Ensign Wesley Crusher

Wesley Crusher is the ship doctor's teenage son, a prodigy with a knack for engineering and an eagerness to prove himself among the Enterprise crew. Bright, earnest, and a little too quick with the right answer, he wants nothing more than to belong on the bridge and be taken seriously as more than a boy.

He's the audience surrogate at its most literal: young, curious, occasionally insufferable in his brilliance, which is exactly the point. Wil Wheaton plays the eagerness completely straight, so the character's need for approval reads as sincere rather than saccharine, and his friendship with the senior officers gives the ship's found-family warmth somewhere to land.