Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we profile Ensign Russell, a recurring character appearing on both TNG and Voyager.
https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp178
Russell serves as an engineering crewman and ensign aboard Captain Picard's Enterprise. He serves for five years on the Federation flagship before transferring to command division with a new assignment aboard the USS Voyager. As you might imagine, that led now-Lieutenant Russell on a wild adventure with the rest of the stranded crew in the Delta Quadrant.
His first appearances on TNG begin in season three, with some appearances in Ten Forward, engineering, and on the bridge. While helping Geordi with repairs on the shields and the sensor array, his name is mentioned for the first time in the episode Tin Man.
QUOTE: Geordi - "Russell, watch the lateral grid balance...no, no no that's too much. We'll have to do it manually."
He also interacts with Geordi on many other occasions, including when trying to detect a source of music in the episode Lessons. Spoiler: it's Captain Picard in a Jefferies Tube!
After that first season of appearances, Ensign Russell is seen almost exclusively working in engineering. However, he is the almost always present whenever the main characters or guest characters make their way to engineering, which happens in about half the episodes. That helped Russell rack up a lot of appearances, 62 alone in TNG. He added 7 more appearances in Voyager, although as with most background characters, he was never credited in these roles.
On Voyager, it is unclear what the newly-minted Lieutenant does, as he is always seen either in the holodeck or in the mess hall in his appearances. Most of these appearances are in the third season, although he also appears in one fifth season episode Dark Frontier, so he was not apparently one of the crew members lost on the trip back to the Alpha Quadrant.
Russell was played by regular stand in Carl David Burks, with the character being named after one of the children of the writers on the episode Tin Man. He was a stand in for Brent Spiner and Robert Duncan McNeil on these Star Trek series. He and his wife took over a North Hollywood Club in 1996 that later became famous as Club Dragopolis. Burks found a new gender identity and took the name Debbie David, serving as emcee and hostess in this very club, while also continuing to appear in films like I Was a Teenage Dragqueen.
So this is certainly one of the more interesting lives in the tapestry of background Star Trek characters and actors.
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