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