Risa @startrek.website teft @startrek.website 1 yr. ago

Wow! If I had a nickel for every time a Trek show had a blind engineer, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. Right?

Transcription: A side by side picture of Star Trek Strange New Worlds character Hemmer and The Next Generation character Geordi La Forge.

82 comments

Clearly you haven't spent enough time around engineers. There's a reason the laser warning sign says " do not use remaining eye to look at laser "
- Reminds me when Data and Geordi was testing that phaser right next to the damn Warp Core.
  
  Forget the episode but it's the one Romulans mind controlled Geordi.
  
  "The Mind's Eye" Season 4 Episode 24
  
  It's crazy that the entire engineering section on Starfleet ships is just right next to the warp core, with absolutely zero structural separation.
  
  The number of times ships had to eject their warp core, or had the warp core go critical, or had other warp core related accidents, you'd think Starfleet would have learned not to exclusively rely on emergency force fields and that they would have simply built two separate sections for engineering and for the warp core.
  
  But no, even after all those experiences, they instead even ditched the isolation doors when they designed the Intrepid class, and basically wrapped the engineering section around the open warp core.
  
  Cause what could possibly go wrong with that approach, eh?
  
  I feel like they do that all the time throughout the TNG era, owing to the fact that they didn't have a "science lab" set in addition to the warp core set which at any rate looked cool and they wanted to use it whenever they could.
- *Ouchlightinator
  
  Hurty beam
  
  "And with it I will take over the Tri-State Area!"
- I mean Hemmer's species (the Aenar) are naturally blind and see through telepathy, all of them. So that really doesn't include him.
  
  The desire to look into lasers is natural.
Hemmer isn't really "blind" though, he just sees in a different way than humans do
- Geordi isn't really "blind" though, he just sees in a different way than other humans do
  
  Not directly related, but my favorite exchange about human eyesight...
  
  (Lt. Commander Data) "Sir, Lieutenant La Forge's eyes are far superior to human biological eyes, true?"
  
  (Capt. Picard) "M-hm."
  
  (Lt. Commander Data) "Then why are not all human officers required to have their eyes replaced with cybernetic implants?"
  
  (Lt. Commander Data) "I see. It is precisely because I am not human."
- Hemner isn't human.
  
  I thought the blue skin and antenna gave it away.
Geordi started as the blind navigator, for irony. They moved him to engineering in season 2 when they decided the did need a chief engineer as a regular character, and Wesley could serve as helmsman.
- Geordi started as the blind navigator, for irony
  
  To be fair, a space ship is probably strictly on IFR all the time. Can't imagine the Enterprise doing a lot of visual approaches.
  
  Also IIRC canonically Geordi's implant gives him better vision than natural eyes.
  
  I don't know if Geordi would describe vision with his VISOR as "better", just that it allows him to see more of the E.M. spectrum. The few times he gets to see with natural eyes (when Riker's Q powers restored his eyes, and when the magic immortality planet "healed" him) he describes seeing beauty that he normally isn't capable of experiencing. "Better" is always subjective
- This is Argyle erasure and I won't stand for it!
Permanently Deleted
- Paul Stamets was the engineer on Discovery... That dude was pivotal to the story in a lot of ways. Not sure how you missed him 😲
  
  It’s not like anyone knows half the names of the crew of Discovery. Most of the time it was The Michael Burnham Show ™.
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  He was just a mycology engineer, not the chief engineer. I honestly can't remember if we ever see main engineering on Discovery. They mostly work in the Spore Drive engine room. But that was Discovery's schtick, that it wasn't the "main" crew that were the stars originally.
  
  I'm seeing people saying both I, and the official Star Trek bio that I linked are wrong. How about an image of his personnel file?
  
  Some people just like to argue for no reason at all.
It's the same amount of Vulcan science officers! (Maybe even 2½, if you count Burnham's upbringing)
- 'Hi we're Starfleet, and we recruit our captains from among the best and the brightest on 150 member worlds, spread over 8,000 light years! But the vast majority of the time, when it's not Jean-Luc Picard, we just get them from this one particular country that accounts for about 4% of the population of Earth. Weird, huh?'
  
  Yeah, well have you looked at the starting salary? And the mortality rate of enlisted... all the smart species know to stay away.
- Wait, are you counting T'Pol and Spock? What about Tuvok? He was a science officer on the Excelsior.
  
  I know the actor was the same, but was that the same character?
  
  Tuvok was the security officer on Voyager.
- Spock is also half Vulcan, no? So it's 3 people and 2 Vulcans.
It's hard to be a blind tactical officer.
- Tuvok kind of managed in the Year of Hell, didn't he?
  
  Martok half managed it. He's not technically a tactical officer but he must count.
If they were smart, they’d bring back Hemmer in the first episode of season three. Having him on one of the Gorn ships would be a perfect entryway for the storyline.
From which series is the left guy from?
- Strange New Worlds
  
  Ah… Paramount plus, there are to many streaming services.
  
  I watched the few first episodes and didn't hate it but wasn't really interested where it was going. Is it worth watching the rest?
- Strange New Worlds

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