Still Just a Geek, page 46
* Take notes. Klingon parliamentary procedure will be on the test.
* #NotAllPeopleWhoDressUpLikeKlingons
* No, I don’t know Klingon. I took Spanish in high school.
And no, I really don’t know Spanish, either.
* Garrett is such a good dude. He’s as much a fan as I am, and his effortless kindness and enthusiasm with our fellow fans are inspiring.
* Stephen passed away in 2017. He was truly a kind and gentle soul.
* I could have called this “a motion simulator,” but like Kleenex means tissue and Q-Tip means cotton swab, “Star Tours” means “theme park motion simulator” for me.
* I want and need to be clear about something: I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me when I got in line for this thing. When we stood in line for something that looked like a motion simulator, I thought that was the extent of the attraction. I was not prepared, at all, for the lights to go out, the entire set to change, and to find myself on the closest approximation to the Enterprise I have ever been on that wasn’t at Paramount.
I’m adding this extra context because that’s the baseline from which everything I am about to relate played out.
* I love Frakes so much. I wish he was my dad.
* This happens when I watch TNG. A big part of the experience is remembering what the sets looked like just off camera. So when I watch TNG with someone who didn’t work on the show, our imaginations are doing very different things with the parts of the ship we don’t see.
* Our sets were designed to photograph well, which created a very different reality from these sets, which were designed to take your breath away in person. This turbolift, for example, actually moved, and the sound effects our show added during postproduction played from hidden speakers in the walls.
* I beat myself up for overusing words and phrases like “gasp.” I was just trying to convey how gobsmacked and emotionally overwhelmed I felt.
That said, I might have actually gasped. I want you to imagine how it would feel—seriously, think about this and let it wash over you—to expect a theme park ride, only to be literally transported back in time to your high school, and it’s a perfect replica—so in this case, no apologies. That gasp was real and spectacular.
* I get what he was going for, but this director wasn’t giving me the inspiration I think he hoped to give me. I wasn’t awed out of my mind by Picard’s ability to control the sky. If anything, it made me feel self-conscious and awkward, extremely aware of every movement I made. As it turns out, that was the best character choice for the moment, and it turns out that Corey’s direction, while weird, ended up pulling the performance he needed out of me.
Sadly, I couldn’t make “control the sky!” work as an everyday phrase. Maybe it will take off now.
* I’m a skinny nerd. At forty-eight, I barely weigh 150 pounds. At fifteen, I struggled to break 100. The producers wanted all of us to look like action figures, so the wardrobe department made this foam latex muscle suit for me to wear beneath my costume. I was already self-conscious about my body, and this god-damn muscle suit just made it so much worse. I felt like it just announced to everyone that I was skinny and unattractive, and it drove home how fruitless my efforts were to gain weight and build muscle mass.
* Gene died when I was nineteen, so when I knew him, I was too young to fully appreciate what it meant to know him. I also know he was a complicated guy, and I only knew one very small part of him. Still, I’m grateful for having known that small part, and I will always cherish the memories.
* Even if Patrick Stewart (Sir Patrick Stewart, pardon me) is wrong, when he talks, you’re almost certain he’s right anyway.
And can I just add how fucking incredible it was to essentially hear Gene say, “Dude, I invented this thing” only to have Patrick effectively respond, “Well then why don’t you follow its rules?” Like, I got to see that, with my own eyes, and more than once.
* See the section about my wet dream sketch, above.
Reference number three!
* Two other times in my life I have had revelations this consequential. I’m going to talk about them in more detail later, but they were: (1) accepting that I had a problem with alcohol and had to stop drinking, which led to (2) my ability to finally accept that the man who was my father does not love me, abused me, and was enabled by my mother who gaslighted me about it.
* I was safe. I was home.
* Her name was Mandy. She was great.
* This part of the ride was an actual motion simulator, and I don’t remember anything about it except crashing into the Las Vegas Hilton at the end.
* I want to go into even more detail here, just in case me from the past wasn’t clear enough. I spent all this time and energy blaming Star Trek for my unhappiness. I suspect that Star Trek was a safe vessel for all of that, because it couldn’t exactly argue back at me, the way the actual source of my unhappiness could and did.
I have already said, or I’m going to say soon, that I don’t believe in anything supernatural. At all. It’s all hokum that makes people feel better. That’s okay, but it’s not real. So all of that said, I could easily write that the Universe (or God, or god), or John Titor, or some version of Wil from the future put this opportunity in front of me that night, and it said, “Hey, kid, I’m giving you something incredibly valuable. It’s a gift, and I hope you are able to accept it.”
I do not know why I was able to accept that gift, but I am so grateful that I did. As I wrote then, it fundamentally changed the direction of my life. I cannot overstate how much I love my life now. If this had not happened to me when it did, I don’t know if I would have this life, and all the joy that comes along with it.
* Since I wrote this in 2001, Star Trek has surpassed what it once was. Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks are a goddamn delight, and when I interview their cast and creatives for The Ready Room, they always tell me how much they loved TNG and Wesley. Yeah, I was there when it was great, and in 2001 maybe I wasn’t ready to get out of the way and let another Trek series stand on our shoulders (never considering that we had just stood on TOS), but here and now, I am so proud to be part of the foundation that Star Trek is building its new adventures upon.
* Armin Shimerman and Max Grodénchik who played Quark and Rom on DS9.
* He’s in the green uniform, which is my favorite. I own one, and I wore it to the opening night of Rise of Skywalker, just like my character did on Big Bang Theory. I got on the local news, which always feels more consequential than guest starring on the most popular television show in the English-speaking world. The reporter didn’t know I worked on Star Trek, but the anchor recognized me and told her who I was. It was pretty great.
* Again . . . foreshadowing!
I’m pretty good at this storytelling thing.
* Hey, Wil from the past? This was some really good writing. I’m proud of you.
* It may not seem like it, but the reignition of my love for Star Trek could only have come with the distance of having quit. So this wasn’t regret, it was catharsis.
* This is my I Am Spock moment.
* More like Dreaming Rainbow, amirite?
Is this thing on?
* I know nothing upsets fans more than not remembering every detail, and to that I can simply claim “I’m only human.”
And IMDB didn’t exist when I originally wrote this.
* It also helps when you play an emotionless robot for a living.
* PSA: Lay off “the sauce,” kids.
* I play poker reasonably well. The one time Wesley got to play seven-card stud with the adults, Riker bluffs him off a set on Fourth Street with a weak ace.
Wesley, you are smart as fuck with nanites, but you suck at poker.
* The battle bridge on Enterprise-D was the bridge from the Enterprise-A, redressed for the twenty-fourth century.
If you care about that sort of thing, and don’t know already, (notice how this filter is getting more and more specific?) all of our corridors, our transporter room, sickbay, and engineering were all redecorated from the original sets used in the original series’ movies. I always thought that was really cool, and it made the heartbreak even worse when I revisited Stage 9 during the filming of Nemesis, and our sets (their sets) were gone, like they’d never existed.
Everything is temporary, kids!
* TNG was one of those shows that famous people wanted to be part of, and they usually got to play aliens in the background, or aliens who were featured extras. John Tesh played a Klingon, Stephen Hawking played himself, and Mick Fleetwood played a humanoid fish creature. I had a full conversation with him (I grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac), and never once saw his face.
* John, as I’m sure most of you know, played Q.
* Bridge with Viacom? Burned!
* Co-executive producer and my personal nemesis.
* This is called gaslighting and it is not okay.
* This was just so cruel. I would never do this to anyone, not even to him.
* Okay, let’s presume this is true (it is not) for a real quick second. When he saw me, alone, literally surrounded by dozens of empty chairs, he didn’t think, “Hey, Wil Wheaton was a part of this show, and he’s out there by himself. I ought to invite him to come onstage.”
Like, that’s the thing an empathetic, kind person does, and he didn’t make that choice.
And, if I’m being totally honest? My entire Star Trek family let me down, too. Literally everyone saw I was there, humiliated and hurt, and literally nobody asked me to join them. I know it was a big deal. I know NASA was there. I know it was a whole thing.
Still. Choices matter.
* Again: fuck that guy.
I’ve seen him a few times since I wrote this, and he’s been cordial to me, even kind. But when it mattered, and when he could, Rick Berman has—at every opportunity—hurt and humiliated me in public. He wasn’t the bully my father was, but I felt like he did everything he could to control me and my career, and make sure I never forgot that I left his show.
* The tagline on my blog was “50,000 monkeys at 50,000 typewriters can’t be wrong.” Regular readers of my blog began calling themselves “monkeys” in reference to that tagline. Hence . . .
* I did regret leaving Star Trek, but it wasn’t because it affected my career. I regretted leaving Star Trek because they were the only real family I had, and I missed them. This realization had been unpacking itself since Las Vegas, and it was almost fully extracted when I wrote this blog post. I was starting to reexamine and rethink a lot of things I accepted without question about where my work stopped, my life began, and how Star Trek overlapped them both.
* I love my life so much. If you’re not reading that for the first time in this book, it means we didn’t remember to edit down the number of times I say it, or we decided to leave it in because I really do love my life that much. In any case, I am the result of all the choices I have made, as well as the choices that were made for me. Some of you have already gotten ahead of me and made the comparison to the legendary TNG episode “Tapestry,” so give yourselves a prize. For everyone else: in “Tapestry,” Picard is shown what his life would be if he hadn’t made a choice he regrets above all others. This leads him to realize that his life was a tapestry of choices, and if he plucked one of the threads out, the entire thing would collapse.
That episode resonates with me at a DNA level. It is my symbiote. I keep that episode alive in my memory, and it keeps my personal tapestry from being unraveled.
I don’t know how, but I know my life would be different if I hadn’t left Star Trek. I would be wealthy, for sure. I would have been the famous kid my mother so desperately wanted me to be. I would certainly have had something to build a post–Star Trek career on (something different, anyway—get it? It’s a tapestry!), but who knows if I would have been happy. I would be an even bigger part of Star Trek than I am, but would I ever have grown up? I could have turned into Kevin Sorbo, god forbid. Would I have discovered who I am? I’ve been to Starfleet, but I’ve never been to me.
God that’s such a great joke, but I feel like it wrecks the entire mood. I’m leaving it, though—no apologies. One thing I know for certain—because I was on this road before I took an exit ramp—is that I would have been an awful, awful, aw-fuh-hul person. I would have stayed unhappy, I would have stayed unfulfilled, and as a consequence, I would have been a complete shit.
* It was also risky, and felt like I was burning bridges, to speak up in public about the things he’d done and how he’d made me feel.
As it turns out, he never read this book, and I’m just not that important in his life.
* Jerk editor said it was okay to keep this in, because it’s just a quote.
What is a song lyric, then? Huh? I’m just quoting the words they said then.
NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE.
* I felt like I didn’t have anything unique or special to add to the conversation. I still don’t. I didn’t want to include this chapter in the book, and was pushed into it by my original publisher. I still feel like I don’t have anything special or unique to say about it.
To that end, I’ve spoken to my current editor, and for the sake of verisimilitude, we’re keeping it in. But this is still a painful memory, and don’t expect a lot of annotations.
* Other things that have made me feel this way since:
Trump’s election, and the four years of cruelty, chaos, and fascism that came with it.
Georgia Republicans passing new Jim Crow voting laws.
Mass shootings every fucking day.
One party in Congress refusing, on principle, to do anything to rein in gun violence.
State-sanctioned murder of Black lives by an unaccountable, militarized police force.
Again, just a few things.
When I wrote this in 2001, I could not imagine anything ever happening in my lifetime that was worse than 9/11. And then a white nationalist minority of Americans elected a fascist who ignored a pandemic and allowed (as of this writing) over half a million people to die.
Don’t come at me with that “greatest country on Earth” bullshit. We have a lot of work to do, still.
In the aftermath of 9/11, when we made such an effort to unite and come together as a country, the deep division between Americans and neo-Confederates in 2021 was unthinkable.
And yet. Racism is a hell of a drug.
* Dogs know. They just do.
* Again, I wish I could remember why I felt compelled to write an entry about 9/11 when I really did not want to do that. I wish I could remember why I let previous editors talk me into keeping this in the book. It’s not the worst entry ever, but that choice of words betrays how I was feeling at the time, and I’m not sure I can still find the words to express what it felt like.
Others have tried, and have absolutely done it better, so I’ll let their words and art do some of the work of this impossible task.
* This was one of the ways my anxiety expressed itself. Thanks to medication and therapy, I can manage it, now, and I fly all over the world. Next time you see a plane overhead, wave at it! There’s a nonzero chance it’s me!
* Jerk editor strikes again.
* And again. I’m starting to think it has nothing to do with clearing rights, but with them having terrible taste in music.
* Hey check it out. I snuck a Smiths lyric past The Man.
. . . I probably shouldn’t have pointed that out.
* Yes, I already commented on this earlier. And yes, I still loved this about him. Sadly, his speeds are more varied because he’s a full-on adult.
I really miss two-speed Nolan.
* Have you? Probably not, which is going to make this entire chapter a little cringe for me.
* Yes, that Jimmy Kimmel. Before he was hosting the Oscars, he was a Comedy Central fixture on this show and an even more improbable relic, The Man Show.
I’m not even sure it’s polite to talk about that last show anymore.
