Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Character Insight No. 195: Kiaphet Amman'sor

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we profile Kiaphet Amman'sor, one of the Xindi Council members seen multiple times on Enterprise.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp195

One of the interesting things about seeing the Xindi Council in Season 3 of Enterprise was the diversity of species leading this civilization. Amman'sor is one of the Xindi-Aquatics, which means the character is full CGI and is often seen in a fishtank. Instead of being silly, it adds a unique and interesting touch to the principle villains of this series.

Amman'sor serves on the Council as a representative and member of the wealthy Ibix Dynasty, and she serves as the primary voice for peace on the Council. For example, she initially opposes building any weapon against Earth, and she also encourages the Xindi to ignore the Enterprise when the ship first enters the Delphic Expanse. After finally agreeing to some form of weapon to defend her home world, she still leads opposition to development of a bio-weapon.

Yet eventually even this strong proponent of peace and non-involvement joins the rest of the Council in supporting action against the humans. If not for Captain Archer's arguments and willingness to share information in a biometric hologram to the Council, Amman'sor may never have played the critical role she does by delaying launch of the super weapon.

That of course leads to the Reptilians and Insectoids stealing the weapon, and a temporary alliance of convenience between the Aquatic Xindi and Captain Archer's crew. In the end, Kiaphet Amman'sor becomes one of the biggest reasons that the humans survive long enough to found the Federation. Even with only six total appearances, this character's importance cannot be ignored.

Kiaphet - "indistinguishable screeching"
Hoshi (translating) - "Irrelevant. We are here to discuss the human's claims."

No official credit is given for the voicing of this computer-generated character, as best we can tell.

The Xindi-Aquatics presented a lot of challenges and puzzles for the show runners on how to present such characters, but they figured it out nicely. The appearance is based loosely on Earth's aquatic creatures with some logical changes like hands in order to indicate they evolved to the next level of intelligence. Not only was this a chance to show off what the team could do in CGI, it was also an interesting take on what could be the future of a planet like Earth, if multiple types of species all become intelligent. Just the type of science fiction high-level concepts that we love in Star Trek.

If CGI is used to make characters in the new series, there's a lot of positives that hopefully will be repeated from Xindi Aquatics like Kiaphet Amman'sor. It would be interesting to see if an aquatic or similar unique character could be pulled off well at some point in that new series.

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