Star Trek Created A Terrible Origin For A Next Gen Main Character
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Geordi La Forge is one of the franchise’s most distinctive and popular characters, but he was originally intended to have a rather strange origin story. LeVar Burton, who played Geordi, came into the series as one of its most recognizable stars, having portrayed Kunta Kinte in the landmark TV mini-series Roots. He was also more than three years into his run as the host of the popular and now legendary children’s television series Reading Rainbow.
The early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation saw many elements of its world and characters still finding their way, and Geordi La Forge was no exception. Until the series’ second season, when the death of Tasha Yar allowed for a major shake-up of the supporting cast, the character had not yet found his place as the Enterprise’s chief engineer. Once he did, he came into his own, as did Worf, who took over for Tasha as chief of security.
But while Star Trek: The Next Generation eventually gave Worf a great deal of connection to his family and culture, Geordi never had much of a backstory. His connection with his android best friend, Data, was always intended to be strong, but even planned elements of that relationship did not ultimately make it to the screen. It wasn’t until early in Season 7 that we got to learn anything about Geordi’s parents, and then only after his mother died.
Perhaps this lack of background for Geordi in Star Trek: The Next Generation had something to do with the abandoned plan to make him an alien. In their book The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross quote Jeri Taylor, an executive producer on the series, about the plan to reveal that Geordi’s mother had been “impregnated by an alien.” This would have come to light when members of his species returned to reclaim him as one of their own.
Geordi’s mother had been “impregnated by an alien.”
While this origin would have fit in with some major Star Trek themes regarding origins and belonging, the TNG team ultimately decided it was not the best direction for Geordi’s character, and we tend to agree. At a certain point, such a revelation about his character might have felt like shoehorning extra development into his story.
Ultimately, Star Trek would give Deep Space Nine‘s Benjamin Sisko a similar origin to the one planned for Geordi, though that alien heritage was a central part of his character’s narrative arc across all seven seasons of the series. By contrast, the late introduction of an alien origin for Geordi, even if it had been planned from earlier stages in the series, might have seemed like an afterthought. Still, there is some lack of development for his character compared with some others, though Star Trek: Picard did its part in attempting to rectify that.
Geordi is another example of the ways in which Star Trek characters are imagined and reimagined over the course of their existence, with what seems to be the right version of their history usually winning out.
