“There were hundreds of kids… who identified with him”: Wil Wheaton Denies a Classic Star Trek: The Next Generation Criticism about Wesley Crusher

In the colorfully doctored universe of Star Trek, Wil Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher is a god. The character, who was created in the image of the franchise’s creator Gene Wesley Roddenberry, was gifted with the foresight to impact all of spacetime itself while also upholding the values that make a person worthy of being deemed as a guardian of the multiverse.

In simple terms, Star Trek has modeled the once child prodigy Wesley Crusher into the most powerful being known to man within the in-universe lore, bested only by the space god “Q.” And that has caused some serious hurt to a faction of the older fans who feel an emotional ownership over the franchise since its conception in 1966.

The Criticism Against Wil Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher

Not all of us get to be as petty as Sheldon Cooper in his rivalry against Wil Wheaton. For some of us, it is as simple as pointing out that the wide-eyed child prodigy from Star Trek: The Next Generation does not deserve the honor of being such a powerful, venerated Guardian of the in-universe mythology.

However, the central complication of the criticism is rooted in the idea that Wesley Crusher is simply a sci-fi fanatic and a know-it-all. To be honored as second to only Q requires a messianic quality, strength of character, and inherent wisdom that is found in only a handful of lores across literature’s inexhaustible sources, the most primary example being Neo in The Matrix.

However, Wesley Crusher does not follow the simple elegance of what a prophecy or an oracle describes as The One. He is unapologetically brilliant, neurotically genius, and exhibits a borderline uncool level of “nerd-ness” in his know-how of the science-fiction genre.

Wil Wheaton automatically became a parody of what was otherwise supposed to be a prodigy figure. His character arc, in turn, was demoted to the dishonorable category of Lazy Writing and chucked into the forgettable pile of genuinely rubbish content lying dormant within the vaults of Hollywood.

Wil Wheaton Has the Last Laugh on Star Trek: Prodigy

While the young child actor was too bound by the Machiavellian external forces dictating his every say and move, Wil Wheaton’s age and experience within the industry have now brought him to Star Trek: Prodigy’s door. Here, the actor finally has the last laugh over whether or not he truly deserves his place within the franchise.

With the mass hatred from the ’80s and ’90s tampered down over the years, Wheaton gets to see his character in a new light. The actor claims in an interview with Inverse:

It is not lost on me that he is now a mentor to a new group of kids. This group of misfit outsider kids that don’t fit in anywhere, who don’t have a place to go call home, and they find that home in Starfleet and they find a family in each other. Wow. Does that mirror my experience as an actor on Star Trek and in my real life!

But beyond the implications that the Star Trek role has had on his personal growth, Wheaton believes that the early criticism against his character was a cruelly biased and unnecessary one.

I want people to repeat this so that we can quash the misconception. For every one person who was like, ‘Man, I hate Wesley,’ there were literally a hundred kids who loved him. There were hundreds of kids who saw themselves, who identified with him, who grew up to be adults who work for Star Trek or NASA or JPL or who write for other science fiction franchises. He was really important to a generation of kids.

In the history of cinema, Wil Wheaton has not been the first actor to have been sidelined and trampled upon for playing a child prodigy archetypal character. The case of Jake Lloyd from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace comes to mind.

Tragically, however, the 35-year-old former actor cannot reclaim his identity and his lost honor today the way Wil Wheaton can after suffering through decades of abuse and trauma.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream on Paramount+