"Star Trek: The Next Generation" The Dauphin (1989)

Director:

Rob Bowman

Writers:

Gene Roddenberry (creator)
Scott Rubenstein (writer) ...

TV Series:

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987)

Original Air Date:

18 February 1989 (Season 2, Episode 10)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi

Plot:

A pretty girl, Salia, comes aboard the Enterprise with her diminutive guardian. She is to be taken to...

Plot Keywords:

Captain | Ferengi | Andorian | Space | Klingon

Cast

Patrick Stewart	...	Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Jonathan Frakes	...	Commander William T. Riker
LeVar Burton	...	Lieutenant Geordi La Forge
Michael Dorn	...	Lieutenant Worf
Marina Sirtis	...	Counselor Deanna Troi
Brent Spiner	...	Lt. Commander Data
Wil Wheaton	...	Wesley Crusher
Diana Muldaur	...	Doctor Pulaski
Paddi Edwards	...	Anya
Jaime Hubbard	...	Salia (as Jamie Hubbard)
Whoopi Goldberg	...	Guinan
Colm Meaney	...	Chief Miles O'Brien
Peter Neptune	...	Aron
Mädchen Amick	...	Teenage Girl - Anya
Cindy Sorenson	...	Furry Animal (Anya) (as Cindy Sorensen)

Company:

Paramount Television

Trivia:

Fans have dubbed this episode "Wesley Reaches Puberty".

Goofs:

Miscellaneous: When Wesley and Guinan are talking in Ten-Forward, a little black dot appears on the screen in the lower right-hand corner and remains there for the rest of the shot, blinking only once.

Quotes:

Anya: Salia, do an old woman a favor and obey me for the rest of this trip.
Salia: You are no more an old woman than I am a leader.
[Worf appears at their quarters to escort Anya on a tour of the ship]
Anya: You *are* a leader. And I... am older than you could ever imagine.

Bombastically stupid

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

There are two gaping sets of problems here. One is the theme (romance between young lovers). The other is the plot structure (enough holes that you could drive not one, not two, but a whole fleet of trucks through).

I suppose it was inevitable that the producers would choose to give Wesley a 45-minute love interest. The production crew was hurting for stories because of the Writer's Guild Strike of '88, and even resorted to recycling stories from the aborted Star Trek II project (not to be confused with The Wrath of Khan). It is indeed a rare gift to convince me, the viewer, that romance can bloom and end in the course of 4 12-minute acts. When the characters here use those three little words, "I love you," I couldn't help but bust out laughing, and I'm known as a Wesley Crusher defender.

But hey, maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon. I didn't even like Romeo and Juliet when I read it in high school, so you're free to dismiss me as biased. At least on the theme, anyway.

No, perhaps even worse than the insipid love affair, are all the structural defects with this script. The episode goes out of its way to describe how "weak" and technologically backward the Federation is compared to the Daledians (the race was never actually given a proper name, only the biological term "allasomorph," which sounds like something Stephen Colbert would have come up with), and yet, this advanced and super-powerful race can't (A) resolve its problems without a 16-year old kid coming to rule them, and (B) can't even be bothered to send a ship to bring her back to the planet! No, instead, it's the Enterprise that gets that privilege, for the sole purpose of artificially generating conflict. Indeed, I think the writers slept through most of Drama Screen-writing 101, with only their notes, obscured mostly by their slumbering drool, revealing the words, "Conflict is key to any drama."

The protector, Anya, has all the intelligence of an amoeba. She decides to "morph" into her creature outfit to kill a sick and potentially contagious patient, only to be stopped by a couple of Enterprise security dudes, only to then spout off the line, "Your powers are infinitesimal compared to mine." That's not just bad writing, that's epic, comic-book bad writing. And of course, despite her "infinitesimal" power, she decides not to kill the patient, or take over the ship, or demand a quarantine, or whatever. She couldn't have sent the Enterprise some advance notice for this pickup trip, like, "Need a quarantined space?" Instead, her young charge, Salia, gets to run around the ship with Wesley, because all of a sudden the door locks on the Enterprise have apparently quit working.

Then there's the notion that beings of morphengenic energy have to "age," and mature, and that they would have feelings and emotions, like love and the rest. Gah. Those sorts of human-centric conceits can only work if the underlying theme, parable, moral lesson, whatever, is so compelling that the viewer can suspend his disbelief. Believe me when I say that my disbelief was not suspended.

All in all, one the weakest in season two, excepting "Shades of Gray," which shouldn't even really count as an episode.