Star Trek: The Next Generation Almost Turned Geordi Into A Very Different Character

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Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) was an excellent character on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Because he was the chief engineer on the USS Enterprise-D, Burton was given the bulk of the show's trademark technobabble, often talking about subspace manifolds, phase inducers, and the state of the structural integrity field. Technobabble was vital on the series, as it allowed viewers to envision how complicated a vehicle the Enterprise actually was, implying that its navigation required hundreds of people overseeing dozens and dozens of systems. Its complexity made the Enterprise feel more realistic, and, dare I say, plausible. 

At the center of it, Geordi wasn't just a master of the Enterprise's engine systems, but he was a nerd about it. He loved machines and complicated technical systems, eager to use his ingenuity to solve complicated engineering problems. All of the characters on "Next Generation" were passionate nerds about their interests, of course, but Geordi was the nerdiest. Burton's enthused performance communicated to viewers that it was okay to lose yourself in nerdy minutiae. Indeed, committing yourself to technical esoterica was going to be one of the binding principles of "Star Trek's" utopian future. Paradise needs nerds to run it. 

Also, Geordi was excellent representation for disabled characters on TV. Geordi was born blind and wore a specialized, face-mounted appliance called a VISOR to feed visual signals directly into his brain via implants in his temples. And yet, Geordi's blindness was rarely a plot point on the show. It was merely an incidental detail about the character. The disabled will be accommodated in the future, and that's that. 

However, he was once considered to have an additional character wrinkle that the executive producers of "Next Generation" eventually rejected. In the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, executive producer Jeri Taylor (R.I.P.) revealed that Geordi was going to be a secret half-alien.

Geordi, it should be noted, is a human character. He was born in Mogadishu, Somalia to human parents. Indeed, audiences eventually met Geordi's parents. His mother, Captain Silva La Forge, was played by Madge Sinclair, and his father, Commander Edward M. La Forge, was played by Ben Vereen. During the development of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," though, there was a brief moment when the writers considered giving Geordi a mysterious backstory wherein his father wasn't his biological father. Indeed, as Jeri Taylor recalls it, she and her team invented a plotline for Geordi when he would discover that his mother was involved with an unstated alien species. As Taylor described it: 

"We wanted to make Geordi an alien. He was going to discover that his father was not who he thought he was, and his mother had an almost 'Rosemary's Baby'–kind of thing and had been impregnated by an alien. As a result, Geordi was actually half alien and now, at his present age, his people were coming back to get him. I thought that would have given Geordi's character a lot of elaboration." 

For those not into popular horror movies, "Rosemary's Baby" was Roman Polanski's controversial 1968 classic about a beleaguered mother-to-be, played by Mia Farrow, who begins to suspect that she was drugged and assaulted by a demonic cult, and that she might have been impregnated by Satan (!). Taylor's remarks imply that Geordi's mother was either assaulted and impregnated against her will, or had an affair that her husband didn't know about. These are bleak stories, but offer a TV writer a lot of dramatic possibility.

So Geordi was going to be the son of a human mother and an alien father. But saying "an alien" on "Star Trek," of course, is a bit of a vague descriptor. The series was healthily populated by many, many alien species, each with a well-drawn-out culture. Was Geordi going to be half-Romulan? Half Ba'ku? Half Excalbian? Taylor doesn't elaborate on that part, so it seems the mystery will persist for fans to consider and debate.