In 'Galaxy's Child', was Geordie a creep or just misunderstood?

I blame the writer, and whoever oked the script.

Trying to do something all futuristicly emotional but, EPIC FAIL!

 

Looking up the official transcript:

Geordi's quip about another women not getting personal is definitely an awkward thing to say, but if it were a sardonic quip... the computer doesn't understand humor and inferred his comment as a request to review personnel files, which would be restricted.

By "beautiful", Geordi is reacting to the technical specifications of Leah and not Leah's simulated specifications. Interestingly, he isn't even aware that he wanted an actual facsimile of the doctor.

...the next scene...

And the fun really starts to slalom after that...

Geordi is now taking potshot guesses at conferences she may or may not have attended, all while the ship's energy is being drained. Geordi did ask the computer to create a simulation from those sources the computer had on file and - yup - no personnel file was used. The best part is, the personal logs' content, of which he (and us by extension) don't get to know about, would have included the happy hubby we don't find out about until season 4.

Since Geordi does not know what's in those logs at those visits, he just merrily lets the computer extrapolate from that and with an inevitable margin of error, because the computer doesn't have 100% personality information - never mind the human factor that the computer can't imagine, nor comprehend.

I couldn't tell what Geordi was hoping for, he might have made an assumption, but he still knew that the shoulder massage that came out of nowhere was an unwanted surprise and said it wasn't appropriate. Which says a lot more about the computer...) While Geordi says "I don't want to feel good right now", what I think I did pick up on was his body language - he was definitely repulsed at an unwanted advance. By a synthesized projection, no less.

 

I kind of see both sides in Galaxy's Child. Geordi's clumsy attempts to flirt with Brahms while assuming that she's single could be seen as a bit creepy, especially when combined with seeing the previous Holodeck program and what "Brahms" said to Geordi at the end (the Enterprise computer is a bad scriptwriter LOL) and Geordi should have been a bit more apologetic about his behavior to her. However, she was pretty rude and mean towards him from the instant that she stepped off the transporter pad about the modifications he had made to the Enterprise engines and how he was doing his job as an Engineer, which I probably would have taken rather personally as well. Thankfully, things got sorted out at the end and I'd like to think that they continued to have a positive working relationship in the future (in All Good Things they were supposedly married?)

 

Only her personal logs are what were restricted. Nothing was said about restricted access to her personnel file

What the computer gives him for the simulation was, at the very least, data from multiple public appearances, & her Starfleet personality profile analysis, which I assume is some kind of psych eval done by a Starfleet counselor, & if he has access to that, we might as well assume he has access to her entire personnel file & Starfleet records on her... just not her personal logs.

He asks it to use "All these sources" to synthesize her. So it might've even interpreted that to mean all available sources of info on her personality, but even that wouldn't necessitate it having any need to point out she was married. It just never came up.

The issue is, at no point does it matter to the computer whether she's married or not. It's just designing an approximation of her personality, & using stuff from these sources, which could also even predate her marriage. Since she's talking about fungilli recipes & theoretical concepts she'd think about, it's reasonable to assume a lot of personal info comes up in that personality analysis & those debates/appearances, without gaining access to her personal logs themselves

My take is that he was hoping for what they usually hope for from a holographic representation of a real person, like Einstein or Hawking or Freud etc... You hope for an interactive experience with that person, for as much as the computer can build a realistic representation, but in this context, it was as the chief designer of the engine

I'm reminded of the movie Apollo 13, when Gene Kranz tells everyone to actually go find the people who built everything, & find out every last possible way to get every ounce of energy & utility out of all their equipment, & I think that's what Geordi was aiming for

He needed to collaborate with & pick the brain of the most qualified person on that engine anywhere in existence, which is her, & the holodeck theoretically poses a very believable duplication of that. One of the best parts of Booby Trap is when Geordi is reminded that this Leah IS the computer. He'd completely forgotten, until she says she could do it, & he realizes she means the ship's computer

9.37% is less than a 10th of the real Leah, & while that is very little, it's also a personality. 10% of me is still a lot of the me that makes up me. The funny thing is Geordi says "I can live with that" & ironically, we'd find out a year later, it's enough of a difference to make things very unexpected

 

That was certainly what he was aiming for, although at the time Leah was a junior member of the team on paper, although she does seem to have done most of the documentation of the project and at least a good deal of the hands-on work.

 

I think Geordi was fine. I think Galaxy's Child does a neat thing in having them both make assumptions about the other and having them realise that neither one was seeing the other as how they truly are. Someone could try to make analogies between the Booby Trap situation and the real world and talking about using likenesses and what is consent, but I think the situation and circumstances are so unique and tied up in technology that doesn't really exist yet that it's kind of pointless. At the end of they day they're both human and aren't perfect in how they handled it and I think that's fine.

 

I think of it like this. Wasn't Shelby a junior member of the Borg task force? & yet she was very much at the heart of the directions it was taking. I imagine a lot of rubber stampers in there with input but no real value to its progress

 

Shelby was certainly a junior to mid-level within Starfleet Tactical (cf UP Fleet Yards) as a whole, but Hansen implies that she was either heading up (or his deputy) on the Borg Task Force specifically, whereas Brahms is a junior -- if influential -- member of one particular part of a particular project (that appears to have used only 1 of 5 design facilities at that particular station) which implies that she's at least a level or two more junior.

 

Somewhere in between, truth be told. He created holo-Leah out of need, and what came after was... well, understandable (he was on the rebound from the dreaded "you're a nice guy but I don't like you that way", the dating equivalent of the Yellow Light of Death). But for crying out loud, he was an intelligent person, and should have understood that a hologram is just a hologram. So yeah, once real-Leah showed up, he got pretty creepy.

 

The episode certainly doesn't do him any favors, in that it's a really unfortunate development that he's now made out to be naive enough to think a 90% accurate computer simulation would be an accurate measure of a real person's personality.

That's pretty dumb & Guinan is looking at him that way the whole time in her scene lol

 

The Guinan scene was absolute on-point GOLD!!! (As usual)

 

The ending would've been better if Guinan had swung by their table, & Geordi had said... "See? I told you everything was destined to work out well between us" & then Riker walked up to him with a padd in his hand & said "Hey, what's this personnel complaint I just got on you all about?" & the others just burst out laughing. Roll credits.

 

Actually... Now that I think about it, it's probably best they didn't add that to the end, or somebody would be in here complaining about how it took Riker til the end of the episode to respond to the grievance filed against Geordi

And I'd have to come in here & defend him by saying they were in the middle of a crisis with the space baby & didn't have time... & it would devolved into a 10 page argument about HR efficacy onboard the Enterprise

 

A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

It was creepy how Geordi pretty much expected her to be his girlfriend and how he commented on her favourite food and her hairstyle change.

 

Riker and Janeway fell in love with a hologram - you usually don't have a choice in matters of the heart

 

If Geordi had kept his holo-Leah to himself, and never showed her to anyone, that would have at least been understandable. I don't think he or Reg Barclay are the only ones to make a holo facsimile of a real person and have fun with it. Not really different from the high school freshman who fantasizes about the gorgeous senior cheerleader while... ah, being his own best friend. As long as no one knows, no one needs to care. The problem was...

1. Geordi didn't make sure no one knew.
2. When he was found out, he should have just said how sorry he was.

The fact that he couldn't differentiate between the hologram he had fallen for and the real life woman she was based on was a seperate issue.

 

But that's the thing. Geordi did not create the hologram! The computer did that all on its own.

If the computer took an offhand comment and interpreted it liiterally, then that's hardly Geordi's fault.

 

The computer created the facsimile. Geordi ordered it to try to simulate Leah's personality. That's what eventually got him into trouble.

 

Understandable.

The original hologram spoke in a dead, flat monotone. That'd be a bit hard to work with, don't you think? It's only natural that if Geordi was going to be working with holo-Brahms, that the hologram actually have her complete personality profile. It doesn't mean Geordi was trying to get with her, just that it'd make the collaboration run more smoothly.

 

Because anytime anyone interacts with a holodeck character it has a personality. To interact with one that doesn't is distracting & unsettling, & not beneficial to this situation at all. The computer deciding all on its own to have that personality choose to get overly friendly with him is what got him in trouble, because in all those circumstances, he basically just had impulse reactions