In the summer of 1988, I attended a Star Trek convention in Denver CO - I don't remember now if it was a StarCon or StarFest. Anyway, a supporting cast member had just finished his talk, and the MC was warming up the crowd for a big-name, I think it may have been Leonard Nimoy, and asked the audience who they'd like to see at next year's convention. The obiouvs names, Shatner and (Stewart - now "Sir Stewart"!!!), etc were all called out.
And then someone called out, "Will Wheaton!". The crowd went beserk, and not in a good way. After at least a minute of cat-calls, the MC got the crowd under some semblance of control, and said something to of the effect of, "Yeah, right. What do y'all think would happen the moment Will Wheaton took the stage and opened his mouth?". Swear to God, in one voice, the audience replied in one, very loud voice, "Shut up, Wesley!"
"Yellow Alert" was an attempt to put a more humble and less annoyingly perfect face on Wheaton's character. ST hadn't dealt much with drug addiction ("Mudd's Women" certainly didn't count!), and I thought this was a perfect vehicle to talk about the pressure young people are under today, or rather then - I remember stories at the time about parents doing crazy things to get their children into the right pre-school so that their children would be able to get into a good college!
I knew I was pushing things with the holodeck - I don't think ST had done a zero-g effect yet either, but I thought that if they could, this would be a really neat use for a big chunk of fx budget for the year. :-)
In any case, "Yellow Alert", made it into the top 10 of a pile of 110 scripts left behind by the 2nd season's executive producer (I think it was Maurice Hurley - he had been a staff writer for the brilliant The Equalizer with Edward Woodward who recently died - the less said about the quality of STTNG's 2nd season, the better, IMHO), after he left the show at the end of the season. It wasn't produced, but the writing staff thought it good enough to allow me to submit scripts in the future without going an agent, which was practically unheard of at the time.
So what do you think - was this a better humanization of Wesley than "First Duty"?
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