Character Insight No. 315: Billy

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review ensign Billy, a background officer seen on Enterprise.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp315 

Billy is an operations division officer who also works some engineering and security shifts on board Archer's Enterprise.  He can be remembered by his imposing visage and his shaved head, making him a perfect look for a security or operations grunt type officer.

In the first season, we see Billy helping carry boxes and hanging out in the mess hall, talking to other crewmates.  He's one of the regular background characters we often see walking past main characters as they are in the corridors of the ship or hanging out in engineering.  One of his few speaking lines first occurs when he calls Trip Tucker from engineering during the episode Civilization.

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Billy shows up in multiple episodes in all four seasons of the show, doing all the types of things background characters are known for from previous Star Trek shows.  Although he was seen or heard a few times during his appearances, the actor Solomon Burke, Jr. was not credited for these appearances formally until the finale.  In that finale, we see Billy tell Archer that it was time to give his speech at the Federation Founding Ceremony.

This character was unnamed until his third appearance, and following that his name is used in other episodes consistently when it comes up.  His promotion to ensign occurs between the primary four seasons of the show and the finale, so perhaps Billy is on his way up the chain in Starfleet and the newly-formed Federation.

As mentioned, Solomon Burke, Jr. played Billy.  He is the son of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Solomon Burke, who was a soul and blues musician.  Burke is also a musician playing in a band called The Position.  He also continues to act, with recent appearances in the films Sun Dogs and the musical Revival.

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Character Insight No. 314: The Roles of Kellie Waymire

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 Kellie Waymire, who played a character in one episode of Voyager before being cast as a recurring character on Enterprise.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp314 

Kellie Waymire was born in Columbus, Ohio, a town of great renown. She pursued degrees in theater and that led her to California to pursue an acting career.  She started on the soap opera One Life to Live in 1994 and then had several TV and movie small roles before appearing on Voyager in the year 2000.

Waymire was case as Layna, an actress working in an open-air theater of a pre-industrial planet that B'Elanna Torres becomes stranded on in the episode Muse.  Layna is in love with a show writer Kelis, who ends up inspired by Torres while she is stranded on the planet.  Lanya becomes a jealous girlfriend who tries to ruin the stage play, but her actions end up contributing to the play's success in the end.  This was a chance for Waymire to show off her original theater roots, but in a TV context.

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Waymire impressed the show runners enough that this appearance earned her an invite to be a recurring character on Enterprise a couple years later.  She appears as crewman first class Elizabeth Cutler in a few episodes of the first season of this show.  We see that she is an entomologist and and exobiologist on her first away mission in the episode Strange New World.  She uses her expertise to study the diverse insect population on a new planet Archer IV.

Cutler could often be seen pursuing her studies in her off time, including over meals, showing her dedication to the sciences.  She also interacts with T'Pol and Dr. Phlox a ton, giving the impression she is a xenophilic who prefers the aliens over her human crewmates.  These interactions with Phlox lead to her taking on an interim medic role and briefly becoming infatuated with him.  However, as a married man, he rebuffs these interests and they remain friends.

Although Waymire and the show runners intended to continue this role into future seasons of Enterprise, the actress suddenly passed away in 2003 from an undiagnosed cardia arrhythmia at the age of 36.  Her character was referred to later in the third season, but no mention on screen was made that the character died.

This is one of those sad stories where a promising recurring character appeared to be poised for bigger roles in a show, and Waymire is precisely the type of actress who probably would've shown up again on the new Trek shows now being produced.  Despite only having a few Star Trek appearances, she left a favorable impression and good performances for us to enjoy.

Kellie Waymire can also be seen on the HBO series Six Feet Under, as well as in guest spots on 90s hit shows like Seinfeld, the X-Files, and NYPD Blue.

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Character Insight No. 313: Arctus Baran

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Arctus Baran, a villain from the two-part episode Gambit in TNG.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp313 

Arctus Baran is a mercenary who commands his own mercenary ship for over a decade. His reputation is one made by his ruthless tactics and willingness to use lethal punishments on his crew. To this end, he implants neural servos in each of the people who serve with him so he can exact pain or death at a moment's notice. Guess that's one way to keep them in line.

We see Baran when he is hired by a Vulcan isolationist movement to acquire missing fragments of the Stone of Gol. Picard tracks the mercenaries to a bar on a small planet and that ends up getting the Captain captured by these mercenaries. Picard convinced Baran that he was a smuggler in order to become a member of his crew, neuro servo and all.

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While Picard is on board the ship, Baran becomes bold and does actions like attack the Enterprise-D and capture William Riker when he goes looking for Picard. Baran strings the captain and first officer along, hoping to use them to help acquire the last missing pieces of the Vulcan artifact before killing them off. 

That plan fails when Picard starts a mutiny and Baran tries to activate the neural servo to kill Picard in response. But Picard had a trick up his sleeve, switching the transponder codes for his servo and Baran's servo, so Baran ends up killing himself. A fitting end to a complicated but brutal villain and ship leader.

Richard Lynch played Actus Baran, and he also has a brother who played a bit role in one TNG episode as well. He also played in several Battlestar Galactica series as the Wolfe character.  He passed away in 2012 at the age of 72 following retirement from the acting field.

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Character Insight No. 312: Miral Paris

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Miral Paris, a small-role recurring character from Season 7 of Voyager.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp312 

Miral Paris is the daughter of Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres, and she is born shortly before Voyager finally returned home to Earth.  She is delivered while Voyager goes through one of the Borg transwarp conduits, making her one of the few, if not the only, baby born in such an environment.  She is named after her maternal grandmother, the sole Klingon grandparent she has.

Miral is also the second baby born on Voyager, the other being Naomi Wildman, who we've previously profiled.  While Naomi begins to play a role on the ship as a child because of being born near the beginning of Voyager's journey, Miral is born at the end and so does not play a similar role.  However, we do see in the Voyager finale an alternative reality in which it takes Voyager 23 years to get home, Miral grows up on ship and becomes an ensign in Starfleet who assists Admiral Janeway on a mission to the Klingon High Council.  This appearance also allows yet another actor to play this role, given the wide variation in ages.

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We see Miral in infant form in the episode Prophecy, where a sect of Klingons consider her to be the kuvah'magh, a chosen one to lead the Empire back to glory.  Her 3/4 human genome made her able to cure a rare Klingon disease, so perhaps she is the chosen one in some way.

We also see computer simulations of various versions of a 12-year old Miral in the episode Lineage, as B'Elanna fights with the EMH over whether gene therapy should be used in utero to remove her Klingon features.  This episode allows B'Elanna to come to terms with her own troubled childhood, realizing that it made her into the unique and strong person she becomes while on Voyager.  Thus, Miral keeps her Klingon genes and ridges.

Infant siblings Carolyn and Matthew Corley played the infant Miral, splitting the duties as is often the case in such TV roles.  Lisa LoCicero played the adult version of Miral in Endgame, and she currently plays a long-running character Olivia Falconeri on the daytime soap General Hospital. 

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