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STAR TREK, 90210 "Some people were glad when I left the show," says Wil Wheaton, 19, who in this episode reprises his role as teen space cadet Wesley Crusher, the youngest officer ever to serve on the Enterprise. Wheaton left Next Generation in 1990 to resume his movie career (he starred in 1986's Stand By Me), but every so often his character returns from Earth (where he's studying at Starfleet Academy) for a guest spot. "There was an anti-Wesley movement among a handful of fanatical Trekkies," Wheaton says, sulking. "They hated Wesley. They couldn't stand the idea of a teenager on the bridge. I'd go to Star Trek conventions and people would say, 'I wish you'd die.' I went to one convention in Los Angeles, and there was even a panel discussion called 'Solving the Wesley Problem.' I couldn't believe it-a whole panel?" Fanatical Trekkies? That's not exactly news. The show's followers have long been known for extreme devotion. Next Generation receives about 1,000 pieces of mail and 1,500 phone calls a month, including hundreds of script suggestions, marriage proposals to cast members, and corrections when the series flubs a technical detail. When a photon torpedo was mistakenly blasted out of the ship's phasers-only portal on one recent episode, the show got 25 calls and dozens of letters. As for "The Wesley Problem": Some hard-core Trekkers object to the character's goody two-shoes image and his propensity for saving the galaxy. This new episode may help change that image-Wesley gets mixed up in a scandal at the academy-but Wheaton still bristles at the criticism. "This is the last time I'm going to talk about it," he snaps. "I've been making excuses for saving the universe since I was 14. The truth is, Wesley Crusher has single- handedly saved the Enterprise exactly 1.4 times. That's all. Like any Starfleet officer, he's contributed to solving problems. But because he's a kid, people think his opinion is somehow less valuable." TALK TECHIE TO ME Gates McFadden, 38, is pacing the set of sick bay, rehearsing her lines as Dr. Beverly Crusher, the Enterprise's chief medical officer (and Wesley's single mom). "'I've picked up minuscule distortions in the surrounding visual receptors,'" she whispers to herself. "'Visual receptors'?" She checks her script. "'I've picked up minuscule distortions in the surrounding Dekyon Field.'" She closes the script. "I hate technobabble. There ought be an Emmy for this stuff." Where there's Trek, there's Trekspeak, that cryptoscientific space chatter that adds a dash of high-tech ambience to the scripts. Amazingly, every word is supposed to mean something-even if what it means hasn't been invented yet. There's even a special Trek writers' manual (titled Yes, But Which Button Do I Push to Fire the Phasers?) to ensure that the show's scribes know the difference between a photon torpedo ("an energy weapon in which a small quantity of matter and antimatter are bound together in a magnetic bottle") and dilithium crystals (which "control the powerful matter/antimatter reaction which permits our ship to travel faster than light"). "Star Trek has always prided itself on scientific accuracy and internal consistency," the manual boasts. "Dekyon Field," McFadden whispers to herself. "Dekyon Field. Dekyon Field. I have no idea what that means." The official Trek definition: "a completely imaginary particle that travels through time and across subspace." Uh, right. DON'T LIFT A FINGER This season Corbin Bernsen (L.A. Law), Bebe Neuwirth (Cheers), Kelsey Grammer (ditto), and Matt Frewer (Doctor, Doctor) have all appeared on Next Generation (disguised as aliens), and next season there are plans for visits by Robin Williams, John Goodman, and Elliott Gould. The show is the chic series for cameos. For this episode, the guest star is no stranger to outer space: He's Ray Walston, who played the curmudgeonly extraterrestrial Uncle Martin on CBS' comedy series My Favorite Martian from 1963 to 1966. "Star Trek started the year My Favorite Martian went off the air," Walston recalls."I was always jealous of it. I thought the Martian show should have been more like Star Trek, with the same seriousness about space travel. We relied too much on barnyard talent: chimpanzees and cats and dogs and elephants-all that crap. Star Trek was a much better show." Walston is playing Boothby, the Academy's grumpy old grounds keeper, and his appearance on the set is causing quite a stir. "Everybody does the same thing when they meet me," he says, frowning. "They all make antenna signs over their heads. Or ask me to do the thing with the finger." He wiggles a finger % as if levitating a nearby chair, part of his shtick on Martian. "It used to bother me, but I'm getting used to it." ALIENS ARE PEOPLE TOO Six young humanoids-a female from Planet Bajora, two males from Vulcan, two male Earthlings, and a female of undetermined species ("They told me what I was, but I forgot," she says)-are lounging on the steps outside soundstage 9, discussing makeup and prosthetic devices. "You don't even notice you have them on," says one Vulcan about his pointy ears. "Unless you try to listen to a Walkman or use the telephone," adds the other. "I don't mind the makeup so much," says the Bajoran, tugging at her skintight Starfleet uniform, "but these costumes are murder." Despite the complaints, the makeup and costumes are a definite improvement over the original Trek-and they're a lot more expensive. Next Generation reportedly spends $500,000 per episode to create the most lavish effects and costumes ever made for TV. The man in charge of turning the actors into aliens is 54-year-old makeup artist Michael Westmore. "We give them a protuberance on the forehead or we change their nose or lips," he says. "We usually don't do the nine eyes and seven arms and earlobes down to the floor sort of thing. We're more subtle." Alien makeovers can take as little as an hour (for a basic Vulcan ear job) and as long as four (for a full-fledged Klingon). The results look spookily real, despite the occasional slipups. "We had one alien-I don't even like to talk about it," Westmore recalls, shuddering. "It was a female. We had six fleshy tendrils coming out of her face. When we saw her on film, though, she didn't look right. So we cut off the tendrils. But then she didn't look like an alien anymore-she looked like a human who had had an accident-and we didn't have any time to fix her." The solution: "The writers added a line in the script. They said that the villain beat her up-that's why she looked so bad." OL' YELLOW EYES Brent Spiner has been swathed in gold paint for six hours and he's still waiting for the go-ahead to deliver his one line of dialogue for the day ("We should arrive at Earth in 10 hours, 16 minutes, sir"). "I've never actually tested how long this makeup lasts," he says, puffing impatiently on a Marlboro in his trailer. "But I have a theory that when all humanity is dead, when the world is in ashes, the only things left will be roaches and this gold paint." Spiner, 43, plays Data, the emotionless, yellow-eyed android who dreams of one day becoming a human being. Of all the ship's senior officers-including Michael Dorn's security chief Worf, LeVar Burton's blind engineer Geordi LaForge, Marina Sirtis' empathic psychologist Deanna Troi, and Jonathan Frakes' first officer Will Riker-Data is by far the most important. Like a tin-plated version of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared Vulcan made famous by Leonard Nimoy, he functions as the show's barometer of humanity. Through his eyes, we see mankind at its best and worst. "Data is a machine that wants to be a man," Spiner explains. "Which is exactly the opposite of Spock, who was always trying to avoid emotion, who actually wanted to be a machine." Data and Spock met during a Next Generation episode last November (Vulcans apparently do live long and prosper-Spock was supposed to be 130 years old in the show), and more than 25 million fans tuned in, making it the most-watched Trek episode since the premiere. "You want to know what I love about Star Trek?" Spiner offers. "You want to know why the show is so popular?" He lights another cigarette. "We had an episode in which Mick Fleetwood (of Fleetwood Mac) did a guest spot wearing the head of a fish. He looked like a giant perch, a giant gefilte fish. But there were no comments in the script about what an ugly creature he was. It's not in the show's vocabulary to comment negatively on ethnicity. And it's not just black or white or Hispanic-it's Romulan and Klingon and snake people and dog people. It's that message of tolerance that makes Next Generation such a great show." Well, in part, perhaps. But there is a whole galaxy of explanations for why people respond to Next Generation. The thrills and chills of space travel, the vivid depictions of brave new alien worlds and civilizations, the sheer drama of blasting into the unknown-these are also powerful reasons to tune in. Not to mention minuscule distortions in the surrounding Dekyon Field.


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