“I dream of a galaxy where your eyes are the stars, and the universe worships the night.”
Wesley Crusher’s first love story is so goddamned adorable that I rank it highly among my favourite episodes of the second season, even though I know full well that there are some beats missing in the storytelling and that its ending arrives perfunctorily. Salia apparently abandons the direction of her plot (will she fulfill her duties to her people, or follow her heart?) at some point during a commercial break, which is hardly stalwart writing, but I don’t much care. This episode is so. Goddamned. Adorable. Given that Wesley’s first… er, Crush… was an inevitable pitch from the writers for somewhere in this brace of shows, “The Dauphin” pulls things off brilliantly.
I worry about the pubescence of Wesley Crusher. Wil Wheaton’s acne is terrifyingly vivid on blu-ray, and he spends the whole year at such a gangly stage. Even as a young man, I looked at Wesley’s second-season uniform and felt embarrassed by proxy for the acting ensign – that silver spandex would be frighteningly inadequate at concealing the visible mainstay of teen boy life, IMHO. One wonders why Wes wouldn’t at least change into a pair of constrictive jeans before going on his first date! But no matter – for any of his concerns beforehand, Wesley turns out to be a crack shot on the first date front, taking an alien princess on a tour of the galaxy (via the holodeck) and feeding her chocolate mousse. Shit, the balls on this kid.
It’s a wonderfully directed episode. Rob Bowman is unafraid to move his camera, and find beats and angles in the framing to heighten all of the characters’ key moments. He’s also the only director on Next Gen, apparently, who knows that the second level of Main Engineering is up there to be used. He stages a terrific “guy talk” scene between Wesley and Geordi, above and below, where Geordi cottons to Wesley’s teen boydom while Wesley tries in vain to destroy the ship through hormonal muddy-headedness. This is followed by the best series of scenes in the episode, as Wesley trucks around the ship asking dating advice of his male crewmates (though, to my lasting regret, never the captain). Worf’s demonstration of the Klingon mating cry (and its accoutrements – hurled objects, love poetry, and lots of ducking) is legendary, but Frakes and Goldberg smack the cover clean off the ball in the scene that follows, where Riker and Guinan deliver rapid-fire flirtation deep into each others’ eyes, while the incredulous Wesley looks on.
Unfortunately, “The Dauphin” is legendary for more ignoble reasons – when Salia and Anya’s shape-shifting natures are revealed, they transform into a pair of monster suits that are second only to Armus in “Skin of Evil” for laughably awful cheapness. In the episode’s original airing, these transformations also featured prototype “morphing” effects, which were really just step-dissolves between various interstitial stages of the effect, and looked ghastly. (The morphs have been cleaned up somewhat for blu-ray, though charmingly, they still look pretty bad.) As such, though, Star Trek’s first modern shape-shifters sink like stones in spite of their relative conceptual sophistication; we’re only five years away from Constable Odo here, but it’s a long, long way to go. Nonetheless, there’s some smart science fiction: Anya assumes different physical forms to play different personal roles with the young woman who is her charge. This includes a “childhood confidant” version, which is interesting, and is played by a very young Madchen Amick in a nearly pornographic jumpsuit with a bunch of holes in it.
The episode gives good advice about girls, which, given that I was thirteen at the time, was useful. “Just because a girl runs out doesn’t mean she does not wish you to follow” might not be as good as it sounds, but I love Guinan’s “moral of the story” speech at the end, when she surprises Wesley by agreeing that he’ll never feel this way again. “There will be others,” she says. “But every time you feel love, it’ll be different. Every time, it’s different.” Truer words.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now.