The Unauthorized Trekkers’ Guide to the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine

Sirtis initially auditioned for the role of Security Chief Tasha Yar. “After my third audition for Tasha, I was literally walking out the door when they called me back to read for Deanna. While I was looking at the script, director Corey Allen came in and said, ‘You have something personally that the character should have … an empathy, so use it.’ I love being able to play someone who is so deep with that kind of insight into people, particularly since I usually get cast as the hard 1980s stereotype.”

Born to Greek parents in North London, Marina demonstrated an inclination toward performing at an early age. “My mother tells me that when I was three, I used to stand up on the seat of the bus and sing to the other passengers.” However, her parents wanted their daughter to follow more “serious” pursuits, so after finishing high school, Marina had to secretly apply to the Guild Hall School of Music and Drama, where she was accepted. “My first job after graduating was as Ophelia in Hamlet for the Worthing Repertory Company.”

A BIG MTV FAN

Following that, she worked for a few years in British television and musical theater, and in other repertory companies throughout England and Europe. She landed some supporting roles in features, such as The Wicked Lady with Faye Dunaway and Deathwish III opposite Charles Bronson.

She decided to stay on in the United States and has settled in Los Angeles, where she watches “far too much MTV” and keeps track of her local soccer team in London, in which she owns a few shares. Her brother is a professional soccer player.

Marina has always been interested in the stars and space exploration and believes that she once saw a UFO. “I was working with a repertory company in Worthing, a seaside town in England. One night as I was walking down the street, I saw this huge orange thing in the sky. At first I thought it must be the moon, but it was very off color. It was very close, but too high to be a balloon. Apparently a lot of other people saw it too.”

LIEUTENANT GEORDI LA FORGE (#ulink_2f78857d-fd14-593f-89c4-2099078be9e4)

Geordi is trained to work on the bridge and as an Away Team member. His unique prosthetic eyes allow him to perform some of the functions of a tricorder and are actually a visor-like device worn on his head, which can detect the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves, all the way from raw heat to high-frequency ultraviolet. Other crew persons seem blind by comparison, although Geordi often wishes he could see the way they do, since he has been blind since birth.

Although in his early twenties, Geordi has the maturity of a seasoned Starfleet graduate and has the highest respect for Captain Picard, hoping to emulate the captain when he gets older. His best friend aboard the Enterprise is the android Data. Each aspires to be “fully human,” because even though they have traits that make them superior in what they can achieve compared to their normal counterparts, neither asked to be different, nor wants to be.

LEVAR BURTON

Due to the longevity of the original series, the new crew has more than one actor who was a Star Trek fan before landing his role, and LeVar Burton is one of them. He states that he has long “appreciated Gene Roddenberry’s approach to science fiction. Gene’s vision of the future has always included minorities—not just blacks, but Asians and Hispanics as well. He’s saying that unless we learn to cooperate as a species, we won’t be able to make it to the twenty-fourth century. I think that by projecting that image, we’re actually creating a reality for today.”

Philosophy has long been an interest of LeVar Burton. At thirteen he entered a Catholic seminary, with the ultimate goal of becoming a priest. But after two years he discovered an interest in existentialism and by fifteen was reading Lao-Tzu, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

“I began to wonder how I fit into the grand scheme of things. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made that the dogma of Catholicism was the be-all, end-all, of the universe,” Burton explains. Following what Burton describes as his “pragmatic search,” comparing the things he did well with the things that excited him about being a priest, he decided to pursue an acting career.

“What attracted me to the priesthood was the opportunity to move people, to provide something essential. I was drawn by the elements of history and magic. As a priest, you live beyond the boundaries of the normal existence. It’s like joining an elite club. You see, it’s not that different from acting, even the Mass is a play, combining these elements of mystery and spectacle.”

NIGHT AND DAY

After he left the seminary, Burton won a scholarship to USC, where he began working toward a degree in drama and fine arts. But the contrast between the sedate, introspective life in a small-town seminary and the USC campus, which he calls “Blond Central,” was startling. “I’d never had so much freedom, and it was difficult to concentrate the first year.” It was during his sophomore year at USC, while only nineteen, that he auditioned and landed the pivotal role of the young Kunta Kinte in the award-winning miniseries Roots.

“I think the producers had exhausted all the normal means of finding professional talent and were beating the bushes at the drama schools,” the actor ventures. The role would win him an Emmy nomination and subsequent acting roles, which prevented his return to college.

Burton starred in a number of made-for-TV movies, such as the Emmy-nominated Dummy; One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story; Grambling’s White Tiger; The Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones; Battered; Billy: Portrait of a Street Kid, and the miniseries Liberty. The actor has also been the host of PBS’s highly acclaimed children’s series Reading Rainbow since its inception in 1983. Among his film credits are Looking For Mr. Goodbar, The Hunter (with Steve McQueen), and The Supernaturals (with Nichelle Nichols).

The actor was born in Landsthul, West Germany, where his father was a photographer in the Signal Corps, Third Armored Division. His mother was first an educator, then for years a social worker who is currently working in administration for the County of Sacramento Department of Mental Health. Burton is single and resides in Los Angeles with his German shepherd, Mozart.

SECURITY CHIEF TASHA YAR (#ulink_72453f69-875f-5182-bbdc-3142e5fcf09c)

Tasha grew up on a failed Earth colony where law and order had broken down and the survival of the fittest became the order of the day. An orphan, she spent her nights and days foraging for food and fleeing the roving rape gangs. The colony broke down due to being comprised largely of renegades and other violent undesirables who were being given a second chance. Instead, violence ruled. A sample of what life there was like was briefly seen in “The Naked Now,” while later developments were seen in the episode entitled “Legacy.”

In her teens, Tasha escaped to Earth, leaving behind a sister who remained by choice, and discovered Starfleet. She worshiped the order and discipline of Starfleet because it was the exact opposite of the chaos she grew up fighting.

At the age of twenty-eight, she achieved the rank of security chief and was handpicked by Captain Picard. She was one of the few crew members who performed the same duties on and off the ship. When an Away Team was selected to investigate a landing site, whether for a possible shore leave or for a conference that Captain Picard was being called to attend, Yar, as Security Chief, was always a part of the initial contact team.

The young security chief satisfied her need for peace and order in her chosen occupation, and held the Starfleet officers embodying this quality of devotion to duty and decency in the highest possible regard. She came close to worshiping them. This is particularly true in her attitude toward the commanding officers of the Enterprise. In her youth, figures of authority had been brutal and deadly.

Captain Picard, having visited Tasha’s homeworld—her “hell planet”—understood what she went through and became her mentor. He taught her to apply the cushioning of history and philosophy to her almost obsessive need to protect the vessel and crew.

TOUGH AND BEAUTIFUL

Natasha was of Ukrainian descent. This, combined with her own strict exercise regimen, gave her a quality of conditioned, subtle beauty that would have flabbergasted males from earlier centuries. With fire in her eyes and a muscularly well-toned and very female body, she was capable of pinning most crewmen. She was also an exciting sensual and intellectual challenge to men who enjoyed full equality between the genders. Neither Number One nor Picard was blind to these qualities in Tasha, but she could never bring herself to view these “saints” as mere mortals.

In “The Naked Now,” Tasha revealed a previously concealed interest in Data. She even went so far as to take him into her quarters and seduce him! When the judgment-inhibiting effects wore off, Tasha realized that she had completely violated her personal sense of decorum, and told the literal-minded android, “It never happened.” Since she didn’t specify what “it” was, Data was a bit confused as to what, exactly, had never occurred.

Tasha’s death at the hands of the creature Armus was a senseless tragedy that left her comrades stunned and bereaved. Oddly enough, it seems to be the emotionless Data who cherishes her memory the most; he keeps a holographic snapshot of her among his most cherished possessions.

The Enterprise crew later encountered Ishara Yar, Tasha’s sister, when they went to rescue a Federation freighter’s crew from captivity on Tasha’s hellish homeworld. She reminded them of Tasha, but she was using them to get help for her political faction. Perhaps she was as capable of loyalty and friendship as Tasha, but Ishara’s loyalties were bound up in the ongoing struggle of her world, and she lacked the courage to turn her back on the chaos and follow her sister’s path.

In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” a temporal anomaly gave Tasha a chance to die a meaningful death, sacrificing herself to go back to a certain doom in order to restore reality to its proper balance. As it turned out, the doom, while certain, was somewhat delayed.

In the fourth-season cliffhanger “Redemption I,” we see a Romulan commander who looks exactly like Tasha Yar. In “Redemption II,” we learn that the woman’s name is Sela and Tasha Yar was her mother. In this alternate timeline, Tasha Yar had been captured by the Romulans due to the events set in motion in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and taken as a Romulan’s wife. Sela was her daughter from that union. When Tasha attempted to flee Romulus with her young daughter, they were stopped and Tasha was executed. Sela does not miss her mother and believes that Tasha deserved her fate.

DENISE CROSBY

Denise Crosby described the character she played with this thumbnail sketch: “She comes from an incredibly violent and aggressive Earth colony where life was a constant battle for survival. She can fight and she knows her job, but she has no family, is emotionally insecure, and somehow feels that she doesn’t quite belong on this ship of seemingly perfect people.”

As the granddaughter of the late legendary crooner Bing Crosby, Denise enjoyed the part and even related to it to some extent. “My grandfather was a Hollywood legend. Growing up with that wasn’t exactly normal or typical either, and I think that helps me understand Tasha’s imbalance and insecurities,” explained the actress in a first-season interview.

Prior to getting involved in developing an acting career, Denise went through what she describes as her “European runway model thing. I hated modeling, but I was taken to Europe by three California designers who were trying to launch their fashions there. I loved London, so I just stayed on.”

When she returned home for the Christmas holidays, she was almost tapped for an acting role. “Toni Howard was casting a movie called Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker and had seen my picture in a magazine. I looked wild. My hair was about a quarter of an inch all the way around. I wore army fatigues and no makeup.” While she didn’t land that role, Toni Howard encouraged her to enroll in acting classes. The roles soon followed.

Her feature film credits include 48 Hours, Arizona Heat, The Eliminators, The Man Who Loved Women, Trail of the Pink Panther, and Miracle Mile.

The TV credits for Denise also include L.A. Law, Days of Our Lives, The Flash, and the made-for-TV movies O’Hara, Stark, Malice in Wonderland, and Cocaine: One Man’s Poison.

Denise has also appeared in some local Los Angeles theater productions, including the critically well-received Tamara, in which she had the lead, as well as the controversial one-act play Stops Along the Way, directed by Richard Dreyfuss.

Needless to say, Denise Crosby reprised her role as Tasha Yar in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and returned to the show in its fifth season. The form this character took was revealed in the final episode of the fourth season, “Redemption I.” A clue about this occurs in the episode “The Mind’s Eye” in which Denise Crosby plays one of the Romulans on the ship that kidnaps Geordi, although her identity in “The Mind’s Eye” is obscured unless you look closely. In the fifth season Denise Crosby turned up periodically, such as in “Redemption II,” and “Unification I & II,” in the latter appearing with Leonard Nimoy in his guest-starring role of Spock. She is one of the few Next Generation regulars to ever play opposite Leonard Nimoy or appear with Mr. Spock.

GUINAN (#ulink_6caff348-af2e-520c-9d4a-18e04541bfb7)

The mysterious Guinan serves exotic drinks and meals in Ten Forward, but her most important role seems to be that of counselor, as she is also a fount of wisdom, giving advice and support, sometimes unsolicited but always needed, to members of the Enterprise crew. She has Captain Picard’s complete trust, as when she alone sensed that something was amiss when the time lines shifted in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and Picard believed her. Their shared background has never been revealed. In “The Best of Both Worlds,” she says that she was “more than family and more than a friend” to Picard, and elsewhere it is revealed that the two met before the Enterprise-D was commissioned (“Time’s Arrow, I and II”).

What is known is that Guinan is thousands of years old, and that her homeworld was destroyed by the Borg and her people dispersed. She was not there at the time, however, and did not witness the destruction. She is an old nemesis of Q, who obviously fears her. She undoubtedly possesses powers that have never been revealed. Her encounter with Q, two centuries ago, is another mystery, deepened by Q’s revelation that she wore a different form at that time. Supposedly, her relationship with Q has something to do with her presence on the Enterprise, but, as usual, revelations about the character only deepen the mystery that surrounds her.

More about Guinan’s background was revealed in “Time’s Arrow,” the fifth-season cliffhanger. Here we learned that she had met Data and other Enterprise personnel hundreds of years before on Earth in San Francisco in the nineteenth century. She has kept silent about this incident, never speaking of it until she urged Captain Picard himself to pursue Data, who was lost in the past, because his presence was necessary there, as she knew this to be a fact.

Still, to most crew members who encounter her, Guinan is the twenty-fourth-century equivalent of the classic bartender, who not only serves up just the right variety of synthehol, but also lends a caring ear and freely gives a touch of humane wisdom wherever and whenever it is called for.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG

Whoopi Goldberg describes her character Guinan as “a cross between Yoda and William F. Buckley,” but freely admits that she’s put a lot of herself into the role as well. Growing up in New York, young Whoopi was inspired by the harmonious message of the original Star Trek, and especially by Nichelle Nichols.

When Goldberg learned that her friend LeVar Burton would be on a new Star Trek series, she asked him to tell Gene Roddenberry that she wanted to be on the program, too—but the producers of The Next Generation thought he was joking. A year later, Goldberg took matters into her own hands and contacted Gene Roddenberry; the two worked together to create the mysterious alien bartender who runs Ten Forward, a popular gathering place for the crew of the Enterprise.

Although Whoopi’s first showbiz experience took place at the age of eight, there was a large gap in her career as she raised a child and, at one time, contended with a heroin addiction. She worked at a variety of jobs, including one in a funeral parlor whose owner had a curious sense of humor, and “initiated” his employees by hiding in a body bin and playing “zombie,” scaring them witless in the process. Whoopi was not amused.