Character Insight No. 323: Kol and Arridor

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Kol and Arridor, two Ferengi recurring characters who appeared in TNG and Voyager.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp323 

Kol and Arridor are the type of Ferengi who add some comic relief by finding a way to mess their own plans up. We first see them serving aboard DaiMon Goss's marauder ship in the TNG episode The Price. Arridor is a physician and Kol is one of the consuls on the ship. In this episode, the Ferengi and the Federation are negotiating over a wormhole that had been discovered to lead to the Gamma Quadrant. 

This Barzan wormhole ends up being unstable, however. So when a shuttle from Enterprise and a Ferengi shuttle carrying Kol and Arridor end up in the Delta Quadrant instead of the Gamma Quadrant, the Ferengi ignore these warnings to go back through the wormhole quickly and they end up stranded in the Delta Quadrant when the wormhole moves its terminus back between the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants. Picard's Enterprise must just move on without the Ferengi. Oh well.

But as you might suspect, this made for a perfect opportunity for these Ferengi to reappear in Voyager, as that stranded ship made its way through the Delta Quadrant. Voyager discovers in the episode False Profits that Kol and Arridor set up shop on the Takarian homeworld, having passed themselves off as Great Sages or deities under the local legends and beliefs. The Ferengi demanded tribute and taxes from the Takarians and had built up significant wealth, as you would expect from conniving Ferengi.

Of course, Voyager couldn't let this scheme stand. Neelix poses as an agent of the Grand Nagus and then as a Holy Pilgrim of Takarian legends to fool the Ferengi into being captured by Voyager and removed from the planet. Of course, the Ferengi are smarter than that, so they escape Voyager on their shuttle and intend to return to the planet. Sadly for them, they ran too close to the same Barzan wormhole which had again shifted to the Delta Quadrant, and they get sucked in, making the wormhole even more erratic and unstable. Nobody knows what happened to the Ferengi from there. Oh well. 

INSERT FERENGI WORMHOLE

Kol was played by J.R. Quinonez in TNG and by Leslie Jordan in Voyager. Quinonez is a background and stand in who often stood in for the EMH character on Voyager. Jordan is best known for his role as Beverley Leslie, the millionaire rival of Megan Mullally's character on the TV show Will & Grace. Dan Shor played Arridor in both appearances, and he has spent the last 20 years in New York City as an acting and screenwriting teacher, as well as the director in residence for the Diversified Theater Company.

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Character Insight No. 322: The Roles of Richard McGonagle

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we continue our series on actors who played multiple roles in Star Trek, with a look at actor Richard McGonagle, who played a couple of characters on two Trek series.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp322 

Richard McGonagle was born in 1946 in Boston, and he took his Boston accent and talents into acting primarily once he reached his 30's in the 1980's. He's played small recurring roles on a number of TV shows beyond Trek, including Party of Five and JAG. But for the past 15 years he has made most of his living doing voice work for many video games, including being nominated for awards for his voice contributions to the last two entries to the Uncharted series.

His first appearance in Star Trek was in the season 5 episode of TNG entitled New Ground. In this episode, he plays an alien scientist named Ja'Dar who is responsible for performing the first tests of a new method of propulsion called the soliton wave. The test we see while he works with the Enterprise crew is unsuccessful, putting the scientist back to the drawing board.

The actor then returns for a recurring role on Voyager, that being Commander Peter Harkins, the head of the Pathfinder Project who works to bring Voyager back home. He reports directly to Admiral Owen Paris, but most of what we see the Commander do is supervise and interact with the sometimes-difficult Reginald Barclay, another actor and character who made the jump from TNG and this series.

Harkins takes a liking to Reginald and even tries to set him up on a date with his sister-in-law, but as you might imagine, Barclay is too distracted with work to do that. Harkins respects Barclay's hard work ethic, but he worries that he follows unreliable theories and may be succumbing to holo-addiction once more when he spends a ton of time studying Voyager's crew in the holodeck. Despite Harkins' opposition to some of Barclay's work, Barclay proves to be right and that leads to the establishment of regular communication between the Alpha Quadrant and Voyager.

QUOTE (from Pathfinder)

In another episode called Inside Man, Harkins helps Barclay try to improve the communication with Voyager using a holographic matrix. They end up needing to work together to foil a plot of a Ferengi who is trying to interfere for profit-making purposes, of course.

Richard McGonagle has been inactive since 2017 but is still offering voice work for new projects.  We will see if he reappears in a new Star Trek series like many other recurring actors have done.

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