“My God, I bet I had a Promelian battlecruiser too…”
Against the claim that there are no good Geordi episodes, I stake that there are at least two, and they are (oddly enough) back to back in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season. The first is “Booby Trap,” which became rather more… controversial?… in the years since its airing, because it’s the one where Geordi creates a computer-simulated dreamgirl on the holodeck and, y’know, makes out with her.
It doesn’t play as unseemly as it sounds. I always found this episode’s sudden insistence that Geordi is lousy at talking to women to be somewhat contrived; he’s easily the most generally affable member of the bridge crew, and there’s no supporting evidence prior to “Booby Trap” which suggests the kind of date night stage fright that Geordi demonstrates here. There is, however, an undeniable quasi-asexuality about Levar Burton’s performance that lasts the whole run of the series. The assertion in “Booby Trap” plays: it is difficult to imagine Geordi having a passionate love life.
The position that “Booby Trap” takes is that Geordi is essentially the guy who’s in love with his car – hopeless at interacting with real people, but when he’s under the hood of his hot rod, he can do no wrong. I’m reminded of Neil Gaiman’s first episode of Doctor Who, “The Doctor’s Wife,” which took a similar tack of lending a manifest female soul to its male protagonist’s favourite machine. Here, it’s the holographic phantom of one of the Enterprise’s propulsion designers, Dr. Leah Brahms, who Geordi conjures up on the holodeck when the Enterprise gets caught in an energy-draining booby trap. Holo-Leah looks like Ingrid Bergman and gives back rubs without lien, and surprise surprise, Geordi’s better at talking to her than he is at talking to any real women in the real world. To be fair, this may have less to do with relative confidence and more to do with the fact that, as an engineer, he might have been shopping in the wrong part of the store by not dating other supergenius tech geeks.
There are some great ideas under the surface here, which (of course) Next Gen doesn’t fully commit to cracking. There’s the question of the “accuracy” of Leah’s simulated personality, which is extended into Season Four’s follow-up episode, “Galaxy’s Child,” where Geordi meets the genuine article and finds her very different from the computer simulation. By way of Geordi’s selective use of sparse data sources to create Leah’s holographic personality in the first place, we might arrive at a neat science fiction metaphor for the way we all construct images of our partners’ personas, through willful selection of information.
And then there’s the much bigger question, with which Next Gen and Voyager flirt relentlessly without ever getting to second base (well, Captain Janeway got to second base – and maybe further): the question of “holographic sex partners: what’s the deal?” If holodecks existed, would their denizens be the equivalent of CGI prostitutes? Cyber-porn? Sex toys? Sex therapists? Daydreams made manifest? Sex slaves made uncomplicated? What, exactly, are the moral implications of creating a romantic or sexual partner in a computer simulation – for the creator, and for the created? A lot of people get a sincere “ick” out of Geordi’s relationship with Leah Brahms, either here (when she’s a holodeck fantasy, not unlike Minuet in “11001001”) or next season (when she’s a real person, whom Geordi expects to like him as much as holo-Leah liked him), but I find the underlying questions too fascinating to judge Geordi harshly. There is a big, unresolved question around the place of fantasy in 24th century life which, if explored, might answer some questions about the particularly tentative relationship we have with fantasy (and especially sexual fantasy) in North American culture right now. We aren’t good at dismissing fantasy as a harmless province of our private personalities – and being confronted with fantasy as tangibly as Geordi confronts his here would probably scare the bejeezus out of us.
One last thing: all questions surrounding Geordi aside, my favourite element of “Booby Trap” is simply the handful of remarks Picard makes about the model starships and “ships in bottles” he built when he was a boy. When Next Gen was on the air, I was building them too – in fact, when this episode aired, I had a minor fleet of FASA die-cast starships sitting on my desk, in addition to the larger Ertl models hanging above my head. And Picard’s right – the miniature adventures that happened in my mind as a result of those tiny ships would make anyone want to climb inside the bottle. I wish I’d had a Promelian battlecruiser.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.