7x20 Journey's End

[3.5/10] It’s a positive to have a Wesley episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s final season. He was a main character on the show for three and a half years. His mom and his surrogate father are still here. Checking in with him at Starfleet Academy, and a fun cameo in a parallel universe are nice, but giving the character a bit of closure as the series took its final lap is a good call.

Unfortunately, it’s not a good episode. Much of that comes down to the Wesley story here, which is part super-rushed character development and part problematic/tropey chosen one pablum. The thrust of it is that after four years at the Academy, Wesley no longer wants to join Starfleet. He’s become rude, sullen, disrespectful, and more than anything, wants to find something else to do with his life. He’s tired of the path he’s been set on since we’ve met him.

As I like to say, there’s something to that! It’s entirely plausible that after four years of living his dream, Wesley would realize the reality of it isn’t what he thought or wanted. It’s absolutely possible that Wesley felt ushered into following in his father’s footsteps, which he eventually found constricting. Those sorts of epiphanies and changes of heart are true to many if not most young adult experiences, in fiction and in real life.

The problem is that we saw three and a half years’ worth of Wesley practically foaming at the mouth to join Starfleet, with nary a hint that he was being forced into it. If anything, the officers of the Enterprise had to slow him down, to make sure his reach didn’t exceed his grasp. With two parents in the service, it’s not crazy to think he’d feel some pressure, but this is effectively the first time the audience hears of it.

So while it’s not so insane to think Wes might feel this way, it doesn’t track with anything we’ve witnessed, and if anything, contradicts the attitude and aspirations the audience did see when Wesley was on the show. Charitably, you can say it puts the audience in the shoes of Beverly and the others, who find the change just as jarring. But considering Wesley is the perspective character here, and it motivates his big choice in the episode, it comes off like character development by fiat, without the change over time that would earn it.

Now look, maybe they only had Wil Wheaton for one episode. I can forgive the practicalities of trying to cram it all into the character’s last at bat. But it doesn’t work to evoke such a massive change in personality and motivation without the audience being there for it.

At least we can fall back on the B-story of...[checks notes]...Picard having to decide whether to forcibly remove a bunch of Indiginous Americans from their homes? Oh no!

Suffice it to say, I have mixed feelings about this storyline too. It violates the usual Star Trek norm of addressing these types of issues through metaphor and abstraction. There’s advantages to that, namely that you can grapple with the central concerns without having to untangle all the real world baggage that comes with invoking actual atrocities and live issues. Using actual indigenous people, both in-universe and in casting, removes all subtlety and independence from the real world problems invoked.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for dropping the veil and treating this like what it is -- a forced evacuation of Indigenous Americans, again -- without any pretense. The moral weight of whether it’s right to displace people from an adopted home, suffused with spiritual attachments, is greater in the shadow of peoples who’ve been displaced time and again in real life, under the similar aegis of treaties that didn’t serve their interests.

The problem, though, is it requires a network television show in 1994 to try to depict indigenous peoples with dignity and sensitivity. This portion of the episode isn’t as bad about that as Wesley’s is, but still falls into some unfortunate “Noble Savage” tropes and stereotypes that come from lumping all of indigenous American culture together. Star Trek had an infamously bad advisor on these topics for Voyager, and I wonder if he was involved here too.

Somehow, though, the worst part of this section is that it indulges in a weird motif of inherited familial sin. The head of the indigenous group researches Picard’s family history and finds that his great x 21 grandfather was a soldier who brutally drove indigenous peoples out of New Mexico, with the statement that Jean-Luc’s here to erase that stain. It’s a strange way to go with this, especially since Picard himself seems to take the intergenerational blame to heart despite disclaiming it to Riker.

It runs against values he expressed to Worf when the Klingon was forced to bear “family shames.” And it’s downright weird to try to make this personal in such a tenuous way rather than have Picard simply shaken by the stated issue of not wanting to forcibly evict a people who’ve already faced such cruel expulsions throughout their history. There’s no reason they had to do it this way.

That said, I like the central conflict. Both Picard and an (at least slightly) kinder Admiral Nechayev are against removing the indigenous residents of the planet. But the Federation Council has negotiated it away as part of a broader peace deal with the Cardassians, and despite official protests, they have their orders. It’s tough to balance the broader benefits of peace against the costs to individual people who must suffer for it. It’s hard to know how to weigh following the chain of command in an organization you’ve dedicated your life to and which you believe in versus an action that you feel is morally wrong. There’s meaty stuff to chew on there.

Except “Journey’s End” only gives us a cop out. The Federation never has to be the real bad guys. A group of mustache-twirling Cardassians get to fill that role, with our heroes protecting the indigenous against them and brokering peace. I admire the compromise here to some extent -- the locals give up Federation citizenship to stay where they are, with a promised benign neglect from the Cardassians -- but it absolves TNG and its main characters from having to make a hard choice. Instead, Picard gets to be the good guy in getting the Cardassians to stand down and find a compromise, which is on brand, but a narrative escape hatch.

Speaking of escape hatches, Wesley’s exit isn’t any better. His storyline carries on an even more pernicious trope -- that of the White Savior. The fact that it’s he who goes on a vision quest, he who saves the locals from extraction by speaking out, he who goes to study with them because they “see things differently” is downright embarrassing. There’s ways you could tease out Wesley being a chosen one without having to mix it up with an amorphous indigenous mythos, which makes an already rough story worse.

We’re also back to a recurring motif TNG finally moved away from when it started to improve in the show’s early years -- Wesley as the bestest boy in the world. On the one hand, I appreciate Ronald D. Moore and the writers’ room cashing the check the show wrote back all the way back in season 1, with The Traveler telling Picard that there was something extraordinary within Wesley that needed to be nurtured. On the other hand, to put in terms of one of Moore’s future shows, it only took a few minutes for my exhaustion to be renewed over “Wesley Crusher and his special destiny.”

There’s a story to be told about Wesley turning away from his Starfleet dreams to explore other planes of existence with the extraordinary being who first saw something special in him. This just isn’t it. Having The Traveler masquerade as an indigenous shaman is almost abominable, and a good rule of thumb in Star Trek is that any time you hear pan flutes in the score, it’s time to run for the hills.

Ideally, these are the sort of developments that would take place over the course of episodes, if not seasons: Wesley falling out of love with Starfleet, slowly developing his unique abilities, making a new connection with The Traveler. Instead, they’re all crammed together in half an episode, and mixed with unfortunate renditions of native peoples and their traditions with character development the audience never sees.

I was never Wesley Crusher’s biggest fan, but he deserves better than this. “Final Mission” is a far better tribute to the character and his connection to the Enterprise and its crew. The best you can say for “Journey’s End” is that it doesn’t leave a long-hanging plot thread from the show’s rocky beginnings still dangling. The worst you can say for it is that the episode makes you wish it had.