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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