Character Insight No. 204: Sela

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we profile Commander Sela, a Romulan/human hybrid officer who brought back original TNG actress Denise Crosby in a recurring role.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp204

Sela is the product of a union between Tasha Yar from an alternate timeline and a Romulan General. This Tasha Yar existed thanks to the Enterprise-C going through a temporal rift during a battle with Romulans and creating an alternative timeline where Yar was not dead in the episode Yesterday's Enterprise. When Yar realizes she dies for senseless reasons in the prime timeline, she request leave to join the Enterprise-C crew and go back in time to help them fight the Romulans.

The Enterprise-C is destroyed again, but some of the crew including Yar are taken prisoner. One Romulan General takes a liking to Yar and makes her his consort, and she gives birth to Sela a year later. When Yar tries to escape with Sela a few years later, she is caught and executed. Sela then becomes a military specialist who happens to become a major player in plots to disrupt the Klingon-Federation alliance.

She appears in multiple episodes dealing with these Romulan plots, including The Mind's Eye and the two-part episodes Redemption and Unification. Her plot to supply insurgent Klingons the Duras sisters to overthrow the current Klingon Empire leadership was foiled by Picard's crew, and Picard again foiled her attempt to attack Vulcan with an invasion force in a plot against Spock.

Although the Romulans would eventually turn a clone of Picard against the Federation in a similar movie callback to the Sela character, the captain sees right through his former security chief's daughter and her plots. Just like with the Borg, this character was an interesting antagonist bringing together some of the most important and best episodes of the series, but one which Picard and his crew were especially well-positioned to stop.

The character concept of Sela was created by Denise Crosby, who enjoyed filming Yesterday's Enterprise so much that she wanted a reason to come back on as another recurring character. Little did she know that she would become one of the more memorable villains of the TNG show, and also the only blonde Romulan ever seen on screen in Star Trek. Guess that hair color is the dominant gene in cross-race relations. If you enjoy Sela, she is an often-used villain in the Star Trek books as well.

Sela was played by Denise Crosby, who obviously played Tasha Yar in Season 1 of TNG. Crosby continues to act today, with recent appearances in Castle, Ray Donovan, and The Walking Dead.

Character Insight No. 203: Trek Tabletop Board Games, Part 2

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we continue our summer game convention follow up look at Star Trek board games, with so many new titles greeting us on the 50th Anniversary.

AKA, this segment goes Collectibles, part 2. (INSERT: "war and cheeks/more antiques for your collection").

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp203

So many Star Trek board games have come out this year for the anniversary and in recent years that we had to split this segment. Check out last week for space conquest and competitive-focused games, but this week we review some cooperative/exploration-focused games.

Ever since the TNG VCR interactive board game in the 1990s with a very angry Klingon, cooperative games have been a staple of Star Trek's collection. But designers have come a long way from those early designs.

Last time we discussed the Wizkids series of games, and a couple years ago this company brought out Star Trek Expeditions as a cooperative planet-exploring game. Once again, Heroclix-type miniatures for the crew mates and for two competing ships make for an easy to keep-track of set of stats and a good depth of game. There's also a good bit of replay possibilities with Expeditions as well.

Last year Mayfair Games brought out a dice-based game called Star Trek Five Year Mission. You can use the original TOS crew or the TNG crew to roll dice to try and finish various types of blue, yellow, and red alert quest cards. Although relatively luck-based thanks to so much dice rolling, this game thematically fits Trek well and is easy for more casual gamers to pick up and play with more experienced teammates.

Another re-skin of an old game called Castle Panic came out for Star Trek this year, and it is called Star Trek Panic, made by USAopoly. Like all Panic games, the players must defend the Enterprise home base from constant attacks from all sides while also trying to collect cards to complete missions. Like Five Year Mission, this is an inexpensive and very approachable game, even though it is just a 50th anniversary re-skin.

The newest game released for the 50th Anniversary had a preview release at Star Trek Las Vegas and GenCon this month, and it is Star Trek Ascendancy from Gale Force 9. This company has made great games capturing the spirit of Firefly and Spartacus, and this is perhaps the most accurate game for capturing the spirit of Star Trek with surprising space exploration, building cultures by expansion, and small doses of conflict. It is a 4X game which has a ton of rules and takes a long time to play, but this may be as close as you get to a holy grail of Star Trek games. For those willing to spend the extra money and time on a long complex game, you will not be disappointed.

Summarizing, this week's recommendations are Five Year Mission for more casual gamers, and Star Trek Ascendancy for the best experience you can have in a Star Trek board game, in my opinion. Let's hope these designers continue to make this hobby live long and prosper for all Trek fans.

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Please send future segment suggestions to @BuckeyeFitzy on Twitter.  Thank you!

Character Insight No. 202: Trek Tabletop Board Games, Part 1

Welcome back to Character Insight! Having just come back from the summer game conventions, it's a good time to look at another place where character and stories of Trek are explored in a fun way: board games! 

Also, to get us in the right mood for a collectibles discussion: (INSERT: "war and cheeks/more antiques for your collection").  Now let's get started!

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp202

As mentioned a couple weeks ago, the 50th anniversary of Star Trek has brought some great content to Trek fans, but one area we did not talk about was a boom in Tabletop Board Games. I split this discussion into two types of games for brevity: space conquest and competitive-focused games this week, for the Klingon minded among us, and cooperative/exploration-focused games next week, for the Federation minded.

There are many popular games which often get updated or re-skinned with a theme from TV shows or other similar IP's. Star Trek is no exception, with Star Trek Catan a couple years ago updating the tabletop game classic Settlers of Catan.

This year, a similar re-skin was done for Risk, in a 50th Anniversary Star Trek edition. Much like Catan, you can play this version of Risk just like the old classic everyone knows, just using a space map and ships based on the five TV shows and captains of the series.  However, there are also some optional advanced rules which add random events, individual captain and crew powers, and quests to complete to achieve victory rather than plain world domination.

Another fun competitive card game from the past few years is Tribbles, where players compete to try and stick the opponent with higher and higher numbers of Tribbles. This game is easy to learn and silly in theme, which will fit casual gamers well.

Finally, Wizkids has brought out a series of Star Trek games over the past few years, including a game in 2016 called Frontiers. This is actually a redone version of a highly complex game called Mage Knight, but it uses miniatures and an expanding board to represent exploration of a hostile sector of space on the other side of a wormhole. Although there are a couple cooperative game scenarios, this game is more about combat and thus loses the Federation spirit a bit.

If miniature-based board game combat duals are your preference, an earlier game in the Wizkids series called Fleet Captains did this much better with Heroclix-type ships with variable stats on a click dial. Of the combat-oriented games, I recommend Fleet Captains over all others, although the 50th Anniversary Risk is fun for lighter gamers.

Regardless, there's plenty of new and recent games to keep Trekkies busy, and we will return next week to look at those cooperative and exploration-based titles.

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Contact me with segment suggestions @BuckeyeFitzy on Twitter! Thanks!

Character Insight No. 201: Angela Martine

Welcome back to Character Insight! After celebrating anniversaries last week, let's take a look at a wedding, and specifically a memorable recurring character from TOS involved in such a wedding, Angela Martine.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp201

A notable scene from the episode Balance of Terror shows Captain Kirk performing one of the most fun duties a starship Captain gets to do: officiate weddings on board. This wedding was between an enlisted phaser gun crewmember Angela Martine and another crew member and phaser specialist Robert Tomlinson. I guess when you spend your time working on phaser banks all day, the romance just fires up. Interestingly, Angela genuflects before the altar, which indicates a Catholic background.

Of course, in typical TV fashion, the poor bride and groom-to-be were interrupted by a distress call received from an outpost along the Romulan Neutral Zone. During the mission, the Enterprise has to chase and fight with a Romulan Bird-of-Prey which had attacked the outpost. Working on phasers is dangerous business, and Robert died during the battle thanks to inhaling a lethal quantity of phaser coolant. So much for anniversaries!

Kirk: It doesn't make any sense. You both know that there has to be a reason.
Angela: <<long pause>>  I'm all right.

The next year, we again see Angela Martine, this time as part of the first landing party to go on the Shore Leave planet in the episode Shore Leave. She joins a science officer Esteban Rodriguez in conducting a specimen survey. This, much like her wedding day, did not go well. After completing the survey and starting to enjoy themselves, a tiger traps them and threatens them. Having escaped from the tiger, the pair then gets strafed by a Japanese Zero, a World War II aircraft.

Angela is presumed dead in the attack so Rodriguez leaves her to go back to the ship. Instead, she is taken below the planet's surface to be healed, and she re-appears near the end of the episode during the Caretaker's explanation of the planet's function. Poor Angela can't even get a relaxing shore leave on screen without having something bad happen, so maybe she should turn her gold tunic in for a red shirt.

The character of Angela was also to appear in Space Seed, but this scene was left on the cutting room floor. Thus, we only see this ensign on a couple occasions.

Angela Martine was played by Barbara Baldavin. Baldavin acted in various TV roles from 1964 through 1980, and then she had more renown as a casting assistant on the 80's series Trapper John, M.D., and Dynasty. She's still married to the original casting director from Star Trek TOS, Joseph D'Agosta.

Character Insight No. 200: An Ode to Anniversaries

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we celebrate This Week in Trek's 250th episode, this segments' 200th installment, and Star Trek's 50th anniversary with a look at anniversary celebrations in and around Trek.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp200

Although Star Trek did not become a huge franchise phenomenon until well after the Original Series, which aired from 1966 to 1969, the owners of the franchise and the creators of the new content have always taken the opportunity to celebrate big milestones of time from that original stardate. That has meant great presents for fans of the franchise on these occasions.

For the 25th Anniversary in 1991, we received a fitting sendoff for the original crew in the movie The Undiscovered Country, while also revisiting the best recurring antagonist of that crew, the Klingons.  A commemorative video game also came out on all platforms that year.

The 30th Anniversary was perhaps even better, with another iconic recurring character The Borg featured in what was the best TNG movie, First Contact. The current TV shows at the time also joined the celebration with DS9 airing Trials and Tribblelations, and Voyager airing Flashback with George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney.

Now, in year 50, we had the movies deliver another great one with Star Trek Beyond, which many believe to be the best of the Abrams cast reboots thus far. But perhaps in the biggest gift of all, a new television show Star Trek Discovery will finally air after over 11 years of no new TV Star Trek. That gap was approaching the only other significant content gap in the TV franchise history, that being the 13 year gap between the end of The Animated Series in 1974 and the pilot of TNG in 1987.

Regardless of how the new show turns out, at least new content is being tried. If nothing else, Trek knows how to celebrate its anniversaries.  This is also true within the show itself, where anniversaries are brought up on a few occasions.

We see happy individual anniversaries like Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres on their second anniversary of a first date in the episode Warhead, and sad individual anniversaries like when Ben Sisko struggles with the fourth anniversary of his wife's death in the episode Second Sight. If you think 50 years is a big deal, you should check out the celebrations for a couple's 300th wedding anniversary on Risa in the Enterprise episode Two Days and Two Nights, or the 315th anniversary celebration of First Contact Day on one of the final Voyager episodes, Homestead.

Neelix: In honor of the 315th Anniversary of his ancestor's arrival on Earth, I've asked Mr. Tuvok to recite the first words spoken to humans by a Vulcan.
Tuvok: Very well...Live long and prosper.

Even in the 24th Century, anniversaries are a vitally important way to honor history and milestones of time. Congrats to Mike and Darrell on episode 250, and in the immortal words of Leonard Nimoy, may all of us and our Star Trek content: "live long and prosper."