“I Am Properly Addressed as Ensign Ro”
I was watching the end of True Blood’s first season last night and tweeted “If I’d known Ensign Ro was on True Blood I would have watched long ago.” This prompted a lot of commentary to the effect that I should have identified the actor in question, Michelle Forbes, as Admiral Cain. I think this is pretty foolish. The Cain role was nice, but I think Forbes should forever be known by the iconic part through which she was first introduced to the TV-watching public. Check out this masterful scene:
Note also that the TNG portrayal of the Bajorans is pretty much the closest thing I can think of to a mainstream American portrayal of a pro-Palestinian point of view (I think DS9 wound up sort of downplaying the allegory, but it was pretty clear in the original presentation). Meanwhile, arguably her most substantial body of work was as Dr. Julianna Cox on Homicide.
65 Responses to ““I Am Properly Addressed as Ensign Ro””
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
July 9th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
On three…
One
Two
Three
Neeeeeeeeeeeeerd!
July 9th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
None of this Ensign Ro B.S. for me–Julianna Cox was awesome.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Julianna Cox was awesome
Agreed, except she had crappy taste in men. Kellerman was such a wanker.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Thanks! Watching True Blood I knew I recognized her from somewhere, now I know it was from her work as Ensign Roe. Much obliged.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Forbes, and Ted Levine, Billy Burke and others, were absolutely great in the shortlived series Wonderland
July 9th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Yeah Dr Cox all the way.
But the biggest problems with Homicide were Kellerman and the doofus that Callie Thorne was paired up with. Those two guys were beyond lame and brought the show to a schreeching halt whenever they were on.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I never knew her on ST:TNG. But she was awesome on Battlestar Galactica and is still awesome on True Blood.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Absolutely Ensign Ro.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Glad some people still hold fond memories of good old Ensign Ro.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Whatever happened to Lynne Kresge?? Is she still locked in that storage room???
July 9th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Ohhh. I liked BSG and I like True Blood and I still never noticed that Maryann was Helena Cain. Duh.
Never heard of Ensign Ro, though. As a geek it’s impossible to not be at least peripherally aware of Star Trek, but I know very little about it. I think I’ve watched maybe a total of three episodes of Trek series from start to finish. Definitely fewer than 10.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I just see her as Miranda Zero from Global Frequency, I show I’ve clearly never seen because that would be illegal.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Homicide was amazing.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
She’s also George’s girlfriend in one of Larry David’s best Seinfeld episode The Big Salad.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I just see her as Miranda Zero from Global Frequency, I show I’ve clearly never seen because that would be illegal.
Man, that show would have been awesome. Global Frequency was such a good comic book. I’d have killed to see Patrick Stewart play Spider Jerusalem, though…
July 9th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Plus she was Gabriel Byrne’s wife on In Treatment.
She was definitely at her best on Homicide, as pretty much the last new character on the show that was good. Before Michael Michele ruined everything.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the writers (for TNG or DS9, I don’t remember which) intended Cardassia Prime/Bajor to be an allegory for Iraq/Kuwait, not Israel/Palestine.
– Rieux, happily married (to a substantially bigger Trek fan than he is)
July 9th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
She’s also George’s girlfriend in one of Larry David’s best Seinfeld episode The Big Salad.
Yes and yes.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Um, Matt, did you see how successful the new Star Trek movie was? Star Trek is cool again.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
She was the last good character on Homicide, unless you count Callie Thorne or Peter Gerety – shame they didn’t make her a detective, she was sort of wasted as an ME.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
And don’t forget the movie Kalifornia, in which she and David Duchovny play a yuppie couple who pick up hitchhiking psychotic rednecks Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis… with hilarious results.
Also: The spokeswoman for Oceanic Airlines on LOST.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
In agreement with folks upthread about Homicide, Julianna Cox, Kellerman, the show’s demise, etc. Although Terri Stivers was a good character, and she might have been introduced after Julianna Cox, I don’t remember. I think she started along with John Seda’s douchebag character, when they were both in Robbery.
Folks might also recognize Michelle Forbes from Swimming With Sharks.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Agreed, except she had crappy taste in men.
Depending on who you are, that could be part of the appeal.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
She’ll always be Dr Cox to me. Which reminds me, why the hell didn’t she even last a whole season on that show? IIRC, she came in mid season, and left before the season finale with no warning. Just written out out of nowhere. Big mistake. If I had to pick a moment Homicide never recovered from, that might be it.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
She’s also George’s girlfriend in one of Larry David’s best Seinfeld episode The Big Salad.
And she was in Kalifornia with Brad Pitt, Dave Duchovny and Juliet Lewis.
Forbes rocks no question. I like how her character on True Blood vibrates and throws raging parties.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Kellerman was a hot mess, but he was a hot mess, if you get my meaning. I didn’t know she was on True Blood!
July 9th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
The Major Kira role on DS9 was originally intended to be Ensign Ro. They had to re-write the part when Michelle Forbes decided she didn’t want to be a regular character.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
@Pesto
Terri Stivers was introduced a little before her as a reoccurring character. Didn’t join the squad full time until the following season, I think.
Talk about a waste of potential. She was a great character when she was in Narcotics. Tough as nails. But by the time she became a full time character, it seemed as though NBC decided no more strong female characters, so they ended up using her as a foil in Callie Thorne and whats-his-names love triangle. I don’t think we ever saw her as a primary. Complete change in the way she was portrayed, along with Mellisa Leo leaving and Michael Michele coming on board and then getting beat down, giving everyone an excuse to talk about how weak women police were. Man those last couple seasons went down hill.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
So, when can we expect the next Doctor Who post?
July 9th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Mac — thanks for the timeline refresher. I agree about the last couple of seasons — I don’t think any Homicide fan defends them as the equal of the earlier shows. Simon and Burns held out as long as they could, but eventually NBC had their way with the show. Fortunately, it was pretty obvious that they were changing the cast for stupid and superficial reasons, so we knew what was coming…
July 9th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Damn straight, Matthew Yglesias. Ensign Ro 4evah.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
What was cool and radical about most of the Star Trek corpus was the politics, not the special FX or the sci-fi mumbo-jumbo and whatnot. This is what ties Star Trek (all the way to DS9), to the hyper-modernist, rationalist so-called Golden Age of science-fiction.
In that regard, the last series and the reboot feature are completely uninteresting. Uncool.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
As ZZ Top says, every girl’s crazy ’bout a Star Trek fan.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
@17: Actually, the Cardassian/Bajoran relationship is much more “Nazi/Jew” than “Isreali/Palestinian,” but neither one is a perfect allegory anyway. The Cardassians (as an empire) are depicted as being more or less evil, at least until they sign up with the even MORE evil Dominion and realize it was a huge mistake. Also, the concentration/labor camps and much more direct subjugation are much closer to Germany in the 1930s and 40’s than Isreal.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the writers (for TNG or DS9, I don’t remember which) intended Cardassia Prime/Bajor to be an allegory for Iraq/Kuwait, not Israel/Palestine.
Kuwait had a resistance, some parts of which were terrorist? I did not know that. (It also didn’t have a religion different from that of the conquerors.)
OTOH, I don’t remember any ultra-orthodox Cardassians claiming that their ancestors came from Bajor, it had been promised to them by their gods, and they weren’t leaving no matter what, either.
Maybe it’s better understood as a general allegory of conquest/colonization, rather than any specific instance. (Northern Ireland, for example, did have a partly-terrorist resistance and a different religion, so it may actually be closer than either of the Middle Eastern examples.)
July 9th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
BTW, I think the Cardassians are more like the 30’s imperial Japanese (esp. the military rule). Now the beauty of speculative fiction is that Showa Japan can be oppressing Palestinians.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
from here on out this blog will only address cool topics
Roundabouts vs. Traffic Circles it is, then.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Admiral Cain was pretty damn psychotically awesome, prior work notwithstanding.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
I always read the Bajorans as the Isrealis circa the 1950s- long suffering people finally given self-determination, struggling to form a government, faith central to their civic life, paranoid about their enemies oppressing them again…
However, I’m probably missing several salient details of Bajoran history. Still, I think the analogy holds up either way- which is quite impressive, really.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Although I first saw Michelle Forbes on ST:TNG (which I never really liked that much, staying loyal to the original Star Trek that I first saw in 1966), I do associate her much more with Homicide, my second favorite 60-minute show of all time (after Buffy The Vampire Slayer). Given Matt’s generally terrible tate in cultural matters, I was pleasantly surprised that he mentioned Dr. Cox. She was also good in her brief stint on BSG, appearing near that show’s peak before it descended into incoherent and horribly written tripe in its last season and a half.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Colby is right, the Bajorans are clearly an allegory for the long sufferings of the Jewish people. I remember that episode of DS9 where the Bajorans conducted large-scale ethnic cleansing and instituted a brutal 60 year occupation against a civilian populace.
That’s just so clearly what the Bajorans were all about.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Heh.
I saw Admiral Cain and said, “Hey, it’s Ensign Ro!”
July 9th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
I’m with Colby. I thought it was about post WWII Israel. And I never bought that Picard would have been taken by surprise by how to address a Bajoran. It goes counter to the character as a diplomat, scholar, anthropology buff, etc. He should have known that.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
For Homicide: Life on the Streets fans, great news: They are putting back into print the DVD box set of the entire series (the one that includes the L&O crossover episodes and the made-for-TV movie). It’s available for pre-order now.
http://www.amazon.com/Homicide-Life-Street-Complete-repackaged/dp/B002BLNGTS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1247179860&sr=1-1
July 9th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
I liked the Ensign Ro character too. I always thought that the Bajorans were based on Tibetans, and the Cardassians with their emphasis on the nuclear family as well as their Nazi-ish traits seem to be German-based to me. And the Klingons are based on a Viking sterotype, and the Romulans are obviously ancient Romans. The Vulcans might be some kind of ancient Greek Stoics. I won’t weigh in on the controversy over whether the Ferengi are based on a Jewish stereotype…
July 9th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
“Note also that the TNG portrayal of the Bajorans is pretty much the closest thing I can think of to a mainstream American portrayal of a pro-Palestinian point of view.
I always thought it was clearly intended as a Rorschach, myself: as much Jews as Palestinians, Bosnians as post-WWII Germans, Poles as much as Ukrainians, as much as Rwandans, etc.
“I think DS9 wound up sort of downplaying the allegory”
On the contrary, they made much more of it, regarding the Cardassians, as a key arc right through to the very end of the series. It drove the entire plot, and the storyline of the majority of the characters: Sisko and Major Kira (who was originally intended to be Ro Laren, of course), most of all, and with Gul Dukat as the duplicitious and only occasionally ambiguous Cardassian. But the list of episodes in which this was all key just runs on through dozens and dozens and dozens: a hundred times more than it was barely touched on in about two expisodes of TNG (a much inferior show due to that lack of serial story-telling DS9 took up after the third season).
Also, MF was excellent in Kalifornia.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“In retrospect, a single blogger probably shouldn’t be doing posts about Star Trek . . . from here on out this blog will only address cool topics.”
Is worrying about what other people think of you, and faking being someone else, actually cool?
July 9th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
It seems to me that the goal of the Cardassians was to subjugate the Bajorans and to enslave them on their homeworld.
To the extent that you wish to see Israelis as the bad guys, their goals would be more equivalent to forcing the Bajorans to move toward worlds in other systems and surrendering their planet.
To the extent that the Israelis have “racist” intentions, they lean more toward ethnic cleansing (i.e. population transfer) than to subjugation.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
She’ll always be Ensign Ro.
And yes, please do posts on Doctor Who. The new series will do, but classic Who gets extra points.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
I don’t think that’s fair. DS9 may have arguably been a better, more consistently written show, but I don’t think that the lack of serial storytelling was very much a part of that. The real distinction is that DS9 was the first Trek without Roddenberry’s involvement, so from the beginning, they had more room to introduce conflict and ambiguity than TNG.
The serial storytelling approach also has its drawbacks. Like B5, if you missed more than two or three episodes of DS9, or if you got into it late you were completely lost. I started watching TNG late second season; I had trouble taping DS9 for several weeks, and finally gave up.
And I’d put “Q Who?”, “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Chain of Command” and “Tapestry” up against any DS9 episode you care to name.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Yeah, I’d agree. I tended to see the Cardassians more as the Third Reich, though, because of their fixation with racial purity, and the medical experimentation–though that could also apply to the Japanese in China during WWII.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
errr. Garak. Probably the most interesting character of the whole series. And Andrew Robinson (of Dirty Harry “you feelin lucky, do ya punk?” fame) is an incredible actor.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Man am I glad it only took 12 comments for the geek factor to shoot through the roof. (I think an unaired pilot for a television show based on a comic book counts as through the roof — even if the roof is already pretty high, due to the whole Trek thing — don’t you?) People are awesome.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Heh. I always thought of the Cardassians as the Soviets and the Bajorans as the Poles.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
ote also that the TNG portrayal of the Bajorans is pretty much the closest thing I can think of to a mainstream American portrayal of a pro-Palestinian point of view
I always thought it was an allegory for the Bosnians during the Yugoslav war, then again I was only twelve when that was on so I might have missed a few things.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I guess you and Sara broke up?
July 9th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I do remember her as Miranda Zero on the Global Frequency pilot, but she was really damped down on that one and didn’t rock my world as being hot – other than kicking the crap out of the NSA security guards.
She’s much more lively on True Blood. Still not clear WHAT her character is, whether a witch or the consort of the god Pan, or the Devil. And what the hell is the PIG supposed to be? Her familiar? Or her boss?
July 9th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
She plays a great frosty bitch.
July 10th, 2009 at 2:47 am
Ya’ll be missing Matt’s original point, the Bajorans=the Palestinians *in that particular Next Generation episode which was their first appearance* This was blindingly obvious to me and I was thirteen at the time.
DS9, the spinoff that focused on Bajor, changed them a lot (though not as much as they changed the Trill, how’s that for nerd?) And the Bajorans flipped from being Palestinans to early post-1948 Israelis. How’s that for a switch?
July 10th, 2009 at 4:36 am
She was at her best, by far, in Swimming with Sharks. The later stick-up-her-butt roles have been all downhill.
July 10th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Get the MST3K DVD of Laserblast.
Now.
July 10th, 2009 at 11:18 am
And I’d put “Q Who?”, “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Chain of Command” and “Tapestry” up against any DS9 episode you care to name.
Single episode comparisons don’t work well for series with long-term storylines. It’s like judging a book based on just a few pages.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I agree with Typist in that this particular episode can be best interpreted as an Israel-Palestine analogy, whereas the roles of the Cardassians and Bajorans in general can probably be superimposed on a number of geopolitical contexts.
I’d also point out that the custom of addressing people by their first names is in fact an Arabic (and by extension, Palestinian) custom. If I were formally speaking to Matthew in Arabic, I would refer to him as Ustadh (Mr.) Matthew, rather than Mr. Yglesias.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:58 am
“She’ll always be Ensign Ro.”
Just for the record, she was promoted to Lieutenant ro by her final episode on film on Star Trek, in TNG, before she quit Starfleet and joined the Maquis, and was never seen again on screen (but has continued in some of the novels, I gather).
Those are both perfectly fair points. I’m just saying that the serial format made for vastly deeper and more interesting storylines than storylines that pretty much had to end after 46 minutes, or whatever. That it makes it much harder for new viewers, or casual viewers, to follow, is of course a corallary (it’s one reason I’ve never started following Lost, for example, after skipping tehe first season).
And, yes, getting rid of many of the wacky Roddenberry rules he’d laid down by the TNG era, by which times he’d swallowed his own legend, was also very important. Characters can have conflict! They can be morally ambiguous! Needless to say, this helped enormously in making DS9 the best of the Trek series after the original.
Fair enough; I wasn’t saying TNG didn’t have any good episodes. (Aside form the first season, which really sucked amazingly, by every possible standard other than Being Star Trek, and the second season only had a handful of good episodes; it didn’t really rise in quality until the third season, overall.)
“Garak. Probably the most interesting character of the whole series.”
No, no, Garak was almost always ambiguous, save that he was much a “good guy” of a Cardassian as ever regularly seen. And one of the most interesting characters of all the series, of course. Gul Dukat, on the other hand, was pretty much outright a bad guy, although they dabbled with some ambiguity to him from time to time before the end.
“Man am I glad it only took 12 comments for the geek factor to shoot through the roof.”
It’s people who are embarrassed to admit to their geekdom, like Matt often is, who embarrass me. Have a little pride in what you genuinely like, for $DEITY’s sake, rather than worrying about whether people will think you’re “cool.” People should be past that latter stage by age 12, if they have any self-respect and self-confidence at all. (POr age 14, at least.)
“Ya’ll be missing Matt’s original point, the Bajorans=the Palestinians *in that particular Next Generation episode which was their first appearance*”
But that’s just not true. They could equally have been Jewish refugees during WWII, or any displaced people. Anyone who thinks it was “obvious” that they were one specific people entirely miss the purpose of allegory, which sucks if it’s blindingly obvious. And that episode didn’t suck. And what the Bajorans started as, and remained as, were allegories for any conquered and displaced people who (eventually) won back their freedom, and then had to deal with all the problems that results in. (As well as having a dominant religion thrown into the mix, made even more complicated that their “gods” could actively intervene, what with being actually time-unbound aliens and all.)
Of course, the dumbest (repeatedly used) race ever created by Star Trek were the Ferengi, despite some good ise pf Romk, and of Nog, in some episodes, and some decent use of Quark. But man, most of the Ferengi-oriented episodes were failures. And often deeply embarrasing just to watch.
Neelix wasn’t ST’s greatest (repeating) character ever, either. Nor Kes. But, then, Voyager was the worst of the series, despite some really quite decent episodes, surprisingly, from time to time, particularly later seasons.
And the Borq Queen should never have been invented.
I think that’s enough Trek geekdom for one comment, don’tyou?
July 16th, 2009 at 3:10 am
True blood will go down as one of HBOs best series by far. A lot of people wont agree with me but its true. It is catching on fast and I’m definitely a massive fan.