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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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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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. 

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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.

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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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