10 Greatest Star Trek Moments In 2024
5. Space, Time, Thought, And Sweater
For its second season, Star Trek: Prodigy had managed to keep a pretty big secret safe… behind a vault door inside a ziggurat. In The Devourer of All Things, Part I, that vault door was opened from the inside. Wesley Crusher, the former warp bubble wonderchild of the Enterprise-D, bounded back onto screens in trademark orange knitwear. Not just back, but back and better than ever. 2023 was the Year of the Carpet. 2024 was the Year of the Sweater.
We had been teased by his brief stop in 21st century Los Angeles (this year, in fact), and the quickest flashback to his Academy days. We wanted more. In season two of Prodigy, Wesley wasn't just there, he was crucial to the whole timey-wimey plot. Temporal Mechanics (101) was the thing, and that required some kind of Time Lord. With Wesley the Traveller of all of space-time, and Wil Wheaton the huge Doctor Who fan, the vault was also a TARDIS.
"After all these years, they finally got Wesley right. After all these years, they finally let him realise his potential," Wheaton told Seán in an exclusive interview for TrekCulture in July. As a character, Wesley was weighed down more than almost any other from the very beginning by his Mozart-like destiny. Prodigy was a liberation for the prodigy, no longer the Mary Sue.