Star Trek Producers Warred Over Who Got To Bring Back Wesley Crusher

GayNrd Editors May 10, 2022

When it came to bringing Wesley Crusher back into Star Trek, the producers of the concurrent shows on Paramount+ all vied for beloved actor Wil Wheaton.

Trek Movie:

One of the big surprises for the season two finale of Star Trek: Picard was the appearance of Wesley Crusher, with Will Wheaton returning to his Star Trek: The Next Generation character, now a full-fledged Traveler. And it turns out Picard isn’t the only show that wants to bring back Wesley.

The war for Wesley

Today Paramount released a “Wesley Crusher’s Return” video feature that was also included in The Ready Room. The video includes executive producers Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman discussing how after the idea of Wesley returning on Picard was brought up, it started a sort of Crusher conflict with at least one other series:

Akiva Goldsman: And then this really funny thing happened. For the first time so far in the Star Trek Universe, people went to war over a character.
Alex Kurtzman: The one thing that pretty much everybody wanted was to figure out a way to bring Wesley back to their own individual shows. So it was a little bit of a fight to bring him back.
Akiva Goldsman: [mocking conversation with other producer(s)] “We’re using Wesley.” And I was like, “But we want Wesley here, he’s a Next Gen character.” “Well, we’re already using him.” “Well, we can use him too.” “Well, no…” It’s like Wesley Crusher was the belle of the ball.
Alex Kurtzman: But obviously bringing him back to Picard was necessary because he had to return to where it came from.
It’s not stated what other show was “already using” Wesley Crusher, but it wouldn’t be Strange New Worlds as Goldsman is the showrunner for that new series. Being that Wesley is now firmly established as a time and space spanning Traveler, he could show up on Discovery even in the 32nd-century setting. However, work on the upcoming fifth season hadn’t begun when these producer debates would have been happing.

That leaves Lower Decks and Prodigy... regardless, unless his inclusion in Picard negated what was planned for this other show, it looks like we could be seeing more Wesley in the future.

The video explains the spark to bring Wesley back began with resolving a timeline issue with the character of Kore (Isa Briones) and it was executive producer Terry Matalas who had the solution:

When we started realizing that there was an opportunity for Kore to go somewhere, that she had to actually go somewhere for the timeline to be restored, [executive producer] Terry [Matalas] said, “What about Wesley?”

In the video, Wheaton expresses his thanks to the Picard writers for cementing the Traveler version of Wesley into canon:

I was so excited when I read the scene and saw the writers for Picard had taken the Wesley who’s existed in my head for all these decades and canonized him.

For his part, today Matalas turned to Twitter to express how thrilled he was to see it happen: