mazz0626 | If I could introduce a regular character to Star Trek...

Ten word pitch: Parasocial relationships; Shannara Troi-Rozhenko, from "Parallels" reality; Lenora Crichlow.

A psychological issue that has become more and more prevalent in recent years is that of parasocial relationships. For anyone not sure what that means, it's basically a phenomenon arising from the fact that human brains really aren't very sophisticated; they only have one storage compartment for familiar faces and voices, and that compartment is labelled "people I physically interact with, who know me as well as I know them". It's why meeting celebrities is so flippin' awkward - your monkey brain is telling you "This person is friend! Treat them as friend! It's unreasonably cold and and hostile to not even offer to pick fleas off them!" while your rational human brain is telling you "This person is a stranger. It would be inappropriate and potentially creepy to treat them with the informality of a long-established personal relationship; you do not know each other." Parasocial relationships have existed for as long as there has been broadcast media with personable hosts and presenters, they fostered them deliberately to keep the audience coming back, but it's become more acute in these days of Youtube when the people on the screen are perfectly normal and exactly the sort of person you could know and be friends with in real life. There's far less in the way of reminders that these familiar faces and voices are not personal acquaintances.

In the brilliant TNG episode "Parallels", Worf(thanks to some quantum [technobabble] shenanigans) bounces around between several parallel universes. In two of them, he is married to Deanna Troi. In one of those, they have children: Eric-Christopher and Shannara. They never appear on screen, but they're canon. As of Picard, they would be 32 and 31, respectively. I would like to tear a hole in the barrier between worlds, and pull Shannara through to the Prime timeline(and not just because she has the most titles of any Star Trek character thanks to her dual aristocratic heritage). Yoinking her out of her universe and plonking her into the one we're all familiar with would offer a great vehicle for a sympathetic exploration of the parasocial phenomenon. She grew up on her version of the Enterprise, she knows virtually every legacy character that we know - but in the Prime timeline, none of them have ever met her. Watching her interact with people she(and we) knows intimately, getting polite distanced coolness back, would be relatable and could be educational.

My dream casting is Lenora Critchlow.
Seen most recently in "Avenue 5" as engineer Billie McEvoy, Crichlow is almost exactly the same age as Shannara, looks like she could be Worf and Troi's daughter(I mean, if you add the forehead, but she already has hair that Mr. Mot would go into ecstasies over and that could come from either one of them), and has sky high emotional intelligence in her acting which would be exactly what you'd want for a quarter Betazoid character. That's not so obvious from "Avenue 5" - watch "Being Human" to see a more impressive range.

"Star Trek" has a well-earned reputation for tackling sociopolitical issues of its time, but it has been considerably less overt about it in the recent shows. I think parasocial contact is a worthy topic for the franchise to explore, and Shannara Troi-Rozhenko, Daughter of the Fifth House and of the House of Mogh, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed and Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx(who - I remind you - is canon) would be a great focus for the issue.