Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we cover ensign Sonya Gomez, a brief recurring character from TNG.
Sonya Gomez is first seen shortly after she is picked up at a Starbase following her graduation from Starfleet Academy. The ensign is overly excited about exploration and being assigned to the flagship, and this overexcitement makes it trouble for her to focus on her engineering job duties initially. However, Geordi helps her out as a mentor figure while she works through these initial days. It doesn't stop her from accidentally making missteps like spilling hot chocolate on Captain Picard when they accidentally run into one another.
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In her couple of appearances, Gomez ends up being a vital crew member in helping overcome a Borg attack and also rescuing the captain from the Pakleds. She also provides advice to an unsure Wesley Crusher before he transfers off the ship to go to Starfleet Academy himself. Her experiences in awkwardly dealing with the captain and at the Academy made her a good person to provide timely advice to someone who was following her track, in a sense.
Gomez was originally to be a love interest for Geordi, but that did not pan out because the seeds of that romance were replaced by a big brother-little sister mentor type relationship with some of the humorous missteps she takes in her first appearance. The story was to have Geordi eventually risk his life to take his visor off and have surgery to establish his vision so he could actually see his beautiful romance interest, but it did not pan out when Gomez didn't come back for more appearances. The eyesight storyline was revisited in the movies though.
Gomez serves a bit of fan service in that she acts like many of us would if we were young 20-somethings granted our dream to serve in space exploration. A fun production note is that her third appearance may have been scrapped because she cut her hair after her second appearance and then had to come back in for reshoots of one corridor scene, so the crew had to use hair extensions and such to make it work. That's a silly way to go, but the character is memorable even if the complete arc with Geordi never developed.
Lycia Naff played Sonya Gomez, and she started her career as a dancer on the TV show Fame of the early 80s. Naff only acted regularly for about 10 years, but she then reappeared for a couple TV bit roles in 2007 and 2008 including on Ghost Whisperer. She quit acting to become a journalist, and she has enjoyed a successful career working as a columnist for many top newspapers and magazines.
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