Star Trek fans were thrilled when it was announced over the summer that Patrick Stewart was returning to the franchise to star in his own series as Captain Jean Luc Picard, marking the first time he’ll play the part since 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. Plot details on the show are sparse at present, so we’re left wondering how much of a continuation it’ll be to Picard’s adventures on The Next Generation.
If you ask the TNG cast, though, it seems they’d love to return alongside their old captain in the upcoming CBS All Access series. While attending Baltimore Comic Con the other week, Will Wheaton – who played child prodigy Wesley Crusher on the classic sci-fi show – admitted that he thinks he and the rest of the TNG crew would say yes if they were asked to come back. However, he did make it clear that he doesn’t expect this to happen.
“I think it is very unlikely they will ask me to participate in it. I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that will happen. If they did, I would say “yes,” of course. I think all of us would say ‘yes.’ All of us, if we were given the opportunity to put on the spacesuits again and go work together and bring those characters back, as they would be thirty years later, we would all say ‘yes.'”
Wheaton then went on to admit that if he and the rest of the Enterprise-D team were to make a return, it wouldn’t be the promise of extra work that would lure them to it but the camaraderie the cast share and a chance to recreate the great time they had making TNG back in the day.
“I don’t think it is because we want the work. I don’t think it is that we need the money. It is not because we don’t have other things to do. It is because we love each other so much. An opportunity, even for a day, to return emotionally to some of the best times of our lives, I think we would jump at that opportunity.”
Infamously, Wesley Crusher is often seen as one of the most annoying characters in Trek history, so he’s not one that’d be at the top of fans’ lists of people to return. However, Wheaton himself is a popular figure in the fandom, thanks to, among other things, his lampooning of himself on The Big Bang Theory. So, he could be a welcome face to see in Picard’s new show.
However, evidence suggests that Wheaton’s correct with his guess that a wholesale comeback for all the Next Gen cast is unlikely. After all, Stewart and Wheaton’s co-star Marina Sirtis has said that she and the rest of the gang had no knowledge of the Picard series beyond what the fans know.
What do you think, though? Would more of Star Trek: The Next Generation crew returning be a good thing? Beam down to the comments section and have your say.
