By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The subject of changing a character’s race is very contentious among genre fans. For example, many Harry Potter fans are in a full-blown wizard tizzy at the news that a Black actor (Paapa Essiedu) may end up playing Professor Snape (a character originally portrayed onscreen by Alan Rickman) in the upcoming Harry Potter TV show. It’s easy to think of this as a modern phenomenon, but changing characters due to racial concerns goes back to the golden age of television. Case in point: the producers of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Booby Trap” changed the character of Navid Daystrom to Leah Brahms because the actor was white.
Navid Daystrom Became Leah Brahms
If you’re a big TNG fan, then Leah Brahms doesn’t need much of an introduction. She’s the warp core genius who Geordi La Forge begins falling for after he recreates her on the holodeck, and when they later meet up in meat space, poor Geordi comes across as the biggest incel in the cosmos. However, what most fans don’t know is that Brahms’ character was originally conceived of as Navid Daystrom, a descendant of the Black character Doctor Richard Daystrom, but these plans had to be changed because the show had already cast white actor Susan Gibney for the part.
For you to fully understand this, we’re going to have to conduct a brief Star Trek history lesson: in The Original Series episode “The Ultimate Computer,” we are introduced to Doctor Richard Daystrom, who uses the Enterprise to test out his fully automated M-5 Multitronic system. Because this was ‘60s sci-fi, though, the new computer that can run the ship by itself ends up taking over the vessel and even destroying multiple Starfleet ships that are in the area for war games. Kirk saves the day, but not before we find out that this drama was caused by Daystrom putting human engrams into the circuit boards of his shiny new toy.
Doctor Daystrom’s one and only appearance in TOS was that of a neurotic and short-sighted man whose technological shortcuts got dozens of Starfleet personnel killed. Despite this, however, the prestigious Daystrom Institute was named after him, presumably because of his earlier work on duotronic computers and not the whole crazy AI thing. And the TNG producers originally wanted to cement their new spinoff’s connection to the earlier show by including a holographic version of Navid Daystrom, a descendent of Richard Daystrom, in “Booby Trap.”
It’s a good idea on paper. Star Trek fans were generally happy with the different ways that TNG connected to TOS, which eventually included cameos from Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Scotty. Therefore, the writers of “Booby Trap” felt that having a new genius engineer character be a descendant of this one-off character from Kirk’s era would make for a fun Easter egg. Unfortunately, the casting department didn’t clock the connection to the original episode, so they didn’t realize that having Navid Daystrom be a descendant of Richard Daystrom would mean casting a Black actor.
They had already cast white actor Susan Gibney in the role, so “Navid Daystrom” became Leah Brahms. Fortunately, the show kept her connection to the TOS character by making Brahms herself a graduate of the Daystrom Institute. She never created a killer AI or anything, but she did transform the lovable Geordi La Forge into one of the creepiest guys in the galaxy for a couple of episodes.
Sadly, Brahms never submitted a tech support ticket after Geordi became so broken. If so, they might have asked her a very useful question: “have you tried turning your incel off and then back on?”
