(Also: Robin Curtis here plays a Vulcan disguised as a Romulan. In Star Trek III and IV, she plays Saavik, the Vulcan [according to the novels, Romulan/Vulcan] role originated by Kirstie Alley. If you’ve ever seen Curtis in a role other than a Vulcan, you realize why her best roles were as Vulcans: She sucks.)

Well, where else would she be able to find a role where the director would be yelling “No, Robin! Be stiffer! Less emotional!” all the time?

That’s not really an “ACTING” role. (Unless he doesn’t really like books.)

Philistine that I am, I would have said that Levar Burton’s second-most famous role was “the guy on Reading Rainbow.”

Of course Geordi (alone among the main characters) was never given any background character development. He was always just the romantically inept, slightly creepy, engineering nerd. Considering the visor and all you’d think they’d have developed his family and past a little bit more.

I’ll admit that my reaction here was the opposite: that it wasn’t Geordi but everyone else who was being stupid in insisting that Mom LaForge had to be dead because her ship was (if I recall correctly) something like two weeks late. Given the distances involved, not to mention the weird crap they regularly encounter, this seemed the equivalent of me staying at work late and not noticing that my cell phone battery had run down, getting stuck in traffic, then arriving home to find my family planning my funeral.

I was also disappointed, because it struck me that this could have been a powerful idea. How many times has the Enterprise been in a situation where, if Geordi and Data hadn’t pulled out a technobabble solution at the last moment, the ship would have been destroyed and no one would ever have known what happened? So a story about a character dealing with the other side of that, being forced to accept that a loved one was probably dead but that you could never know for certain, could have been very powerful. But the speed at which they went from “the ship is late” to “let’s have a memorial service” just left me shaking my head and thinking, “Gee, you gave up fast. You didn’t like her very much, did you?”