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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?
(startrek.website)
Transcription: A side by side picture of Star Trek Strange New Worlds character Hemmer and The Next Generation character Geordi La Forge.
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.
This is Argyle erasure and I won't stand for it!
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
Good point!
Yeah, my understanding is that it wasn't better. But I imagine his "current" implants are.
Also don't forget like he said it was like seeing everything all at once, it's just a bunch of noise and you have to learn to pick out what you want to see. Like when you're out of concert and everybody is loud around you and you want to listen to your friend, you have to learn how to do that, I'm not sure I'd classify that as better