#004 - It’s like holograms in your BRAIN
Poor Wesley, being a kid on a starship; poor Wil Wheaton being stuck playing that kid to an unkind audience. (Though Wil seems to have come through the dark tunnel of being Wesley Crusher and then some at this late date.)
The problem with Wesley Crusher, if I’m gonna argue it, was mostly that the show wasn’t built to showcase a kid’s wonder. And as The One Kid On The Enterprise (in terms of major recurring cast members) he didn’t really have a peer group to build stories with either; there was no one we, as viewers, really cared about who wasn’t mostly too busy to hang out with Wes and too old to have a non-condescending, non-twee, non-Very-Special-Episode emotional arc with him.
So Wes was stuck trying to be a grownup on the sidelines even though he wasn’t (and so we got to watch him be bummed that adults we liked were annoyed by him being inconvenient or underfoot, nominal pat on the head at the end of some episodes notwithstanding), or having Wes-centric episodes where he gets up to who knows what random nonsense this time with some one-off guest star kids who we have zero investment in. It’s a bad setup, for a kid whose backstory was already sort of glum and dicey.
And I can’t blame people for not liking the character, because he didn’t get used well; but it’s kind of a shame when you think of Wes’s potential with slightly different plotting and setup as the kid living the greatest goddam adventure a kid could have. How great would that be? But maybe that’s just not Star Trek.
Anyway, I’m taking a shot at Wes having his miiiiiind blooooown here but I think what I’m saying is that it’s an affectionate shot. If Wes didn’t get a chance to have his mind blown by the actual insane future scifi world he was living in, he ought to at least get a chance to get a little bit OMG HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOOKED AT YOUR HANDS? about the concept of old-school roleplaying.
Geordi: So, the holodeck will be out of commission for a few days. But!
Geordi: I’ve come up with an alternative. I’ve been researching an ancient Earth custom they called “role-playing.”
Riker: …
Troi: …
Geordi: It’s a kind of story-telling game, like the holodeck but without any of the holograms!
Wes: So, not like the holodeck?
Geordi: The holograms are in your imagination, Wes!
Wes: …
Geordi: We pretend we’re exciting characters, having adventures, solving problems, overcoming adversity as a team…
Worf: That sounds extremely silly.
Picard: Are there…detectives?
Geordi: Uh, well, there can be, but–
Picard: Make it so!
The whole process that evolved for making Larp Trek -- of going through TNG episodes (and, eventually, DS9 as well, in particular to get more Keiko shots) and grabbing screencaps and trimming them in photoshop -- was odd and incovenient. I was scrubbing episodes for good characters and lighting and clear focus and building up piecemeal a whole library of different expressions and moods and closed-mouth reaction shots and so on.
I found myself struggling throughout the course of the project to find the balance between going back to find yet another character shot that fit a given panel in the strip, and just writing around the missing perfect headshot by changing the joke or pacing or so on a bit. It was enough of a pain to go get more shots that I tended to do it in clumps rather than on demand.
The shot of Wes here is really supposed to be a "holy shit!" mind blown reaction, though that particular screencap feels ambiguous and borderline stupified rather than clearly excited. I've always wished it were just slightly differently inflected.