10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Next Generation

Fandom can be terrible and awful and often blames the wrong people when something goes rotten within a show, movie, or franchise. Think about the abuse heaped upon Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best after The Phantom Menace. Everything wrong with the character of Wesley Crusher has nothing to do with Wil Wheaton.

The fact that “Wesley” was Gene Roddenberry’s middle name points to the fundamental problem with Wesley Crusher: he was the Great Bird’s wish fulfillment character, not a flesh and blood being with human foibles. This is evident from the way he’s described in the Writer/Director’s Guide, which insists that, “Several centuries previous he might have been one of the young electronic wizards who were introducing computers to a puzzled world” — but also, “He most definitely is not a ‘nerd.’”

And speaking of "electrionic wizards" a model for the character was right there in the zeitgeist: David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) in WarGames (1983) a likeable, technically brilliant teen with insecurities who makes plenty of mistakes.

Yet, right out of the gate, Wesley was smarter than the average square. He wasn’t some ordinary kid. He was a genius whiz-kid (The Traveller directly an unironically compares Wesley to Mozart). As such, he was never developed into a fully rounded character, and the hatred directed at him was almost certainly because his special status didn’t feel earned, it was destiny. If Wesley had been written as a real flesh and blood character who makes mistakes yet keeps striving to prove himself as worthy to be Starfleet material of the sort he idolizes — his mother included — audiences might have rooted for him instead of wanting his head on a platter.