Traveling Through Time With Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton: Geek And Trans Ally

SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t know what happens in the season two finale of Star Trek: Picard, you may want to watch that episode first before continuing to read!

He’s back! Actor and best-selling author Wil Wheaton, the host of the Paramount+ streaming series The Ready Room, returned to the legendary Star Trek franchise in the season two finale of Star Trek: Picard, which dropped Thursday.

For the first time since the motion picture Star Trek: Nemesis premiered two decades ago, Wheaton reprised the role of Wesley Crusher, formerly the boy genius of Starfleet, now known as “The Traveler.”

“I love Wesley Crusher. I cherish Wesley Crusher. I am fiercely proud of Wesley Crusher,” Wheaton told me in an email. “It is an honor and a privilege to be the actor who plays him. I have no idea what, if anything, happens next in his story, but I’m as excited as anyone to find out. If it turns out that there’s more of his story to tell, I cannot wait to be part of it.”

Wheaton, 49, shared a little more about the experience with readers of his blog and with viewers of The Ready Room in this week’s new episode of his talk show.

Click here to watch this video on YouTube (If necessary, fast-forward to 23:50)

“Don’t want to make this all about me, but you may have recognized a rather dapper, rather wise and well-traveled face in the Star Trek: Picard season two finale. That was me! Your boy got to play Wesley Crusher again in the 21st Century!” Wheaton exclaims. “This was so special for me.”

“My sad truth was that I couldn’t fully feel any of those things, for a lot of reasons, when he and I worked on the Enterprise,” says Wheaton. “I didn’t think I would ever have a chance to fully embrace and appreciate playing him again. I didn’t think I’d get to love being Wesley in the moment, the way I love being Wesley in my memory. But I did, and I am so grateful.”

Wheaton explained that just as he is not the same teenager he played on television 30 years ago, his character is not the same, either. “We’re both still part of the Star Trek universe in a different way than we were.” The actor summed up the experience as “wonderful,” and shared a behind-the-scenes video of the scene that marked his return.

How And Why Star Trek Brought Back Wesley Crusher

Given that he is a character that divided fans into those who loved to hate him and those who saw themselves in him, the one thing both sides agree upon is that Wesley Crusher is most certainly memorable.

Just being part of the Star Trek legacy will do that, and fans of the shows and the films come from all corners of the world, across generations, and have included billionaires, astronauts, presidents, kings and even a secretary of state who recently passed away: Madeleine Albright.

In a Zoom interview in January, Wheaton told me he first planted the seed of a comeback with co-executive producer and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman at the Star Trek Day celebration last September.

Click here to watch that full interview with Wil Wheaton, recorded in January 2022.

Goldsman reveals in The Ready Room video that it was his colleague Terry Matalas who officially introduced the idea of bringing back Wesley, as a way to resolve a plot point: He could, as The Traveler, remove the 21st century genetically-augmented prototype superhuman Kore (played by Isa Briones, who also plays Soji on the series and played at least two other characters in season one) from the timeline.

“Then a funny thing happened,” says Goldsman in the video. “For the first time in the history of the Star Trek universe, people went to war over a character.” Co-creator Alex Kurtzman described the squabble between the showrunners as “a little bit of a fight.”

As is by now obvious, Goldsman and Matalas won the battle to bring back Wesley. And that’s fitting, since the accomplished audiobook narrator told me in our interview that as much fun as he’d have appearing on one of the animated series, such as Star Trek: Lower Decks, or introducing his character to a new generation on Star Trek: Prodigy, there’s only one show in the franchise that feels like “home.”

“The cast on Picard are my family. If I had the opportunity to work with my family again, if I had the opportunity to be on the bridge of a starship with any of them, it would be a challenge, I would weep most of the day, it would be it would be difficult. So the answer to that question is a very broad, absolute ‘Yes.’” Wheaton said. “You know, a businessperson would tell me to play it coy and say, ‘I hope we can make a deal.’ But the reality is, I love Star Trek so much. And I know that Star Trek loves me back. If the opportunity were to arise, I know that we would all work real hard to make it happen.”

It appears that won’t be happening. Paramount announced last month that although several actors from Star Trek: The Next Generation will appear in the just-wrapped third and final season of Star Trek: Picard, Wheaton’s name was not among them.

Fans weighed in, some delighted at the snub, many more dismayed, and Wheaton himself blogged about it:

“I share some of your sadness, for my own reasons,” he wrote, “but I choose to focus instead on how special it’s going to be to see my family back together again, and how wonderful it’s going to be to talk with them about it in The Ready Room.”

Still Just A Geek

Wheaton is the author of Still Just A Geek: An Annotated Memoir, which he can rightfully boast is on the bestselling indie bookshop list, as well as on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list and in the top ten on the combined hardcover and ebook nonfiction list.

In his memoir, he opens up about his life, love, his battle with depression and about coming to grips with his past work, his career choices and his birth family. He also describes how he found fulfillment in the new phases of his career, and came to terms with a painful childhood.

‘The man who was my father wasn’t a dad to me at all,” Wheaton told me. “My mother made me her thing when I was a kid, and she used her thing to fill up the emptiness in her life that she didn’t get from anywhere else.”

Before writing his book, the dad of Ryan and Nolan Wheaton said he had to “unlearn the toxic, hurtful behaviors that had been modeled to me,” and therapy helped him deal with chronic depression, something he’s blogged about.

“I spent all this time with ‘teenage me’ and with ‘early 20s me.’ And lately, the really little version of me, like ‘ten years and younger me,’” said Wheaton in our interview. “I think of it as like carrying this bag of pain around, and every now and then, I’ve got to reach into it and kind of dump it out and organize it, sort through it and then put it away, so that it’s no longer being carried around by the younger version of myself. I’m almost 50. I can do this for you now,” he imagines telling his younger self.

“He Was A Dick to Me”

In promoting his book, Wheaton has been logging long hours on tour, recording fresh episodes of The Ready Room and dealing with a lot of celebrity drama. William Shatner was recently quoted, complaining about having to answer questions about a long-ago feud with Wheaton, which the author discussed on his blog in great detail in 2021 and mentions in his memoir.

The original incident dates back to 1988, on the set of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a film which Shatner directed not far from where Wheaton was filming Next Generation. He was 16. Wheaton wrote about how excited he was to meet the legendary Captain Kirk. However, Shatner “was a dick to me,” he recalled.

The New York Post reported on this excerpt from the memoir, and Shatner—who blocked this reporter on Twitter for writing about his boorish behavior on social media related to the word “cisgender”—responded on Twitter that he didn’t remember “this event.” He noted he apologized for it anyway—at the urging of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, according to Wheaton. Shatner also suggested it was all a ploy to promote the book.

Wheaton responded on Facebook:

“You know, I honestly feel bad for Bill,” Wheaton wrote. “He and I dealt with this years ago, and it hasn’t been an issue between us. Someone decided to write a real click-baity article that made Bill seem petty, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. I do appreciate the free publicity, of course, but I don’t appreciate the effort to drum up a fake feud or controversy for the sake of clicks.”

Another media moment came a few weeks ago, when Wheaton reunited with his Stand By Me co-star, Jerry O’Connell, on the syndicated CBS TV show O’Connell co-hosts, The Talk.

O’Connell, who also stars in Star Trek: Lower Decks, took a moment to apologize to Wheaton for failing to support his co-star when they were kids, given that Wheaton was going through an incredibly hard time off set. Wheaton responds that they were just 11 years old, and also talks about how he’s dealt with his trauma.

Dave Chappelle Is ‘The Face of Anti-Trans’

Wheaton has also made headlines weighing-in on the controversy surrounding comedian Dave Chappelle. The comic and Netflix have been widely criticized for what he said about transgender people in a comedy special, and thereafter, and Netflix has come under fire for how its executives responded to that criticism.

For Wheaton, the scandal brought to a mind a personal episode of shame, and he wrote a long post on his Facebook page in December 2021 to address both that memory, and his feelings about Chappelle. Talking about it got Wheaton fired up.

“What I realized as I grew older and confronted my own homophobia, was that it had been really normalized, really strongly normalized,” he told me. “I am appalled when I look back and recall some of the things I said and did as a younger person, I forgive myself for not knowing any better, but I’m still grossed out and bothered by it, a lot. So Chappelle does all of these things. He is, in my opinion at this moment, as close as you’re going to get to the face of anti-trans.”

Wheaton and I also talked at length about his extraordinary interviews with the queer actors on Star Trek: Discovery, including trans nonbinary actors Blu del Barrio and Ian Alexander as well as Anthony Rapp, Wilson Cruz, Mary Wiseman and more, and why he’s a such a strong ally to the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans people.

“Shame on every single one of those fucking cowards who is so worried and preoccupied and obsessed with their own access, their own influence, their own social standing, their own ambition, that they are willing to put all of that ahead of the fundamental right of a trans person to exist and walk down the streets feeling as safe as I,” Wheaton exclaimed. “That is inexcusable. That is indefensible. It enrages me.”

You can watch the full video of our conversation on YouTube by clicking here:

Wheaton Owes It All to… Tribbles

In our interview, Wheaton explained that both his Star Trek career and his happy marriage of 23 years to actor Anne Wheaton are all thanks to a science fiction writer who has a 55-year association with the franchise. His name is David Gerrold, and in addition to many other contributions, he wrote the screenplay for the classic 1967 original series episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” a longtime fan favorite.

“When Next Generation was being developed, Gene really wanted a teenage character to bring kids in,” Wheaton recalled learning, years later.

“David said, ‘I think it’s a really bad idea. Teenage characters tend to become like Will Robinson or cousin Oliver [the ignoble Brady Bunch character who has since become a TV trope]. It doesn’t work. If you’re going to do this, you need an actor who’s going to bring this kind of pathos to this character that makes him not just ‘Gee whiz.’ And I just saw this kid in Stand By Me, and I think that he would be really good for this role.’”

Gerrold sent me a Facebook message confirming that is indeed how it happened, and added some more context.

“When we were first blocking out the characters for ST:TNG, and Wesley Crusher was added to the ensemble, I immediately thought of Wil Wheaton,” Gerrold wrote. “He had made such a lasting impression on me in the movie Stand By Me, because he reminded me of myself at age 12. I wrote a memo suggesting that we consider him for the part. He had recently been in two or three episodes of St. Elsewhere and it struck me that was how Wesley Crusher should be played, so I was thrilled when he was cast in the part. Years later, I had the chance to recommend to him that he give Big Bang Theory a chance. When he showed up playing himself in so many great episodes, I laughed my ass off. I’m proud to call him friend.”

Big Bang Theory, a CBS sitcom in which Wheaton played a version of himself, was thrilling, but he told me it also was a source of great anxiety.

“I loved every second of it. I adored the cast. I loved the writers. Every single second I was on that stage was great,” he said. But, he added, there was a price: “It took me 10 years to feel comfortable and feel like I deserved it. I was convinced I was going to be fired every single time. I was convinced, ‘This would be my last episode,’ but I absolutely loved it and I’m super grateful for it.”

Once again, Wheaton credits Gerrold as the linchpin to his success, and everything else he cares about, especially Anne.

Wheaton explains it this way: Because of his fame from the series, he traveled on a Star Trek Cruise, where fans get to sail away with the stars. He was 18, and made friends with a woman named Stephanie, who later invited Wheaton and his future wife to the same party, where they met.

“Had I not met Stephanie, I never would have met Anne. Had I not been cast on Star Trek, I would have never been on that cruise. Had it not been for David Gerrold, I never would have been on Star Trek. I mean, it just keeps going back and back, and back, back to back.”

All because in 1967, Gerrold, a 23-year-old college student, sold his first television script. It was about the Enterprise encountering trilling furballs that are “born pregnant,” according to Dr. Leonardy “Bones” McCoy. And in another coincidence, Wheaton grew up as a fan of that original series, and became an actor who was cast as a member of Roddenberry’s “next generation.”

So, the next time you see or think about tribbles, think of Wil Wheaton, too, and the role their creator played in launching him on his career.

Fans told me, they’re grateful for that, and for Wheaton’s work as host of his show.

“He seems to have really taken charge as the lead Trekkie in The Ready Room. He communicates authentically as a fan. He laughs with us, for us and cries with us and for us,” said Raven Doud. Stevie Manns wrote: “I love him on The Ready Room. He has such a rapport and genuine love of all things Trek. He’s so endearing to watch him interview the cast and crew.”

Wheaton answers other questions from fans and more in my full interview. Click here to view the video on YouTube. Click here to learn more about Wil Wheaton’s book, Still Just A Geek, and follow Wheaton on Instagram by clicking here.