The actor who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek has stated that his iconic visors gave him extreme discomfort and 90% blindness while wearing them. Why didn’t they design them better?
It actually almost happened. In the episode “Q Who?” they introduced Ensign Sonya Gomez:
While at first glance the character seems rather harmless (unless she happened to be carrying a cup of hot chocolate) appearances are deceptive. For you see, Sonya was in fact an assassin, sent by the producers to eliminate a particularly troublesome prop: Geordi’s VISOR!
The plan was that over several episodes, a romance would develop between Sonya and Geordi. This would lead to a subplot where Geordi becomes upset by the limits of his prosthetic to deliver a more natural representation of what his girlfriend looked like. This would finally come to a head when he opted to undergo an extremely dangerous operation that would restore his natural sight just for the chance to see her as everyone else did!
…And then she’d leave, because Lycia Naff had only been signed up for three episodes.
No one has ever made a definitive comment on why the plan wasn’t carried out that I know of, but according to Naff like many budding romances, it may have been torpedoed by poor communication. Apparently no one actually informed either her or Burton that they were supposed to be laying the groundwork for a romance until after they’d finished shooting their scenes, so they played it more like a “little sister/big brother relationship.” As this was the days before Game of Thrones, the writers were unconvinced they’d be able to effectively pivot to OMG-they-love-each-other-so-much-that-he-got-brain-surgery-just-to-see-her-better levels of heat in just two episodes. Naff also believes she may have put the final nail into Sonya’s coffin when she cut her hair for another role after they’d released her, only to be called in for an unexpected reshoot a week later.
Once producer Maurice Hurley left the show at the end of season 2, that was pretty much the end of the idea. Rick Berman took over his job. By all accounts, Berman was largely uninterested in taking notes from the cast regarding their costumes unless they were accompanied by a doctor’s note asking if they could please stop compacting Patrick Stewart’s spinal column.
And, on the balance, that was probably for the best. A big part of why Geordi worked and continues to work is the fact that his blindness does not cause him to be viewed as an inherently tragic figure. The VISOR and his complex relationship with it reflects the way that a lot of people feel about the tools that they rely upon to cope with having a way of perceiving the world that differs from the baseline. Having him just give up the VISOR so he could better appreciate Lycia Naff’s hotness would have undermined that aspect of the character.
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