Producers wanted to make Geordi LaForge an alien

Geordi LaForge, the chief engineer of the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, almost had a much different life than the one that unfurled over seven seasons. And it had an interesting concept. Executive Producer Jeri Taylor told the writers of The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years that they (producers) wanted to make Geordi an alien, and not just an alien born to alien parents. Instead, they wanted Geordi’ mother to have been impregnated by an alien (much like Deanna Troi was in The Child).

Geordi would have been half-alien, but that wouldn’t have stopped his people from coming to get him. Taylor didn’t elaborate on why the people would have waited so long to come get him. Perhaps they just learned about him or waited until he reached a certain age. But she did think that this development would have given something extra to Geordi’s character.

A similar storyline was developed for Star Trek: Voyager in which Ensign Harry Kim was supposedly an alien being drawn back to his home planet of Taresia. It turned out, though, that it was all a ruse because the Taresian women’s reproductive process was deadly to the men so they had to continually harvest other males from space. Kim had been injected with Taresian DNA, but he was rescued before he could be fully transformed.

Geordi’s story, though, would not have been real, and he would have remained an alien, though, how it would have affected his life or the lives of those around him remains a mystery. It might have been interesting to see the chief engineer get that type of storyline. It would have given LeVar Burton something more to work with, and perhaps even created a side of him that would have made the character stand out even more.