By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While it’s a great episode in most respects, many Star Trek: The Next Generation fans have learned to hate the episode “Booby Trap.” That’s because of a creepy subplot in which Geordi LaForge begins falling in love with a hologram of fellow engineer Leah Brahms, and he makes things insanely weird (we’re talking incel: the final frontier) when he runs into the real woman in a later episode. However, those fans should know that it could always be worse: originally, this hated plot was going to have Picard interacting with Brahms and ultimately saving the day.
Why Star Trek Almost Made Booby Trap Worse
Having the lead actor participate in this cringeworthy Star Trek storyline may very well have made “Booby Trap” even worse. Fortunately, we were spared having to see this thanks to showrunner Michael Piller, who felt that “It should be Geordi, because Geordi is in love with the ship and this is a story about a guy in love with his ’57 Chevy.” Despite what some fans now think, Piller didn’t see this as any kind of character assassination…instead, he thought it “played into Geordi’s character, who’s always been a fumbling guy around women, but if he could just marry his car, he’d live happily ever after.”
As huge Star Trek nerds ourselves, it’s admittedly a bit difficult to imagine Captain Picard spending all that time in the holodeck alongside Leah Brahms, especially because the crisis the ship is facing (its power is being drained by an alien booby trap) clearly requires the talent of an engineer. But maybe it’s not that crazy: in the earlier episode “11001001,” he competed with Riker for a hologram’s affection. Therefore, a subplot where he had his own flirty fascination with the holographic Leah Brahms might not have been all that out of place.
Furthermore, the finished version of this Star Trek episode had Picard insisting on personally flying the ship out of the titular booby trap. This gives us a fun glimpse of Picard’s inner control freak…his need to kick out an experienced helmsman so he can prove that his piloting skills haven’t waned. Because of this, the earlier story idea in which Picard would have consulted with Leah Brahms instead of leaving it to an experienced engineer doesn’t really seem all that implausible.
While it’s fun to imagine the Picard-centric story we could have had, some Star Trek fans may be more interested to learn that “Booby Trap” features Geordi specifically because he’s more comfortable around machines than women. Geordi is creepy to the Brahms hologram in this episode and downright hostile to the real woman in “Galaxy’s Child,” and these episodes disturbed certain fans because the stories didn’t line up with the friendly engineering chief’s usual personality. However, no less than Michael Piller (arguably the best writer TNG ever had) saw this as a natural part of Geordi’s unlucky-in-love arc rather than some dramatic outlier.
Star Trek: The Next Generation fans generally like “Booby Trap” except for some of the Geordi scenes that boldly go where no cringe has gone before. It’s not clear if Picard would have made these scenes less creepy; in all likelihood, the character’s presence would just make the captain less likable. Thanks to a script change, Picard’s reputation was spared, but Geordi’s suffered a warp core breach from which it never truly recovered.
