Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review Ensign Giusti, who appeared in the TNG two-parter Gambit.
Episodes like Gambit cause the chain of command to be invoked and put lower officers in command of the ship. In this case, Captain Picard was believed dead and first officer Riker was off ship searching for him when both became abducted by a group of pirates seeking to reassemble an ancient Vulcan psionic weapon called the Stone of Gol.
As a result, Commander Data is left in charge of the ship, and that leaves his ops station open for a relief officer. In this case, that relief officer is Ensign Giusti. What's notable about this character is that the actress Sabrina LeBeauf was a well-known TV actress thanks to her role on The Cosby Show over the previous years. It's similar to when you see familiar faces show up in final seasons of popular TV shows today, like Aaron Rodgers and Ed Sheeran showing up in Game of Thrones, for example.
Anyway, unlike most short-term guest characters, Giusti has a relatively normal shift at ops and nothing horrible happens to her. That's likely because the focus is really diverted between Data dealing with command and his superiors trying to foil their captors' devious plans. In the end, she is just one of the 11 different faces we see at the ops station on Picard's Enterprise and unfortunately, one of the least memorable.
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This ensign has not made significant appearances in the books and other non-canon works. According to production notes, she was named for a friend of Naren Shankar, one of the show writers and producers.
Ensign Giusti was played by Sabrina LeBeauf. Outside the aforementioned role of Sondra Huxtable on The Cosby Show, she appeared regularly in only one other TV show, that being Fatherhood from the mid-2000s. She spent much of her acting career on stage in Shakespeare plays in Washington DC, and she also continues a side career in interior design today.
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