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29 Days of Star Trek Meme: Day 20
Feb. 25th, 2012 08:02 pm20 - Of the minor characters (one shots, not the recurring ones) who's your favourite?
I was going to say K'ehleyr, but she’s in two episodes and referenced a lot, so I’m not sure if she counts as a ‘one shot’. So, as awesome as K'ehleyr is, I'm going to limit myself to characters who were only in a single episode*…
I’m going to have to go for Commander Toreth from TNG’s ‘Face of the Enemy’. What I think’s great about her is that the episode would have worked fine if she’d been a generic Romulan villain; Troi undercover on an enemy ship would have provided more than enough material, and I’m sure it would have been a decent show. But Toreth isn’t a villain, she’s quite sympathetic, certainly more so than Troi’s Romulan dissident ally, who proves utterly callous in advancing his plot.
It adds a wonderful ambiguity to the episode, that Troi may just be playing the part of an officer of the Tal Shiar, but she’s forced by her circumstances to use the same tactics as the Romulan secret police and to oppose a commander who, were it not for her patriotic loyalty to Romulus, one could easily imagine as part of the Federation Starfleet.
It’s a shame Toreth’s never appeared anywhere else; the Star Trek novels, which seem unable to create new characters when there’s an obscure extra from canon they could use instead, don’t seem to have ever used her, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen any fanfic featuring her either. I’d love to see a story where she runs into Troi again and recognises her sometime after the Dominion war…
I was going to say K'ehleyr, but she’s in two episodes and referenced a lot, so I’m not sure if she counts as a ‘one shot’. So, as awesome as K'ehleyr is, I'm going to limit myself to characters who were only in a single episode*…
I’m going to have to go for Commander Toreth from TNG’s ‘Face of the Enemy’. What I think’s great about her is that the episode would have worked fine if she’d been a generic Romulan villain; Troi undercover on an enemy ship would have provided more than enough material, and I’m sure it would have been a decent show. But Toreth isn’t a villain, she’s quite sympathetic, certainly more so than Troi’s Romulan dissident ally, who proves utterly callous in advancing his plot.
It adds a wonderful ambiguity to the episode, that Troi may just be playing the part of an officer of the Tal Shiar, but she’s forced by her circumstances to use the same tactics as the Romulan secret police and to oppose a commander who, were it not for her patriotic loyalty to Romulus, one could easily imagine as part of the Federation Starfleet.
It’s a shame Toreth’s never appeared anywhere else; the Star Trek novels, which seem unable to create new characters when there’s an obscure extra from canon they could use instead, don’t seem to have ever used her, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen any fanfic featuring her either. I’d love to see a story where she runs into Troi again and recognises her sometime after the Dominion war…