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 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.
