Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Guinan
6. We Can Change Appearance When We Want To
Bringing Whoopi Goldberg back to the role of an ageless character was always going to raise a few eyebrows, particularly as twenty years had passed in the real world between her last appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis. Though addressed on screen, it may perhaps had been better if nothing had been said at all.
When Picard enters Ten Forward in The Star Gazer, he is greeted by his old friend. As Goldberg has no El-Aurian genes herself to stop the aging process, the decision was made to explain this away. El-Aurians, it transpires, can choose to age if they want to. This, Guinan explains, is often to put those people with much shorter life-spans at ease.
It may have been easy enough to simply ignore the fact that Goldberg is twenty years older - so much of SciFi necessitates a 'just go with it' attitude - but then including a version of the character played by Ito Aghayere opens the floor to more questions.
Goldberg had played a younger version of the character in Time's Arrow, so - can El-Aurians age in either direction? Did that version of the character become Ito's iteration, then switch back to Whoopi's, and stick with the latter through time?
Star Trek is no stranger to recasting roles, though this one certainly left audiences pondering - now what exactly is going on here? Ito Aghayere's interview with Variety attempts to shed some light on this - this Picard travelled from a future where Starfleet never existed, so there was no temporal incursion back to San Francisco.
In this timeline, Guinan only began to look like Whoopi before the events of TNG. Is this a cop out? Perhaps, but as Trekkies, we've seen worse!