The first few Star Trek: Lower Decks episodes weren’t great, and though I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a fan of the show, subsequent installments have been better. One element I like is that it’s set in the years after The Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space Nine, potentially allowing for cameos from characters in those series. For example, John de Lancie’s Q is returning in his first on-screen appearance since the Voyager episode “Q2” in April 2001.
Now, another The Next Generation alumnus has expressed a desire to reprise his role. In an interview with TrekMovie.com, Wil Wheaton – who played Wesley Crusher – said he’d love to appear on Lower Decks. He was asked which of the current shows was his favorite and replied as follows:
“I absolutely love Lower Decks. It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. And I love the acknowledgment that there are not only other crewmen and women on a starship that are not our bridge crew, but there are also other starships that are not the flagship. So who ends up on the B-team, and what does that look like? And what does that sound like?”
The interviewer pointed out that showrunner Mike McMahan had said he’d love to bring Wesley Crusher onto the series, but that he doesn’t know if he can due to the character’s temporal status (he left the Enterprise with the mysterious Traveler to explore the nature of reality). Wheaton replied that he’d “do the show in a heartbeat” and explained where he thought Crusher was now, saying:
“In my headcanon Wesley Crusher is a Time Lord. In my headcanon, Wesley is off with The Traveler. He experienced some kind of multidimensional, higher-dimensional experience and it changed him and changed who he is and what he does. And he’s a very different kind of character now than he was the last time we saw him. I don’t know if that interpretation is the correct interpretation. There is also an interpretation which says none of that stuff ever happened. He went and lived on that planet with all of the people that we’re trying to be run off by Starfleet and that’s where he stayed. And he would be coming out of that if we saw him again.”
The actor also went on to note that he’d love to reunite with his former cast mates in the second season of Star Trek: Picard, stating that being able to work with Patrick Stewart would be “a gift and a blessing.”
Wheaton has become a beloved figure in the Trek community since his days in Starfleet, which is quite the turnaround given that Wesley Crusher was famously despised by fans when The Next Generation first aired. Personally, I hope he comes back in some form, as it’d be great for his story to get an ending beyond disappearing with an inter-dimensional weirdo. Fingers crossed they can unravel the temporal conundrum of Wesley Crusher and get him on Star Trek: Lower Decks.
