Our Final Frontier

To boldly go where no one has gone before.

I just finished reading Still Just a Geek (2022) by Wil Wheaton. It’s an annotated version of his memoir Just a Geek (2004). For the non-trekkies out there, Wheaton is the actor that gave life to the character of the space teenager, Wesley Crusher. Wesley is the son of Beverly Crusher, the doctor, and a member of the crew of the Enterprise D, the ship in The Next Generation, the successful eighties reboot of the original Star Trek series.

The annotations of the memoir are considerable. They add more than 150 pages to the original. Beyond a new introduction, and an epilogue, the annotations take the form of copious footnotes, where Wheaton upends his original memoir.

In these pages, Wheaton confronts his childhood trauma, his phobias, his chronic depression, and his generalized anxiety disorder. He goes from being an advocate for a public internet, to being a defender of the mentally ill. He turns into a fighter against the stigma of mental illness. In rewriting his memoir, Wheaton discovers he is “beautifully broken,” and he manages to keep his depression and his anxiety at bay.

What strikes me about the confrontations and reversals of Wheaton’s memoir is that he applies the lesson of Star Trek to himself. He “boldly goes where no one has gone before.”

Consider, for example, the Mind Meld. Every trekkie is familiar with this Vulcan practice. Mr. Spock famously showcases it in “The Devil in the Dark,” an episode where the half human, half Vulcan saves the day by mind-melding with a blob of rock called the Horta. He verbalizes the pain that the monster feels. She suffers from the loss of her species, and the death of her children by the colonizers of Janus VI.

Similar journeys to the darkest recess of the unconscious mind take place in the series’ spinoffs. They are rehearsed again in the last season of Picard (2023). This time, we owe the journey to the extra-sensory empathy of the Betazoids.

Deanna Troy, the half human, half Betazoid empath of The Next Generation, tells a traumatized Jack Crusher, “Nothing is more elusive than a door the mind doesn’t want to open.” She then proceeds to use her telepathic abilities to reveal that Jack’s father (Admiral Picard) contaminated Jack at inception with the DNA of the monstrous Borg.

The revelation leads Jack to confront the monster behind the door. He first fights his human father, and then fights his Borg mother. In the end, Jack manages to save the Federation.

I never liked Wesley Crusher, the adolescent, but I like Wil Wheaton, the writer of memoirs. Like Mr. Spock and Counselor Troy, Wheaton believes that it’s possible to overcome trauma (even social trauma) by boldly going where no one has gone before. By confronting our monsters from the Id.

Wheaton’s memoir is proof that writing can be a healing vessel — Chekhov, the Russian helmsman of the original Enterprise, would say wessel. He proves that writing can take us on the dangerous journey to the unconscious, our final frontier.