Jeri Ryan is cool af. She embraces Trek and never stopped contributing to it.
I was so annoyed by how unabashedly they added her to trek for sex appeal and I decided from day 1 to hate 7, even if she was replacing a really annoying character.
But then she ended up being a stellar character with a great arc.
Her acting prowess is unmatched. She pulled a Robert Downey Jr. when she played the Doc inhabiting her body while pretending to be regular Seven.
Her acting prowess is matched, and dare I say exceeded, by Darcy Carden when she played four different characters.
This isn’t to say that Jeri Ryan isn’t a great actor. Just that Darcy Carden was really good in the episode.
That was one of my favorite moments in the show because her acting was so spectacular!
I will admit that as a young preteen, when watching Voyager, a common reaction was “BOOBA 😮”.
Rewatching it in much more recent years… her acting is SHOCKINGLY good - up to and including handling the sexual objectification that she experiences from other crew members (imo a clear nod to the costume she was made to wear and the audience’s likely reception of that, and which I believe is also an indirect dig at Rick Berman for being an over aggressive catsuit enthusiast) in a darkly amusing and at times heartbreakingly vulnerable way. Girl’s got LAYERS of acting in there.
People can be hot AND cool at the same time.
Even a broken Berman is right twice a season.
deleted by creator
I agree with this. I don’t appreciate the sex appeal and hoped that Voyager would be fine with Torres and Janeway as female leads- but at least she contributed to the story
Oh I fully appreciate the sex appeal. Crass as the idea is to boost ratings by casting a bombshell in a bone tight catsuit, credit where credit’s due it worked. A lot of TVs got tuned to UPN to look at that silver vinyl suit.
Turns out Seven was a massively important character; she got to do a lot of very important Star Trek stuff. Star Trek is at its very best when it’s exploring the human condition and often does so with a human adjacent character who is on the edge looking inward at humanity: Spock the human/vulcan hybrid. Data the android. The Emergency Medical Hologram. And Seven of Nine the former borg.
There’s some clumsy men writing women stuff in there but she has a lot of smaller moments where she slams up against the subtleties of human communication; As a borg she’s as diplomatic as a rifle cartridge and as subtle as her costume. The best stuff with Seven is her fairly unique position in the franchise as a cult escapee. She deals with some heavy shit, the trauma of being assimilated as a child, growing up in the collective and then being taken from it.
And Jeri Ryan did a world class job at bringing the character to life.
