[glenra]

By way of a friend-of-a-friend being one of the TNG writers, I was given a pretty cool explanation for what happened with Wesley. Upshot: It was the writers' strike.

What happened was this: The TNG team had regular meetings where the writers and producers got together and reviewed the state of the series - what kinds of scripts and stories they were looking for and what was in the pipeline and what sort of course corrections they wanted to see. At one such meeting the producers said "we've got this character Wesley but we haven't really DONE anything with him - the audience doesn't know much about him. We'd really like to see some stories that let us connect more with that character." Then the dozen writers all went home with that thought in mind: let's get to know Wesley! And how do you "get to know a character better" on a Trek show? Have him save the ship! So the following week, a dozen writers all submitted their own independent "Wesley saves the ship" scripts.

...and right after that the writers' strike happened and nobody could write any NEW scripts, so to keep the series going they had to film and show any decent scripts they already had handy, far too many of which (by pure chance) featured Wesley saving the ship. If they had had a choice, they would have filmed fewer of those scripts at all, sent a few back for rewrites, and staggered them out much farther apart between runs of episodes in which a little kid DOESN'T manage to make everyone else on the ship look stupid or redundant.

[jonnathanson]

That is kind of hilarious and amazing. My understanding is that the writers' strike also accounts for the notorious clip-show episode "Shades of Grey" in Season 2, in which an entire plot is loosely constructed around Riker's "flashbacks" to footage from previous episodes -- made all the more jarring by the fact that it's only Season 2, and there haven't even been all that many clips to flash back to.