Character Insight No. 329: Crewman Rossi

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Crewman Rossi, a background character from several seasons of Enterprise.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep329 

Crewman Rossi is in the command division and serves aboard Archer's Enterprise.  We see her in the background of many scenes throughout the first three seasons of this show. 

In the first season, Rossi was seen most often as a face in the crowd at the mess hall.  This included for the movie night in which the crew watches the Earth film For Whom The Bell Tolls.  In one of these appearances, she is found unconscious next to her salad by Trip Tucker thanks to a Ferengi gas canister on board the ship.

In the second season, we see Rossi in the mess hall on many more occasions, but we also see her join other crewmates in some R&R, including a shore leave on Risa and on a recreation facility at an automated repair station the Enterprise visits.  As with many poor background characters, she is also subject to the bad things that happen on board, including when she is possessed by a wisp in the episode The Crossing. 

As her time on Enterprise goes on, we actually see crewman Rossi more in a work context.  She is seen on the aft bridge working in the second season, and then we see her at the helm and in the situation room in various third season episodes.  Thus, she joins the long list of distinguished officers who has served at the conn of a Starship Enterprise. 

The character of Rossi was named for Enterprise associate producer Dave Rossi, when the character was given a name after appearing in several scripts.  Rossi appears in many deleted scenes in the special features, if you watch those on the Enterprise disc sets.  This is not surprising, given her over 25 appearances on the show.

Rossi was played by regular background actress Hilde Garcia.  Garcia also appeared in some other stand in and background roles in Enterprise as well as in one episode of Voyager.  She maintained a personal and professional website and blog for many years and as recently as 2016, but has not been very active in the acting field in recent years as she and her husband David have focused on raising their family.

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Character Insight No. 328: Robin Lefler and her laws

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Robin Lefler, a recurring character from TNG, and her list of personal laws.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp328 

Robin Lefler is an ensign engineer who appears on Picard's Enterprise for a couple of special missions. In the episode Darmok, Lefler helps Geordi La Forge in combat preparations in case the Enterprise must engage the Tamarian deep space cruiser. She does not have significant involvement in this episode, which is contrasted with her starring guest role in the episode The Game.

In The Game, Lefler is on board as a mission specialist to help explore the Phoenix Cluster. Of course, her job duties take a bit of a back role in this episode to her romantic interest in Wesley Crusher, who is on holiday from the Academy. Together they discover that a rogue group is trying to take over the Enterprise and all of Starfleet by getting them addicted to a visual game. 

With her engineering expertise, she was able to diagnose what was going on by analyzing the game itself and Commander Data after he is deactivated. She helps give Wesley the information needed to finish foiling the rogue plot even though she also temporarily succumbs to the addictive game's effects. Although not significant in real life at the time, this episode serves as an interesting look ahead to the problems of modern society with mobile devices, not just games. 

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Through the romance with Wesley, we find out that Lefler had parents who moved around a lot during her childhood because of their special expertise as plasma specialists. Thus, Lefler says she does not develop a home or friendships easily. Nevertheless, Wesley wins her heart enough to perhaps start a long distance relationship when he heads back to the Academy. On his way out of Enterprise, Lefler gives him a hardback copy of her Robin's Laws, a set of over 100 personal adages she considers essential life lessons. 

We see some of these laws, including "you can only count on yourself," "life isn't always fair," and "when all else fails, do it yourself."  More of her laws were to be revealed in other episodes like True Q where the character was originally to appear, but her scenes were cut from the scripts and so that's all we have on Robin's laws outside the novels, which expand them more.  

In 2002 actress Ashley Judd indicated the character was to be reprised in the movie Star Trek Nemesis as Wesley's wedding date, but his scenes did not make the final movie cut and so we did not see if this would be true. It would've been another fun easter egg in the final TNG crew appearance as a group. 

As just noted, Ashley Judd played Robin Lefler. She's the daughter and sister of country music singers Naomi and Wynonna Judd, and despite moving around a lot as a kid, she settled briefly with roots while going to the University of Kentucky, where she remains a loyal regular basketball fan. She's also named for a city called Ashland in Kentucky, as she's an 8th-generation family member of that commonwealth state. She continues to act today while also spearheading several global humanitarian efforts and political activism efforts. 

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Character Insight No. 327: Lyndsay Ballard/Jhet'leya

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review the only character other than Spock to have been reanimated to reappear a long time after death, that being Lyndsay Ballard of the Voyager episode Ashes to Ashes.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp327 

We first see the character of Lyndsay Ballard on screen after she has passed away and been reanimated as a Kobali named Jhet'leya. She contacts Voyager and asks for refuge as she is escaping from the Kobali society who reanimated and transformed her from human into their race. The crew is initially suspicious because ensign Ballard had been dead for about 3 years, and show viewers would also be suspicious because we never actually saw Ballard on screen before this season 6 episode.

But it is clear this character was one of the background faces in the crowd in the small crew that was Voyager during the first years of their stranding in the Delta Quadrant. Here's what we learn about her time in Starfleet.

She entered Starfleet Academy at the same time as Harry Kim, and they lived across the hall from one another. They became best friends, and Harry had a crush on Lyndsay but he never had the kahunas to tell her. She basically lived off PB&J sandwiches and lived a messy lifestyle, which of course drove the OCD tendencies of Harry nuts.

She graduated from Academy and was immediately posted to the Voyager in the engineering department, just like Harry. A few years later, these two were assigned to an away mission to investigate readings of dilithium ore on a class M planet, but it was a trap by a Hirogen hunting party. Lindsey was killed on the way back to the shuttle.

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The Kobali reanimate corpses they find and transform the DNA to make mates for their race to go on. This happened to Lyndsay Ballard, which is why she is Kobali when she reappears as Jhet'leya to Voyager 3 years later. Despite the Doctor being able to restore her human appearance and some initial fun and romantic times with Harry, this character soon realizes her mind and body were indeed forever changed and she doesn't really enjoy the things she used to when she was a human. That helps her decide to give up her claim to refuge on Voyager and her past life as a human when the Kobali attack Voyager and demand Jhet'leya's return.

Although we normally only cover main and recurring characters on this segment, the Ballard and Jhet'leya story spans beyond the Ashes to Ashes episode she actually appears in, and it is a surprisingly good story about the human condition of dealing with loss and moving on. Plus we see more awkward past from Harry Kim, which is always a positive.

Lyndsay Ballard was played by Kim Rhodes, who has been acting for about 20 years and continues to do so, primarily in small television roles mostly today. She can recently be seen as an assistant director on Criminal Minds and as a sheriff on Supernatural. 

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