Deep Space Nine did a lot with the women it had, but it didn’t have enough women. Kira Nerys is a great character. Jadzia Dax is a great character. Ezri Dax is . . . fine? Hell, Kai Winn is a great character, and a great role for Louise Fletcher, who was originally scheduled for this date before selfishly dying ten months ago today—meaning she doesn’t qualify for the other column yet, either. And from there, we rapidly slide into the land of “can I actually get five paragraphs about this person?” If your most interesting career detail is that you produced a video with Leonard Nimoy about how you and your family could survive if the Y2K apocalypse hits, probably not.

Penny Johnson Jerald, like much of the DS9 cast, bounced around Hollywood for years before the show began. In her case, about fifteen years. She did 29 episodes of The Paper Chase, a bunch of Standard TV Career Shows, and 82 episodes of The Larry Sanders Show. She had an impressive but brief role in What’s Love Got To Do With It?; she played Lorraine Taylor, Ike’s ex and the mother of his children. She appeared in both classics—The Jeffersons—and “oh, yeah, that exists”—She’s the Sheriff.

In fact, she did one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show with considerably more female characters, if one that didn’t always know what to do with them. She played Worf’s sister-in-law on one episode where his human adopted brother violates the Prime Directive. Later, she would be literally introduced to be a love interest for Sisko—Jake believed his father needed a girlfriend, and Kasidy Yates was, you know, a human woman?

It’s worth noting that Jerald Johnson herself does not consider Kasidy to be a complicated character. She says most of the roles she’s played have been laid back, which is presumably easy for her to play. She said her most challenging role was as Victoria “Iron” Gates on Castle, where she’s much tougher. She was extremely upset to discover she’d been fired from the show, and according to the showrunner it was a challenge to write her off, so I wonder why they did it.

The only Star Trek I can think of that has consistently having multiple well-written female characters is Picard, which seems to be going out of its way to do things right in that department. (Though here is where I admit that I’m behind on Picard, too.) It’s as though the executives have never quite recognized how much of the fandom is and always has been made up of women. I might know more stories of women being excited to be on a show they’ve loved since childhood than men; famously, Patrick Stewart was embarrassed and Whoopi Goldberg had to convince them that, yes, she really did want to be on the show. But why should that influence who’s on it?

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