Yesterday at Gamescom 2013, Microsoft revealed the list of launch titles for the Xbox One, which will be hitting shelves some time in November and set you back $499.99.

Here is the list of Xbox One Launch Titles:

• Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
• Battlefield 4
• Call of Duty: Ghosts
• Crimson Dragon
• Dead Rising 3
• FIFA ’14
• Fighter Within
• Forza Motorsport 5
• Just Dance ’14
• Killer Instinct
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes
• Lococycle
• Madden NFL 25
• NBA 2k14
• NBA LIVE ’14
• Need for Speed: Rivals
• Peggle 2
• Powerstar Golf
• Ryse: Son of Rome
• Skylanders: Swap Force
• Watch Dogs
• Zoo Tycoon
• Zumba Fitness

We have talked about this before many times on the Big Shiny Podcast, and that is too often when a new console comes out there is a huge lack of great launch titles to accompany it. In my opinion, it’s looking like Microsoft is looking to not fall victim to that this time around with a strong list of launch titles. You have your first person shooters, sports games, fighting games, third-person adventure games, racing games, and even a Skylanders and LEGO game thrown in there for good measure.

It looks to me there will be plenty of quality gaming options for anyone picking up an Xbox One right out of the gate.

You can follow Arse-bot and all the pointless thoughts he puts out into the interwebs on Twitter @Arse_bot

There has been a lot made of a rumour coming out of Badass Digest that is saying that Lucasfilm and Disney are close to announcing that Episode VII won’t be a summer release, but will instead be coming out for Christmas 2015.

They cite unnamed sources.

Probably the same unnamed sources that sold them the debunked story that JJ Abrams was quitting Episode VI.

This story is being reported EVERYWHERE as though it’s a done deal. People are already looking into sub-zero weather sleeping bags for the campout for tickets. Fans are assuming May is dead for Star Wars.

But here’s the problem: There’s no evidence to support it.

Normally, people would look at the available clues and see if there was merit in the rumour, but in this rumour, at this point, there is actually a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

First: when Star Wars: Celebration Anaheim was announced there was this line on the official Star Wars website:

Star Wars Celebration 2015 will be held in Anaheim, California, from April 16-19, 2015. Timed with the release of Star Wars: Episode VII, this promises to be a Star Wars Celebration like no other.

That’s actually an official acknowledgment of the time period Episode VII will be released. Celebrations I-III were all timed a few weeks before the release of Episode I-III and they wouldn’t make mention of it if it wasn’t true. Lucasfilm IS an official source for Star Wars news. That sentence didn’t get included on that website by accident.

Second: The ONE thing Alan Horn DID say about Star Wars at D23 was to confirm a summer 2015 release date for Star Wars.

“Look for ‘Episode VII’ in the summer of 2015.”

So, that’s Disney officially confirming the time frame. And both of these instances are from the last few weeks.

The only company even slightly involved in the production that hasn’t weighed in on it is Bad Robot, and those guys are so sworn to secrecy, I bet they haven’t even told their significant others they’re working on Star Wars, let alone the presumptive release date.

Then, we have Variety reporter Marc Graser tweet that he’s being told from his sources that the December release date story is bunk:

Being told there's no truth to the December release date for #StarWars #Disney

— Marc Graser (@marcgraser) August 19, 2013

So, the evidence says we’re looking at a May (or at the very least “summer”) 2015 release date for Episode VII.

But evidence isn’t enough to satisfy some and they’re still worried about other things.

One common argument is that May is simply too crowded for Star Wars to make money and they need to move it to December where it’s a safer bet.

Well, according to the calendar, the only film releasing in May 2015 is The Avengers: Age of Ultron, another Disney film, albeit under the Marvel banner. There is enough time in the month to give each film a 2 week window of box office dominance, which is about all any film can ask for these days. That’s a lot longer in movie time than you realize. Think about this: The Wolverine came out three weeks ago and it already feels like an eternity.

But for those saying December is less crowded, what about the three movies that have already staked out that territory (including Kung Fu Panda and Alvin and the Chipmunks.) Sure, those movies won’t do Avengers sized business, but that’s certainly more options than just Avengers. And that season is sure to get even more crowded based on the Oscar-bait films being released in time to qualify and other big blockbusters that always stake out that Christmas release.

There are simply less movies coming out in May 2015 than any other major tentpole month. Just because Disney also owns Avengers doesn’t mean it’s too crowded.

The next big argument is that they simply don’t have the time to make the movie if they’re shooting in January 2014 to get it done in May of 2015.

But that’s not exactly true. Did you know principal photography on A New Hope began on March 22, 1976? Having Abrams start in January 2015 gives him a full 3 month headstart on the job Lucas did that first time out. Sure, the prequels took more time, but they also spent more time in post-production.

But the prequels also fit on the same time schedule. It took three years to make each of the prequels.

As far as I can tell, work on the script for Episode VII, the first step in any mode of pre-production, began in June of 2012. That hits the three year window for a May 2015 release perfectly as well.

Others think that Disney simply doesn’t care that Star Wars movies are traditionally released in May. That may well be true, but they’re the ones giving us all of the indications that it will be.

I’m sorry, but at this point, there’s simply no compelling reason whatsoever to believe that Star Wars is being moved to December 2015.

Sure. It could happen. The sources Badass Digest are citing could be totally right. But looking at the evidence we have, there’s no reason to believe it.

None.

Whatsoever.

Note: I reached out to Lucasfilm for comment on this issue and have not yet received a reply.

It was reported on his official facebook page this morning that the famous (and incredibly talented) pop novelist Elmore Leonard passed away at his home this morning, surrounded by his family.

He’d been struggling with complications from a stroke. He was 87.

His ear for dialogue and telling engaging, cinematic stories in prose form. He was a snappy writer that had a tremendous impact in the world of prose, crossing genres with ease, but also the world of film.

Adaptations of his novels came in the forms of movies we’ve all seen, like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and countless others. Favorites all.

3:10 to Yuma was based on a short story he’d written. The television show Justified on FX is also based on a pair of his short stories.

He’s left an indelible mark across our pop culture landscape, in the way we view stories, in the way we talk, and he can’t be thanked enough for that. I can personally attest to the fact that lines he’d written in his books and crossed over into movies had found their way into my vernacular. He just had a great ear for that sort of thing.

You felt cool reading his books. They exuded cool.

For any fan of good writing (and feeling cool), I can’t suggest enough that you read some of his work. Do it now.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of speaking to Wil Wheaton, today we’re talking with Michael Dorn. Dorn has appeared in more episodes of Star Trek than anyone else, as Worf, the first Klingon ever to join Starfleet.

You can order the fourth season of TNG on Amazon, and you can find Michael Dorn on Twitter.

Bryan Young: Thanks for taking the time out to talk to me about Star Trek, I’m sure it’s not something you do very often.

Michael Dorn: No, no, this is the first time [laughs]

BY: With the season Rur Blu-ray coming out, which I guess is the primary thrust of what and why we’re talking. What did you feel about season 4 as you guys were going into it?

MD: Season four was I think when we all kind of hit our stride, in terms of the producers, the directors, the actors, everybody was kind of finding, well they’d found their way. Which is one of the great things about television, you really have time to kind of flush out a character or arrive at some comfortable place for the actor and the character, and I think the fourth season is where we really hit our stride. Everybody was just clicking and we knew that the series was going on, we knew that the fans loved it so it was a good season.

BY: I read that you’re one of the few cast members who was a giant fan of the property before you got the job.

MD: Oh, yeah.

BY: What was it that drew you to Star Trek before you got involved?

MD: A couple of things. When it originally came on, my brother and I were, you know, we loved television and we grew up watching cowboys and Indians and westerns and the Untouchables, the Riflemen and all these kinds of shows that were on, and comedies, too. It was the first one that really had a multicultural cast, that was interesting to us, but also initially it was a fun show. It was was like Gene Roddenberry was fond of saying, it truly was Wagon Train to the stars. They were doing stuff also that was kind of groundbreaking, which was they were talking about balance of power, talking about the Communists and the Americans and the whole Cold War attitude that was going on, which was part of it.

BY: That was something that kind of struck me, I was about seven when Next Generation started and I remember being shocked at how steeped in that whole Cold War, how bold it was to put a Klingon on the bridge of the Enterprise.

MD: Exactly.

BY: Was there any sense of that, when you were doing that, right off the bat?

MD: Not at all, the one thing that does hold true by the facts, and I always go by the facts, is that I was the last one cast. I was an afterthought. The story that backed that up is that people had given Gene so much guff about the Klingons, are the Klingons still the enemy, are the Klingons gonna be this and are they gonna be that? He just said, “forget about this, we’ve moved on,” and that’s why he put him on the bridge. That’s one thing about Gene, is he’s smart about television and those type of things, he wanted to show that people move on. It’s not the same thing, it’s not us against them.

BY: Over the years, you’ve played more Star Trek than anybody, a fact that I’m sure you get pointed out to you all the time…

MD: Which I’m really proud of, I’m really proud of it.

BY: How did you feel, did you ever delve into, are you this expert on Klingon culture and history now that you’ve been the avatar we’ve all seen it through so much, through Next Generation and Deep Space Nine?

MD: Actually, the Klingon culture, and, again, this is a direct edict from Gene when I got the job, he didn’t want the character to be anything like we’d seen before. I knew all the characters and I knew all the actors, I knew all the Klingons before then so I just took a different tact, I just went in a different direction and from that the writers and producers took off on that. They just went way out there, which was great in devising the Klingon culture really. We really got an idea of what it was about, and his place in the whole hierarchy of the Klingon Empire. It was a new start for Klingons and that’s what I was happy about.

BY: My favorite episodes with Worf through Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were ones where he does specifically play against type, I think my favorites might have been the babysitting episodes in Deep Space Nine; I imagine that was fun, too.

MD: The good thing about the producers, one of the good things, is that they understood that I was very close to my character; Next Generation, maybe not so much because basically they were writing and I was just working, but Deep Space Nine I really made it clear that I wanted my character to do something else. Not to do something different, but to really delve into this guy, not to just have him sitting around being mean and being pissed off at everybody. I think that’s what they did, and luckily they understood that Worf is not a guy who tries to be funny, or tries to be dramatic or any of those things, he just is; and if you write good dialogue, it’s just going to come off good. They were good about that, at least.

BY: So season four actually set the stage for a lot of stuff that you guys paid off in Deep Space Nine, with Alexander and things like that were you guys, with season four how was that going into it? Could you imagine that you’d be doing that years later on another Star Trek show and carrying through some of those stories?

MD: Not at all, I never imagined that I would go on to do eleven years as a character, I was happy to do four years. In this business, to work is the number one thing, to get work, so I was just happy to do the four years and had no idea. The one good thing is that I was never the one that had to go up and yell and scream at the writers and the producers to give me stuff. There’s seven characters, so you’re not going to get something every week, the show’s not going to be about you every week and I understood that, but when they wrote stuff they wrote really great stuff. I think that I just, I don’t think I ever went up to them and said “I don’t know what’s going on, you’ve got to write me more stuff, this isn’t good!” It was always really, really interesting. I was number seven on the call sheet, so that meant I wasn’t going to get every show, but when they wrote him they really pulled out all the stops. It was fantastic, I was always really happy with what they wrote. It’s interesting, there was one time, I remember very specifically, where we captured a Romulan and the character, my character, had the blood that could save the Romulan because he needed a transfusion, and I read the script and at the end it says “Worf refuses and the guy dies.”

I went up to Rick Berman and, I wasn’t yelling, I just went, “Rick, are you sure you want to do this?”

And he goes, “Well, why?”

And I said, “Well, it’s Star Fleet and you kind of do stuff that, and it really would put him in a different light. I’m not sure how, but what do you think?”

And he said “Well, Michael, that’s why we want to do it. We want to show that he’s NOT a human being. And he’s not ordered to do it, but if he has a choice then, no, he’s not going to do it. And he’s fine with that.”

And I was like, “Okay, it’s your show.” And it was a great decision, it was a very wise decision.

BY: At what point did you find the character? You said the show hit its stride in the fourth season, but when was the moment that you were the character? Or when were you more invested in things, like that story you just told, instead of just taking the scripts and doing your best with them. At what point did Worf really gel for you the most?

MD: I think actually the first season, there was an episode, “Heart Of Glory” I think it what it is? Where the Klingons come one the ship and they try to take over, and Worf is, you know. It really dealt with all the things that Worf dealt with, it showed where he came from and it showed where he was born, where he grew up and his human parents and it really kind of, and that was kind of the first episode where I was like “I get it” I had already given him a little bit of a back story, but that’s where I understood and got it. From that moment I just took off and I didn’t have a question after that, they didn’t have a question after that either.

BY: How difficult was it to find the voice? And once you found it, were you worried? Like, “I’m going to have to do this every day for the next eleven years.” [laughs]

MD: I didn’t know it was going to be eleven years when I first did it. No, the voice was, the way I’m talking now was his original voice. If you watch the first episode, maybe the first two episodes, that’s the voice I have, it’s this voice. Gene came to me and he said, “We’ve got to do something about that, because you sound like an American, and we wanted you to sound different.”

So I said, “okay, great,” and for two days I tried a couple of different things and Gene said, “no, no, no,” and I think I came back the next day and tried two or three more things, and the Worf voice that you heard, that was one of the voices, they said “That’s the one.”

And I go, “okay,” and that’s it. Once again, changing your voice is small potatoes when you’ve got a job. If they said, “Michael, you’ve got to talk like this for the rest of your life,” I go, “okay!” If you’re going to be on a show for 20 or 30 years, yeah, that’s fine!

BY: So you didn’t find any challenge in keeping it once you were there? It wasn’t physically demanding on you? Probably much less so than the makeup process that was every day.

MD: No, that was no demand at all. My voice is low anyway, so I just lowered it some more and got a little more gruff, and put it, he doesn’t use contractions a lot – there are some times when I slip and there will be a contraction, but for the most part he doesn’t use contractions, which gives his voice a little stiltedness.

BY: You directed, I think, four episodes? A lot of the other cast members went on, I’ve talked to LeVar Burton and Jonathan Frakes, and they kind of made a career out of that, but you seem to have only done the four. Was that not something that held a lot of interest for you after you’d done it?

MD: No, actually, interestingly enough, the history is one thing that people can kind of look back on, but I actually asked Rick if I could direct from early on and because of the makeup and the time that I was going to take, I just didn’t have the time. I was in makeup, you know, 12 hours a day; but I always wanted to, that’s why I got in the business, to direct. I did four episodes, and it is a very interesting thing, after that I directed these other shows, I directed a sitcom and I directed VIP with Pamela Anderson and was going in that direction, but as with in the business it just didn’t work out that way. The shows, they like my work and a couple of them got cancelled, and there was another show that I was shadowing the director on and that one didn’t work out so it’s one of those things where it just didn’t work out like it did for those guys. But, it’s not over yet, I still have things, I’m working on my own projects and I think that it’ll come around again.

BY: For my last question, it’s kind of a two-parter: one- what would you say the episode of Star Trek that you’re the most proud of and I know you’ve talked a lot about making Worf a captain and getting that off the ground, where is that at?

MD: Well, there were two episodes in Deep Space Nine that I just though, when it comes to Klingons and Worf, that I thought were just fabulous which were “Soldiers of the Empire” and “Once More unto the Breach” with Jon Colicos. Those were just brilliant, brilliant episodes, wonderfully written episodes. I think Ron Moore wrote the episodes and they were just brilliant, just brilliant. There were a bunch of episodes on Star Trek that dealt with Worf, I think that “The Redemption” part one and part two are great episodes, but I really loved the feel of those last two. We were actually on Klingon ships, we were in the Klingon Empire. They were fantastic, I think they were my two favorites.

Also, the Worf thing, last year there was interest and I talked to a couple producers and we actually had pitch meeting with Paramount and CBS, and it got a little, business things got in the way in terms of the JJ Abrams movie coming out and CBS/Paramount and their relationship with JJ Abrams. I don’t think they wanted to step on his toes by putting a new series on, but it’s not dead yet. I’ve finished the script and hopefully someone will take a look at this and say “we can do this” so we’ll see.

BY: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me, I’m a big Star Trek fan. I think the stuff with Worf and Jadzia and Ezri is probably some of the most compelling, dramatic, incredible Star Trek that’s ever been put down.

MD: Oh yeah, I agree.

You can order the fourth season of TNG on Amazon, it’s available now. You can find Michael Dorn on Twitter.

Check back for our review of the season four Blu-ray, via Huffington Post.

I had the extreme good fortune to be able to interview the Internet celebrity, board game connoisseur, and Star Trek veteran Wil Wheaton. We spoke in honor of the release of the release of the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was also his last as a regular cast member.

We talked about that time in his life, but we also talked about Star Wars. For the discussion on Star Wars, you can actually listen to that portion of the conversation on the Full of Sith podcast.

You can order the fourth season of TNG on Amazon, and you can find Wil on Twitter and via his website.

Bryan Young: The first thing I wanted to let you know, I guess that, totally off topic, a redditor had me send you, through the RedditGifts marketplace, some books of mine. So I thought that was interesting that that happened at the same time as this interview got set up.

Wil Wheaton: Oh! That’s, oh, you wrote Lost At The Con!

BY: Yes, that’s me.

WW: Yeah, so thank you. You threw extra books in when it was delivered to me. What a weirdly small world.

BY: With season 4, I don’t know how often you revisit, I mean, how often do you revisit Star Trek? Particularly episodes you’ve been on?

WW: Not very often. Every now and then, I’ll come across something that is just running on television and I might stop and watch it for a few minutes. Mostly when I watch the reruns these days, I don’t even pay attention to the story anymore. I’m looking at it and remembering whatever I can about what it was like to shoot that episode and what was sort of going on at that time, things like that.

BY: So, if that’s how you get to experience The Next Generation, are there other Star Trek series that you get to watch as a fan at all? I mean, I know you’re an impossibly large geek about many things, but are there other aspects of Star Trek that you’ve found yourself latching onto as geek and not as a member of the crew?

WW: I’m a huge, huge fan of the original series, and I absolutely love to watch original episodes whenever I can find them. That is a thing that I watch as a fan. There’s also a couple of seasons of Star Trek that I wasn’t a part of that I can also watch as a fan. I can even watch episodes that I was in, because it was so long ago that I don’t remember as much of it as episodes of TableTop or episodes of Big Bang Theory. It’s a different experience for me.

BY: Which was more uncomfortable for you, the sweaters and the jumpers, or the actual Star Fleet uniform? Which looked very tight.

WW: I thought the rainbow striped uniform was really cool, I really like that. I liked that I was wearing something that was unique to me. I liked that I was wearing something that had all three colors of the Star Fleet branches on it, I thought that was cool that Wesley hadn’t yet committed to one particular branch of Star Fleet so he could kind of go wherever he wanted. I thought that was really great.

I was not a huge fan of the sweaters, mostly because I was fourteen years old in 1987 and I wanted to be wearing obnoxious neon colors because that’s what we were into back then. I really didn’t want to be wearing these earthy colors and in these sweaters that were just gross.

I think my favorite thing ever was, it may have been in season 4, when I got to wear an actual, proper Star Fleet uniform that everybody else wore with the jacket and the pants and all that. I just loved that.

BY: That’s what I was going to ask about, was it a different experience getting to put that on for the first time and sort of be the same as everyone. I mean, you’d been hanging around and shooting in your other costumes for so long, and finally you were sort of, was it off set the same as it was on the show? Were you finally one of the guys at all?

WW: Well, that never really changed. When we were shooting, we were all very much a family, and for me, my experience, being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old through this time was very much like having eight parents. And always being, sort of, having to be on good behavior and dealing with all the things that you deal with as a teenager. So getting to, you know, that never really changed.

What has changed over the years, especially as I got older and as I became an adult in my own right, I could hang out with them in a way that I just couldn’t when I was a child and they were adults. And now that we’re all just adults, it doesn’t matter that I’m in my forties and they’re in their fifties and sixties, that just doesn’t matter, we can hang out. 25 years ago, when I was a teenager and they were in their thirties, we just didn’t have anything in common other than work.

That’s something that I always felt the writers could have done more with, that created a real angst in me. If Wesley were a real person, I imagine he would have felt something very similar to that, feeling like he can hang out with these people as peers when they’re working, but they can’t really hang out and go goof off and be friends when they’re not working. If the writers had given Wesley that reality, the way it existed in me, I think it probably would have made him a more well-rounded and a more satisfying character that was more of a person than an idea.

BY: Was that ever anything that you thought to voice when you were in the situation there? Did you ever take the initiative to talk to the writers about that, or is that something you kind of hit upon in hindsight?

WW: I didn’t have the maturity and the wisdom as a child to figure all that stuff out, I just knew that I felt conflicted and I didn’t know why. I mean, that’s kind of a core feature of being a teenager, right, being confused and conflicted? I don’t know what it was like for the other actors, but I wasn’t allowed to talk to the writers, and I know from some of the writers that they were given an edict by the executive producers that they were not to talk to us.

BY: Why is that, do you think? Just to keep actors from lobbying for better parts?

WW: I really don’t know, I suspect that a lot of that was sort of motivated by a desire to sort of keep people under control.

BY: Of all the episodes you’ve done of Star Trek, what’s the one you’re most proud of?

WW: I’m really, really proud of, I think it’s called Final Mission? Picard and Wesley and a red shirt guy crash land in a shuttlecraft on a planet, and they end up stranded together in a cave. Wesley is charged with keeping Picard alive. I think it’s some of my best work as an actor on the show, and it was certainly one of the best scripts I ever got to work with. Just being in scenes with Patrick all day, every day, that was just amazing. I feel that I grew a lot as an actor during production of that episode.

BY: So, I’m probably seven or eight years younger than you, and watching The Next Generation as a kid at that age, having Wesley on the bridge was like the coolest thing in the world for me. It’s actually funny, in showing it to my son, Wesley is the character that he globs onto and he’s ten now. At what point did you become aware that you were the avatar for kids watching the show in groups of families?

WW: I didn’t even know that until I was in my late twenties. That was the first time I’d ever heard about that, all I ever heard were the, because I was online so much back then, all I ever heard were the twenty-somethings complaining about there being, about a kid existing on a television show. The kids that really identifying with Wesley, who have now grown up to become doctors and engineers and scientists because they were inspired by just the existence of that character, they were kids so they weren’t online complaining about stuff. They were enjoying the show, then enjoying life, then moving on.

It’s been wonderful over about the last ten years or so, to meet people all over the world who are roughly my age who grew up watching Next Generation with their parents, identifying with Wesley Crusher and then moving on to watch Next Generation and the new Star Trek movies with their own children. It’s really cool that it’s this thing that has bridged now three generations of family. It’s really humbling and exciting for me to be part of that legacy.

BY: How often to you get people coming up to you and saying, and I’m sure that my experience with that isn’t unique in any way, how often do you hear that? Does it ever feel like a weight at all to you?

WW: No, it’s awesome, it’s a gift.

BY: Okay, I can accept that. I believe that completely, actually, but it’s funny, I remember very distinctly watching the first episode and reacting so vehemently and hating Picard when he told you to shut up. I think I was maybe 7 when that happened, and when I showed that again to my son that was the one thing he latched onto, too, it was like “Man, that captain, he really doesn’t know how to act around kids at all.”

WW: People say it and they think they’re being clever and it’s just sort of like, I’ve heard that so much that it used to really irritate me. Now it’s just mildly annoying, people say that to me on Twitter and I block them. Whenever someone disagrees with me about a thing, that seems to be the first place they go to and it’s just like, come on you guys. We can do better than this.

BY: Wow, that’s, I wouldn’t have expected that people would go immediately there that quickly. With being on set, especially during season 4, and correct me if I’m mistaken, but that was your last year as sort of a regular cast member, and after that you were just sort of around now and again, right?

WW: Yeah, that’s true, I became recurring after that.

BY: What was it that caused that switch? And how did you feel about that? Was getting away something that you needed to do more, or was it something that you were anxious about?

WW: By the time the fourth season rolls around in a large ensemble show, the writers have generally settled on who they’re going to write for, and it wasn’t me. And that’s cool I get it, in retrospect I totally get it. I mean, you’ve got the robot is really interesting, you’ve got the relationship between Picard and Dr. Crusher is really interesting, Riker is really great, and there’s this kid that nobody really knows what to do with because he’s never been allowed to develop beyond being more than an idea.

Right around that time, I had been cast in Valmont by Milos Forman and he was going to take me to Paris to be in the movie, it was a legitimate movie, it would have been great work with an incredible director. It would have been kind of a career making kind of thing. We shot the beginning of season 4 out of order, we shot the second episode first if I recall correctly. The producers, after I had been cast in this movie, it would have been a conflict, I would have been unavailable for the first week of production on Next Generation, which normally would have been a problem because everyone is in the first episode back, however this year I was in first episode but I was not in the second episode so it shouldn’t have been a problem. One of the producers told me, through my agent, and then told me personally before production started, that the production schedule had been juggled around quite a bit and Wesley was heavily in that episode and that there was no way they could shoot around me and there was no way they’d be able to accommodate me working on this film.

I had to not go work on this movie, that would have very much been a career making experience, then a few days before the production of that episode began, they wrote me out of the episode completely.

I was sixteen or seventeen and I was just enraged, I felt betrayed and controlled and lied to and wronged. It was the beginning of the end of me being able to be there and have a positive relationship with the people who made the show. I always loved the cast, I continue to love the cast, I loved a lot of the people who were on the set every day, our crew was terrific. There were a couple of people in executive producing positions who I felt worked very hard and deliberately to undermine and sabotage my ability to have a career beyond Star Trek.

This was confirmed for me years later by other people who were involved in that whole experience. That really sort of poisoned the well. I was so upset about it that I told my agents at the time that I wanted out of my contract, I don’t want to be on this show full-time any more, I don’t want to be working at a place where I’m treated like I don’t matter, especially because at that time Wesley had become a character that they didn’t do much with. I was basically on the bridge saying, “Yes, sir,” and sending the ship into warp speed.

There were negotiations, we always renegotiate contracts in the fifth season, and they renegotiated me off the show full-time. I’ve written about it, I wrote about it extensively in my book, Just A Geek, it’s something I regret in some capacity but also it’s something that I’m really glad that I did because it has lead me down a path to the life that I live right now where I created and host and produce TableTop and Geek And Sundry, where I work on Big Bang Theory multiple times a year, worked on Leverage and Eureka for multiple seasons, and have been able to find my ability to communicate as a writer with the world.

Had I stayed on Star Trek, that very likely never would have happened. It’s very easy to just get complacent and comfortable, who knows where my career would have gone after that? It really forced me into a position of having to make my own way. I’m really glad that I’ve done that, and in some ways I will never forgive this particular producer for sabotaging my career, in other ways, if he hadn’t done that, who knows? We probably wouldn’t be on this phone call right now.

BY: I was going to say, it seems like you’re the one laughing last here. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t heard of Wil Wheaton. It sounds kind of weird to say, it’s like how many members of the Enterprise crew can people name without their character names? It’s probably you and Patrick Stewart and LeVar Burton, because of Reading Rainbow. There’s three of you guys now, because of what you’ve done afterwards. And that’s not to say, I mean there’s Jonathan Frakes who went into directing so he’s not as visible and things like that, but you’ve built a career where people care about what you’re doing. I think you got the better end of the deal.

WW: I am incredibly, incredibly happy with my life. I don’t want to change anything because the defining characteristic in my life is that every day I’m afraid I’m going to wake up from this really fantastic dream I’ve been living.

BY: I think that’s totally normal, though. I feel the same way and I haven’t achieved an eighth of what you have. I think a lot of people feel that way and look up to you in ways like that. I met you at Dragon*Con when I first gave you a copy of Lost At The Con years ago, and I was able to tell you that it was you publishing your short stories on your own that was one of the keys in me figuring out why and how I should publish Lost At The Con. It’s the way you’ve built yourself in the days post Star Trek that have really served as an example for a lot of people, not just me.

WW: That is a wonderful thing for me to know, thank you.

BY: With Next Generation, after you were just a recurring character, it seems like now with the crew and the cast, it seems like you guys haven’t missed a beat at all when you see each other at conventions and things like that. Is that the case?

WW: Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate. We’re all very, very close to each other and we have stayed together and stayed close to each other, and have really; that experience that I talk about, sort of feeling like those producers were working to divide and conquer us, I think they ended up putting us closer together. When the world gets broken up, the way things were back then, when the world gets broken up into us and them, we were and are “us” and that’s just the way that things stayed together.

You can order the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Amazon and it’s available now. You you can find Wil on Twitter and via his website.