By Brent McKnight | 8 years ago

For many of us, the past few days have been spent watching footage of Hurricane Sandy pummeling the Northeast, periodically checking in with friends and loved ones to make sure that they were safe. In the aftermath of the massive storm, news teams are hitting the streets, interviewing everyone they can get their hands on, including one anonymous Star Trek alum.

About 45 seconds into the video of this newscast they talk to a “New York resident” and former cast member of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Nana Visitor (what a great name for an actor who frequently appears in sci-fi productions). They don’t point out that she’s an actor, that she’s a member of the Trek family, and in fact, it doesn’t even look like they know who she is. Kids these days.

“It looked like something out of a movie,” Visitor tells the reporter about the storm. And she should know, since she currently has 60 acting credits on her resume, including DS9, Dark Angel, Batttlestar Galactica, and Torchwood, among others.

Does it really matter that no one on a PBS news crew knows who Kira Nerys is, and that no one recognizes Visitor? Should sci-fi fans feel slighted? Not in the slightest. They obviously have bigger things to worry about, like covering what will probably turn out to be the biggest news story of the year, and documenting the continuing human drama of the survivors and the recovery. This is just an interesting footnote to the whole ordeal.