whatever happened to these characters?

[bullethead]

RPJOB wrote:

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Also, five years seems a bit on the lenient side. Compare to what Cyrano Jones was facing.

The Federation seems to take threats to democracy in stride.

I see Kirk and Spock took some pages out of the Judge Dredd play book.

[Steve Mollmann]

Commander Giotto is a viewpoint character in A Choice of Catastrophes, which happens in late season 2. One draft had a comment that it was a rare landing party for him, but I feel like that got cut in the editing. He was fun to write, especially in his interactions with Chekov.

Christopher wrote:

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Not really. They've been given inconsistent first names in various works, when they've been used at all. In Forgotten History I tried to be consistent with other recent works like A Choice of Catastrophes, but there are still some contradictions among recent works; for instance, both I and ACoC give DeSalle's first name as Vincent, as did The Star Trek Concordance (presumably taken from a script), but The Sorrows of Empire gives Mirror DeSalle's first name as Michael (from the actor who played him). I tried to fudge it by calling him Vincent M. DeSalle in FH, suggesting that the Mirror version went by his middle name.

Even M'Benga hasn't been portrayed consistently; Vanguard called him Jabilo M'Benga, ignoring the precedent of '80s novels that called him Geoffrey.

If there was a preexisting first name for a character that appeared on screen without one, Michael and I tried to use it, no matter the source.

Both A Choice of Catastrophes and The Tears of Eridanus call M'Benga "Jabilo Geoffrey M'Benga."

[Christopher]

Steve Mollmann wrote:

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If there was a preexisting first name for a character that appeared on screen without one, Michael and I tried to use it, no matter the source.

Yeah... I'm not too fond of the practice of just giving the character the actor's first name, although I have done variants (like "Vaylin Zaand" for Billy Van Zandt's Rhaandarite character from TMP, or Marcella DiFalco for Marcie Lafferty's character). And in the case of DeSalle, I've known "Vincent DeSalle" from the Concordance for so long that I didn't even realize it was non-canonical until I saw him called "Michael" in TSoE.

Hey, remember the old pre-Pocket days when the fans decided that Sulu's first name was Walter? I'm not sure whether that was widespread, but it was in the old Best of Trek fanzine anthologies (along with "Penda Uhura"). Even after The Entropy Effect came out, I saw some references to "Hikaru Walter Sulu."

[tomswift2002]

Well, we were never given Sulu's middle name on screen, so I guess Walter could work.

[Greg Cox]

These days, of course, you can always check Memory Beta to see if an old TV character has ever been assigned a first name. If so, I try to be consistent with the earlier usage . . . but have been known to play the "actor's first name" card on occasion.

[Mage]

tomswift2002 wrote:

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But for the op, they might want to check out Diane Carey's 1996? novel Ship Of The Line, since Captain Bateson was the first captain of the new Enterprise-E.

Captain BENTEEN, from the DS9 two-parter Homefront/Paradise Lost. She was a commander at the beginning of that two-parter, and was promoted by Leyton to captain of the USS Lakota.

Captain Bateson showed up in TrekLit quite a few times after Ship Of The Line actually, atleast three novels that I know of.

[Christopher]

Greg Cox wrote:

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These days, of course, you can always check Memory Beta to see if an old TV character has ever been assigned a first name. If so, I try to be consistent with the earlier usage . . . but have been known to play the "actor's first name" card on occasion.

Which isn't always helpful when a character has been given different first names in different sources. Mem B's entry on Mr. Leslie was ambivalent about his first name. I can't even remember which one I went with in Forgotten History.

[RPJOB]

Christopher wrote:

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Yeah... I'm not too fond of the practice of just giving the character the actor's first name, although I have done variants (like "Vaylin Zaand" for Billy Van Zandt's Rhaandarite character from TMP, or Marcella DiFalco for Marcie Lafferty's character).

DeFalco is one character I could live with never seeing again. All I can hear is that flat deliver of the line "Vessel is floating free now. No forward momentum" and I just want to stuff cotton in my ears.

Marcy Lafferty apparently got the gig solely by being married to Shatner. It certainly doesn't appear to be because of any acting ability.

[JonoKyle]

What happened to Rennan Konya?

Last I heard he was Deputy Chief of Security on the USS Enterprise-E and had just broken up with T'Ryssa Chen, but he has not been seen since Paths of Disharmony and I noticed on Memory Beta he is now listed as married. Is he still on the Enterprise-E and who is he married to?

[Sci]

RPJOB wrote:

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Actually, Picard and his coconspirators did give Starfleet a veto over the office of President. They've established a precedent.

One of the advantages we as readers have, again, is that we the audience know those characters' goals, beliefs, and motivations in a way we never could in real life. And one of the things we know about those characters is that none of them considered their actions against Zife to be a precedent for the future. Every last one of them considered their actions to be an extraordinary event, to be undertaken only this time and never again. They neither want nor regard themselves as having the moral or legal authority to do it ever again.

Also, it is important to pay attention to the make-up of the conspiracy -- there are some noticeable absences. The Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet was not party to the conspiracy. Neither was the Starfleet liaison to the President's office (who is often portrayed as the #2 in Starfleet). So institutionally, this seems to have been a conspiracy of a small number of flag officers, but not a decision made by the organization itself; Starfleet's commanding officer was unaware of it.

It's also important to note that the current Starfleet Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Akaar, was not party to the conspiracy. Jellico had been party to the conspiracy when he became C-in-C, but he resigned after the Borg Invasion.

So institutionally, Starfleet no longer has several key members of that conspiracy -- which makes it all the harder to argue that Starfleet has a "veto" over the President, since its current leaders don't know about that conspiracy, and since key members of that conspiracy aren't in Starfleet anymore. I do not think it reasonable to say that a precedent has been established when there's no institutional knowledge of that "precedent."

Don't forget, this is the same Starfleet that had maneuvered the President into declaring martial law on Earth just a few years earlier (Paradise Lost).

Why does Starfleet as an institution get the blame for Leyton's crimes but not the credit for Sisko defeating him?

RPJOB wrote:

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And that's one interpretation of what happened afterwards. We don't know one way or the other at the end of the episode.

It is inconsistent to hold it against Starfleet because of events in one book, but not to acknowledge what is factually established in another book. If you're gonna make a fuss about the events of A Time to Heal, then you have a logical obligation to acknowledge the facts established in Hollow Men. They're both part of the same continuity.

Also, five years seems a bit on the lenient side. Compare to what Cyrano Jones was facing.

You're going to claim the Federation is inconsistent or hypocritical because of a penalty that existed one hundred five years before the events of DSN Season Four?

It had been over a century. I think it's safe to say that the Federation just in general adopted a more lenient judicial system in the meantime. Certainly the horror with which the Federates in VOY's "Repentance" consider capital punishment would suggest an evolution in Federation legal practices since TOS's "The Menagerie" established a death sentence for people who contact Talos IV.

[Christopher]

Sci wrote:

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It had been over a century. I think it's safe to say that the Federation just in general adopted a more lenient judicial system in the meantime. Certainly the horror with which the Federates in VOY's "Repentance" consider capital punishment would suggest an evolution in Federation legal practices since TOS's "The Menagerie" established a death sentence for people who contact Talos IV.

First off, that was a Starfleet death penalty, not a part of Federation civil law. It would only have applied to Starfleet personnel. And second, it was the only death penalty on the books, an extraordinary exception to the norm. So I think you're off-base if you're implying that the 23rd-century Federation was okay with capital punishment.

EDIT: Well, at least the core worlds. Ardana was a Federation world and had the death penalty, but it also had institutionalized discrimination, so I wonder if maybe the Federation signed them up too hastily, or if some politician looked the other way to get the mining rights there. We know Deneb V had plenty of death penalties ("I, Mudd"), but it probably wasn't in the UFP, at the time, because in "The Pirates of Orion," the Enterprise was sent to represent the Federation at the dedication of Deneb V's new Academy of Science, something that I doubt would be necessary if the planet were in the Federation.

[datalogan]

I'd be interested in seeing again:
Phillipa Louvois (TNG "Measure of a Man")
Darryl "Dare" Adin (TNG novels Survivors and Metamorphosis) and his group of mercenaries
K'Ehlyr (TNG "The Emissary" and "Reunion") (yeah, I know that might be hard with her being dead)
Peter Kirk (TOS "Operation: Annihilate!" and novel Sarek)
Edward M. La Forge (TNG "Interface")
Cleante al Faisal (TOS novels Dwellers in the Crucible and Strangers from the Sky)

[TJ Sinclair]

datalogan wrote:

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I'd be interested in seeing again:
Phillipa Louvois (TNG "Measure of a Man")

I always liked her, too. She did show up recently in The Buried Age, which takes place a few years before "The Measure of a Man," and deals with Picard's court martial. I don't recall her showing up in any other novels, but she did appear in a couple of issues of DC's TNG comic, written by Michael Jan Friedman. It was a kind of cool story about her and Data.

Peter Kirk (TOS "Operation: Annihilate!" and novel Sarek

I'd to see more Peter, too, but as much as I love Sarek, I somehow doubt contemporary novels would jibe with that portrayal of the character.

[RPJOB]

Sci wrote:

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One of the advantages we as readers have, again, is that we the audience know those characters' goals, beliefs, and motivations in a way we never could in real life. And one of the things we know about those characters is that none of them considered their actions against Zife to be a precedent for the future. Every last one of them considered their actions to be an extraordinary event, to be undertaken only this time and never again. They neither want nor regard themselves as having the moral or legal authority to do it ever again.

Also, it is important to pay attention to the make-up of the conspiracy -- there are some noticeable absences. The Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet was not party to the conspiracy. Neither was the Starfleet liaison to the President's office (who is often portrayed as the #2 in Starfleet). So institutionally, this seems to have been a conspiracy of a small number of flag officers, but not a decision made by the organization itself; Starfleet's commanding officer was unaware of it.

It's also important to note that the current Starfleet Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Akaar, was not party to the conspiracy. Jellico had been party to the conspiracy when he became C-in-C, but he resigned after the Borg Invasion.

So institutionally, Starfleet no longer has several key members of that conspiracy -- which makes it all the harder to argue that Starfleet has a "veto" over the President, since its current leaders don't know about that conspiracy, and since key members of that conspiracy aren't in Starfleet anymore. I do not think it reasonable to say that a precedent has been established when there's no institutional knowledge of that "precedent."

Why does Starfleet as an institution get the blame for Leyton's crimes but not the credit for Sisko defeating him?

It is inconsistent to hold it against Starfleet because of events in one book, but not to acknowledge what is factually established in another book. If you're gonna make a fuss about the events of A Time to Heal, then you have a logical obligation to acknowledge the facts established in Hollow Men. They're both part of the same continuity.

You're going to claim the Federation is inconsistent or hypocritical because of a penalty that existed one hundred five years before the events of DSN Season Four?

It had been over a century. I think it's safe to say that the Federation just in general adopted a more lenient judicial system in the meantime. Certainly the horror with which the Federates in VOY's "Repentance" consider capital punishment would suggest an evolution in Federation legal practices since TOS's "The Menagerie" established a death sentence for people who contact Talos IV.

It doesn't matter if all the members of the conspiracy are still in the fleet or not. Picard and the others did what they thought was right. Who are they then to tell someone else that they're wrong if other Captains, Admirals and such decide to remove Bacco for what they believe to be good and valid reasons? If it's OK for Picard to override the democratic wishes of the population of the Federation why is it not OK for someone else to do so if they believe that they are doing the right thing? Why would Leyton be sentenced to 5 years in a rehab colony if he thought he was working to save the Federation? Why would Starfleet be interested (apparently) in shutting down Section 31?

The point is that the Zife conspirators got away essentially scott free with the exception of Ross and he even got to retire, presumably with whatever passes for a cushy pension in the 24th century.

Who's to say the Federation has grown more lenient? There's numerous examples that the Federation is now willing, nay, expected, to allow entire civilizations to die because of the Prime Directive. They also attempted to force a group of Federation citizens off their plant that they had lived on for over a century. They've also known about section 31 since the time of Archer, made rousing speeches (in the novels as well) about bringing them down and yet Section 31 continues pretty much without opposition. Perhaps the Federation has decided that having their own version of the Tal Shiar or the Obsidian Order is actually a good thing a long as they don't make themselves too obvious.

Kirk wasn't above threatening to destroy Flint's planet or Eminiar VII. Imagine how that would have turn out of Kirk had been unable to issuer the countermand order. You don't make a threat you're not willing to deal with the consequences of.

The Federation is not as nice and benevolent as people tend to ret-con it to be.

[RPJOB]

Christopher wrote:

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First off, that was a Starfleet death penalty, not a part of Federation civil law. It would only have applied to Starfleet personnel. And second, it was the only death penalty on the books, an extraordinary exception to the norm. So I think you're off-base if you're implying that the 23rd-century Federation was okay with capital punishment.

EDIT: Well, at least the core worlds. Ardana was a Federation world and had the death penalty, but it also had institutionalized discrimination, so I wonder if maybe the Federation signed them up too hastily, or if some politician looked the other way to get the mining rights there. We know Deneb V had plenty of death penalties ("I, Mudd"), but it probably wasn't in the UFP, at the time, because in "The Pirates of Orion," the Enterprise was sent to represent the Federation at the dedication of Deneb V's new Academy of Science, something that I doubt would be necessary if the planet were in the Federation.

It was the only one on the books at least until Turnabout Intruder when General Order 4 had taken over that title. Perhaps GO 7 was folded into the existing GO 4 and actually expanded the number of crimes that the death penalty could be applied to.

We also know that Vulcan had the death penalty in the 22nd century. We also have no indication that it was rescinded.