Star Trek: The Next Generation: Where No One Has Gone Before Review (S1E06)
★★★☆☆ The Enterprise gets lost in space in an uneven guilty pleasure
A questionable warp experiment hurls the Enterprise to a distant region of space where thought and reality are one and the same.
Stranded hundreds of years from home with no hope of rescue, Picard and crew must put their faith in a mysterious traveller, an alien responsible for their predicament who also sees considerable promise in young Wesley Crusher…
As a proud card-carrying member of the “I hate Wesley Crusher” fan club, it’s a matter of galactic irony that one of my favourite early episodes of The Next Generation heavily features the insufferable character being vociferously touted as the most extraordinary young man in the entire universe.
Where No One Has Gone Before is indeed a little too indulgent with icky Wesley love, but it also marks the first episode where TNG actually began to live up to its promise: To actually go somewhere we’ve never been before. It certainly wasn’t perfect; conceptually, it’s a hot mess, an episode that jarringly juggles intergalactic adventure, faux high-concept sci-fi, and half-baked Lovecraftian horror.
And lest we forget its troubling tonal shifts, best summed up when the episode interweaves Tasha Yar’s horrifying flashbacks to youth on her rapey home planet with footage of a crewman playing the air violin. What a hoot, this episode is a Mozart-powered fever dream.
But this episode does something its predecessors failed to do: Actually have fun with its premise. Thrown across the cosmos, the look on Picard’s face when Data nonchalantly tells him how mind-bogglingly far away from home they are is seared into memory. It’s one of the first moments I go to when thinking about Star Trek’s enduring potential as a show that explores.
I also get a kick out of the appearance of Stanley Kamel’s Kosinski, a talented actor taken from us far too soon, and one of my favourite one-time Trek characters that no one else seems to talk about. Kosinski actually reminds me a lot of me, a self-assured hack whose ability to conjure meaningless drivel is second only to his ability to take credit for someone else’s magic.
I often refer to this episode, and much of TNG’s first season, as the chicken soup of Star Trek. I know it’s mostly garbage, but it’s these early episodes I so often reach for as an antidote to all the darkness in the world right now.
Where No One Has Gone Before isn’t a perfect episode, quite far from it. In fact, I completely understand those who dismiss it as just as bad as the rest of the show’s earliest offerings. But there’s just something magical about it, an unexpected journey to somewhere beyond imagination. It might be crap, but it’s my kind of crap.
Now get that kid and his shitty jumper off the bridge. Regular warp speed will do.
