The First Duty

Wesley almost gets blown up and kicked out of Starfleet in his finest ever episode

When an Admiral informs Picard that he's being contacted as a close friend of the Crusher family and “there's been an accident”, we all get our hopes up that Wesley has been slain in a freak transporter explosion. But no, it’s a courtroom drama at Starfleet Academy. And as boring as that sounds, what follows is Wesley Crusher's finest hour, and a TNG episode that breaks format to boldly go where Trek has never gone before.

Words

During the writing team's Mexican retreat in the autumn of 1991, Ronald D. Moore came up with the concept for this episode with his good friend Naren Shankar, who had been a Writer’s Guild intern with TNG the previous season. Shankar remembered their discussions well:

Ron had been in ROTC in college and we were both into military history. We wanted to do a show set at Starfleet Academy and pick up where Wesley was with his life. Our focus was on the notion of choosing between your friends and your duty.

However, Rick Berman did not like the idea. As Michael Piller later noted:

When we pitched it to Rick, he said, it’s not a Star Trek. Star Trek is about going off into space and exploring new planets. It’s not about going back to Earth. He’s right, of course, and no one’s going to argue that he’s not, but I looked at him and said ‘Look, to me we have the opportunity to do something special. We have the chance to explore an issue that is extra meaningful to a lot of young people. If you’re involved in drugs or teenage misbehavior or crime, and you may know that it’s the wrong thing and you have the choice of being loyal to your friends or doing what is honest – that is a great issue for us to explore.’

Piller eventually won over Berman, who laid down one restriction: no more than three custom sets. They solved this one by shooting on location at the Japanese Garden of the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant at Van Nuys in Los Angeles (about twelve miles from the Paramount Studios). Here’s the map the crew were given to get there!

Disputes over the story continued throughout production. Early drafts involved a more heinous crime, but the general feeling was that the worse the offense, the further it seemed to stray from the established character of Wesley Crusher. Piller remembered that Moore wanted Wesley to remain loyal to his friends, but Piller felt differently:

Ultimately I gave the order to go with the truth – that’s what I’d want my kids to do – but I think it shows how much we can get into these characters when we find ourselves debating the points they’re arguing.

He also called this behind-the-scenes incident “one of the most rewarding arguments in the history of the production of this show.” The entire writing team was thrilled with how it turned out. Moore later remarked:

We took that character in a really interesting direction and I think it helps him grow as a character a lot and makes him more accessible and human. I’m just really happy with what the episode became. It’s probably my favorite episode of the year. It had a lot of meaty stuff; the Picard/Wesley scene is powerful. When he looks up from behind the desk and gets up, you think he’s going to slug him. Picard just had a real heartfelt anger in his face.

I have to agree. This is one of my favourite episodes, and apparently it was really popular with the US Air Force too - they started airing the episodes to their cadets to help introduce them to the concept of the honour code!

I also like the careful construction of the technobabble. Just a few terms carry a lot of weight - ‘the flight range near Saturn’, ‘Nova squadron’, ‘Kolvoord Starburst’... everything feels just right for the situation. I enjoy Moore’s writing almost always, but the care taken here not to burden the story with unnecessary terminology is something I really admire.

Acting Roles

“A lie of omission is still a lie.”

Obviously this episode is entirely set up as a vehicle for Wil Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher, who absolutely nails his performance here. I think this was the first time I ever truly appreciated that he could actually deliver on this role (which, to be fair, was a terribly conceived role that would hamstring any actor). But the way it subverts the surrogate father relationship between Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard and Wesley Crusher is absolutely phenomenal. Stewart has always been TNG’s secret weapon when it comes to performances, of course, but here the dynamic between the two actors is utterly electric. The confrontation between them is burned deeply into my memory, and I quote it so often that my wife could recite Picard’s devastating barb, above, even before the scene came on screen.

Director Paul Lynch was especially pleased with Wheaton’s performance:

It’s nice to see because he was a good young kid actor when we first started Next Generation, and now he’s matured into a good first-rate actor. It’s nice to see the difference over the years.

I couldn’t agree more.

Of the many supporting players, the most notable in retrospect is Robert Duncan McNeill’s Nicholas Locarno - and according to co-writer Shankar, this character was not part of the first draft at all. Instead, Ed Lauter’s Lieutenant Commander Albert played a greater role - and a different one too, as a tougher, more career-minded officer. Amazingly, despite more than two hundred roles (many of them bit parts), Lauter was never in L.A. Law. I still find that quite hard to believe!

McNeill’s Lacarno is pitch perfect in this episode. We’ve probably all seen him as Paris in Star Trek: Voyager, and honestly I don’t think any of his episodes on that show come up to the standard of his performance in this one. Partly, that’s down to the character of Paris not being as interesting as Locarno.

Intriguingly, when they were casting Voyager, they set out to find someone ‘like’ McNeill’s Locarno... and failed to do so. In the end, they decided just to bring in McNeill himself - but not as Locarno. Why not? I have it on good information from a writer on the show that the reason for this was that Voyager didn’t want to have to pay royalties to TNG writers for a character they felt they could simply substitute. I don’t agree. Locarno would have been a stronger character than Paris. It’s sad that cost-savings prevented continuity that would have added depth to Voyager, but that’s how it goes in TV production sometimes.

It’s worth mentioning that McNeill had already had a big break before this role: he was Kevin Corrigan in 1987’s Masters of the Universe.

If you haven't watched that film since it came out, you are now obligated to go back and watch this cheesy big budget B-movie with fresh eyes! Oh, and I should also mention that he was in L.A. Law the year before being cast in this role. Sadly, his career after Voyager hasn’t gone anywhere, despite a few guest spots here and there, which is a great shame.

From the point of view of the production crew, however, McNeill was not a big deal. On the other hand, getting Ray Walston to play Boothby was “fortuitous” (as Rick Berman put it), and the scenes between Walston and Stewart add a great deal of charm to the episode. Walstone was also in L.A. Law the year before this episode... but then, he’s been in everything.

Walston’s career began in 1953, and the oldest role I've seen him in was Luther Billis in 1958’s South Pacific (I saw the movie after this episode, and it freaked me out to see ‘young Boothby’ in the chorus line!). Other memorable roles included Mad Jack Duncan in 1969’s Paint Your Wagon (another musical - I love musicals!), J.J. Singleton in 1973’s The Sting, and of course Mr. Hand in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a role he reprised in the short-lived spin-off TV show. But his longest recurring roles were as Uncle Martin in the 60s show My Favorite Martian, and as Judge Henry Bone in the charming 90s show Picket Fences (81 episodes).

Oh, I should mention that he played Glen Bateman in 1994’s mini-series adaptation of The Stand, one of very few famous characters named after me(!).

There are so many guest stars I literally cannot fit them all in because of the file size limit on emails!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Although this episode is mostly about the performances, there's still a few great visual moments. There are some very nice Okudagrams depicting the formations of the ships...

And even nicer sequences such as the NavCon satellite that appears as a plot device in Act Three, and most especially the SFX shots depicting the actual event taken from flight recorders.

But of course, all of this pales into insignificance next to the Syd Dutton matte that is merged with live action footage filmed at the aforementioned Japanese Garden of the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which is also where the Boothby scenes were filmed. This matte painting is so subtle as to be nearly imperceptible in the episode!

As a really nice touch, the Academy flag flies here at half-staff, a detail added by visual effects supervisor Dan Curry. Sadly, there are only three more Dutton matte paintings left in the entirety of TNG. A riveting script, electric performances, and a Syd Dutton matte? It’s hardly surprising that I love this episode!