Well, another year, another birthday, another present to myself. This time it's the sexy Lieutenant Marla McGivers from the Star Trek Episode "Space Seed".
Over the past couple of years for personal reasons that are not easy to explain on JSVB, I've developed a strong attachment to this character. Certainly it's enough for me to try for a well-rendered portrait.
Marla is peculiar. She only appeared in the one episode, and her treachery nearly kills the entire crew of the Enterprise. Or perhaps a better way to phrase her actions would be as misplaced loyalty.
The Star Trek Guide points out that although she is lieutenant by rank, her uniform doesn't have that stripe. Her duty on the Enterprise was as the ship's historian: she could interpret what the ship found on her five year voyage of discovery in terms of Earth history, which seems to me a remarkably useless skill given the wide variety of strange and alien worlds Captain Kirk discovers. Mind you, kirk also encounters a few "parallel Earths", but Marla McGivers is never seen to help with those.
She does find critical use when the Enterprise locates the marooned spacecraft Botany Bay: it's a sleeper ship sent from Earth in our time, and it's loaded with genetically-enhanced supercriminals entombed in hypersleep. Through Marla, we come to understand how Khan Singh and his team came to be jettisoned into deep space. She sides with Khan in a mutiny that nearly costs the lives of all the crew.
Marla McGivers is one of the first crewmembers on the Enterprise shown to actively pursue the arts. She seems to prefer painting rather than doing her regular duties, something I appreciate.
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