March Icon of the Month: Geordi La Forge

As I said back when I first talk about doing this Icon of the Month feature, the people I'd choose weren't restricted to just women, but would include men, and fictional characters. So with that in mind, I decided to choose a fictional character and one of my favorites from Trek, Geordi La Forge, Chief Engineer of the Enterprise-D and E.

Whereas Scotty is the favorite of many Trekkies, Geordi is mine. Don't get me wrong, I love Scotty, but TNG was the first Star Trek series I watched and so I was exposed to Geordi before Scotty.

One of the things I like about Geordi is that he was both disabled and not treated differently at the same time. Typically, TV shows at the time would treat disabled characters as tools to send a "message" to the audience about how people with disabilities shouldn't be treated as defective or as different from able-bodied people. The fact that these shows would do this with "very special episodes" that treated disabled characters as being different was overlooked by the writers and producers. But on TNG, Geordi was given equal treatment. He was expected to do his job and was held to the same high standards as anybody onboard the Enterprise. But his disability wasn't ignored either and it was discussed in several episodes. It was just a part of his life.

His friendship with Data is one of my favorite things ever. I love how they rely on each other. If one had a problem, they would go to the other for advice. I think their relationship could be described as siblings. Geordi was an only child and Data's brothers were a psychopath and Windows 2000 with limbs, so they both found a companionship that they never had before.

There's an episode of TNG called The Most Toys where this asshole kidnaps and fakes Data's death so that he could add the android to his personal collection of stuff. Geordi is the only one who refuses to accept that Data died in a shuttle accident and eventually proves that he didn't. Meanwhile, in the movie Generations, Data is wrought with guilt and shame after Geordi is kidnapped by the baddies. He blames himself and while the emotion chip he had installed earlier in the movie was obviously hyping up his emotions, they were still there.

Like I wasn't going to add this picture.

All pictures from Memory Alpha.