Though considerably better than the three previous episodes, this one is nevertheless still really bad. It lacks the sort of fantastically ill-conceived premise that ruined all three of the post-pilot episodes prior to this one, and it’s at least possible to comprehend aspects of what it’s trying to accomplish. The execution is pretty terrible, however, and both the headier ideas that the story tries to explore and the way that the episode develops Wesley Crusher as a character are causes for mixed feelings.
On the story execution front, probably the episode’s biggest mistakes revolve around the character of Kosinski, who is unrelentingly irritating and is not at all a believable character. It is possible to make a character who is a self-important blowhard interesting, and it is also possible to make a character who is a self-deluded fraud interesting—but I don’t think it’s possible to make a character who is both of those things interesting. A self-important blowhard needs some actual substance (some basis for his self-importance), and a self-deluded fraud needs to be relatable and vulnerable. Kosinski is just a jerk, and one whom it is hard to take seriously as a real person. How could he not realize that he doesn’t actually know anything about what he and the Traveler are doing? What did he do all his life before meeting this Traveler? And how is the story served by making him so damned unlikable? Also, among other execution mistakes, the main characters for once actually underreact to the situation in which they find themselves this time, after blasting a bazillion light-years from home and not really knowing if they have a way of getting back. In particular, the scene in which Picard solicits input from the bridge crew about what to do after the first incident is very poorly written (despite also containing a gesture toward classic Trek spirit in Data making the case for studying local phenomena). It’s also very much a strike against this episode that its plot makes little sense. Even ignoring the fact that the Traveler is essentially magical, the episode offers really no explanation for why the things that happen to the Enterprise happen—or why they didn’t happen to the previous ships that Kosinski and the Traveler visited. For that matter, there is also no explanation as to why those other ships actually experienced propulsion improvement as a result of the duo’s work. And one really has to wonder, too, why Starfleet would ever have approved these “tests” without having any clue what they were all about or how any of it was supposed to work.
Finally, before getting to what might be called “the meat” of the episode, I have to direct attention to how terrible its teaser is. Like too many other first-season episode openers, it’s all about ginning up artificial tension in ways that don’t work at all. First, Riker is consumed with what seem like knee-jerk suspicions about the process to be undergone, before he even meets Kosinski and the Traveler. Kosinski’s total inability to interact with other human beings is played as though it, too, is supposed to heighten the tension, and Troi’s long-winded speech about being unable to read the Traveler (she had way less to say about her inability to read the Ferengi in the previous episode) works way too hard to create a sense of mystery around the character. The episode would have been better off not drawing our attention to him prior to the first warp test—but apparently the audience wasn’t trusted to pay enough attention to notice the important moments without being primed first? Finally, the way the teaser ends with cheesy foreboding (“Oh no! What dire consequences are these warp propulsion tests going to have for the Enterprise?”) feels totally fake and just doesn’t work at all.
We come, then, to the material surrounding Wesley and the Traveler—which is a mixed bag that’s kind of difficult to evaluate. Wesley’s own behavior in this episode is fine, apart from the illogic of someone in his position hanging out in engineering (which no one seems to find at all odd except for Kosinski—and his reaction is presented as though it’s just another aspect of his general dickishness). The element of “no one listens to Wesley even when it’s obvious that he’s onto something really important” is terrible, though. And as for the whole “incredible genius child prodigy” concept introduced here…honestly, I’ve never quite decided one way or the other what to think of it. I mean, clearly, this was what the writers wanted to do with the character all along, and was the whole reason why he was included on the show in the first place—and it provided, obviously, the basic pretext for making Wesley an “acting ensign.” So, from that perspective, one arguably can’t evaluate it entirely separately from how one evaluates the larger question of Wesley’s existence as a character. But on the other hand, it needn’t have been so; there very much could have been merit in having the teenage son of an officer as a character, without him having to be a genius or become part of the crew. However that may be, though, it’s not what the show did. The idea of Wesley as a genius prodigy with (in a paraphrase from memory) “space, time, propulsion, and the instruments of the ship that manipulate them” is odd, but not inherently awful. Over the course of his time on the show (and extending into his later occasional guest appearances), it was often used in ways that were a really bad idea (notably once already in “The Naked Now”), but it would also be put to interesting thematic uses on a few occasions. The “don’t tell Wesley or his mother anything about this” aspect was pretty dumb, though. As for Picard inventing the rank of “Acting Ensign” on the spot and making a teenager suddenly an officer of a sort—it definitely stretches plausibility, but it does also set up interesting story possibilities, and it will (eventually) contribute to a sense of family among the main characters. Like I said—a very mixed bag.
On a more abstract philosophical level, TNG would, throughout its course, repeatedly advance “space exploration as a metaphor for more fundamental kinds of exploration” sorts of themes—and sometimes, as in this episode, it would explore these ideas by way of sci-fi-bordering-on-fantasy concepts about the power of the mind to shape reality and/or to realize possibilities that lie beyond normal understanding. The latter sort of material can register as thought-provokingly high-concept, as upliftingly humanistic and existential, or as so much mystical drivel and mumbo-jumbo (and sometimes as a mixture of all three), depending both on execution and on viewer interpretation—hence my ambivalent reaction to the “first taste” of this sort of material that we got in this episode. In this instance, Wesley’s specialness and the Traveler’s abilities are both pretty much just presented as inexplicable and essentially magical facts for the viewer to accept, and the Traveler—while managing to be basically likable rather than coming off as smug—goes way overboard in his speech to Wesley about keeping his “dangerous nonsense” to himself. Still, practically nothing that was established about the show or its characters during the first season was handled very well, and it’s hard in some cases to sort out the bad ideas from the bad execution of ideas with potential. So, again—ambivalence.
The rest of the episode—thoughts merging with reality and weird shit happening, etc.—is the sort of thing that is usually more interesting in theory than in practice, and it was pretty poorly executed here on top of it. Most of the scenes of thoughts becoming reality are fairly uninspired, and whether each person’s thoughts become real only for that person, or for everyone else as well, seems inconsistent. The episode also doesn’t spend enough time on the idea to really do much with it, so in the final analysis, it’s mostly just pointless filler. Ultimately, this episode gets Wesley into the position that the writers want him in and plants some seeds that will be followed up on to some extent much later in the series—and otherwise is pretty pointless, besides being (as usual) executed very poorly.