Anyone else disturbed by La Forges sexual harrasment of Leah Brahms?

There should be.

 

They way I always saw is it was people who both had bad people skills simply having those flaws be exposed. You even see it in the opening scenes. He asumes she will be into him because of a holodeck character and is all nerdy around Guinan and she seems to hate him without even meeting him because the moment she arrives the first thing she says is basically to insult him for screwing up her engines.
Then you come back from commerical break and they are arguing over the engines. What I find intresting is the array of emotions they go through Geordi is both trying to make friends,defend his work and still kind of has hopes for romance which is the nerd part of him coming through. She seems kind of cold at times but that is partly because she also cares about what she acomplished with her work on the Enterprise engines and also proably feels threatened by what I guess is maybe a engineer sterotype that designers can' know as much about a ships engines as it's Chief Engineer. Also she even admits that people sometimes she her as been cold or uncaring but in reality it's just that she cares about her work so much that doesn't always come through.
You then have the diner which some see as Geordi trying to be romantic and maybe it was to a extent but where some might see it as creepy I see it as naive.
Then we have the scene on the holodeck. I can see why she might get the wrong idea that maybe he only see's her as a sex object but I understand why Geordi might be upset that he is being yelled out for something that didn't happen and is basically a misunderstanding. Not to mention anytime someone gets yelled at your always going to get a equal emotional reaction back because people hate it when people do that to them, no matter what the yelling is about.
To me I enjoy episode is because the characters show a lot of normal human flaws and I think the actors have good chemistry with each other. Gibney did particular good job of making the real Brahms different from the holodeck version of her character. I also like the space baby stuff which is a nice B-story that is better than just techobabble stuff while dealing with a spatial anomaly.
Also Geordi naivety is actually called on the carpet in the scene with Guinan. The "must of been wearing a different visor" scene which was nice.

Jason

 

But Geordi DID crteate the 'Leah Personality' program - when he first called up the image of Leah, it was just a computer interface, until:

And like other in the thread have stated, I too was more appalled at how he treat the REAL Leah Brahms. had he just stayed with his personal simulation on the Holodeck, and not tried to use personal info he gleaned from the simulation in his attempt to get romantic with the real Leah Brahms - I would have an issue with his character in the episode.

 

Citation?

 

I think up until the dinner - which I admitted was a misstep - LaForge was trying to be friendly and professional and Leah was the one who was out-of-order. For instance in the first two scenes we see real Brahms in we get this:


[Transporter room]

CREWWOMAN: Doctor Brahms is ready to transport, sir.
LAFORGE: Okay, bring her over.
(Leah beams in)
LAFORGE: Hi. I mean, welcome aboard, Doctor Brahms. I'm Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, Chief Engineer.
LEAH: La Forge. So you're the one who's fouled up my engine designs.
(and stalks past him straight out of the room)

[Engineering]

(Leah is getting the full tour)
LEAH: The matter-antimatter ratio has been changed. The mixture isn't as rich as regulations dictate.
LAFORGE: Experience has shown me that too high a ratio diminishes efficiency. I worked with the mixture until I got the right balance.
LEAH: The magnetic plasma transfer to the warp field generators doesn't correspond to the recommended specs.
LAFORGE: Right. Again, I adjusted the flow. Sometimes things happen a little differently here is space than they do on the drawing board.
LEAH: Is that a criticism, Commander?
LAFORGE: No, of course not. It's just a well known fact. There's theory and there's application. They don't always jibe.
LEAH: You've charted a completely new swap-out schedule for main components replacement.
LAFORGE: You bet. I found the Starfleet estimates for the MTBF units to be unrealistic. I simply determined my own schedule based on observation and experience.
LEAH: Is that going to be your only defence, Commander, that same tired rhetoric? Out here in the field we learn things you designers couldn't possibly understand.
LAFORGE: In the first place, Doctor, I'm not aware of needing any defence. And in the second place, if you're determined to be.
CREWWOMAN [OC]: Doctor Brahms, you have an incoming message on subspace.
LEAH: I'd like to hear this message privately.
LAFORGE: In my office. Be my guest.
LEAH: Thank you.

Seems to me that Geordi's being the friendly/professional one here?

No, Geordi added a personality to the matrix based on public resources. Any questionable dialogue was based on her personality profile (provided by her husband?) not Geordi's request.

Actually I remembered slightly wrong.

DS9: Meridian. Quark is attempting manufacture a custom holoprogram of Kira for an associate Tiron (played by Jeffrey Combs). Kira doesn't approve (due to assuming corrrectly in this case that it is sexual) and threatens Quark with violence if he produces it. Quark eventually hacks the station's encrypted personnel files to get the information he needs, but doesn't get his money because Odo and Kira sabotage the program to put Quark's head on Kira's body.

So it would appear that the holoprogram wasn't illegal but rather as Riker suggested 'against protocol' (which given the content of Barclay and Quark/Tiron's programs is reasonable). Even the illegal access to records (because Quark, unlike LaForge, isn't cleared for that information) doesn't result in significant penalties for Quark.

 

I'm not reading all 11 pages of replies here. They take us through the series of events with Geordie. They show how the simulation meant to collaborate on solving a crisis came to mean something to him. It of course looks creepy and stalkery to the real Leah B, but we the viewers saw how it happened, and we know better. Or so I thought.

 

Lolwhut? The person is that person. The dancing light image being run by a computer subroutine isn't that person. It's not even a real thing.

 

This is like the Exocomps, the Friends of Data.
We're giving rights to inanimate objects?
What if I made my holosuite program with Picard's physical features and Riker's personality? Or a personality I made up?

What's the difference of someone whacking off to Picard/Riker/made up guy and pretending with a photo of the blue jean model? Or an old photo of the cheerleader from high school?

 

My take on it was this:

Leah saw the "Booby Trap" simulation, which had the computer's AI deciding to give Geordi a free backrub at the most unintelligent time, which alone suggests 24th century AI is just as incapable of genuine thought as it is in the 21st century so far. But Leah then thought into the miniscule scene she saw and took it waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond reason (and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more beyond context) and kept badgering Geordi without giving him a chance to respond in "Galaxy's Child".

I don't recall any hints from anyone about other programs existing, apart from Leah's insinuating he may have had a program for every day of the week or mood. Again, that seems to suggest she's the harasser and not bothering to listen to the full story.

I do recall Geordi responding to the backrub and then saying "not now, the ship's about to blow up" (and it wasn't a euphemism) but Geordi still tries to tell her to watch the entire sequence, because it exonerates him.

 

That's what I've recently assumed, in the wake of AIs and female avatars and the movie Her. Geordi, as sad as it may seem, ended up "marrying" a holoprogram and having kids (real or holographic? Does the 2390s Federation allow cloning for individuals without a viable partner?).

That might be why we don't see Leah La Forge and the kids, they all live on a holodeck in Geordi's bachelor pad.

 

I don't appreciate the bigoted tone you're taking toward photonic life forms in this post.

The above message has been brought to you by the Campaign For Photonic Equality. Photons Be Free!

 

That's pretty unfair. We don't know the events leading up to Geordi's coupling with Leah, mentioned in the show's finale. We don't even really know if it's the same Leah, but assuming that in all likelihood it is, (as he mentions her heading up the Daestrom institute) she could've been long divorced or whatever before anything developed. It was just a very weakly written one-off comment, to try to give some kind of flushed out later life for Geordi, who didn't have much of a personal history to draw from. I'd never take it in a negative light like that

I can't buy that either. You're talking about likeness rights, & the only legal ground I could see being infringed regarding it would be defamation etc... IF someone like Quark were profiting on distribution of said simulations, kind of like what a celeb might do if someone were circulating realistic faked nudes, but if some Joe Blow is doing some sims in private, it is mighty Orwellian to think that should be policed

Using ship resources to do it might get a little sticky for the likes of Geordi or Barclay. Technically, that's like using your work computer.

 

Or her first husband could have died.

 

Then again, the entirety of "All Good Things" was an illusion created by Q, so there's no reason to take anything in it seriously. Including Leah's mention.

 

I know you're winking, but I never saw it as an illusion. Q plays with alternate realities the way we'd play with Tinkertoys. The two out-of-time realities were probably just as real as the one in which we began and ended. The way I see it, it's like Q just crimped the multiverse of "Parallels" to move Picard among three realities or timelines. Part of the point that Q was making to Picard is that Federation technology is capable of altering reality. The main deflector dish is an amazing thing!

 

^^Or alternate timeline.

ETA - Oops, beaten to it.

 

Geordi is the kind of guy who unironically thinks friendzoning is a thing.

 

Depends on how you look at it. We're meant to look at it from Geordi's perspective, where he had shown her "Courtesy, respect and a hell of a lot of patience. But my patience has run out. You secretly love me because a hologram loved me. Take off your clothes, we're having coitus." After "a hell of a lot of patience," is a quote I made up but I think it fits well. Looking at it now, from a more objective perspective, it's quite creepy. We've known Geordi for four seasons and we know we's an awkward but well-meaning guy. On the other hand, Dr. Brahms wasn't a fantasy holographic blowup doll, she was a professional colleague who had never met Geordi before and didn't have a clue about him, let alone that he thought they belonged together. It was written from the perspective of a shy, socially awkward nerd (like many of us on this thread are I imagine), so we're supposed to sympathize with him. But after looking at it now, years later, I don't sympathize with him at all. Brahms was a married woman and Geordi invited her for a creepy, private dinner in his quarters; unless you're going to cheat on your husband, I wouldn't expect Dr. Brahms or almost any woman, would like that at all. Like many nerds, he came on WAY too strong, was rightfully shot down and then complained it was her fault when all she was there to do was to study the engine modifications LaForge had made. Yeah she was cold, maybe even rude, to Geordi, when she came on board but she had a job to do and felt LaForge had screwed her perfect designs up. From the beginning, Geordi took the fantasy image of Brahms and tried to put on the real one. Let me give an example from my own life. There was an online avatar of a blogger I developed a long-distance crush on a couple years ago. Then like Geordi, I met the woman behind the avatar and she was not what I had fallen for. At all. Unlike Geordi, I didn't lash out at her. I shrugged my shoulders, said that people online aren't like they are off and moved on.

 

I don't see what's wrong with desire even jealousy. Geordi may have been too bold or had unrealistic expectations but that doesn't make him a predator.