Dr. Janice Lester

Dr. Janice Lester

JANICE LESTER, PhD, in Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder (#3.24), was an archaeologist--in fact one of the leading archaeologists among citizens of the member states of the United Federation of Planets. On or about Star Date 5928, Janice Lester made the discovery for which she is most famous. Sadly, it is for that same discovery that she is most infamo... Show more »
JANICE LESTER, PhD, in Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder (#3.24), was an archaeologist--in fact one of the leading archaeologists among citizens of the member states of the United Federation of Planets. On or about Star Date 5928, Janice Lester made the discovery for which she is most famous. Sadly, it is for that same discovery that she is most infamous--for, like all too many archaeologists in the pre-history of the Federation, she attempted to use her discovery for a personal purpose. But hers was not a sin of venal material greed. Instead, hers was a sin of spite. And, allowing that spite to drive her, she committed mass murder, and the attempted murder of one of the most celebrated officers of the Star Fleet Armed Forces: Captain James T. Kirk. Contents [hideshow] 1. Early career: Star Fleet 2. The life-entity transfer discovery 3. The Attempt on Kirk's life 4. Breakdown of command 5. Aftermath 6. Note on Realities The only explanation anyone has advanced for her behavior is this: Janice Lester was an accomplished woman who was never satisfied with her achievements. She developed a dangerous delusion, the gist of which was that she needed to steal another person's life to validate herself. She was a brilliant and competent woman, who reacted strongly, and tragically, to an unofficial glass ceiling in Star Fleet.It is to the credit of Star Fleet that, following a full review of the Lester Affair, its Bureau of Personnel revised its policies and effectively ended certain elements of a man's world culture that pervaded it. Admiral Kathryn Janeway, in her own treatise on the Lester Affair, says flatly that she and other female officers owe their opportunities to Janice Lester and her exposure of an Old Boys' Network that had taken over the Bureau of Personnel and informed its decisions concerning the careers of female officers of Star Fleet.Early career: Star FleetJanice Lester's early career included a period of service in Star Fleet. She spent a year alongside James T. Kirk and they became romantically involved. The lack of opportunities for a woman to command a starship struck both Lester and Kirk as unfair. Captain Kirk said later, at the board of inquiry, that he did not feel he could buck the Bureau of Personnel. Janice Lester became embittered by the career barrier and blamed Kirk for not pushing hard enough to remove it. Their relationship soured as a result. When (SD 5928.5) the two had their fateful reunion, Kirk would say we'd have killed each other if they had stayed together. Lester recalled that Kirk walked out on her when it became serious. Lester abandoned her career in space, but continued to study every detail of a starship's operation. She nursed powerful resentments for the femininity that stood in her way, and for the masculinity that served Kirk so well.The life-entity transfer discoveryBy 2269, Lester, having resigned from Star Fleet, was now on the tenure track in the Department of Archaeology of the Federation's premier multi-system university, the Makropyrios. In that capacity, she led an expedition to Camus II, exploring the ancient remnants of an advanced civilization that had, seemingly, perished in a profound upheaval. This society had nuclear power, and specifically powered itself using a fissile element that was called plutonium in the twentieth century on earth and is called celebium today--so named because it is a surprisingly frequent constituent of the crusts of planets that, like Earth, formed in the third generation from second-generation supernovae, and because it has a relatively short half-life. (From the Latin celer, meaning fast .)The element celebium deserves special note here, because its properties figured in the tragedy (some say atrocity) that followed. Celebium has always been known, since its discovery on earth, to be not only highly radioactive but also highly toxic, even as a chemical. An environmental activist of pre-Contact Earth once wrote: Plutonium [as it was then known] must be kept out of the biosphere! This civilization on Camus II, that had an overabundance of celebium in its crust, built a device capable of exchanging the life entities of two sentient beings, complete with personality and memories, while both were alive. Incredibly, this device, the only one of its kind ever found, was still in working order. The Makropyrios, after the Lester debacle, sent a follow-up team to Camus II to evaluate the device more fully. They confirmed what Janice Lester herself dictated in her own logs: mentally superior individuals who were dying could exchange bodies with the physically strong. Those who deserved it, could gain immortality, at the expense of others. Those others were all condemned inmates, of course. The current working hypothesis is that the Camus II civilization prescribed the penalty of death for murder--and also for crimes against the State. The latter use of that penalty, and the peculiar form this penalty took, no doubt provoked the revolution that caused the Camus II people to become completely feral. Which is why, of the civilization that was Camus II, only those ruins remain. (Note: the board of inquiry, on the strenuous recommendation of Captain Kirk and his officers, recommended the Federation Council issue another general order, similar to General Order Seven, forbidding anyone to use this device or to build anything like it.)Janice Lester could have made her career with this find. Had she published her paper, she would have had instant tenure and been on a fast track to hold the chair in the Department of Archaeology and perhaps even to become a Dean at the Makropyrios. Instead she let her old spite against James T. Kirk cloud her judgment. She planned to use that device--to take James T. Kirk's place.The Attempt on Kirk's lifeNaturally her plans required several months of preparation. The expedition's physician, Dr. Arthur Coleman, bore an unrequited love for Lester. Together, they killed the expedition's entire staff by sending them to a spot where they knew that the anti-celebium shielding would fail. Dr. Coleman's guilt was a shared one: he knew the staff suffered from celebium poisoning and failed to treat them for it.Dr. Lester then asked Arthur Coleman to do two things more: to drug her until she could barely function (but leave a vulnerable body for Kirk's personality to inhabit), and then to send a subspace distress call. She knew, of course, that USS Enterprise was patrolling in the region. As she predicted, Enterprise answered the distress call on stardate 5928.5.Captain James T. Kirk arrived at Lester's bedside, where she appeared to be near death. He expected no danger, because of course Janice Lester made no report of her find. So she could ensnare him easily. She had placed the life-entity transfer device in her room. As soon as Kirk had the bad sense to stand next to it, Lester fired a phaser at him, one she had set to induce a state of catatonia instead of the usual flaccid paralysis that phaser stun usually produces. (Star Fleet briefly considered, then rejected, a plan to modify hand phasers to deliver such a charge. Some sentient beings cannot tolerate induced catatonia as easily as humans can.) As Kirk stood frozen in place, Lester activated the device, and was immediately thrilled by her possession of Kirk's body. The transfer would eventually fail, and the exchanged personae would return to their original bodies, as long as both remained alive. (Which was why the Camus II civic leaders, upon making such a transfer, immediately executed the other party to the transfer.) Drugged and disoriented within Lester's body, Kirk was easy prey. But Janice Lester wasted precious time with a spontaneous gloating monologue. She tried to strangle Kirk, but could not finish before Mr. Spock and Dr. Leonard McCoy arrived on the scene.They reported finding the rest of the team dead of radiation poisoning. Dr. McCoy at this time first described his dispute with Dr. Coleman over the cause of the poisoning. Celebium poisoning is easily treatable; other forms of radiation poisoning, less so. But Dr. Coleman interrupted everyone by saying that Dr. Lester was near death. Lester eagerly boarded the Enterprise as the Captain, satisfied to finally have the command she felt was rightfully hers. But he could not avoid bringing Kirk (in Lester's old body) aboard. Kirk was still a liability as long as he remained alive in Sick Bay. But, over the protests of Dr. McCoy, Lester placed Kirk under the exclusive care of Dr. Coleman, thus keeping Kirk isolated from the crew.Lester's attempt to emulate a Captain's behavior was marginally successful at first. But her composure degraded at any hint of scrutiny from the officers familiar with Kirk. Dr. McCoy soon challenged the Captain's mental health, and insisted on a physical and mental examination. (Star Fleet regulations grant to the Chief Medical Officer of any ship the absolute authority to order such an examination of any member of said ship's crew, including the captain, about whom he or she has any such doubts. This Wouk Rule, or Queeg Rule, came from a suggestion from the senior officers of the old United States Navy who took part in the original founding of Star Fleet.)But Dr. McCoy's examination and testing program ultimately proved unremarkable. Along with this stroke of luck, Lester had another: Kirk, looking for all the world like Lester, persuaded Nurse Christine Chapel to let her take her own sedative--and then had smashed a drinking glass and sawed through the straps that held her down to the folding bed in Sick Bay. Running wildly through the ship, brandishing the glass as a weapon, and denouncing the ostensible Captain Kirk as a strutting pretender, she (or he) presented the perfect picture of an insane woman. That gave Lester all the pretext s/he needed to confine her to the brig--in total isolation.But in doing so, Lester underestimated Spock. Lester would learn later--and expensively--what Spock would do next. Lester first heard about it when the ship's p.a. system sent out the shrill boatswain's-whistle sound effect that substituted for the traditional Now here this! call. Then came the message: Security to Captain Kirk! Dr. Lester's cell has been broken into! Lester gathered two more redshirts and, with them as escorts, rode the turbolift to the brig. He found Spock just outside, and another redshirt on the ground--downed, no doubt, by means of the martial art peculiar to Vulcans, specifically a strong pinch to the brachial plexus. Phasers, Lester ordered. Repetition of your physical violence will not be called for, sir, said Spock. No physical resistance will be offered. This was a reference to how Lester had greeted Kirk at their last meeting: knocking that broken drinking glass away and following it up with a karate chop to the base of her neck, enough to drop Kirk (in Lester's body) to the deck.Lester's escorts reported finding Lieutenant Galway inside the cell, also unconscious--no, actually, beginning to recover, but with a sore left shoulder.Lester then arrested Spock and made an all-hands announcement that Spock would face a court of inquiry to consider recommendations for a general court martial. For making a mutiny.Breakdown of command Captain Lester convened a court of inquiry on the mutiny charge. It began well. Engineer James Montgomery Scott questioned Spock closely and expressed his monumental frustration: We need evidence we can examine out in the open! All Spock had, was his telepathic impressions of Kirk--or at least, that's what he said. Without objective evidence, such an assertion was valueless, and Spock knew it.Then Spock challenged Lester to produce the key witness: Janice Lester :him/herself. Lester at first refused, but found herself out of arguments.So Lester summoned Kirk to the court. What followed was surreal, as one can only imagine. Lester's questions of Kirk were leading, argumentative, and calculated to hold Kirk up to ridicule. (The political scientist Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals, observed that ridicule is perhaps the most dangerous weapon in the hands of any person seeking to overthrow the established order.)When Lester asked a question touching, not on feasibility, but on motive, Spock had had enough. He objected to that question, and indeed the whole line of questioning, as self-serving. Lester did not handle that well. She suggested that Spock was trying to gain command of the Enterprise himself, suggesting that the alternative--giving Janice Lester a uniform with the two-and-a-half stripes on her sleeves that marked a captain--would be too absurd for words. (That particular part of the record convinced Star Fleet to widen its investigation of the Lester Affair to include the Bureau of Personnel; see below.) Lester urged Spock to give it up and return to the Enterprise family. Spock refused, and in an even tone, said Lester did not belong in command of the Enterprise, and that he, Spock, would do all in his power to fight a person who, as he maintained, had stolen another person's body.Instead of glibly using that declaration as evidence, Lester ranted and raved and screamed at the top of his/her lungs.. And that was his/her fatal mistake.First, Lester left the improvised courtroom after ordering everyone to be silent in his/her absence. Lester wasn't gone more than five minutes before s/he returned and asked Communications Officer Angela Martine (whom Lester misidentified as Lisa, perhaps confusing her with Lieutenant Lisa Palmer, who by then was detached from the ship) to play back the conversation s/he knew had taken place in the corridor. Lester heard it all, beginning with Scotty saying that, though he had seen his Captain feverish, indignant, and boiling with rage, he had never seen him beet-red with hysteria. Lester heard Scotty suggest that he and McCoy would have to be prepared to take over the ship under Article 104 Section C of the Star Fleet Uniform Code of Justice (which derives from Article 184 of the former Articles for the Government of the United States Navy). That's enough, said McCoy. We know what we said. Lester, in a gloating manner, drew a phaser and arrested both for collusion with mutineers--and summarily ordered their execution.Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu and Ensign Pavel Andreyevich Chekov shot to their feet to protest. They pointed out that Star Fleet allowed the death penalty for only one violation of law: General Order Seven. But: Chekov quoted that as General Order Four. And Lester did not notice Chekov's mistake. (Nor was this a mistake that Captain Kirk would ever have missed. Spock himself had risked the death penalty by violating that very order--and literally hijacking the Enterprise in the process. Kirk had even taken part in a drumhead court-martial that a senior officer and Star Base commandant had called to try Spock on the General Order Seven charge after he and Kirk had caught up with the Enterprise.)Lester insisted on the execution and confined the four prisoners to one cell.Sulu and Chekov took the next bridge watch. Sulu then, as he later testified at the board of inquiry, recruited Chekov in his own plan to take over the ship. His reasoning: no matter who this entity walking around looking and talking like Captain Kirk really was (and Chekov had strong doubts), they simply could not allow an execution to take place. So that when the ostensible Captain Kirk came onto the bridge, and gave orders for all hands to witness punishment on the ship's hangar deck, the two abruptly took their hands off their combined console.Again Lester ranted and raved--and this time was shouting in falsetto (for which Captain Kirk later required laser treatment of his vocal cords to stop the incipient polyp formation this caused). And then the captain reeled, fell hard into the command seat, and put his hands forward. That much, the shocked Lieutenants Sulu and Martine, and Ensign Chekov, saw. But Lester had a quite different perception: for a fleeting moment, she was back among the prisoners in their cell!The retransference failed. Lester woke up, still in Kirk's body, but with three officers giving her/him the fish-eye. S/he left the bridge without another word.Lester went to see Coleman and explained what happened: the transitory retranference, and the spreading mutiny among the senior officers, now encompassing the bridge watch. Lester ordered Coleman to prepare a doubly lethal dose of a fast-acting barbiturate. To get Coleman to agree to this, s/he reminded Coleman sharply that if the transference failed completely, Kirk would have evidence to accuse Lester and Coleman both of murder in the deaths of the first Camus II team.Then, in one final attempt to kill Kirk, Lester confronted the prisoners with an order that they go into separate cells. Janice Lester walked out first. Spock started to make another point of law when suddenly Coleman tried to make his move--and Janice Lester struggled with him. Kill him! Kill him! cried Lester, forgetting how s/he would look and sound. Then, at that precise moment, Lester and Kirk both froze in place--and the misplaced personalities returned to their proper bodies.Broken, incoherent, and sobbing in her complete failure, Janice took her accomplice Coleman's arm and wanted him to kill Kirk. Coleman offered to help rehabilitate her with the assistance of McCoy, who escorted them both to Sick Bay.Kirk commented that the unfortunate woman could have had a life as rich as any woman's, if only... but left the thought incomplete. (An unsubstantiated rumor has Spock completing the thought: If only she had been able to take any pride in being a woman. )AftermathCaptain Kirk's immediate problem now lay in how to regain the confidence of his crew, beginning with the bridge watch. Happily, his walking onto the bridge, in the company of Messrs. Spock and Scott, resolved all doubts. So did his performance in command, including his use of certain turns-of-phrase ( lighting off all boilers, for instance) with which the bridge watch was familiar.Eventually he transferred Drs. Lester and Coleman to the USS Potemkin, whose captain then delivered them to Star Base Two--under arrest.Arthur Coleman, MD was tried and convicted of conspiracy to commit mass murder, several counts of accessory-to-murder in the deaths of the first Camus II team, and conspiracy to assassinate an officer of Star Fleet. He was sentenced to twenty years on New Botany Bay on Earth.Janice Lester was also tried, but on more serious charges of aggravated murder, reflecting her role as the originator of the plot. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life as an inmate of the Elba II Rehabilitative Institute for the Criminally Insane. (Dr. Coleman applied for an appointment to the Elba II medical staff. But Warden Cory rejected his application. Arthur Coleman already had a record of administrative incompetence and therapeutic misadventure due to error of judgment. That record had gotten him relieved of duty as CMO of his own ship, forcing him to get out of Star Fleet, even before he first met Janice Lester.)Star Fleet did convene a court of inquiry into the Lester Affair, after receiving Captain Kirk's preliminary report. He and his officers all gave evidence. But in addition, the court expanded its inquiry to the Bureau of Personnel.The court ultimately found that neither Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, Lieutenant Commander McCoy, Lieutenant Commander Scott, Lieutenant Sulu, nor Ensign Chekov were at fault for any of their conduct. But the court also found that the Bureau of Personnel had been acting improperly for years in refusing, on specious grounds, to appoint female officers to command capital ships.The court did not find that Janice Lester, in particular, would ever have been qualified for command. Her breakdown under the strain of her own making--that is, of carrying on an imposture and having to field questions that came naturally when said imposture was incomplete--clearly showed that any such career would have been a spectacular failure. Captain Kirk, at the mutiny inquiry into Spock's actions aboard the Enterprise, had said it best: she was not qualified for command by either temperament or training. But what the court found relevant, was that the Bureau of Personnel never reached the merits of Janice Lester's temperament. That was because they never put a female officer on a command track. How many other careers of female line officers had the Bureau sidetracked with its good old boy policies? How many talents had the Bureau wasted over the years that this sort of thing had gone on?Admiral Westervliet, the Chief of Operations, received the court's report grimly. In response, he relieved several officers at the Bureau of Personnel of duty and authority and, if one can imagine such a thing, assigned them to even more humiliating desk jobs. He then virtually demanded that the Bureau assign the next available starship to the best-qualified woman in Star Fleet. The new, thoroughly chastened Bureau did this by assigning Captain Boadicea Janeway, the grandmother of Captain (later Admiral) Kathryn Janeway, as the new Captain of USS Defiant II. By all accounts, this first Captain Janeway acquitted herself well.Thus the Lester Reforms (a name that Westervleit gave them) had a lasting effect: the good old boy system came to an end. No one today questions the wisdom of a command appointment on gender grounds alone. Thus, though Janice Lester never again walked free, the Federation did rehabilitate her reputation, at least to some extent. The Makropyrios, in addition to remembering Janice Lester for her remarkable discovery on Camus II, also set up the Janice Lester Institute for the Study and Elimination of Prejudice. Admiral Kathryn Janeway, following her return from the Delta Quadrant, completed a dissertation on the Lester Affair (see above). After she successfully defended it, the Makropyrios granted her the degree of Doctor of Laws.Note on Realities This drama takes place within the context of the Prime Reality. The back-step in time by Nero the Romulan, on which occasion he destroyed the star destroyer USS Kelly, killed the father of James T. Kirk, and lay in wait for then-Ambassador Spock so he could lay waste to Vulcan and make him watch, so accelerated the paces of technological development that James T. Kirk would end up commanding a much larger and much more sophisticated USS Enterprise, this ten years earlier in his life and career. It would be illogical in the extreme to assume Federation politics did not evolve as rapidly as did Federation technology. So the Old Boy Network probably would never form while the incipient Federation labored under a state of near-emergency. Such networks form in time of complacency, not when the times call for hard realism.We may therefore infer that Janice Lester never met James T. Kirk, and never had the specific reasons described here to nurse an anti-male grudge. Whether she could have qualified for a starship command in this Alternate Reality remains an open question. What might have happened instead was: Janice Lester joined the Makropyrios, recruited Arthur Coleman anyway as her team physician, discovered the life-entity transference device, published her paper, and made Dean, with Arthur Coleman along for the ride. Show less «
HD
Annabelle: Creation
IMDb: 7
2017
109 min
Country: United States
Genre: Thriller, Horror, Mystery
Twelve years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a nun and several girls from a shuttered orphanage into ...

Dr. Janice Lester actors