Shut Up, Wesley
Nobody liked Star Trek's Ensign Crusher
A Twitter fight attracted The Middlebrow’s eye this morning. Actor Wil Wheaton complained about comedian Dave Chappelle, calling for him to be excluded from a forthcoming Netflix comedy special.
That The Middlebrow is unabashedly Team Chappelle on this one doesn’t really matter. The point of interest here is the Star Trek: The Next Generation Character Wesley Crusher, portrayed by a teenage Wheaton during the show’s run between 1987-1994. Crusher was the Jar Jar Binks of the Star Trek universe — just loathsome.
A conceit of The Next Generation is that in the time between it and the original series, Star Fleet grew more ambitious in its exploration of the galaxy, building larger ships meant to venture into space for far longer than the original “five-year mission” of Captain’s Kirk’s Enterprise. These larger ships included quarters for crewmember families, who were ferried around the galaxy and potentially turned into Borg with their working spouses and parents. Wesley was the son of the ship’s doctor, a single mother whose husband had died under a previous command of Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Wesley was a precocious, Star Fleet-obsessed genius looking to turn an unwitting Captain Picard into a surrogate father. Picard was uncomfortable having families onboard his ship and Wesley was constantly underfoot, chiming in about official business and once even grabbing the controls in response to an emergency alert, which was the equivalent of a child visiting the cockpit grabbing the control stick midflight.
Wesley was needy but hyper-competent, often solving problems that vexed the experienced officers while they denied his desperate appeals for approval. When the Enterprise ventures to planet Omicron (ominous!) Theta, they find an android named Lore, who is identical to Star Fleet’s android science officer, Data, except (of course) Lore is evil. Only Wesley figures out that Lore replaces Data to wreak havoc and try to destroy the ship by feeding it to a cosmic “Crystalline Entity.” This is the episode where Picard snaps “Shut Up, Wesley!” Which is precisely the GIF that Twitter users chose in response to Will Wheaton’s anti-Chappelle rant.
Wheaton’s Twitter defenders have replied, “But, the whole point of that episode is that Wesley was right and Picard almost got everybody killed by dismissing the kid!” That’s true. But it only serves to highlight how strange it is that experienced Starfleet officers fell for Lore’s deception in a universe where the identical copy of a good person is almost always dastardly.
When this show was in its first run my best friend pointed out to me that our hatred of Wesley was just unrepressed jealousy. Wesley was smarter than us. Wesley lived in the future. Wesley lived and worked on a spaceship. We definitely thought it was worth the risk to the Enterprise and its passengers for Picard to indulge telling Wesley to shut up. We all wanted Wesley to shut up.
As actor and character aged, the writers tried to rehab the Wesley. They made him an “acting ensign” so that he could be integrated into the missions rather than be underfoot. They sent him to Starfleet Academy, which made him both a less frequent character and less incongruous when he did show up. But ultimately, they had to turn him into a Dr. Who style-timelord so that he would go away to another dimension and stop bothering the audience.
Whatever you think of Wheaton and Chappelle, everybody hated Wesley.
Middlebrow out.