Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Wesley Crusher

"All teenagers scare the livin' s**t outta me," as the song goes. In this 24th century case, however, there was no such cause for concern. Even when Wesley was 'breaking the rules,' it was always in a highly sanitised manner, and we all remember the 'don't do drugs, kids' talk with Lieutenant Yar. His "Chemical Substance," not My Chemical Romance.

Before Star Trek: The Next Generation had begun, writers and producers realised that, to maintain a certain degree of believability with viewers, they needed to explain why a teenager, no matter how squeaky-clean and practically perfect he was, had such a prominent and on-going place on the bridge.

According to The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, one reason for Wesley's "special status," which was considered but abandoned before the final draft of the Writer's/Director's Guide, was that he had invented a "landing-envelope forcefield for away teams on inhospitable planets." By late 1986/early 1987, Robert Justman and team had already sketched out the relationship between Wesley and Picard, including the fact that father Jack Crusher had been killed under Picard's command.

During The Next Gen's first season, as related in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, there was one person particularly determined to get everyone to say 'yes to the Wes' — Gene Roddenberry's notorious lawyer Leonard Maizlish. Whilst evidently not a writer, Maizlish had been furtively making changes to various scripts. In Dorothy Fontana's script for Too Short a Season, for example, new scenes featuring Wesley suddenly appeared, all added by Maizlish. As Fontana herself stated, "Maizlish was strongly pushing the inclusion of the Wesley character in all scripts. He admitted to [Rick] Berman that he had."