On this episode of Gimme That Star Trek, Siskoid and his guest DC Dave (making his Network debut) each draw up a list of Trek's most underused - or perhaps misused - main characters, and discuss how they might have been better utilized in their various shows.
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Credits:
"Star Trek Theme" by Alexander Courage, with the Irredeemable Shag on vocals. End theme: "Deep Space Nine Theme" by Dennis McCarthy.
Bonus clips from: Star Trek Strange New Worlds' "Among the Lotus Eaters", starring Melissa Navia.
And thanks for leaving a comment!
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Excellent Subject matter this week and Dave brought some excellent home work to show to work with Siskoid.
As a fan of Enterprise (I know I am likely the only one who likes Enterprise over most of the shows – the exceptions are Picard season 2&3 and SNW) I heartily agree that show had some rough moments particularly after 9/11 but the underuse or Mayweather still frustrates me. Over in Voyager Harry Kim and Paris were at least a comedy double act to give him a little to do. But Mayweather had such a great back story that was barely tapped.
But Chakotay… they wasted him and it showed in the performances. I always felt the best choice would have been to try and write him out of the series, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe they could have swapped him for the mirror verse version or something to at least give him something to do….. maybe a borg swap for 7 of 9?
But then I always found Voyager frustrating anyway so maybe that’s about right….
You went into the behind the scenes stories for the older shows but not SNW, where Ortegas’ actor was having, to understate, a very tough time during the time season 2 was filmed, and so more intensive stories for Ortegas were shift around. We can, in fact, look at the season in an archeological way and try to reconstruct her original plots: Flying Blind would make sense to have been an Ortegas song, which would probably mean she was originally in the time travel story, either instead of or woth La’an; the Kahn delimena works with erasing a friend as the consequence, and the one who fell for Kirk. That’s one dinosaur model we can put together from those bones..
We can’t reference things we were not aware of. Unless that’s actually what the first drafts looked like, that all sounds like a stretch.
Christina was the one with a song and dance background who pressed the production to make a musical and got her wish. If Ortegas gets Flying Blind (which is actually called How Would That Feel) has nothing to do with Ortegas unless we’re saying she WAS in the time travel episode AND in love with some one who is NOW HERE somehow, and which would NOT have included Khan (then why do it?). These stories would have been much weaker had they been about Ortegas, so I’m skeptical.
The thing is, while I become interested in the history of the shows once they’re done, I don’t like to read anything of the sort WHILE the show is going on because it gets very meta and spoilery. It just messes with my enjoyment. So if you’re coming at this from an informed place, apologies. Hopefully no one is benched for outside reasons in Season 3.
Excellent conversation and an auspicious Network debut for Dave. I feel like listening to podcasts is like hanging around the Blob; sooner or later you’re going to get absorbed and become part of the mass. Plus the mass will inevitably terrorise a town (like Charlotte).
Great discussion fellas. I would personally add Sulu to the list, especially after he was made captain in The Undiscvoered Country. George Takei pushed for a Captain Sulu TV series, but was constantly turned down. Maybe the TNG/DS9/VOY showrunners didn’t want to set a show in the past during their era, but later we got Enterprise which was further back than TOS.
Imagine if they’d done that, and we had cameos from the TOS crew, side characters, etc., showing us stories from the period between the films and TNG. AND, most importantly, we could have fleshed out Sulu beyond Takei’s natural charms, which sold the character in many ways more than the scripts and screen time ever did. The same can be said for Nichols and Koenig as well, and to a lesser extent, Doohan.
He was on my short list, but I’m glad I could include him (if not Takei) in one of my story pitches.
Yeah, I love your Astro Physicist angle there. I’d buy it!
My favorite choice for underrated Trek character was Ensign Ro from TNG. I thought she was a great addition to the cast, and Michelle Forbes was great in the role. And then they did her dirty in the final season, which made me really angry. I was happy they brought her back for PICARD and she was redeemed (a bit). Still, I think she was under utilized.
Fun show!
We couldn’t count her as regular cast (same with Barclay), but I loved the character.