An unusual thought on a guest star and some lore expansion

leviathan99

I really like how STO got Kim Rhodes as Lindsay Ballard. I thought she gave one of the stronger performances. It wasn't at all gimmicky to get her back but fairly organic.

So I couldn't sleep and was watching old Voyager episodes. I watched "In the Flesh" (guest starring Kate Vernon later of Battlestar Galactica) which is where the whole Undine plot in STO launched. This was the episode that showed the first Undine training camp and had Vernon as an Undine under the cover identity of a Commander Valerie Archer, played romantically opposite Chakotay. Ray Walston reprised his role as groundskeeper Boothby.

At first what hit me was that they mentioned a couple of famous captains in the same sentence as Picard: Lopez and Richardson. I thought, "Huh. Those people are as big of a deal as Picard. I'd like to see them or hear something about them." And I think Lopez and Richardson could be interesting characters to weave in. There are a decent number of unseen characters in Trek but those two were apparently off having their own series worth of adventures.

But something else also hit me: Because the assignment of the Undine was infiltration and because Boothby was real, it seems likely that every cover identity used by an Undine in the episode was also real.

So here's my thought:

Get Kate Vernon as Valerie Archer, the REAL Valerie Archer.

I know there's been talk about Felicia Day and some of the Supernatural cast in STO. I think it's healthy for the game's story development if not every guest star has to be a big Trek character and I get the idea of occasionally going for actors from other sci-fi.

Valerie Archer represents an interesting case of a character portrayed by an actor with sci-fi cred, who has a place in Trek... And yet we know NOTHING about the real Valerie Archer except that she was a commander around 2375. She'd be maybe early 70s in STO, around the age Picard was in Nemesis. Strong female character, most likely. Genre actress. An interesting Trek connection.

She did Battlestar, Heroes, The 100, and she's in Axanar. I think she really stole the show in her Voyager outing.

And of course there's that Archer name. Cryptic could decide what they want to do with THAT. :-)

But I like the idea of characters whose existence is natural or implied but whose characters are undeveloped enough that Cryptic can use them organically. I actually made a big list back when the Foundry first came out of characters who were never seen onscreen to get around the likeness limitations while having characters who would have been present for episodes. Ie. unseen DS9 junior crew could pop up in a mission, I figured, and relate their experiences first person. Instead of "Records indicate that Captain Sisko of DS9 faced the Dominion...", I thought it would be handy to have characters who could say things like, "I was a junior officer on Deep Space Nine. I was in the Klingon restaurant when the Dominion attacked..." And then if you went and looked it up, you'd see that the character I used was a character O'Brien mentioned in the duty roster. Some even had subplots on the actual show. I believe there were recurring references to a love triangle among three junior officers on DS9. Very subtle.

Anyway, I used a few in Foundry missions. But I think Valerie Archer would be a great example of a character you could use and it would carry a reference to an episode but it wouldn't necessarily be overplaying your hand with a "Janeway is here to save the day" moment. And now I've added Lopez and Richardson to my list of never-before-seen characters, these two apparently having been legendary captains to rival Picard in the late 24th century.

Oh: one more candidate for a legendary Starfleet figure we've never seen: Thomas Halloway. Mentioned as the captain of the Enterprise in the alternate timeline Q created in Tapestry where Picard was an astrometrics officer. Novels have done a few takes on him, some where he commanded the Enterprise-D before Picard, some where he didn't, some where he was young, and some where he was old. I did put him in a Foundry mission but he's a solid example of a character who's probably a famous officer (Q did say nobody would be better or worse off in the timeline from Tapestry so theoretically he'd be of equal stature to Picard in the Prime timeline) but we've never seen him at all in an episode.

artan42

IT's a nice idea. It's also be nice to get something of Archer out of the ENT era and a descendent would be a good way of doing that... in her T6 NX refit of course .​​

leviathan99

artan42 wrote: »

IT's a nice idea. It's also be nice to get something of Archer out of the ENT era and a descendent would be a good way of doing that... in her T6 NX refit of course .​​

Well, if she's especially modest, she might skip over explaining her relationship to JONATHAN Archer and identify herself as a descendant of HENRY Archer, the pioneer Warp Drive researcher. That would pretty much ALSO make her Jonathan's descendant unless there's something we don't know. But it wouldn't be quite as "in your face" with the reference.

I've got friends descended from prominent people and it's not like their most famous family member is the only one they ever talk about.

artan42

Oh yeah, I forgot about his dad. That would be interesting.​​