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Rob London

Maggie Lovitt

Published Sep 10, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

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Star Trek is famous for re-using its guest stars, who can be easily hidden under makeup and prosthetics. Jeffrey Combs alone has played almost a dozen different aliens, once playing two separate recurring characters in the same episode. Although that has diminished in recent years, with production of most modern Trek series moving from Hollywood to Toronto, Ontario, one recent guest star reminded fans that it wasn’t her first time on the final frontier. Rachael Harris dropped by the Star Trek panel at last weekend’s Tampa Bay Comic Con, moderated by Collider’s Maggie Lovitt, to relate her experience on Star Trek: Voyager to the audience.

Harris recently guest-starred on “Level-Five Transporter Accident,” the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode that saw most of the USS Enterprise’s crew transformed into Jim Henson-style puppets. She played Ch’Rol, an imperious green-skinned Orion space pirate who attempts to take advantage of the crew’s condition to seize control of the vessel. However, she doesn’t find it quite as easy as she anticipated. As she told attendees at the panel, Harris played a small part in the 1997 *Voyager *episode “Before and After.” Her scene involved some bizarre alien biology, and that didn’t just include the fake ears she had to wear:

“I was Kes’ mom. I have super short blonde hair, and I was an Ocampa, so I had Ocampa ears, and I pushed the baby out my back! Because we carry our babies in our backs. So there’s literally, like, me in like 1996 or 97, something like that, I think, and I’m pushing out like that, and it literally looks like I am pooping.”

Harris, a longtime fan of Star Trek, told fans she used to “play Star Trek” with her late brother and described coming back to the franchise as “the greatest thing ever,” especially since she didn’t have to excrete a baby this time, and merely had to be painted a verdant shade of green.

Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.

You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.

The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.

You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.

Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.

The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Before and After” centers around Kes (Jennifer Lien), a member of the short-lived Ocampa race. A typical Ocampa lifespan is over in the space of less than a decade; Kes finds herself experiencing her entire life, including the parts she hasn’t lived yet, thanks to exposure to a time-manipulating weapon. In the past, she experiences her own birth, as mentioned above; in the future, she finds that she’s married to fellow crew member Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), while their similarly fast-aging daughter has married Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wang), and Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) has been killed by a hostile alien race.

Thanks to the Doctor (Robert Picardo), Kes is snapped back to her normal timeline before she can be de-aged into oblivion, and hopes to avert some of her dark future. Ironically, Kes’ future on the series would be cut short; Lien left the series early in the next season to be replaced by ex-Borg Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan).

Star Trek: Voyager is streaming on Paramount+. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

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