From: tlynch@cco.caltech.edu (Timothy W. Lynch)
Subject: Re: OPINIONATED COMMENTS (SPOILERS for THE FIRST DUTY)
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 21:50:24 GMT

Now that the news server seems to actually be sending mail out again, time
for the heavy work.  :-)

kanamori@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Atsushi Kanamori) writes:

>Spoilers below for THE FIRST DUTY.



Actually, this won't be as bad as I feared, because on *most* of it, we're
actually agreed.  The differences seem to settle on one character.

>They found a logical and satisfying way to punish the kid. 

Apparently not satisfying enough, based on the posts I've seen from a few
diehard Wes-haters.  Then again, one can't easily show boiling in oil on
screen...

>He'll have 
>to endure the guilt of his role in killing Joshua Albert, he'll be a 
>year behind his peers and have to endure on campus with everyone knowing 
>what he did and it's GOT to make things awkward between him and the 
>Enterprise crew the next time he visits (although I haven't bitched 
>about serialization in a while, I'm going to now: if they don't at least 
>*acknowledge* this the next the time Wes comes aboard, I am going to be 
>SUPREMELY pissed. You have been warned :-)

Agreed down to the last syllable.  The next time we hear of a Wes show, if
the signs suggest this will be glossed over, the torches get lit immediately.

>One complaint that some people might have is that Bev got shortchanged
>here. 

Yep, but only slightly.  The one thing that would solve that would be to have
one, just *one* scene between her and Wes (or her and Picard) after Picard's
found out what he did (or, after Wes's confession).  Any would do; I really
would like to have seen how her nicely naive "my son can do no wrong" attitude
reacted when the truth finally came out.

>So much for what worked. What *didn't* work was the character of Nicholas 
>Locarno, and for that matter, the entire "choose between friendship and 
>truth" angle. 

Gentlemen, start your engines...:-)

>The problem was in that every scene, Nick projected 
>"silver-tongued phony" at me -- he had no depth, no charisma, nothing to 
>make him sympathetic and indeed, I couldn't *believe* that Wes would feel 
>such loyalty towards the creep 

I wouldn't go that far at all.  I didn't care for him much myself, but in
some of the same ways that I've never cared overmuch for Jim Kirk--and yes,
I do think much of the parallel that's been discussed here is valid.
A couple of times, he really lost me (the "no one could have asked..." line
is one of them), but most of the time my impression was not "this guy's a 
sleaze", but was "well, I can't see myself working with him, but I can
see where lots of others might".

(Sorta like a cross between Kirk and Bill Clinton.  ;-) )

>Yes, we are TOLD (not shown!) via Boothby 
>that the Nova team is a highly worshipped team on campus and that the team 
>members would follow Nicholas into hell and back, but I just couldn't
>believe it from what I saw. 

Believability aside for the moment, I don't think telling vs. showing was
so bad here.  To show it would probably have taken time, detracting 
significantly from the real strength of the episode--and I doubt either of
us would have wanted that.

>Nick's eleventh hour noble sacrifice rang false -- it was inconsistent
>with the character he'd projected for the past hour. Now, it's certainly 
>possible for a character to do something unexpected, yet for it to make
>sense afterward. It doesn't here. 

It did to me, initially, but I've been talking with a few friends and have
been persuaded of an alternate interpretation that both of us might be able
to find palatable.

Namely, that Locarno's last act was still fairly self-serving.  He was already
going down, and he'd lose nothing with this confession.  What he might do
is gain back the respect of a lot of the campus, and probably turn Wes into
more of a pariah than he would have been beforehand.  (And Wes, in his current
funk, would be very likely to see it simply in the terms of "he protected the
team and I didn't", I think.)  Could you imagine two years or so down the
line, when Locarno is still a folk hero without even being around, and Wes
is being treated like dirt?

I actually prefer this more than treating Nick's sacrifice as genuine, although
I had little problem doing the latter.  The problem now seems that it wasn't
made particularly clear which we're meant to see it as.

>The other problem is that the actor who played Nick just didn't 
>project any depth -- he played it like an obvious, one-dimensional phony. 

[obligatory statement that "see, the Kirk parallel just gets stronger!"
deleted :-) ]

>A little bit about acting: Jacqueline Brooks was certainly well-cast
>Admiral Brand; that dragon is *not* someone I would want staring at me
>through a magnifying glass! 

Amen to that.  Yeowtch.

>The other performer that leapt out at me
>was Richard Fancy (Captain Satelk): leapt out as "incredibly bad actor",
>that is. He seems to be from the Kim Cattrall school of Vulcan acting,
>and he was even worse than *she* was. Blech.

Wow.  We're even agreed here.  Nice.

>I do have a few other gripes about the show, although mostly minor.
>First, the scenes with Boothby were a waste of time and celluloid. 

I completely disagree here, but if I remember right you outline this more
fully elsewhere and I'll bop you on the head for it there.  :-)

>Overall, the Boothby scenes smelled far too much of 
>another "give a big-shot actor a token cameo so he can say he was on Star 
>Trek" gimmick. 

Ray Walston is a big-shot actor?  I can't think of anything he's done
since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", personally.

>The Infamous Bergman closeup shots return again in the courtroom scenes
>and in the ready room scenes -- this time, I'm siding with Tim: they
>*were* distracting. 

Figures; this time I didn't mind them, *except* for the initial one of
Brand, which had me screaming.

>Finally, a note about the continuing "friendship between characters"
>saga -- well, other than P & W, there wasn't much opportunity for it
>to show itself here. 

Picard and Bev seemed strong enough, and Wes/Bev as well.  Apart from that
triad, there wasn't much--nor was there a need for such.

>On the other, we had half a step backward when Picard
>reminded Geordi "Wesley's one of us.", which smelled way too much like
>Wes's "Worf's our friend. We have to help him." schtick in THE ICARUS FACTOR.

Oh, not at all.  The one in TIF was bad primarily because it was so 
*incredibly* overdone.  This one was kept very simple:  "Wesley's one of
our own."  Five words--and nothing else needed to be said.  Had he had a 
couple more sentences on the topic, I might have joined you; but not
here.

Tim Lynch (Cornell's first Astronomy B.A.; one of many Caltech grad students)
BITNET:  tlynch@citjuliet
INTERNET:  tlynch@juliet.caltech.edu
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"Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a 
process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong."
			--Allan Sandage