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