press at what a bad idea this was [but] I thought that since Gene was involved we had a real good shot of making a good show that would carry on in that tradition of Star Trek." Throughout the series, Burton was equipped with Geordi La Forge's trademark VISOR, which he found extremely unpleasant to wear: "It's pretty much a living hell. 85 to 90% of my vision is taken away when the VISOR goes on. I bumped into everything the first season—light stands, overhead microphones, cables at my feet—I tripped over it all. So it's a sort of conundrum. The blind man, who puts on the VISOR and sees much more than everyone else around him, when the actor actually does that he's turned into a blind person. Then there was the pain. In the second season, we re-designed the VISOR and made it heavier and the way we actually affixed it was that we screwed it, we literally screwed it into my head and so there were screws that we would turn and there were flanges on the inside that would press into my temples and so after fifteen or twenty minutes of that I got headaches. So I had a daily headache for about six years. Which was also no fun." During the series, Burton's character was Chief Engineering Officer, and thus was often portrayed repairing machines or discovering new scientific phenomena. Burton commented how hard it sometimes was to deliver the technobabble used by La Forge in these scenes with a straight face: "Technobabble brings with it its own challenge. I'm not an engineer, I just played one on TV. The methodology that I found most successful was to really spit it out as fast as I possibly could. Giving the illusion that I knew what I was talking about when, in fact, I really didn't." Asked about his favorite scenes, Burton answered that he especially liked holodeck adventures: "The Holmes and Watson episodes for Data and Geordi, the Robin Hood episode, you know, those were a lot of fun for us. I think the holodeck was a very cool concept, you know. You can create a three dimensional reality. I mean, how cool is that?" Following the end of the series, Burton has stated how much he gained from The Next Generation; "When I got married my best man was Brent (Spiner, who portrayed the