initially strand the Enterprise 300 years travel from home (hello Voyager fans!), and then strand the ship seemingly beyond the edge of the universe, likewise creates a unique problem for our heroes and their guests to have to solve.

It bears out in the character interactions. Kozinski is a great presence here, carrying the confidence and superiority complex of a Tony Stark which leaves Riker in particular instantly bristling, but also standing his ground. Kozinski tries to spin mistakes as successes and even take naming rights for scientific breakthroughs, waxing rhapsodic about his place in history.

That makes it all the more satisfying when, as isn’t exactly made subtle, he is unwittingly barely responsible for any of it. His flusteredness when his usual methods don’t work, his chastened demeanor when he realizes that his assistant did all the work, and his little bit of joy when the assistant actually asks for his help give him a nice little emotional journey. With that, Stanley Kamel’s layered performance gives the show it’s first great one-off guest star.

There’s also something interesting about Wesley being the one who sniffs out what’s really going on here. I had forgotten that The Traveler makes his appearance this early, but his almost ethereal presence on the ship, and his nigh-instant recognition of Wesley’s abilities makes him a unique figure in this drama. (Frankly, his vibe with Wesley plays a tad creepy, but I doubt it’s intentional.) The episode shows rather than tells by having Wesley figure out what it would take for Kozinski’s experiment to work, with The Traveler’s approval, and playing Cassandra is a good look for the kid when he tries to explain what’s actually happening after the Enterprise is flung so far from home.

But from there, the episode takes a major turn for the worse. Rather than just dealign with the fact that the Enterprise is a long way from Federation space, “Where No One Has Gone Before” sends them to some crazy zone where thoughts bleed into reality. It becomes a cheap excuse for the show to do a lot of cheesy effects, like Worf seeing a targ, Tasha seeing her cat (oh god, please don’t go back to using the phrase “rape gangs”), other crewmen thinking they’re classical violinists or ballerinas, and Picard seeing both a plummet into space and his deceased mother. There’s little to be gained from any of these sequences. It’s just a “weird shit happens” here parade, and none of the events we see are genuinely weird or compelling enough to stand out in their own right.

Worse yet, the episode devolves into some silly notion of thought being the basis of reality and not at all separate from time and space, which makes Star Trek feel closer to fantasy than science fiction. It’s be a game-breaking revelation for the franchise if TNG didn’t (rightfully) discard the notion almost as quickly as it introduced it. The Traveler’s speeches about it and Picard’s instant acceptance of this absurd, pseudo-philosophical notion strain credulity. The resolution, naturally, hinges on the crew all thinking good thoughts so that The Traveler can channel that energy and do his thing to get them back home, as though he’s some star-bound equivalent to Tinkerbelle.

Worse still, it’s not enough that Wesley’s shown an aptitude for these things that ought to be encouraged. The Traveler has to give a speech to Picard that basically tells the captain that Wesley is the specialest boy in the universe, and his talents for energy and propulsion need to be fostered in the same way that Mozart’s musical talents did. It’s just short of God himself telling Picard that Wesley’s the greatest, and the sort of blunt wunderkind-ism that irked early audiences of the show.

That said, there is something satisfying when the ship makes it home, when Kozinski accepts the humility of who was really moving the needle, and when Picard gives Wesley his commission as an acting ensign. The way TNG gets there is suspect, but for as much as Wesley’s preciousness is a point of annoyance for the show, Picard’s relationship with this surrogate son of his former good friend (and his later love interest) remains a strong point, even in the early going.

For all his annoyance with children, Picard recognizes that Wesley’s gifts should be nurtured, and so gives him a place, however small, on the crew, replete with duties heavy on study. It’s very Picard of him, to reward talent with duty and expectation. And yet, that’s what makes it such a heartening moment at the close of this one, when for all his early stuffiness and sharp edges, the good captain shows some care and consideration and recognition to the source of much of his annoyance up to this point.

That’s what’s frustrating about Star Trek: The Next Generation in the early going,. The seeds are there. You can see the creative team and the performers working through this sort of material, honing it, trying to steer around speed bumps like nigh-magical dimensions and impossibly bright teenagers. For all the Enterprise’s travels in this episode, they’re sadly just not quite there yet.