Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Geordi La Forge
6. Save That One For Harry Kim?
During the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a storyline was pitched for Geordi La Forge that would have dramatically changed the character forever. As Jeri Taylor described it in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years:
We wanted to make Geordi an alien. He was going to discover that his father was not who he thought he was, and his mother had an almost Rosemary's Baby-kind of thing and had been impregnated by an alien. As a result, Geordi was actually half alien and now, at his present age, his people were coming back to get him.
Of course, that plan never made it to screen, but if it sounds familiar then it's because it's pretty much half of the premise of Identity Crisis, wherein a parasite from Tarchannen III transforms Geordi (non-permanently) into an alien.
The idea is even more similar to what happened to Harry Kim in Favorite Son. In that episode, Kim's metamorphosis was a Taresian retroviral trick. Had they followed the initial script for Favorite Son, however, Kim would have discovered that he had, like the plans for Geordi, really been an alien all along (and would continue to be so). You'd think Geordi might have thrown a pip or two down to Kim with the abandoned storylines, especially before blowing him up as Captain La Forge in Timeless.