wesley was one of the best fucking characters on tng and some fucking people pretend like he acted exactly the same as he did in like the first 5 episodes over the course of all of his appearancez like he wasnt one of the more human deep complex and even more emotionally mature characters on the enterprise ... like can you fucking tell me what you hate about wesley that isnt something that only happened in like 3 episodes out of all 1 billion episodes

I really enjoyed working with him. …Though admittedly the rewrite of ST:TNG s1e6–for which Michael Reaves and I weren’t responsible: we were cut off at first draft due to in-house politics—did take Wes in directions we hadn’t been planning.

ETA: And the Traveller. Trust me, when I send aliens out into the world, I don’t usually leave them in their pajamas. :/

But re changes in Wesley (per a query in the comments about this): The rewrite to which Michael and I were subjected was what we might as well call a “spite rewrite”, intended to get rid of everything possible in a script that smacks of the previous writing team. (Background: upper management had fallen out with the person who brought us in to pitch. So after that person was forced out of the TNG offices, all the scripts by people they’d brought in were either scrapped or completely rewritten.)

Of our first draft script—based nearly beat for beat on the pitch that no less an expert than Bob Justman, when we were done, declared “the Star Trekkiest Star Trek story he’d ever heard”—nothing was left after the rewrite but one shot and one scene. The scene was Michael’s lovely one in which Picard meets his mother.

The shot was mine, in which Picard steps into the turbolift and almost falls right out of the ship through a TNG-universe version of the Door into Starlight.*

...Everything else was changed in content, or tone, or both.

What I can say about Wes is that I think our draft treated him in a lot more depth, and with significantly more nuance, than the rewrite did. (sigh) It was a learning experience. Among other things, I learned that it’s unwise to spend so much time deciding what your Writer’s Guild pseudonym will be that you miss the deadline to actually pull your name off the script. 😏

HTH.

*For non-Middle Kingdoms readers: this was a straightforward visual in-joke on my part, referring to what in that universe is also known as Death’s Door—the gateway to the last Shore, where “the Sea is starlight”, and where those newly dead—or awaiting rebirth—recover from the stresses of human life before moving on...or back for another round of the greatest Game.

The Official Star Trek Fact Files’ entry on Galaxy M33 from Next Gen’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before”

IIRC, when we were working on this I said to Michael [Reaves], “You know, the Messier catalog hasn’t been getting that much love lately. Let’s stick one of those in there. 33 might be nice: it’s probably the furthest object that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.” …And so we went with that.

…It’s a pity they didn’t keep more of our original draft; there was some great stuff in there. But (shrug) …in TV, rewrite happens.

this one episode of star trek be like