Where No One Has Gone Before

The Enterprise is a ship of exploration. It does a lot of traveling. So how can a guy who calls himself The Traveler shake up everything the Enterprise crew knows? And who’s the jerk he’s riding around with? Find out when Mission Log goes… Where No One Has Gone Before. always thought the premise of a sham engineer, allowed to tinker w Starfleet’s engines was pretty shaky. Loved the special effects though of the far reaches… Also – the ideas in this episode were based upon this 1983 Original series novel. That would explain the first draft of Where No One Has Gone Before naming the Traveller as “Hamalki”, the name of the glass spider race of the aforementioned novel (pictured above). I agree with pretty much everything that both John and Ken said about this episode. I have always, and still, find the Traveler annoying because of the way that the actor plays him. Doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that the actor who plays him is a lawyer today. With regard to how much criticism has been made of the Wesley character, I’ve never really minded Wesley, but I can see how making his character an explicit child genius (and later “Wunderkind”) would put people off of him (who likes a know-it-all?). I agree with John’s criticism of the Traveler’s message being like that of Tinker Bell. And I also agree with Ken’s point about the Traveler’s message addressing the limitations of human knowledge and insight. On the one hand, there is undoubtedly so much more to the universe than any of us can possibly imagine. But, on the other hand, “Just think about it real hard, and your thoughts will magically make it so,” is kind of a lame offering of speculative sci-fi. There are plenty of quantum physicists who really do speculate along the lines of thought affecting, even causing, reality—as an explanation for the bizarre behavior of particles in the double-slit experiment, for example (particles appear to “decide” how to behave based on the as-yet un-executed intentions of the physicists conducting the experiment)—but, the way that this notion was portrayed in the episode, with the Traveler waxing on about “thought and energy combining yada yada” was a bit too generic to be inspiring or thought-provoking. Also, as mentioned, everything that the Traveler says has an annoying quality to it. Anyway, I enjoy this episode well enough, and it’s one of the more memorable of Season 1.