Geordi's Dead! OMG!!!1!!! - UPDATED

This blog post is strictly for the absolute geekiest among you. Seriously. I'm not joking. If you aren't going to be able to follow some pretty obscure Star Trek references and appreciate gently messing with people on YouTube, this might be a good time to check outta this one. No hard feelings.

Now that's out of the way... so, I've been gently messing with some people on YouTube. If you go to the video for Part 5 of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Timescape," and jump to 4:45 into the clip, you'll see that when the runabout flies into the beam the Romulan ship disappears.



Several viewers, having missed Picard's line a few minutes earlier ordering Riker to beam Geordi off the Romulan ship, thought our intrepid blind engineer was still on the warbird when it vanished. And so people were posting comments like:

kmg4: "They didn't show how they cured LaForge. "

and

Satak8: "Did he died?"

and

Nishiki83: "picard told riker where he was, and they had to beam him to sick bay. i'm sure he was okay. :) "

to which I responded with:

dannyboylee: "He disappeared along with the warbird. Strange way to kill off a major character, but it's ballsy, you have to admit."

This is the exchange that ensued:

Gaeilgeoir: "'We successfully evacuated the crew of the Romulan ship.' -This would also mean Geordi, since he was onboard their ship. He didn't get killed off."

dannyboylee: "No, I read an interview with Rick Berman and Michael Piller in an issue of Star Trek: The Official Fan Club magazine where they said that in this episode Geordi is officially killed off. And that the Geordi we see in every subsequent episode is a clone. And that one of the stories that is subtly running through all the rest of the episodes that they never actually fully explored was the idea that every character KNEW Geordi 2 was a clone except for Geordi 2 himself. Pretty crazy!"

Gaeilgeoir: "um, it's pretty bizarre to follow through with majjor plot development like that but not follow through on follow-up explanations and/or stories to back it up. RB & MP worked too long on the franchise and I'm sorry, I'm not sad to see one of them gone cuz damn, ST needs some fresh blood. That's mainly why Star Trek:Enterprise got canned..."

dannyboylee: "Well, what's interesting about Enterprise is that apparently if the series had continued, the pilot, Travis Mayweather, would at some point have been captured by an alien race that would have made dozens of copies of him as a way of working out the kinks in their cloning experiments. Because they hadn't mastered it yet, all the clones would be blind... and you'd learn that this was the source of all the Geordi clones. So all of Starfleet knew Geordi was part of an old group of clones but him."

wickedeststeve: "picard told riker that geordi was in the romulan engineering section, and to beam him to sickbay. so not sure why you all think he died."

dannyboylee: "According to Michael Piller, Geordi was replaced with a clone while on the Romulan ship, so the Geordi that they beam directly to sickbay was a clone. The actual Geordi disappeared with the warbird. This is why for the rest of the series Geordi is actually a clone. And these clones, as I stated in my previous comment, were all based on Travis Mayweather, from an unshot episode where he would have been abducted by aliens and cloned. The imperfect cloning technology resulted in blind clones."

woodie62: "What date was that mag where you read this? I'd like to read it myself. . . ."

dannyboylee: "It's a rare magazine. And it's out of print. Very hard to find."

sunnchilde: "I never realized before now that Geordi never came back from the Warbird. The "clone" nonsense is weak. Damn. I'll never be able to enjoy this episode again."