My criteria is just "bad acting".
The guy in The Chase was grunting and posturing and doing all the Klingon stuff, but he was unconvincing.
When I see Michael Dorn, Tony Todd, Christopher Lloyd, David Warner, Mark Lenard, John Colicos and Michael Ansara, I see Klingons.
The guy in The Chase was a guy made up like a Klingon, but somehow his performance rang false.
In other words, there was just something fake about the guy.
Hard to put a finger on it.
It i
s hard to put a finger on. The actor in
The Chase may have seemed while fine reading for the part, who knows? Maybe after the forehead, beard, teeth, etc. were added, some subtler virtues may have been lost. But to me it comes down to what I call 'character shorthand', an actor who seems to posess a 'physical equivalent' of the mental characteristics desired. For example, Leonard Nimoy appears very intelligent, so it helps in his portrayal of Spock.
Let me put it this way: you might see or know someone in real life who at first glance may seem socially withdrawn or awkward, not saying much, or whatever offbeat trait, yet it turns out he's a fantastically talented piano player or writer. Perhaps they have a photographic memory, or some other trait which you never woulds have guessed at the beginning. On the other hand, someone well-spoken and smart-seeming might make all sorts of foolish mistakes and actually be very inept socially. That's just how real people are...they are who they are.
You can also catch someone in an element that doesn't highlight their strengths, giving incorrect impressions of them. This sort of wrong place, wrong time thing is part of all our lives.
In the time-format of movies and tv, there's not always the opportunity to get to know someone in the same way you would in real life. People and events must be truncated to maximize impressions and get the most out of the rime we spend with them...after all, the clock is ticking.
Now, regarding
The Chase, the Klingon captain was dealing with ship command, scientific matters of dna fragments and whatnot. The guy as presented had more of an aura of someone in a rough biker bar, the type you could imagine being the one to break a pool cue in half!
I'm not expressing this well, but that's why I mentioned the Klingon underling in
Unification. That actor seemed to have the potential to convey (again, in that 'shorthand' way) the qualities of authority and intellectual curiosity lacking from
The Chase character. Like I said earlier, switch the actors, and I think everything would've been fine.
I'm not picking on the creators of the show at all, 'cause it's probably just that things don't always go as planned: that's one thing that film and real life most definitey have in common!
