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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 Trekconventions 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.


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