1x18 Coming of Age

[8.4/10] I’m a sucker for stories where some outsider bounds onto a show and relitigates all of our heroes’ past adventures in the worst light possible. It’s a well-worn trope, with everything from Game of Thrones to Agents of Shield busting it out. But it always works on me because it seizes on a theme that resonates -- the truth is malleable, or at least very opaque, especially when stripped of context. It exposes how much we think and feel about something is tied up with our perspective on it, and how the addition or subtraction of important details, let alone motivated reasoning, could change that.

But I especially like it as applied to a character like Captain Picard. Especially for fans revisiting the show, he is the consummate professional and unflappable leader among leaders in Star Trek, if not all of television. We, like the officers aboard the Enterprise, have seen his talents and steady stewardship (no pun intended) of his ship and his crew through impossible situations. Even in this early season, it’d be easy for him to just ascend into myth as the Captain of all Captains heading up the flagship of the Federation.

Lt. Cmmdr. Rennick, sent by the Inspector General’s office to interrogate Picard and his team over any possible irregularity, doesn’t see it that way (or at least doesn’t seem to). He casts every past incident in Picard’s history through the worst lens possible, and the impulse is to call it all unfair. The audience understands the circumstances of Picard’s past calls and even his mistakes, which show his talents as a Starfleet officer rather than undermine them. It’s heartening, then, to see the rest of the senior officers not only defend their captain, but to seem so miffed on his behalf at Rennick’s insinuations (and there’s some sharp editing in these scenes to boot).

At the same time, though, you realize that when you stack all of these things together, Rennick might have a point. Sure, it was under Starfleet orders, but Picard did let a charlatan like Kosinksi takeover and misdirect his ship. He was compromised by the Ferengi, even if it could have happened to anyone. However dumb the application of the Prime Directive might have been, he did violate it on Edo. And there is something a little hinky, at a minimum, about him being in command of Dr. Crusher, and her having certain authorities over him, given their personal histories and lingering feelings.

In short, as much as Rennick’s motives seem suspect and this “conspiracy” seems potentially trumped up and “political”, there are legitimate, if out of context questions being raised about who Picard is, what he’s made of, whether he’s fit to continue in Starfleet.

That dovetails nicely with the other plot in “Coming of Age” which sees Wesley taking his multi-day Starfleet Academy entrance exam, to test whether he’s fit to join the service as well. Writer Sandy Fries does a superb job balancing these two plot threads in the same episode, letting the events of one inform the other in a natural and compelling way.

That goes especially for Wesley. The kid is kind of a twerp in the show’s early going, but he’s relatable here, struggling under the stress of a big exam and worried about what his instructors might throw at him. He doesn’t want to disappoint his mother; he doesn’t want to disappoint his Captain and surrogate father, and he doesn’t want to disappoint himself.

Honestly, it’s just interesting to see how rigorous and difficult the Starfleet Academy entrance exam is. Trick questions on astrophysics exams, surprise interpersonal tests in hallways, and the dreaded psych evaluation built to test your deepest fears. While I could do without Wesley’s cheesy interactions with the fellow flat-affect candidate who finds him “cute” (I half-expected him to fly around the room in his enthusiasm, Rudolph-style), it helps humanize Wesley to see him wowed at the renown of his competition and fretting over what comes next, rather than blithely solving complex problems on the Enterprise,

The episode sets up the contours of the test deftly. We see him and the others doing short answer questions and seemingly practical exercises that test the knowledge Starfleet officers would need to have. That gives Wesley a chance to demonstrate his compassion, giving his fellow top-scorer Mordock the encouragement and tip he needs to finish an assignment faster than Wesley could rather than letting the catfish-like alien flail.

We see a chance encounter in the corridor between Wes and burly officer that turns out to be a surprise examination of Wesley’s observational and conflict-resolution skills with other species, when he spots his antagonist’s webbed hands that signifies and alien race that only responds to confrontation. These moments create the prospect that Wesley could lose his chance at the Academy for favoring kindness over getting ahead, and establish that anything can happen as part of this examination, including the occasional ruse.

Most importantly, “Coming of Age” also focuses on Wesley’s anxieties about the psych exam, which gives us our first human moment (if you’ll pardon the expression) for Worf, which makes for a landmark TNG moment. Worf’s moment of mentorship with Wesley sets up that the psych test isn’t meant to scare you; it’s meant to challenge you on what you have the most difficulty with. For Worf, that’s not snarling beasts or the prospect of death, but rather the need to rely on others, even for his own life, something he must do constantly while aboard the Enterprise. There’s maturity in his explanation and encouragement to Wesley, particularly in his statement that he has not defeated this “enemy”, but must fight it every day.

That all leads to the defining moment of Wesley’s psych eval, when in the middle of the test, he hears and explosion and has to spring into action to try to save two officers threatened by a coolant leak. He’s able to drag one to safety after lifting some heavy machinery off, but can’t coax the shell-shocked but otherwise unharmed one out of his corner before the facility seals the door, forcing him to abandon one fellow officer to save another.

This, of course, turns out not to be an interruption to Wesley’s psych examination, but rather the examination itself. (The shell-shocked dude’s wild overacting should have been a clue, hah.) I’m too familiar with this scene to know whether it fooled anybody on a first watch, but I buy it fooling Wesley, head-faking his expectations and challenging him in a sideways fashion that, in hindsight, feels of a piece with Starfleet’s other off-kilter testing approaches. While we don’t see the other (presumably equally personalized) psych exams for Wesley’s fellow candidates, this works as a slanted but no less potent take on the “Kobayashi Maru.”

But the compelling part of this set piece isn’t the blasting coolant or screaming officers; it’s the realization of how and why they were challenging Wes. The hardest thing turns out to be having to make a life or death choice like that, because it’s the exact kind of choice that resulted in his father’s death, the choice that Wesley, like Worf, would have to confront and live with every day, a choice made by none other than Captain Picard.

That adds even more clarity to the interrogation half of the episode. Rennick is getting in the way, but even he has to look impressed and almost in awe when Picard shows his coolness under pressure. Jake Kurland, the young man whom Wesley beat out for the slot at the academy examination, steals a shuttle in his shame and dismay and mishandles it to the point of possible destruction, with no tractor beam or transporter array able to reach him.

Instead, it takes a cool head like Picard’s to save the young man. The Captain comes up with the winning strategy -- involving bouncing the shuttle off the planet’s atmosphere to give it the speed to escape -- but also the proper instruction and attitude toward the shaken teenager, a combination of firmness and encouragement that characterizes Picard as a leader. It’s a great vignette to show the value that the Captain brings, the sharp insight into problem-solving and people-managing that makes him so good at this job, no matter how skeptics might want to frame his successes and failures.

That ends up playing into the other difficult choice for Picard that’s raised here. Rennick issues his final report after all of his seemingly ill-tempered muck-raking where he gives Picard...a glowing review. It appears that Rennick was just doing his job, like Picard himself did so many times, despite his apparent hardassery. He confesses that all he could find was a little laxness that he attributes to a sense of teamwork and familial camaraderie, even closing his report by basically asking Picard for a job, earning an all time great reaction from Jean-Luc in the process.

It turns out that Admiral Quinn wanted Rennick to Picard through his paces because he’s worried about some nebulous threat within Starfleet and wants to appoint Jean-Luc as commandant of Starfleet Academy. Despite this extreme vetting and the vagueness of the “I need people I can trust” proclamation and the inevitability of Picard turning down the offer, you can understand why Starfleet would want someone like Picard molding the minds of the next generation of young officers, with how he handles Jake Kurland and how he handles young Wesley amid their mutual disappointments.

Despite his quick-thinking on the exam, Wesley loses out on the slot at Starfleet Academy, confiding in his captain and quasi-dad that he feels like a failure for it, especially if it diminishes him in Picard's eyes. But the Captain asks him if he did his best and if he learned from the experience and if it will prepare him for the next set of challenges he faces. Wesley says that he did, and Jean-Luc tells him that it’s a success.

More importantly, he tells young Wesley that he cannot judge himself by someone else’s approval or disapprobation or how some authority frames or judges him. He can only judge himself by his own standards, and only measure success in those terms. And if that weren’t enough, Jean-Luc confesses to his erstwhile ward that even he, the most decorated Captain in Star Trek history, failed the entrance examination his first time.

It’s one of the signature and defining moments in the series and the franchise as a whole. It humanizes Picard the otherwise stuffy, unshakable statesman who seemed destined for the captain’s chair and Wesley, the boy wonder who solves problems far beyond his ken. It shows that each has suffered their losses and made their mistakes and so wondered about their future. It gives a reason why each holds their place on the Enterprise for at least a year longer. And it tells the viewer to seek success on our own terms, by our own measure, regardless of how some outside force may seek to skew it. “Coming of Age” is The Next Generation’s first great episode, and in that message and structure, one of its greatest.