mattandsarahsaunt asked:

I just saw that Scott Grimes guested on a TNG ep. IMDb says his character was meant to be a friend for Wesley. Do you have any idea what happened to that idea?

wilwheaton answered:

I don’t know what *actually* happened, but I do know that at least one of the major writers in the early days hated Wesley, and they wrote him with obvious disdain, making him almost a “GEE WIZ” cartoon at times.

If I recall correctly, Scott was on the show about halfway through season one? The writers were still giving Wesley the occasional peer to hang out with, but it was always one scene like that and we never saw him with his friends again. It was a creative choice, and I think it would be different today, but in the late 80s, I don’t think there were many writers (certainly not on TNG) who really understood smart kids and how to write Wesley as more than an idea.

And I can’t prove it, but I STRONGLY suspect that this one particular writer deliberately undermined Wesley, and wrote him as obnoxiously Will Robinson from Lost In Space as possible. I can’t prove it, and I could be TOTALLY wrong, but every script in the first season with this writer’s name on it gave Wesley the WORST stuff to do. At least some of the other writers actually treated him like a character who was worth exploring, but by the time they had taken the place of this particular writer, the damage was done and Wesley never fully recovered, until last year when he finally realized his potential as The Traveler.

This is all to say that, maybe someone had an idea to give Wesley a peer, like Jake had Nog, and it would make sense to cast Scott in the role, but I don’t recall hearing that he was considered for a recurring character, or that there was any real effort invested in building out Wesley’s story that way. Which honestly makes a lot of sense considering the era, the realities of production, and the lack of “We watched how the TNG writers fucked up Wesley, so we’re not going to do that to our young character” at the time.