Character Insight No. 340: Icheb

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review a recurring character from the latter seasons of Voyager, the former Borg drone Icheb.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep340 


Icheb was a young Brunali who was discovered by Voyager after he had been assimilated by the Borg. However, what Voyager did not know was why all of adult Borg drones on Icheb's cube were dead while several premature/developing Borg drones were alive. Voyager decides to try and re-integrate these four young people into non-Borg society and Seven of Nine decides to try and lead these children back, following her own successful re-integration.

Life aboard Voyager was difficult initially for the former Borg children, as Seven tried for a long time to control the children with heavy discipline and rules. When Icheb, the oldest but most gentle and soft-spoken one of the bunch, refuses a disciplinary order and yelled at Seven for never letting the children do what they want, she realizes that a different approach needs to be taken. She starts treating the children more as individuals and this helps them continue to re-integrate into normal society.

Icheb's original homeworld and his Brunali race are eventually discovered by Voyager. The Brunali are an agrarian society that used to be very technologically advanced, but that led to constant attacks by the Borg thanks to their planet being near the mouth of a Borg transwarp conduit. Janeway sends Icheb back home over Seven's objection, and Icheb discovers that his parents used their society's great knowledge in genetics to craft him as a virus to defeat the Borg Collective. In other words, they had made Icheb as a weapon rather than a son, and had voluntarily put him through assimilation.

QUOTE from Child's Play
"Then why does my stomach feel so strange?"
"You've got butterflies in there."
"I never assimilated… butterflies."

Icheb's parents sedate him and send him again towards the transwarp conduit to finish the process he had started, but Seven exposed their plan and stopped Icheb from being re-assimilated by the Borg. With no real home to return back to, Icheb decides to stay on Voyager. That makes him unlike all other locals who joined Voyager for a time, as all the other children, Neelix, and Kes all end up going back to their home societies or staying with another society before Voyager returns to the Alpha Quadrant.

Icheb eventually applies to Starfleet Academy to earn his commission that he earned in the field based on his strong aptitude in astrophysics. He becomes a valuable member of the crew, serving in various science and engineering fields over the last two years of Voyager's journey. At the same time, we see some fun character development as he mistakenly believes Lieutenant Torres has fallen in love with him, and he interacts regularly as a peer to Q Junior when that adolescent joins the crew for a time. Icheb also shows an appreciation for James Kirk and loves playing the Vulcan game kal-toh, once even beating Tuvok at the game.

Icheb was a modern version of Neelix and Kes, someone to give local flavor to the crew based on them undertaking a long journey far from Earth. In this regard, he adds interesting new character and story possibilities just like Seven of Nine did previously, while continuing the ongoing story of the journey home and the conflict with the Borg. He's a really important character to what made Voyager unique and good.

Icheb was played by Manu Intiraymi in most appearances and then by Mark Bennington in the one appearance we see this character as an adult. Intiraymi continues to act today, but his most notable regular role beyond Voyager was on the TV series One Tree Hill, where he plays Billy. His name is a combination of Incan words for the God of law and the God of the sun.

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Character Insight No. 335: The Roles of William Morgan Sheppard

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 William Morgan Sheppard, who played 4 different memorable characters in Trek.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep335 

William Sheppard was born in 1932 in London and was educated in Ireland and the UK.  He started his career with a 12-year stint in the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in various stage plays.  In the 1970s he moved into TV acting, especially on British television shows.  Over the next 30+ years he generally showed up as a guest actor in small roles on all kinds of TV shows and movies, which brings us to his Trek appearances.

His first and most notable appearance was as the scientist Ira Graves in the season 2 episode of TNG entitled The Schizoid Man.  He is effectively a grandfather figure to Commander Data because he taught Data's creator Noonien Soong everything he knew.  Graves has a terminal illness when the Enterprise comes across him, so they are working on saving all of his research, leading Data and Graves to spend a lot of time together.  Graves transfers his consciousness into Data to try and live forever, but the Enterprise crew figures this out, and Graves surrenders Data's body by transferring his knowledge but not his consciousness to the Enterprise computer, dying once and for all.

The next we see of William Sheppard is as the one-eyed Klingon Commandant on Rura Penthe in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  The Commandant welcomes Kirk and Bones to the prison planet and then helps try to entrap them in a conspiracy to kill them, but as well all know, Spock and the Enterprise foil this plan.  

His next character was as a pilot of a ship hunting a ship-devouring protoplasmic beast that creates illusions to trap and consume ships and their inhabitants, in the Voyager episode Bliss.  This character Qatai is a bit of a Captain Ahab here, trying to exact vengeance on the beast for eating his family 40 years before.  He helps the Voyager escape after they are fooled by the beast and continues his battle with the beast.

Finally, Sheppard appears as the lead Vulcan science minister who tells Spock that he has made the Vulcan Academy despite his disadvantage of a human mother in the 2009 Star Trek movie.  We'll never forget Zachary Quinto's Spock basically telling this guy off and going to Starfleet instead.

Despite only appearing a single time for each of these characters, William Morgan Sheppard left a memorable impact by playing interesting characters in great Trek stories.  He leaves a legacy that all other guest actors should aspire to for this series.

William Morgan Sheppard died in January of this year, with his wife and son by his side in the hospital.  His son has also appeared on Star Trek and on Doctor Who, making them two of the only actors to cross over in those two famous sci-fi universes.

Thanks to Jared on the Discord for this segment suggestion!

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Character Insight No. 332: Captain Ransom

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Captain Rudolph Ransom, a memorable character from the two-part episode Equinox in Voyager. 

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep332 

Captain Ransom is the captain of science vessel USS Equinox, and he earns his command after making first contact with a species called the Yridians. However, this Captain was not as well suited to the rigors of command as others, as became apparent when he and his crew were stranded in the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker, the same entity that pulled Voyager to the Delta Quadrant.

The Equinox found themselves in a part of the Delta Quadrant controlled by the Krowtonan Guard, a territorial species that did not take kindly to others being in their space. As Ransom wanted to avoid being stranded for the rest of his life, he makes the command decision to try and go through the Krowtonan space to head back towards Earth. This decision was costly, as the Krowtonans attacked frequently and ended up killing 39 of the crew members on board Equinox.

This put the Equinox on a much poorer path than Voyager was on during the first 5 years after both ships were pulled away from home. The crew was starving and the ship's dilithium was drained, and they found themselves desperate to reach an M-class planet to try and survive. The planet they go to has an inhabitant race called the Ankari, who introduce the Equinox crew to nucleogenic lifeforms. The Equinox crew discovers that these lifeforms emit antimatter that could be used to modify their warp drive to get home faster.

Thus, Captain Ransom and his crew make the decision to begin murdering these lifeforms and converting their remains to augment the Equinox warp drive. They begin to come under constant attacks from the nucleogenic lifeforms, at which point Voyager discovers this other Starfleet ship and rescues them from destruction. When the actions of the Equinox are discovered, needless to say that's not copacetic for old Captain by-the-book Janeway.

QUOTE

"Starfleet Regulation 3, Paragraph 12: In the event of imminent destruction, a captain is authorized to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means."
"I doubt that protocol covers mass murder."
"In my judgment, it did."
"Unacceptable."

We find out the history of Captain Ransom and the Equinox in this encounter, and Ransom proves to be someone who favors misdirection over direct confrontations. That gives Janeway and her crew the advantage when the Equinox and Voyager face off with one another over this mass murder issue. Seven of Nine saves the day by encoding the power relays to prevent the Equinox crew from using them. Ransom even goes so far as to order torture of Seven of Nine before he relents under the guilt of all the actions he has taken. When he finally decides to surrender, his crew mutinies and it leads him to transport all his crew to Voyager before going out on his ship in a warp core breach blaze of glory. 

The character of Captain Rudy Ransom provides an interesting comparison or look in the mirror for Janeway and the Voyager crew. While Voyager did tend to bend the rules to survive in the tough environments of the Delta Quadrant, they never got so desperate as to lose their core principles, as Ransom and his crew do. It's a really dark two-part episode, but one of the best in Voyager thanks to this leader of the Equinox.

Captain Ransom was played by John Savage, who had breakout moments as a Vietnam war prisoner in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter and as Claude in the 1979 film adaptation of the Broadway play Hair. He continues to act today, including in the recent movie The Last Full Measure. 

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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.

QUOTE

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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Character Insight No. 323: Kol and Arridor

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Kol and Arridor, two Ferengi recurring characters who appeared in TNG and Voyager.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp323 

Kol and Arridor are the type of Ferengi who add some comic relief by finding a way to mess their own plans up. We first see them serving aboard DaiMon Goss's marauder ship in the TNG episode The Price. Arridor is a physician and Kol is one of the consuls on the ship. In this episode, the Ferengi and the Federation are negotiating over a wormhole that had been discovered to lead to the Gamma Quadrant. 

This Barzan wormhole ends up being unstable, however. So when a shuttle from Enterprise and a Ferengi shuttle carrying Kol and Arridor end up in the Delta Quadrant instead of the Gamma Quadrant, the Ferengi ignore these warnings to go back through the wormhole quickly and they end up stranded in the Delta Quadrant when the wormhole moves its terminus back between the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants. Picard's Enterprise must just move on without the Ferengi. Oh well.

But as you might suspect, this made for a perfect opportunity for these Ferengi to reappear in Voyager, as that stranded ship made its way through the Delta Quadrant. Voyager discovers in the episode False Profits that Kol and Arridor set up shop on the Takarian homeworld, having passed themselves off as Great Sages or deities under the local legends and beliefs. The Ferengi demanded tribute and taxes from the Takarians and had built up significant wealth, as you would expect from conniving Ferengi.

Of course, Voyager couldn't let this scheme stand. Neelix poses as an agent of the Grand Nagus and then as a Holy Pilgrim of Takarian legends to fool the Ferengi into being captured by Voyager and removed from the planet. Of course, the Ferengi are smarter than that, so they escape Voyager on their shuttle and intend to return to the planet. Sadly for them, they ran too close to the same Barzan wormhole which had again shifted to the Delta Quadrant, and they get sucked in, making the wormhole even more erratic and unstable. Nobody knows what happened to the Ferengi from there. Oh well. 

INSERT FERENGI WORMHOLE

Kol was played by J.R. Quinonez in TNG and by Leslie Jordan in Voyager. Quinonez is a background and stand in who often stood in for the EMH character on Voyager. Jordan is best known for his role as Beverley Leslie, the millionaire rival of Megan Mullally's character on the TV show Will & Grace. Dan Shor played Arridor in both appearances, and he has spent the last 20 years in New York City as an acting and screenwriting teacher, as well as the director in residence for the Diversified Theater Company.

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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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Character Insight No. 319: The Roles of James Sloyan

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we continue our series on actors who played multiple roles in Star Trek, with a look at guest star James Sloyan, who played four different background characters on 3 different series of Trek.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp319 

James Sloyan was born in Indianapolis in 1940 but moved to Europe when he was a young boy.  As that was an interesting time in world and European history with World War II, his family moved around to many different places including Rome, Capri, Milan, Switzerland, and Ireland.  Thus, when the family moved back to the United States in 1957, James had a wealth of different cultural experiences to draw upon.  

Because they lived in upstate New York, he quickly involved himself in the theater by managing a local theater and then attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.  He was drafted into the Army and after 4 years of service, returned to his Shakespearean theater where he then performed in 28 plays and choreographed all onstage fight scenes.  He eventually moved his talents to some small roles in television, including serving as the voice of Lexus advertisements from 1989 to 2009.

In Star Trek, his first appearance was as the traitorous Romulan Admiral Alidar Jarok in the episode The Defector.  He returns a few seasons later to play an adult version of Worf's son Alexander Rozhenko in the episode Firstborn.  His performance as the Romulan Jarok was so well done that it led to these many other roles in the Trek series of the time.  Although Jarok did unknowingly lead the Enterprise into a Romulan trap, his desire to make a better future for his family was a relatable story that repeats itself in many works of fiction and stage plays.

QUOTE (from The Defector)

"There comes a time in a man's life that you cannot know... when he looks down at the first smile of his baby girl and realizes he must change the world for her... for all children."

James Sloyan then played Doctor Mora Pol in several episodes of Deep Space 9.  Pol was a Bajoran scientist who studied the changeling who became Odo over the many years of the Cardassian Occupation.  Pol therefore becomes a bit of a mentor figure for Odo, who adopts the same hairstyle when he takes humanoid form.  The relationship between these two characters is complicated as Pol used certain methods like shock therapy to train Odo, who did not agree with such practices.

However, Pol and Odo put their differences behind them when they train an infant changeling in the episode The Begotten.  Pol also serves an important role in providing research information and help to Dr. Bashir and others when Odo suffers from unknown ailments in a couple episodes.  Dr. Pol's work is the foundation which helps the Starfleet crew understand and manage their relationship with changelings, later to be the key players behind the adversary known as The Dominion.

QUOTE (from The Alternate)

Dr. Pol was originally to be played by Odo actor Rene Auberjonois, much like Brent Spiner and Robert Picardo played their mentor or creator figures, but the constant switching and heavy makeup differences between the two characters was too much for one actor to manage.  Thus, Sloyan was brought on and gives us more memorable performances in this recurring role.  James Sloyan reappeared once in Voyager, this time playing a Haakonian scientist in the episode Jetrel.

James Sloyan has been mostly retired from TV and movie acting since 2000.  In addition to Trek and on stage, he can be found in a ton of different shows like The Young and the Restless, Party of Five, MagGyver, Matlock, and Baywatch.

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