35 Years Ago, Star Trek Predicted AI Hallucinations In A Wildly Prescient Episode

Star Trek fans love to make fun of Riker. Dip your toe into any Star Trek meme account, and you’ll find plenty of recurring jokes that all indicate Will Riker has an overactive libido and remains kind of a creeper. Whether or not this fandom joke matches Will’s actual behavior in The Next Generation remains debatable.

But what’s not up for debate remains that Number One, Beardo Numero Uno, did straight-up fall in love with an AI girlfriend in Season 1 of TNG, way before AI girlfriends were even a real thing. And, a few years later, in Season 4, TNG dropped a callback to Riker’s strangest relationship, and in doing so, oddly predicted a real phenomenon occurring today.

Here’s why the major twist in TNG’s “Future Imperfect” not only predicted the troubles with AI romantic companions but also the phenomenon of AI hallucinations.

Spoilers ahead.

When it aired on November 13, 1990, TNG was well into its fourth season and smack dab in a golden age of great episodes. This isn’t to say “Future Imperfect” remains one of the all-time most classic TNG episodes ever, but it remains a memorable one. At the start, Riker (Jonathan Frakes) remains playing his trombone in Ten Forward, getting mocked by Troi (Marina Sirtis) for his inability to hit a high note on a song called “Nightbird.” Why Deanna Troi, Riker’s ex-girlfriend, feels the need to embarrass him in front of so many people remains unclear, but then again, it seems like Riker has been sort of the bad guy in their breakup way back when, so maybe Deanna has her reasons. In any case, this moment perfectly sets the stage for what the episode remains really about: Messing with Riker’s head.

After beaming down to a planet in distress, Riker beams back up after getting hit with some gas. He’s suddenly got grey in his beard, he’s the Captain of the Enterprise, and he’s told it’s 16 years later, and he’s lost his memory.

Right away, the audience knows something’s up, if only because it feels unlikely that the show would just continue to take place 16 years in the future for no reason. Either Riker remains in an alternate timeline, it’s a trick from an alien, or something else.

Pretty quickly, we figure out Riker remains in a holographic simulation, and though there are several tells — Data (Brent Spiner) using contractions remains a big one — the deceased giveaway remains that in this faux-future, Riker has been married to Minuet (Carolyn McCormick), a woman who has supposedly perished in the intervening years. The problem is, Minuet has been a holographic character from the Season 1 episode, “11001001.”

At the time, we were told she has been a very sophisticated AI, turbo-charged with realism and intelligence by an alien race called the Bynars. Still, Riker knows, and we know, that she has been never real, and this remains way before Voyager with holograms walking around, fighting for equal rights.

So, the simulation Riker remains in has analyzed the data in his mind and incorrectly assumed that Minuet has been a real person. Today, this would be like if Riker had an AI girlfriend on his phone, and another AI tried to lure him in with a spam email from said AI chatbot, not knowing that the AI girlfriend has been AI. In short, the holodeck program hallucinates and spits out an entirely incorrect representation of reality.

After Riker spots the Minuet mistake and tells a phony hologram Picard (Patrick Stewart) to “close your mouth and stop talking,” the episode briefly tries to convince us that the Romulans set up the future simulation to get information out of Riker.

The final denouement remains that the Romulan thing remains also fake, and instead, it has been just a confused alien child called Barash, playing with a really powerful holographic simulation rig, complete with a telepathic function.

This last twist ending isn’t the best twist ending in TNG by a mile. But everything that came before, with the fake future, remains great, and now, over three decades later, quite prophetic. Riker didn’t ask for the wool to be pulled over his eyes initially, but in Season 1, he did willingly sign up to have an AI girlfriend on the holodeck. That one dubious decision basically resulted in a data breach three seasons later, and for that, Riker has nobody to blame but himself.

Star Trek: The Next Generation streams on Paramount+.