“It’s a good thing you’re cute, Wesley, or you could be really obnoxious.”
This is one of my favourite episodes, and a highlight of the first season. It’s an odd exception for me, in that it’s one of the few episodes that I didn’t see until many years after it initially aired – I missed it in Season One and had to wait till the series was stripped for syndication after the end of Season Five. It has the further rarity of being one of the few Wesley-focused episodes that’s quite solid, and the further distinction still of being an episode where both the A-story and B-story are equally engaging. It’s sharply acted by the entire principal cast, and cleverly assembled by episode director Mike Vejar.
In the A-story, Wesley takes his Starfleet Academy entrance exam – an odd scenario where entry into the Academy is essentially treated like an episode of Survivor, complete with immunity challenges, and where only one candidate may ascend to the prize – which, of course, doesn’t make a lick of sense from a talent recruitment perspective. (Naturally, it’s engineered this way to keep Wil Wheaton on the show – we’ve gone through a season of exposition on just how exceptional Wesley Crusher is, so short of a colossal whopping failure on the written test, it would be hard to explain keeping him out of the Academy entry requirements.)
The really crazy idea in the episode is the Psych Test – the batshit bit of mind-torture that Starfleet apparently routinely engages in, putting all of its applicants into an unannounced simulation where they are forced to confront their deepest innate fear. It’s wonderfully grim as a story idea, sketching in a complete psychological profile for Starfleet as an organization in as comprehensive a manner as the Kobayashi Maru scenario does in Star Trek II. In Wesley’s case, the fear he must confront is in having to leave a crew member to die in an emergency situation, which allows “Coming of Age” to nicely sketch in some of the backstory of Jack Crusher’s death without ever directly addressing it. One line from Wesley (and one earlier line, in a different context, from Beverly) indirectly assert that Captain Picard made a command decision, on the Stargazer, that sacrificed Jack Crusher’s life. I continue to appreciate the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation never bowed to the temptation of doing a big, maudlin episode about the Jack Crusher backstory; they just addressed it in dribs and drabs when dramatically relevant over the course of the seven years, from the vantage point of Picard, Beverly, and Wesley, as needed. Quite a bit of restraint there.
For Wesley, in the meantime, there are coming-of-age type relationships to work through in the episode of the same name, as he learns some of the parameters of graduating to adulthood, Starfleet style. Wesley bonds with Mordock, the Benzite, and with Lt. Chang, who is administering the entry exam; he has a great (but short) scene with Worf, on the subject of the Psych Test; and of course, his inevitable father-son chat with Captain Picard at the end of the episode. On this subject, Gates McFadden recently did an interview which, unfortunately, rather sours a bit of my relationship with the show; she points out, quite rightly, that Next Gen never wrote Beverly any opportunities to provide the same kind of mentorship to her son that he routinely received from his male crewmates. Too true, and quite sad in retrospect. All Beverly ever gets to do is freak out when Wesley gets in trouble – which he does, of course, quite a lot – but we never really get to see the good doctor raise her son.
The B-story of “Coming of Age” is, as I’ve said, just as successful as the A-story, introducing Lt. Commander Remmick and Admiral Quinn, in advance of their legendary return appearance later in the series in the “Conspiracy” episode. Remmick’s investigation of the Enterprise crew gives great opportunities for all of the characters to demonstrate how far they’ve come since the series launched – “Coming of Age,” indeed. Four Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.