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

People who take an extended break from work often use it to go travelling, but Wesley seemingly did things the other way round. In Star Trek: Nemesis, it looked like he'd taken time out of travelling to go (back) to work. The last we'd seen of Wesley, he was a cadet resigning from the Academy. Now, he was all dressed up in his dress uniform as a lieutenant junior grade.

Wil Wheaton's journey to appearing in the movie was equally a little different. During a Next Generation 25th anniversary panel at the Phoenix Comicon in 2012, Wheaton revealed that it was, in fact, LeVar Burton who had secured him the role in Nemesis. At the time, Wheaton wasn't really in touch with his fellow TNG castmates, but he and Burton had bumped into each other at an event. Afterwards, Burton went back to producers to convince them to include Wesley in Nemesis. Wheaton accepted the part without even knowing what the scene entailed. He did, however, ask Nemesis screenwriter John Logan for a bit of background on his character post-Journey's End, as he noted during the Comicon panel:

Did [Wesley] come back to Starfleet from roaming around the galaxy in the Traveller's windowless white van eating chloroform candy? Or was he at Starfleet Academy?

Logan replied that he didn't have enough room in the script to address it, and so it would be up to the audience to decide why Wesley was in uniform.

In a deleted scene from Nemesis, which also made it into Logan's novelisation of the movie, Captain Picard says to Wesley that "it's good to see you in uniform again." In the same scene, Wesley also confirms that he's looking forward to serving on the Titan, having been assigned the night shift in engineering. In 2008, Wil Wheaton returned to the role of now Lieutenant Commander Wesley Crusher, Assistant Chief Engineer of the Titan, for the '4D Encounter Theater' segment of Star Trek: The Tour (later Star Trek The Exhibition).