Character Insight No. 311: M'Benga

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Doctor M'Benga, a recurring character from TOS.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp311 

The character of Dr. M'Benga was created for an episode that was written by Darlene Hartman and purchased by the showrunners but never made it into the TV show.  Although his first name is never spoken on the episodes he does appear in later, in this script it was reportedly Joseph.

Dr. M'Benga is the ranking chief medical officer on the Enterprise when Dr. McCoy is off the ship.  We don't see him take over much, but we do get to see him participate in a couple memorable episodes.  First, in A Private Little War, he treats Spock from a gunshot wound using the experience he gained while serving a medical internship on Vulcan.  The highlight is the doctor slapping Spock silly to drop him out of his Vulcan healing state.

In another appearance in the episode That Which Survives, he supervises an autopsy of a redshirt who dies following the touch of an alien creature.  His work on this autopsy reveals that the death was not caused by a disease or organism, but instead, by cellular disruption brought on by the touch.

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Dr. M'Benga was also to be the brother of a commander who was to be the first officer on the USS Hope in a spinoff show called Hopeship, but that never occurred.  Thus, this character with Ugandan heritage could have been a branch to the bigger Trek world, had it not been for the show running decisions behind the scenes.  As it is, Dr. M'Benga is memorable for the few times he is on screen in TOS.

Booker Bradshaw played Dr. M'Benga, who acted through the 1970s before becoming an accomplished TV series writer for shows like Planet of the Apes and Different Strokes.  He died in 2003 due to a heart attack, but his contributions to many TV shows will live on forever. 

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Character Insight No. 310: The Roles of William Lucking

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we continue our series on actors who played multiple roles in Star Trek, with a look at guest star William Lucking, who played a recurring role on Deep Space 9 and a one-time role on Enterprise.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp310 

William Lucking was born in Michigan in 1941 and he jumped right into acting in the 60s and 70s, playing in a lot of biker or hippie roles in those decades. He had a first marriage that lasted nearly 31 years before being widowed by breast cancer, and he remarried and has now been married to Sigrid Insull for over 20 years, so this is a rare person who has enjoyed 2 20+ year marriages in his life!

His roles in Star Trek started with DS9, where Lucking plays Furel, a member of the Shakaar resistance cell that Kira Nerys was a member of before the events of this show. Although Furel was not the leader of this cell, he was memorable because he was missing his left arm. We find out later that he lost that arm in a mission to save some of his friends after praying to the prophets to allow him to give up his life in exchange for saving theirs.

Furel's first appearance is in season 3, when he and the former Shakaar resistance cell members work together to resist Kai Winn's actions against farmers who resisted her orders to return some soil reclamators. His next appearance is in season 5 when he appears to warn Kira that someone is hunting and killing all of the resistance cell comrades. Unfortunately, the assassin figures out where he and former boss Lupaza were located and kills them with an explosive device .

A few episodes later in season 5, we receive a flashback episode where Kira's past with this resistance cell and with Furel is explained in more detail. Furel helped Kira exact revenge on some Cardassians when they drive her father from his homestead and mortally wound him in the process. This helps explain the close friendship and bonds seen in the earlier episodes.

QUOTE (from Ties of Blood and Water)

Later on, Lucking was cast again to play Harrad-Sar, an Orion privateer and villain in the Enterprise episode Bound. He offers three Orion slave girls to the Enterprise as a goodwill gesture towards setting up a mining agreement with Starfleet, but the real plan was to take over Enterprise using the slave girls pheromones and powers of suggestion, to capture Captain Archer for his crimes against the slave market in a prior episode. The Enterprise crew figures it out in time to save the ship, but this is one of the more memorable one-off episodes for Enterprise.

QUOTE (from Bound)

Lucking showed his range in playing these two very different characters in Star Trek. Ironically, one of his most notable roles in his acting career comes as a biker, consistent with those early decades of his career, in the show Sons of Anarchy. He plays Piney Winston, a regular on that show.  This is one of his final acting credits, as he has not played in another role since a couple of guest appearances in 2013 and 14. 

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Character Insight No. 309: Tallera

Happy New Year, and Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, while eagerly anticipating the beginning of Discovery season 2, we review Tallera, a guest character and villain from TNG.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp309 

Last week we covered the best of Picard, and one two-part episode we did not mention was Gambit.  This is the episode where we meet Tallera, who infiltrates a mercenary ship at the same time as Captain Picard on his own covert mission.  She ends up confiding in Picard that she is a Vulcan V'Shar agent trying to find a psionic resonator weapon called the Stone of Gol to keep it out of the hands of an isolationist group who wants to overthrow the Vulcan government.

Well, as it turns out with most spy-vs-spy scenarios, Tallera was actually double-crossing Picard and everyone else because she was actually an agent of that isolationist movement.  Her real name is T'Paal, which is spelled differently than the one we know from Enterprise.  She does acquire the Stone of Gol and then uses it to wipe out several of the mercenaries.

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However, she didn't count on the logic of Jean-Luc Picard to figure out the weapon's weakness.  He realizes from the markings on the stone that the psionic resonator can only work as a weapon against others if it uses the aggressive energy of the victim.  In this way, the weapon is kind of a mirror against aggression, which is typically very effective in the hands of a trained telepath.

But Picard does some 24th-Century yoga, clearing his mind of all violent thoughts, and it allows him to disarm Tallera of the weapon.  So Tallera did not succeed and was not seen again.  She presented an interesting character because it opened a door into interesting factions and politics within the Vulcan planet, while also allowing for the Captain to show off his unique set of skills in this showdown against a new villain.

Robin Curtis played Tallera, and she is of course better known in Star Trek for taking over the Saavik role in Star Trek III and IV when Kirstie Alley did not reprise the role.  She retired from acting in 1999 and now is a successful real estate broker.

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