Midshipman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Ensign Wesley Crusher, Teen Geek Idol

[azurelunatic]

So there's a round of discussion about Mary Sue (and Gary/Lary/Harry/Barry Stu) happening in corners of fandom that I read, and one of the entries mentioned Wesley Crusher and got me thinking off on a tangent.

How could Wesley Crusher have been treated in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to make him identifiable and even awesome? He was apparently a blatant self-insert of Gene Roddenberry, and annoying, and because he was so disliked, when an episode focused on him, he was show-warping rather than show-enhancing. I think it would have been possible to make him identifiable rather than alienating, and with only a few tweaks to premise and casting. (Note: this is the perspective of someone who's not seen the whole show, and therefore I am pretty much guaranteed to be missing parts of Wesley's canon portrayal that might screw with what I'm proposing.) But he was basically shoved into the show without proper grounding for his existence, just a flimsy backstory, and viewers were expected to identify with him and accept him just because he was OMG TEENAGE. That ... doesn't really work.


Idea 1: Don't make him the exception.

It's a huge ship, and full of people with families, yet we rarely see children anywhere. There have got to be some other teens on board. Yes, at that age they should still be learning, and generally small children are not welcome in the workplace. However, the classroom is not the only place to train a youth. Apprenticeship, hands-on learning, is a time-honored technique. Bring in a few extras of youthful appearance (not necessarily actual teenagers), dress them in appropriate uniforms, and scatter them about in the background, working with experienced crew members. Students who are old enough and who are learning about fields of study that have applications on the ship spend, say, half the schoolday in the classroom, and half the schoolday pulling a partial shift alongside crew, as midshipmen.

In case of danger, all midshipmen are sent back to the civilian (and theoretically more protected) areas of the ship. Yellow alert means to pack up your stuff and withdraw in good order. Red alert means to run like hell and not get in the way of any senior crew also running like hell in the opposite direction. (This could lead to exciting opportunities for drama: a midshipman trapped on a dangerous deck; does the captain piss off the aliens and risk another shot and risk not only the lives of adult crew members but a midshipman, or does the captain cave and lose face? Or stall for time?)

Wesley might then be the only teenager to be promoted to ensign; the only teenager to be on the bridge at all; the only teenager who the show focuses on who occasionally can't leg it back to quarters when the alarm sounds. But he'd not be the only one at all.


Idea 2: Even on a ship that *has* teens, Wesley really doesn't have any friends his own age.

Wesley's intelligence, his relationship to ranking officers on the ship, and his special position as ensign isolate him from the other teenagers. Show some extras his age in a lounge dancing in civvies; show Wesley sitting alone with a PADD. In uniform.

Wesley is walking down the hall. A group of midshipmen are walking the other direction. After Wesley has passed, but before they are quite out of earshot, they erupt in whispers.

Wesley comes into the mess and sits down at a long table a few seats away from a group of midshipmen at the same table. They finish up their meal quickly and go.


Idea 3: Give him some non-adult friends, or at least people he has a positive relationship with.

Yes, he's a genius and socially isolated, without friends his own age. Put him to work tutoring a seven-year-old genius; show someone rightfully looking up to him as a mentor and friend. Show "And you think you can get those problems done by next week?" "I think so, Wesley." "Good. Comm me if you have any questions." Show "Sorry I'm late, Mom, I was tutoring Keisha and we lost track of time." There are a few midshipmen he works with, and they interact with perfect professionalism.


With a those few tweaks, Wesley could have been transformed from being the Only Special Snowflake in a desert, to being the Only Special Snowflake in a blizzard. He's still a Special Snowflake, but now there's more support for his existence in his own society. He becomes identifiable: not just sole teenager in a world full of adults, but teenager isolated from his peers because of his intelligence and difficulty with/disinclination for social interaction, having more meaningful interactions with adults than people his own age, yet isolated from them too due to age and social difficulties. With identification, Wesley becomes awesome and not dreaded, and the audience can buy in: this is me, this is my friend who's too smart for his own good, and there I am/he is, and OKAY THIS IS KIND OF AWESOME.

If Wesley hadn't caught on with the audience even with the changes, with a framework that inserted a pool of teenage extras into the background, another teen or two could have been brought forth as a guest star and tested for recurring character potential.

Comments

[auguris]

This? Would have been AWESOME. I wish I could go back in time and show this to the producers and say DO THIS DO IT DO IT.

[lastscorpion]

This is a really good idea. We used to talk about how there should have been a cadre of teenagers/kids as runners or messengers -- IIRC, Picard's Enterprise was *always* having comm trouble. They could have been doing Morse with a laser from the windows for ship-to-ship, and scurrying through the Jeffries tubes for in-ship communication.

Midshipmen are such an important part of the "Horatio Hornblower" type stories that ST was originally based on. It could have been cool if they'd done it right.

[lady_ganesh]

That would've made so much sense. I especially love the idea for a mentoring program, because then you could've done so many things with Wesley without drawing the rest of the plot to a screeching halt.

[ree]

This makes me a little sad, because I could have cared about your version of Wesley.

[pengolodh_sc]

Small nitpick: A midshipman serving on a ship would be a member of the crew (in the process of qualifying for a commissioned rank), and would be expected to take watches and action stations as other crewmembers would. As far as I know, in all navies/fleets that actually use the rank midshipman, it is ranked either as the lowest rank of commissioned officer or as a special case of warrant officer. The role you describe seems more akin to what happens in the British Sea Cadet Corps or the United States Naval Sea Cadet Corps or US NJROTC.

[azurelunatic]

Fair enough!

[cesy]

I would love this.

[jeshyr]

Not Really Relevant: As a profoundly gifted teen watching TNG I was both in love with and deeply wished to be Westley Crusher. It really hurt me that pretty much everybody else I knew hated him so much :(

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading your thoughts here--I love it when people think about ways to make shows better! Thanks for posting (I followed your link from tielan's page).

Also, I grew up on Next Gen and I think your ideas make a lot of sense; some of them remind me of things that Deep Space Nine actually did. That show was much better at implying the dynamics of a larger community, so that the main cast characters sometimes were able to stand out in contrast.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I'm not so sure that the "only having adult friends" makes him a Gary Stu per se. When I was his age... well, I did have friends who were my peers, but I had a much easier time of it associating with adults. As this is a public entry, I'm not going to get into it further, but in the real world, that's definitely not a "wish-fulfillment" quality.

And if anything, I would think that having positive relationships with his peers on top of his existing ones would make him even more of a Gary Stu. The whole "everyone likes me and I like everyone" thing.

That said, I do agree with the first point, that he's often treated as teh speshul snowflake, and also the fact that he's something of a "captain's pet." =P That he's able to solve complex problems that would normally stump even the best and the brightest in the real world. The episode where he and Captain Picard get stranded on a desolate planet (I can't recall the name offhand, but Picard breaks his leg and desperately needs water, and Wesley ingeniously figures out a way to remove this force field around the planet's only source of water) comes to mind. And so does that viral video game one (although, I admit it, I LOLed when he tried to warn everyone, "There's a game going around!"). XD

In short, I think it's more the fact that he was often the one to "save the day" when no one else could that made him a Stu. Even Seven of Nine of Voyager (often referred to as a Mary Sue because of the emphasis on her during season 4) had her own very human flaws and made mistakes that weren't so endearing. While she was the one to "save the day" in some episodes, I think that distinction was much more evenly handed out in the series than in TNG (unless I'm remembering wrong).

[azurelunatic]

I think you may have taken away a different meaning than I intended when I wrote this. I wasn't thinking of "has only adult friends" as being a wish-fulfillment characteristic. I was thinking of the lack of pretty much any relationship with his peers (positive or negative) being a characteristic that would detract from the ability of the average teen-watching-TNG to relate to him.

And since pretty much all his canon relationships, period, are with adults, and all the relationships I'd described prior to that point were negative relationships with other teens (isolation, gossiping behind his back, excluding him), I thought it would be best to balance those with some form of positive relationship with someone his own age, even though "I work with you and we have reasonable professional interactions but it's not like we're BFF" is not the strongest of positive relationships.

My thought was that making him more relatable might diminish from the annoyance factor of having this twit be the Big Damn Hero, and seeing other teenagers in competent roles around him would make his presence somewhat more realistic.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

Even so, my point still remains that I (and probably surprisingly more teens than one might expect -- if Allison from The Breakfast Club is any indication, since it seems a lot of people identified with her more than any of the other four characters XD ) tend not to have trouble relating to peers who don't have the "normal" peer relationships. Feeling socially isolated from peers seems to be a fairly common lament of teens, and I would think that if anything, it would make such a character easier for them to relate to per se. (Of course, I could be wrong about this, but I'm just going by my observations, people I've talked to, etc.)

I will, however, concede that the other teen characters need to be placed in more competent roles, so that it would make him look less like a speshul snowflake who always saves the day.

[azurelunatic]

I think you still misunderstand me.

I don't want to give Wesley normal peer relationships. I want to give him PEERS so he can have peer relationships at ALL. I want them to range from (on the GOOD side) not-much-of-a-relationship-at-all to pretty bad.

I think in canon he is pretty much the only teenager on the ship -- physically isolated from peers, not just socially.
If he is the only teenager on the ship, he doesn't have a chance to show what kind of relationship he would have with other teenagers.
I think he would be socially isolated from other teenagers even if there were a bunch more of them on board.
I want to show him interacting with them so I can show that most of them relate to him badly/he relates to most of them badly.

I do not think that he is best friends forever with anyone his age.
I do not think that there is anyone his age that he would feel comfortable sitting down with and having a long conversation about anything.
I do not think that, in the Starfleet of the future, there would be the sort of outright bullying that someone with Wesley's general social skills would probably get in a modern high school, so I would not show actual active bullying. Also, I think that his peers might be reluctant to bully someone who is essentially the captain's foster son.

I want to show that there are, however, a very few of them who do not shun him outright. This handful of peers who do not shun him outright are not anything close to having normal peer relationships, it just means that not all of his peers on the ship are actually jackasses.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, sorry. ^^;; For some reason, I remembered that there were other characters his age (though there were very few of them). It's been years since I've seen the series, so I could be remembering wrong. And now that I think of it, it could have just been that one where Picard, Ensign Ro Laren, Guinan, and Keiko were aged down due to an anomoly.

So yeah... Fail memory is fail.

[moniqueleigh]

Eh, there were other kids/teens on the show. They weren't often visible, but Enterprise was not a ship of war (even though they often had to fire upon or were fired upon). It was a Science ship, and had quite a number of families on board. Kids were generally in classes, but there were episodes where Picard (or some other adult, but mostly Picard because writers liked putting the Stuffy Adult Male in Uncomfortable Situation) would meet with Obviously Bright Non-Adults, i.e. "Take Your Kid To Work day" or "So You Think You Want To Do This day."

I suspect the biggest problem with the Wesley character was that he was often shown besting the adults, even the Super-Speshul Brilliant other adults. And not being very gracious about it in most cases. Even Wheaton has said words to that effect.