Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Chris Westlake’s main title theme from Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Today’s prompt comes to us from SadClown. Thanks, SadClown. The prompt is: Do you have a favorite character who only appears in one episode?

I have many. A couple of them are Lower Decks characters. But before I get to those one-time LD characters, I’ll recap the six one-time characters I told SadClown about when he posted his prompt suggestion in the comments section on October 22.

Reynaldo Piniella did a great job bringing to life Julio, the laconic-for-most-of-his-screen-time Puerto Rican teen who works at Red Lobster and frequently irons his shirts inside the group home Cheese was sent away to, in Reservation Dogs’s profane but ultimately uplifting “Stay Gold Cheesy Boy” episode from 2022. (Rez Dogs had so many intriguing one-time characters. Another one was Elora’s estranged white birth dad, who was played in Rez Dogs’s penultimate episode by Ethan Hawke, the current star of Rez Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown.)

The Kenneallys—a family of two adult actors and their two teenage children, who also worked as actors—were funny as the squeaky-clean Swerdlows, whose unctuous compliments to each other during a group session with Dr. Hartley nauseate the cynical Mr. Carlin in the 1977 Bob Newhart Show episode “A Day in the Life.” And the late Sully Boyar—the bank manager in one of my favorite movies, Dog Day Afternoon—left a powerful impression in his final role as Dr. Krakower, Carmela’s brutally honest shrink, in the 2001 Sopranos episode “Second Opinion.”

Legendary director Mike Nichols was originally cast as Dr. Krakower, but he persuaded David Chase to replace him after only one day of work because he felt he wasn’t right for the part. Nichols was right about himself. I have a really hard time picturing the male half of Nichols and May as Dr. Krakower. That’s how terrific Boyar was in the role.

[Majel Barrett voice] And now, the one-time characters I didn’t mention last time. On Star Trek: The Next Generation.

LD’s “The Least Dangerous Game” episode is the first glimpse of insecure Boimler’s desire to become known as “Bold Boimler.” The ensign decides that from now on, he’s going to say yes to everyone who comes his way—including the Cerritos’s alien guest, K’ranch, who represents the Kromsapiods, whose Predator-style culture is all about hunting other species (but never killing them because the Kromsapiods respect life above all else).

K’ranch chooses Boimler to be his prey for a Kromsapiod ritual known as a Venarix hunt, so Boimler is chased all over the Cerritos by a terrifying hunter who tosses spears and Batman Returns-style Batarangs at him. If you ever thought Predator could have used some footage of Schwarzenegger screaming like Dr. Smith from Lost in Space while a Yautja chases him all over the jungle, “The Least Dangerous Game” is for you.

The Kromsapiods were a new alien race created for LD. Strangely named after both ketchup and ranch dressing by LD creator Mike McMahan, K’ranch is one of my favorite examples of the animators at Titmouse, Inc. using the 2D animation medium to give an alien who would have been expensive and time-consuming to create for a live-action Trek show so much movement and freedom—at a fraction of what it would cost to make that alien exist in live action. K’ranch moves less like a humanoid who’s always glued to the floor and more like an acrobatic animal who can cling to walls and leap off them.

I love most of the Predator movies, and “The Least Dangerous Game” was like if a Yautja was plopped into the world of Star Trek. Chris Westlake even did a riff on Alan Silvestri’s Predator theme. The hunter was entertainingly voiced as an early ’90s Trek take on a Yautja (as in he’s kind and thoughtful when he’s not viciously targeting his prey) by prolific animation and video game voice actor Nolan North, one of many veteran voice actors who voiced more than three characters on LD. Another talented voice actor who played multiple characters on LD was the late Eric Bauza.

The 46-year-old Filipino Canadian voice actor’s recent death from hypertension is a bummer because I’m Filipino, too. His greatness and versatility as a voice actor—most famously in the modern-day Looney Tunes TV shows (I’m glad I got myself the entire run of Looney Tunes Cartoons on Blu-ray a few months before his death) and Coyote vs. Acme—were among the reasons why I came out of a 16-year hiatus from taking voice acting classes to pick up where I left off with those classes.

On LD, Bauza’s most memorable character was a one-timer: Coqqor, a temperamental captain who represents the Chalnoth, a race that, unlike the Kromsapiods, previously appeared on TNG (1990’s “Allegiance,” to be exact).

Coqqor is part of the scene that made me laugh the longest during LD’s five-season run: Captain Freeman’s disastrous negotiation with Coqqor (over who should be the first to scan a nebula) while both of them are—because of Boimler and Rutherford’s suggestions to the captains to try out their Hal Holbrook-style approach to conflict resolution—dressed up as Mark Twain.

During the heavily scripted riffing segments on MST3K, host Michael J. Nelson rarely broke. The one thing that did cause him to break and lower his head into his own lap because he was laughing so hard was a crotchety old storekeeper who snarls nonstop at his teen employee during the 1946 B-movie The Brute Man. The sight of a dignified Black woman like Dawnn Lewis as Freeman trying to do an aristocratic Southern accent like Val Kilmer’s accent from Tombstone in front of an unsatisfied and irate Chalnoth captain (while both captains are wearing Mark Twain mustaches and wigs) is to me what the crotchety old storekeeper is to Nelson.

Bauza, the modern-day voice of Bugs Bunny and many other Looney Tunes characters, was totally unrecognizable as the voice of Coqqor in “Something Borrowed, Something Green.” It’s a good example of how chameleonic he was as a voice actor when he was alive.

The late Hiromi Tsuru was another voice actor who tragically died young due to a heart-related issue (aortic dissection in her case). In one of Samurai Champloo’s best episodes, 2004’s “Daraku tenshi (Fallen Angel)” (retitled “Gamblers and Gallantry” for English-speaking viewers), she voiced Shino, an eel chef trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive jerk who forces her to work at a brothel to pay off his gambling debts.

Jin, the show’s icy and emotionless ronin, rescues Shino from a suicide attempt and falls in love with her while helping her escape her scummy husband. (“Counting Stars,” the classic Nujabes instrumental during the bittersweet but hopeful final scene in “Daraku tenshi,” was a previous Original TV Score Selection of the Week.) Shino deserved another appearance after “Daraku tenshi.” I wanted to see Jin checking up on her and her eel stand.

I also wanted to see Taxi doing a lot more than it did with Charlayne Woodard. She was charming in her only appearance on Taxi as Nina Chambers, a young Black cabbie who wants to make it on Broadway and develops a crush on an uninterested Alex (his lack of interest isn’t because he’s racist but because her optimism turns off his cynical self) in the 1982 episode “Nina Loves Alex.” Taxi’s biggest flaw was the lack of non-white regulars in its cast. Woodard would have been a perfect addition to the cast.

In one of the Avocado comments sections in 2020, Wallis Lane said that Bobby Wheeler, an earlier Taxi character who also wanted to make it on Broadway, was the show’s most frustrating character.

“I never thought Jeff Conaway ever got a handle on that character, other than douchebag swagger, and never found any of his plots interesting,” wrote Wallis.

True. Nina was more appealing to me than Bobby. Many Taxi fans fondly remember her, while my last one-time character is somebody no viewers remember. That’s because the show he appeared in only once—Fox’s Key West from 1993—was one of several Northern Exposure clones that came and went without a peep in the early ’90s.

Key West was about the denizens of idyllic Key West, Florida and their interactions with both the city’s newest resident—a Jersey factory worker (played by Fisher Stevens) who won the lottery and used his winnings to move to Key West and become the next Ernest Hemingway—and the new mayor, a Republican in a predominantly liberal city. She was played by TNG alum Denise Crosby. All 13 Key West episodes are up on Internet Archive.

In Key West’s second episode, “The Second Day in Heaven,” Filipino American gay actor Alec Mapa guest-starred as Philip, a mayoral aide who worked for the previous mayor—a Democrat who lost to Crosby’s Chaucy Caldwell because she used his homosexuality to discredit him—and is now part of Caldwell’s staff. But he resents his new boss because her takedown of his old boss at the televised debate that cost him the election offended him as a gay man.

“The Second Day in Heaven” was the first place where I saw Mapa act. The short king dominated the screen during both his confrontation with Caldwell about her belief that gayness is a sin (it’s a great scene where she finds out that most of her staff is LGBTQ, and with just a nod and a laugh, Philip lets her know that he and his fellow staffers are going to be her worst nightmare) and a later verbal confrontation with a local Cuban crime boss who tries to intimidate Caldwell in her office.

Unfortunately, Philip never appeared on Key West again. He was the show’s most intriguing character—other than Savannah, the slinky prostitute played by Jennifer Tilly.

In “The Second Day in Heaven,” Mapa proved he was born to play a lawyer. I’ve never seen him play a lawyer. Sheeeeeit, even Danny DeVito got to play one—although that character was a lawyer who practiced without a license—in The Rainmaker. The fact that Mapa has never been cast as a lawyer on a Robert and Michelle King legal drama and the late Patrick Stewart wasn’t cast as a barrister in some legal project after his performance in “The Measure of a Man,” TNG’s most beloved courtroom episode, is one of many reasons why Hollywood sucks.

I didn’t mind that Coqqor appeared only once on LD, whereas the other one-off characters left me wanting more. I’m sure there are a few more one-off characters I neglected to mention, and maybe one of their names will surface below.