Star Trek TNG - Where No One Has Gone Before

Originally Aired: October 26th 1987

This one gets off to a dull start with some engine specialist coming aboard to try some experimental new engine stuff on the Enterprise. The enlightened future society of the Federation can't be all that enlightened as everyone starts chatting about how this guy's theories are all nonsense. And when he gets aboard, he's all arrogant about how he's right and they're all too dumb to understand. Riker and the specialist argue a bit and Riker agrees, in a very condescending manner, to allow him to try it.

Meanwhile, Wesley Wonderchild is comparing notes with the Traveller - the specialist's alien assistant - who even to my 13 year old self was obviously the real source of the improvements to the engine technology. The alien seems impressed that this 15 year old kid knows warp field theory pretty much as well as he does.

Predictably the experiment goes wrong, as Geordie announces that they pass Warp 10 - which is pretty much infinite speed - and you see whole galaxies whizz past, as Star Trek Continuity, both past and future, gets a kick in the nuts. First, Kirk's crew established there was a near impenetrable energy barrier enclosing the Milky Way galaxy. How did Picard's Enterprise get through it? Second, years from now USS Voyager will claim to be the first ship to break the Warp 10 barrier. Suck it Janeway! Picard got there first. Convenient you forgot that. :)

When they manage to stop the ship, they're two galaxies away and 300 years travel from home. And Janeway whined and bitched about a 70 year trip! It took her 7 years to do a 70 year trip home. I bet Picard gets his ship across the 300 light years home by the end of the week. Janeway really does suck.

The alien assistant seems weak after the trip and only Wesley seems to give a shit. The rest of the crew seems to be occupied with their predicament, while Wesley seems to be making realisations about the nature of the universe hundreds of years ahead of his civilisation's best scientific minds.  While the crew take the chance to explore this new area, and the douchebag engineer takes credit for an accidental discovery, Wesley tries to fill in the adults on the truth. But this is TV where adults never listen to kids, so they blindly trust the engineer to take them home. Whoops!

The attempts to go home doesn't work and the alien nearly vanishes during the flight. The ship travels through countless galaxies and ends up in a completely ridiculously distant part of the universe, over a billion light years away. Almost immediately strange things start to happen on the ship - pets from home appear and disappear, lift doors open into space, people flashing back to their past, string quartets in crew quarters and so on. There's even an appearance by Picard's dead mother - who unlike him even sounds French!

As a pleasant surprise Picard quickly works out that it's what they're imagining or thinking about starts to happen for real, and warns the crew to control their thoughts. In Engineering, they all finally catch on that the alien was behind it all. And as if to make up for the clichéd ignoring of the child earlier on, Riker points out to Picard that Wesley spoke up twice earlier to tell them but he didn't listen. Damn it Riker! Didn't Picard make it clear in the first episode that it was your job to talk to the kids, not his? The alien has passed out and Picard orders the doctor to wake him up to take them all home before they all imagine themselves to death.

The alien is pretty much a hitchhiker who trades engine upgrades in order to bum around the galaxy. He and Picard waffle on about the nature of thought and space and reality for a while, before the alien reveals to Picard that they are in a part of the universe which is pretty much pure thought and they better get home before it all goes to hell.

And then we get the Tinkerbell solution to take them home - the whole crew is ordered to imagine the well being of the alien or on their duty. And with the crew ordered not to think of Pink Elephants, they try to re-create the accident once more.  I'm surprised the Pink Elephant factor didn't screw them over by one or two crewmen imagining the ship being ripped in half. The Traveller gives it everything he's got and disappears in the attempt, propelling the ship clear across the Universe one last time to arrive right back where it all started. And straight away they head off onto their next assignment. I guess that being lost billions of light years away isn't any excuse for missing the Enterprise's scheduled arrival at whatever planet they're off to. :)

As they go, Picard humorously draws out a conversation with Riker for the sole purpose of making Wesley feel nervous. Then he grants him a field commission of Acting Ensign to reward him for his contribution to the crisis. In general, the Wesley plots in this episode are done awkwardly with no subtlety, but they do get his character arc moving - something which they have yet to do for any other character of the cast. Wesley 1, everyone else SUCK IT.

I really like this episode. As badly executed as it was, it's a wonderful sci-fi idea, of the kind that is all too rare on this show. Looking over the episodes so far, there's one real sci-fi idea - an omnipotent being puts our species on trial to see if we deserve to be exploring the galaxy, and it's hardly that original. The others are either not really sci-fi (Code of Honor is basically a political intrigue story, and Naked Now a medical crisis) or they are sci-fi but just repeating a really unoriginal story (Last Outpost, where a member of an ancient powerful civilisation judges the younger races of the galaxy as they try to explore the ruins of his planet).

But here we have what Star Trek, and Starfleet, is at it's core - the best our society has to offer out there, pushing back the frontiers and exploring somewhere so different, we are literally incapable of understanding where we are or how it all works but are left with the impression that one day, we will be back and work it all out. I have to wonder if this wouldn't have made for a better pilot episode and this accidental travel across the universe was the ordeal which Q used to test humanity. In just a few years after this Deep Space 9 started with a strong sci-fi concept (explaining linear time to a race that exists outside of time and has no frame of reference) and hooked me from the first episode.

Next up, whenever I get to it is Lonely Among Us. I can honestly saw that I don't even remember this episode. But before I watch and blog that episode, I have a few other things I want to get around to blogging, so don't hold your breath.