She was also played as a child by Isis Carmen Jones in the episode "Rascals" and a younger version of the character by Ito Aghayere in Picard.

[8] At the lunch between Berman, Roddenberry and Goldberg, she explained that Star Trek was the only futuristic science fiction series at the time she knew of that featured black people prominently.

[3][5] Guinan-centric episodes were scheduled throughout the rest of the run of The Next Generation to coincide with the availability of Goldberg, who at the time was continuing to appear in films and other work.

The idea was resurrected during the writing process of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Rivals", with the character of Martus Mazur intended to be Guinan's son.

However, the first time that the El-Aurian species was mentioned by name was in this episode, but this may have been inspired by the scripts for Star Trek Generations which the writing team would have seen by that point in the production of the series.

[13] Goldberg became intrinsically linked to Star Trek, and she became a personal friend of creator Gene Roddenberry, subsequently being one of the eulogists at his funeral in 1991.

[14] During the initial production of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, she met with director Nicholas Meyer to discuss appearing as a Klingon in the film.

[10] Returning actor-character combinations are famous in the Star Trek franchise, and popular also; TNG's "Unification" (1991) episodes featuring Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Part II brought in the highest Nielsen ratings (15.4) of that season, and the highest for TNG except for the pilot and finale[18] (see also Star Trek crossovers).

Producer Rick Berman was noted as being "extremely sensitive" about who interacted with Goldberg on the set, according to the book The Making of Yesterday's Enterprise by Eric A.

[22] In one instance where a co-writer of Yesterday's Enterprise talked with Goldberg, Berman found out about it and said he did not want this kind of interaction which was oriented towards the production office.

During the course of the episode, she gives advice to Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) about whether he should leave the ship to join his mother when she transferred to Starfleet Medical on Earth.

[5] In this episode, she refers to meeting Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) for the first time when she came on board the Enterprise-D, something which was later ignored and discounted.

[27] She made further appearances in the second season, including in "The Outrageous Okona" where she advises Data to use the holodeck to help him better understand comedy,[28] and again in the Data-centric episode "The Measure of a Man",[29] as well as "The Dauphin" where she and Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) attempt to explain flirting to Wesley Crusher.

Guinan is the only member of the crew who is aware that something has changed, and believes that Lieutenant Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) should not be on the ship.

[35] Guinan appears in part one of "The Best of Both Worlds", where she and Captain Picard mull over his tactics defending the ship from a Borg vessel, contemplating the potential end of human civilization.

[39] Her other appearances in the season included "Galaxy's Child", "Night Terrors" where she reveals she keeps a rifle behind the bar,[40] "In Theory",[41] and the first part of "Redemption" where she scores higher than Klingon Security Chief Worf (Michael Dorn) on a firing range on the holodeck.

[46] In "Rascals", alongside Picard, Ro, and Keiko O'Brien (Rosalind Chao), her body is de-aged to that of a child following a transporter accident, where the younger Guinan was portrayed by actress Isis Jones.

[47] In "Suspicions", she advises Doctor Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) on whether to trust her instincts when a Ferengi scientist is killed during an experiment on board.

After time traveling back to 2024 in order to correct the timeline, Picard and his crew encounter a younger version of Guinan living on Earth in the 21st century who aids them.

As seen in the third season premiere, Guinan decided to capitalize on the upcoming Frontier Day holiday by selling small models of the various Enterprises in her bar.

[56] Terry Erdmann and Paula Block state in their 2008 book Star Trek 101 that the key Guinan episode is "Yesterday's Enterprise".

[60] In the summer of 2019, Screen Rant suggested that Guinan could get her own series more easily, due to the character being hundreds of years old there would be many, many stories to tell.