Warning: Spoilers Ahead for Star Trek: Picard Season 1
Star Trek: Picard said one final goodbye to Data, but Geordi Laforge didn’t get to be a part of it. Despite the fact that a handful of former Star Trek: The Next Generation characters have made appearances in Picard, Geordi has yet to come back. He isn’t going to be in season two either, so he’s fully missed his chance to ever see Data again. That’s sad to think about but at the same time, it would be the wrong move to have Geordi meet up with Data in any form now, because that would take away the power of Data’s final moments.
Picard is a sequel series to Next Generation and picks up with Captain Jean-Luc Picard years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis when he’s called out of retirement under mysterious circumstances. Picard, meanwhile, is still mourning the loss of his friend Data. Data was an android who served on the Enterprise with Jean-Luc during the course of Next Generation, and he sacrificed his life to save Picard and the rest of the crew at the end of Nemesis. Data’s death deeply affected Picard, as he had grown very close to Data over the years as the android explored what it meant to be a synthetic human, and if that really made him any less alive from non-robotic humans and aliens.
Picard wasn’t the only member of the Enterprise’s crew that was close friends with Data, though. Geordi Laforge – the chief engineer of the ship – went on many adventures with Data, and was always someone who argued for the android’s humanity. With so much of Picard‘s first season’s emotional arc centering around Data, and the heaviest moments of the finale involving him, it could be expected that Geordi might have shown up and gotten to say goodbye to his old friend. That didn’t happen. Nor is Geordi going to be appearing in season two of the show. It seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for some meaningful closure between the fan-favorite characters.
All that being said, if they tried to give Geordi and Data a goodbye moment now it would be a mistake. Picard was only able to talk to Data after he “died” and saw his friend in an afterlife vision while his consciousness was being transferred into an artificial body. In order for Geordi to have a similar moment, he would either have to “die” himself, or have what Picard went through be no different than any other dreamscape. It would remove the sanctity of those moments, and whatever scene they write would ring hollow. On top of all that, Data’s final request to Picard was for his consciousness to be terminated. He believed that the finite nature of human life is what makes it beautiful, and bringing Data back after this would cheapen that.
While it would have been nice to see Geordi say goodbye to his old friend, that window has passed and now it would only take away the emotional power of Data’s final scenes. Even so, Star Trek: Picard would benefit from adding Laforge to the show’s cast, so his snub continues to be an ongoing mistake of the series.
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