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

We've said it before, and we'll say it again — you don't have to graduate from Starfleet Academy to make a success of yourself in the Star Trek universe. That's no doubt especially true if you've been marked out from an early age as destined for the higher planes by a representative for the Milky Way branch of the Recruitment Agency for Super-Geniuses. Towards the end of his time at the Academy, Wesley's grades were declining to the point where he might have 'washed out' anyway. Instead, after a lot of soul searching, and a teeny bit of emotional manipulation from those Traveller-induced visions, Wesley quit of his own accord.

Wesley's change of course in Journey's End mirrored, at least in part, events in the life of the episode's writer Ronald D. Moore. Moore had left a career in the Navy to become a writer. In The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, Moore stated that,

There were things in my life pointing me in that direction that I wasn't paying attention to, sort of like Wesley. I just thought that everything about this character said he did not belong in Starfleet… It always seemed he was just doing things that were expected of him.

However, as The Next Gen Companion goes on to point out, others expressed reservations about the move for Wesley. There was "concern" that having the character "who was Gene Roddenberry" leave Starfleet was "doing him [Roddenberry] a disservice."

At one point in the development of Journey's End, plans had been hatched for Wesley to (temporarily) join the Maquis as part of the set-up for Star Trek: Voyager. After the suggestion of the Native American storyline, however, the establishment of the Maquis was left more directly to the eponymous Star Trek: Deep Space Nine two-parter. Oh, and Boothby was almost a stage in the Lakanta/Traveller reveal!