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. 339: The roles of Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review the career and roles of Rebecca Romijn, a recent notable addition to the Star Trek family, as well as her husband Jerry O'Connell, who she is bringing into Star Trek with her.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep339  

Unlike other actors and actresses we've done profiles on in this series, Romijn has not yet appeared in multiple different character roles.  However, she was a surprising recognizable face added in season 2 of Discovery and she reprised her role as Number One in a great Short Trek for this season entitled Q&A.  To celebrate her continued appearance on the show, this segment will look at her background for those unfamiliar.

Romijn was born in 1972 in California, and her father was a former Dutch national who was a custom furniture-maker while her mother taught English.  In high school she was known as the jolly blonde giant thanks to her notable 6 foot height and positive demeanor.  She went to college to study music but dropped out to pursue a modeling and later acting career.  

In her modeling career, she grew to become one of the famous Victoria's Secret models, also making the first appearance in body paint in Sports Illustrated, a precursor to the body-positive ESPN magazine body issues we see two decades later.  During this time she was also married to John Stamos of Full House fame, but they divorced a few years later.

The body paint turned out to be a ticket to one of her biggest film roles when she started acting, that being the villain Mystique in various X-Men movies.  While a younger version of the character was eventually taken over by Jennifer Lawrence, Romijn became one of the defining faces of that franchise in the 2000's, alongside acting greats Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.  In this time she also met and married her current husband, Jerry O'Connell, and had twin daughters with him.

Although Romijn has played in a number of TV and film roles in the last 20 years, more recently she has taken on a regular voice role as Lois Lane in Superman and Batman videos.  She then added Star Trek to her resume by playing Number One on Pike's Enterprise in Discovery.  As stated earlier, she has shown more than capable of carrying on the intrigue of this character originally portrayed by Majel Barrett.

Interestingly, it appears Romijn has also brought her long-time acting husband into the Trek ranks as well.  Jerry O'Connell is perhaps best known for his role in the 1986 film Stand By Me, but he has continued to be a prolific film and TV actor for the last 35 years.  His Trek role will be as Commander Ramson in the first episode of Star Trek Lower Decks, which is in pre-production at the time of this segment.  Perhaps this will become another power acting couple that will add several memorable characters to Trek, we can only hope.

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Character Insight No. 338: Christopher Brynner

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review a key character from the two-part episode Past Tense of Deep Space 9, Christopher Brynner.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep338

Christopher Brynner is the wealthy businessman and owner of Brynner Information Systems, a company based in San Francisco in the 21st Century on Earth. His past is not revealed in any detail on screen, but a short story in one of the Strange New Worlds compilations posits that Brynner was previously a lieutenant in the US Army in the early 2000's, serving in the Iraq war. Whatever his background is, he turns out to be in the right place at the right time to help Jadzia Dax when she and two other DS9 crew members are transported back in time to this history of Earth.

Ben Sisko and Julian Bashir were being held in the city's sanctuary district, a place where the homeless and mentally-ill were interned. Outsiders thought this was a good solution with ample care being given to these people, but on the inside, it was basically a prison. Dax convinces Brynner to help her find and retrieve Sisko and Bashir from this prison-like setting.

QUOTE

But because a Starfleet crew cannot let injustice stand for no reason, Dax also works to convince Brynner to restore computer access for the residents at the sanctuary district. He does help achieve this in the end, allowing residents to reveal their poor condition to the outside world. It is left as an open question where Earth will take this information from there, and given the current political nature of our society, who knows how this would be handled in real life today.

The little additional bits of character we learn about Brynner come from his dialogue with Dax, including some about his life experiences of skiing on Mount Cook and obtaining and later removing a Maori tattoo from his body. He may not be the most likeable character, but he does have power and influence and he is convinced to use those for the greater good. His character name was derived from Chris in The Magnificent Seven, who was played by actor Yul Brynner.

Brynner was played by Jim Metzler, who enjoyed a long acting career with many small appearances in television shows. He's appeared in shows ranging from NYPD Blue to Grey's Anatomy, and he was nominated for a Golden Globe for one of his supporting roles in the 1982 film Tex.  His final TV appearance credited was on Mad Men in 2014, and he's been enjoying retirement since then.

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Character Insight No. 337: The roles of Cameron

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review another actress who played multiple roles on Star Trek, that being Cameron.

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Cameron is the stage name for Roberta Jean Oppenheimer. Not much is known of her pre-Hollywood background, although we know as a child she always dreamed of being a stage star, leading to her move to Las Vegas to appear in several stage shows. Most of her television and movie appearances came in the 1990's. Some of this work was as a stand-in, but she also earned some significant screen time as a background character in Trek.

Her most notable recurring role was as Ensign Kellogg on Picard's Enterprise. She appears in over 40 episodes over the final four seasons of the show, with further appearances in the movies Generations and First Contact. She was only identified by name in the episode The Drumhead, and her appearances are usually in the mess hall or as a security officer.

As a stand-in, she served as one of the Beverly Crusher stand ins over her four years on the show, and she also worked a little as a stand-in for Seven of Nine when that character was first added to Voyager. She was replaced in latter seasons of Voyager in this role, but this was near the end of her short acting career in TV.

As for other bit roles in Trek, Cameron ran the gamut through the alien races of the show. She played a Klingon aide to Gowron in TNG, a Cardassian officer in another TNG episode, a Prytt guard and a human unnamed officer on Voyager. She also participated in many live and print Trek marketing materials, including promotions tours for DS9 and as a crew character for Star Trek The Experience in Vegas.

Outside Star Trek, Cameron appeared in several movies including Coneheads, Tales from the Hood, and Tomorrow Man.  She also relived her Vegas show girl days in one of the worst-reviewed movies of all time entitled Sunset Strip.  After wrapping up her TV and movie career, she appeared as the show creator and writer on the burlesque show Cameron's Bump and Grind. She retired from public view following this self-made show.

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Character Insight No. 336: Best of Nog (tribute to Aron Eisenberg)

Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we honor actor Aron Eisenberg, who passed away this week, with a Best Of segment for his most notable TV character, Nog from Deep Space 9.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep336 

The character of Nog appears in over 40 episodes of the show and he arguably has one of the best character arc stories of Star Trek. A large credit of that goes to the superb acting of Eisenberg, who elevated some of the scenes he was in and the other actors around him.

Nog starts as a child character and a local foil to Jake Sisko, Commander Sisko's son who was recently moved to the space station.  In one of their first pranks and escapades together in the episode A Man Alone, they release some bolites on a dining couple to cause them to turn blue, green, and yellow for a short time.  

QUOTE (from A Man Alone, S1):

Jake and Nog's friendship grows and Nog learns many valuable things from Jake and also from Keiko O'Brien, who sets up a school on the station.  Nog proves his resourcefulness on many occasions, including in helping Jake escape from the Jem'Hadar while on a camping trip that turns into the first conflict with The Dominion.  That incident led Nog to desire to be the first Ferengi to serve in Starfleet.  He must convince Sisko as a command officer to endorse his application to the Academy, leading to this memorable scene in Heart of Stone where he convinces Sisko of his motives.

QUOTE (from Heart of Stone. S3):

Nog has a fast rise through the Academy, earning the rank of ensign after just two years as a cadet thanks to his help during the beginning of the Dominion War.  While there are many memorable missions from the Dominion War days, his accidental encounter with the USS Valiant, which was being run by the Red Squad cadets from the Academy, is perhaps his best character piece as an officer.  He initially joins the Red Squad crew and follows orders blindly despite his friend Jake's objections, but he discovers his mistake before it's too late and escapes the exploding Valiant in an escape pod with Jake.

QUOTE (from Valiant, S6):

We also see Nog deal with and overcome PTSD in another great episode It's Only A Paper Moon following losing his leg in later Dominion battles, and he ends up on the Defiant crew with the other DS9 officers to help end the war at the end of the series.  His arc completes with him being promoted to lieutenant junior grade by Sisko, a far cry from the mischievous child character Nog was in season 1.

Nog was played by Aron Eisenberg, who sadly passed away this week at the age of 50.  Despite struggling with health problems since birth and going through multiple kidney transplants in his lifetime, Eisenberg was one of the most fan-friendly and engaging actors you could meet at various conventions and events.  He only acted for about 10 years, but he had moved on to other passions including a photography business and parenthood in recent years.  The Trek world is truly richer thanks to Eisenberg's contributions to it, and we will greatly miss him in this community.

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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. 334: Ensign Giusti

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Ensign Giusti, who appeared in the TNG two-parter Gambit.

https://archive.org/details/characterinsightep334 

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.

QUOTE - NOPE

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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