The Star Trek Episode That Made Wil Wheaton Quit
The fact that Wil Wheaton left Star Trek: The Next Generation has often baffled fans. While it was certainly annoying to play the kid genius character and take crap from fans, the fact is that most child stars don’t walk away from steady paychecks, especially for gigs that make them into household names. Why, then, did a talented young actor leave the show that made him famous? As it turns out, Wil Wheaton decided to leave this Star Trek spinoff after an unnamed producer lied to him about Wesley’s involvement in “The Ensigns of Command.”
Wil Wheaton Leaves Star Trek
The tale of why Wil Wheaton left Star Trek: The Next Generation can be found in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, the Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman book which is required reading for fans of the franchise’s golden era. In that text, the actor recounts how he had been cast in the movie Valmont and had to negotiate shooting schedules. The movie was going to be shot in Paris during TNG’s post-Season 2 production hiatus, but the movie’s production was going to spill into the production of TNG’s third season.
However, Wil Wheaton didn’t think this would be a problem because “The Ensigns of Command” was the first episode being produced for season 3 of this Star Trek spinoff and Wesley Crusher didn’t have a very extensive part in it. Therefore, he assumed it would be easy enough to write him out of whatever minor scenes he may have been written into. He held that assumption right up until his agent was contacted by a Star Trek producer.
“One of the producers told my agent that they could not write me out of that episode,” he said, “because it was a Wesley-focused episode, and I couldn’t go work [in a movie]. He called my house and told me, ‘It’s a Wesley episode, and I’m writing a scene with you and Gates that’s going to move your mother-son relationship forward, and it’s really important to the series.’”
That sounded well and good, but according to Wheaton, the producer “just lied to me…a few days before we began production on that season of Next Generation, this producer wrote me out of the script entirely, and it was appalling to me. The message was very clear–we own you – and it was a move to sabotage my career.”
The End Of Wesley Crusher
Looking Back, Wil Wheaton remembers this as the incident that motivated him to leave Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, there may be more to this story than at first glance…while the actor remembers being written out of “Ensigns of Command” altogether, Wesley does appear in a handful of scenes. It’s possible Wheaton was referring to a meatier role getting cut down to size, which would be right in line with this episode receiving extensive rewrites (so many that writer Melinda Snodgrass nearly removed her name from the credits).
The other interesting thing is that Wil Wheaton recalls this Star Trek producer lying to him as a kind of power move. While that’s entirely possible (the internal politics of early TNG were reportedly very toxic), it also seems possible that the unnamed producer the actor spoke to was confusing episodes. The Wesley-centric episode that moved his relationship forward with his mother was “Evolution,” which served as the actual third season premiere episode despite “The Ensigns of Command” getting produced first, so there might have been a genuine mixup regarding production.
Even if this was an honest mistake, though, we can understand Wil Wheaton’s annoyance with the Star Trek producers. Intentionally or unintentionally, one producer kept the actor from starring in a steamy Miloš Forman film that might have transformed his career. Plus, he would have starred alongside Hollywood heavyweights like Colin Firth and Annette Bening, and we somehow suspect they’d shout out “shut up, Wesley” far less than the average Star Trek fan, making the movie even more attractive to the talented actor stuck playing sci-fi’s most annoying kid genius.
