Character Insight No. 326: Kira Taban and the Roles of Thomas Kopache

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 Thomas Kopache, including his most notable character Kira Taban from Deep Space 9.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp326  

Thomas Kopache was born in 1945 in New Hampshire and he did not enter the field of acting until he was nearly 40 in the 1980s. Kopache started with many small roles on television, eventually showing up as a background character in several different Star Trek series.  Indeed, he is one of only 5 actors who played in all 4 post-TOS Trek series before the new era of Discovery, and he is also one of only 4 actors to play at least 7 characters on Trek.

We begin with his most famous Trek character, that being the aforementioned Kira Taban from DS9. Taban is Major Kira Nerys's father, and we see him in a couple of flashback episodes explaining the Major's background. Taban was married to Kira Meru, who was one of many Bajoran women captured and made to be love slaves called comfort women for Cardassian officers on Terek Nor. Because Meru was cooperative with the Cardassians, Taban and his three children were well treated and taken care of by the Cardassians during the occupation of Bajor.

Taban is killed as a result of weapons fire received when trying to defend his home and village from a Cardassian assault group wanting to burn the village down. Nerys was by his side for most of his dying hours, although she leaves on a raid to attack her father's assailants and he dies before she returns. This haunts her character for many years, as explained in the episode Ties of Blood and Water. 

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Thomas Kopache's first roles were before this one, as he appears as a Romulan named Mirok and a train engineer in different episodes of TNG. He then appears as a communications officer on the Enterprise-B at the opening scenes of Star Trek Generations. In Voyager, he played a character named Viorsa, and then in Enterprise, he plays a Vulcan Tos and a sphere-builder test subject. Thus, Kopache brought a ton of very distinct characters to life over his many years involved with this franchise.

Outside Trek, Thomas Kopache is also best known for his roles as a judge on Boston Legal and as an assistant Secretary of State on The West Wing. He also plays the liberal cowboy on HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a fun character who pokes fun at drug and medical device ads and conservatives.

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Character Insight No. 325: Biddle Coleridge

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review a key character from the Deep Space 9 two-part episode Past Tense, that being Biddle Coleridge or "BC."

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp325 

We see BC when Ben Sisko and Julian Bashir are trapped in the past, specifically in the 2020s.  In this version of our future on Earth, San Francisco is divided into several Sanctuary Districts, and BC is known as a ghost, one who terrorizes the residents of his District with violence and thievery.  This is also the episode where Sisko's time travels lead him to meet Gabriel Bell, a key player in the history of the America of Starfleet's past and our future.

Bell helps Sisko and Bashir when BC attack them to steal their food ration cards, but BC ends up killing Bell.  The rest of the Defiant crew still in the future gets to observe the changes that Bell's untimely death causes, as there is no Starfleet and the Romulans take over the Alpha Quadrant.  All because this punk BC lives the life of crime.

Sisko realizes the importance of this historical figure being killed, so he poses as Bell and later teams up with BC during riots in the Districts that would later become known as the Bell riots.  BC attacks and takes control of the processing center, taking some hostages, and Sisko playing as Bell keeps him from killing the hostages while BC negotiates for his escape from the Sanctuary District.

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Bell also convinces BC to demand the end of the Sanctuary Districts altogether, and Sisko basically replaces the role that Gabriel Bell played in the original historical timeline.  The government ends up storming the processing center to free the hostages, and BC is killed in this fight.  However, the messages BC and Sisko were able to send to the free world and the lack of harm to the hostages eventually led to the end of those Sanctuary Districts.

The Biddle Coleridge character goes by BC as a nod to DS9 assistant director B.C. Cameron.  And while it doesn't look like America will be divided into Sanctuary Districts in the next 4 years, this dark alternative future unfortunately evokes some of the tensions in our society today, and with a few different leaders or decisions, maybe we would've ended up there. 

BC was played by Frank Military, who has done more as a show writer than an actor during his career.  He was one of the lead writers for the shows Miami Vice and NCIS, and he's appeared in small roles on Miami Vice and CSI during his time as a writer.

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Character Insight No. 324: Engineer Argyle

Happy Star Wars Day, and Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Lieutenant Commander Argyle, who was one of the first chief engineers we see in TNG.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp324 

Argyle appears in a couple of first season episodes, including the episode Where No One Has Gone Before. In this episode, we see the engineer oversee a warp drive experiment in main engineering. In another appearance in the episode Datalore, he supervises the reassembly of Lore in sickbay. Although he has little dialogue, we do see him speak with a slight Scottish accent, a nod to the original chief of Star Trek, Montgomery Scott.

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He is referred to by Commander Riker as one of our chief engineers, which explains why we often see him in a supervisory role. That line also alludes to the fact that the chief engineer role was not really set during the first season of this show. To this end, Argyle starts to appear when the character of Sarah MacDougal begins to disappear after being the first chief engineer we see on the show in season 1. After Argyle's couple of appearances, he is also generally replaced by a Lieutenant Logan showing up as chief engineer. Of course, the unsettled chief role eventually led the writers to insert Geordi La Forge into that role, so these misfires on filling that role in the beginning had a good ending for Lavar Burton and all viewers.

Speaking of filling that chief engineer role full time, there's a fun backstory about Argyle and the actor in the background of TNG season 1. Some of the documentaries about this show have revealed from other actors like Wil Wheaton that the character of Argyle was to be officially considered as a full time chief engineer. The show runners decided to see if viewers really liked this character and his callback to the original Scotty, basically letting viewer mail determine if this should be their long term fit for the role. 

But this intent was apparently leaked and then, viewer mail encouraging Argyle as the full time chief engineer started rolling in before his episodes even aired! Some viewers complained that they were solicited by direct mailings to write in on the subject. This caused the show runners to move on from Argyle, foiling the plot entirely. It's fun background like this that adds depth to the already-interesting story of how Star Trek was revived for TV by TNG.

The character of Argyle is referenced again in a remastered edition of the fourth season episode Galaxy's Child on an engineering log we see on screen. He is mentioned as an engineer, but not placed in a ranking of engineers or listed as chief. Thus, until told otherwise, Argyle goes on.

Engineer Argyle was played by Biff Yeager, who is perhaps best known for recurring appearances on the series Gilmore Girls. He also was hooked in with director Tim Burton and so appears in the 90s movies Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. Yeager still acts in some small recurring roles through today.

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