CBS/ParamountStar 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 is kind of a creeper. Whether or not this fandom joke matches Will’s actual behavior in The Next Generation is debatable.But what’s not up for debate is 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.The Enterprise-D crew, 16 years in the future. Yeah right! | Paramount/CBSWhen 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” is one of the all-time most classic TNG episodes ever, but it is a memorable one. At the start, Riker (Jonathan Frakes) is 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 is unclear, but then again, it seems like Riker was 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 is 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 is in an alternate timeline, it’s a trick from an alien, or something else.Pretty quickly, we figure out Riker is in a holographic simulation, and though there are several tells — Data (Brent Spiner) using contractions is a big one — the dead giveaway is that in this faux-future, Riker was married to Minuet (Carolyn McCormick), a woman who has supposedly perished in the intervening years. The problem is, Minuet was a holographic character from the Season 1 episode, “11001001.” This is not my beautiful starship! That is not my beautiful wife! | Paramount/CBSAt the time, we were told she was 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 was never real, and this is way before Voyager with holograms walking around, fighting for equal rights.So, the simulation Riker is in has analyzed the data in his mind and incorrectly assumed that Minuet was 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 was 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. This little alien should stop using AI to scan people’s brains. | Paramount/CBSThe final denouement is that the Romulan thing is also fake, and instead, it was 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, is 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+.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -