TNG: The Game

Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E6, “The Game,” is an episode that was presumably written by a recent college grad whose entire dorm nearly had their academic careers ended by an addiction to…this seems like a WoW thing, but it’s a 1991 episode, so we’re not even to Diablo yet. Maybe Tetris? The simple “put thing into thing” gameplay of the game depicted in the episode does resemble Tetris more than anything with even an excuse plot like the standout games of 1990 and 1991 (Link to the Past, Final Fantasy III, Super Mario Wrold) all had. Anyway, I’m giving them a ton of credit with the assumption that it was based on some kind of actual experience, when it draws its themes at least as much from video game alarmism that used to be so common before the children of the 80s became culturally dominant.

I don’t feel a ton of need to go over why that was dumb, feels like anyone reading this blog is probably already on board with that, at this point most of the people who knew little enough about video games to be taken in by that kind of bullshit are dead, probably from old age, but maybe there was a gamer uprising that I missed while I was working on a D&D sourcebook. No, what I want to talk about is that near the climax, Wesley Crusher, the last holdout against the mind controlling game, is hunted down by the rest of the Enterprise crew and forced to play it and become addicted. They force his eyes open so that he’ll be forced to interact with it, and then…he blinks. Clearly non-diegetically. Humans blink a lot and unthinkingly, and of course they didn’t actually pry the actor’s eyes open for the shot, they just pressed their fingers nearby and then he shot his own eyes open wide (movie magic!). The human blink reflex is really hard to control so I’m guessing they did lots of takes and all of them had this problem, and sometimes you just have to ask the audience to suspend their disbelief over a literal blink-and-you’ll-miss-it error. Still kind of funny, though.

This is Wesley Crusher’s last significant episode (he’s actually visiting the ship after having left for Starfleet Academy), and I find it interesting how completely rehabilitated the character is. This episode is even doing “Wesley holds out against a threat that’s overtaken the adults” like they did incessantly in season 1 and it was miserable, but they pull it off just fine here in the post-beard growth season 5. Wesley avoids the game because he’s got a crush distracting him long enough to be one of the last holdouts, by which time the way the game has overtaken the entire crew is immediately obviously creepy, not because he’s a speshul wunderkind. His flight from the older officers of the Enterprise involves a lot of resourcefulness on both sides, which makes him seem genuinely clever, not like the adults have all had their teeth beaten out by the Idiot Ball so Wesley can save the day. Ultimately he succeeds not by single-handedly overcoming the crew of the Enterprise, but by repairing damage done to Data, who is immune to the game and was taken out early on to prevent him from counteracting it, and then leading the crew on a chase long enough to distract them that Data is able to whip up a solution.

Apparently it was too late, though. Wesley’s writing in season 1 was abysmal, and apparently his season 2-4 writing (he appears only sporadically in season 5) wasn’t enough to save him. The main solution to Wesley’s writing problem in seasons 2-4 was to de-emphasize his role – he’s mainly there to be Geordi’s sidekick in Engineering, and he works fine in that role, but it does mean there’s not really a chance to rescue the character so much as just to overlook him. Clearly by season 5, if not by season 2, “Wesley sucks” was too much of a meme to dislodge.

One carried forward eternally by Wil Wheaton’s refusal to get over it. People love Kate Mulgrew, all Wil Wheaton has to do is say “I was fifteen years old, they gave me a terrible script, and I did the best I could with it” and most people would be sympathetic to him.