Las Vegas: More from Star Trek's Finest

The official Star Trek site continued coverage of last weekend's Las Vegas convention through Sunday evening, reporting a large group of actors, writers and others connected with the franchise.

Nana Visitor (Kira) and Rene Auberjonois (Odo) were the first two guests early on Saturday, discussing their more recent television projects - her starring role on Wildfire and his three years as a regular on Boston Legal though he will be returning in the fall as a recurring character instead. "In the last season, I was not as thrilled with what I was given to do," he admitted in StarTrek.com's report. "So, we came to an agreement: I'm going to do some of the shows, not all of them...I'm focusing more on my photography and art." He holds no grudge against his co-star William Shatner (Kirk), who gets much of the screen time on Boston Legal, about whom Auberjonois said, "Bill is the kind of guy who all he does is ask you questions about yourself. I think that is the key to how he has reinvented himself over the years. He's a man fascinated by everything in the world around him."

Visitor, who now lives in New Mexico with her sons where Wildfire films, shared happy news about her latest genre appearance: "I did a guest star on a wonderful show, Battlestar Galactica. It was really, really fun." Of course, she and Auberjonois both know Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore from his years on Deep Space Nine.

Another trio of DS9 actors, Cardassian stars Marc Alaimo (Dukat), Casey Biggs (Damar) and Andrew Robinson (Garak), appeared onstage together for the first time. "A lot of times you can't act or do anything through two pounds of rubber on your face. So when they found people that could, I think they really liked that," Biggs noted, explaining why he thinks their characters were initially chosen to recur on the series. "And these writers were very, very interested in intricate storylines." He believes the show was so good because it was "the bastard child" of the franchise, "so everybody left [the writers] alone, so they could go in their little rooms and really write cool stuff...with me, they sort of saw what I did and started writing for it."

Biggs also announced that he did not believe that Kira could have beaten Damar in a fight, prompting Visitor to return to the stage and challenge him before the two kissed and made up. Auberjonois came onstage for a wave as well.

Two Next Generation stars, Jonathan Frakes (Riker) and Brent Spiner (Data) shared the stage next, singing, dancing and joking with one another and the audience. They did impressions of castmates, including each other as well as Patrick Stewart (Picard). Frakes reminded the audience that he had directed a Masters of Science Fiction episode, "The Departed," airing on ABC on August 25th, though Spiner professed indignation that Frakes didn't cast him on the show. "Bring tissues...I do depressing really well," Frakes warned the audience.

Frakes and Spiner escorted the next guest, Kate Mulgrew (Janeway) onto the stage, where she discussed her recent theatre work and reminisced about meeting then-First Lady Hillary Clinton before suggesting that her current political allegiances lie with Barack Obama. She said that she was "deeply proud" to have been cast as Janeway and "wanted to embrace her complexity. Her ardent devotion to science is something, I think, that I could not touch." Asked by a teenage girl for advice about going to college and ending up into space, Mulgrew said, "Stay away from men!"

The Sisko family reunited as Avery Brooks (Benjamin), Penny Johnson-Jerald (Kasidy) and Cirroc Lofton (Jake) took the stage together, though Jerald protested that Lofton couldn't possibly be 29 now "because I'm 29!" Of Brooks, she said, "I gotta be careful, my husband's back there, but I do wanna jump on him!" She is now in October Road, while Brooks is working on a CD and Lofton just completed the film Don't Lie.

Enterprise's Anthony Montgomery (Mayweather) was the first guest on Sunday, reported StarTrek.com. He said that since the show was cancelled, he took a break from show business for awhile, but has since been married, recorded a rap album and shot two independent films. An American in China was filmed in remote villages in the titular country, where "the majority of those people have never seen a black person, not even on television...a lady walked up and she rubbed my arm to see if the color would rub off. I'm dead serious! She wasn't being disrespectful or anything, it's just, they didn't know!" The grandson of jazz great Wes Montgomery said that "although I get tired of all the disparaging lyrics and hearing them cuss people out and killing people and selling drugs and demeaning women" in hip-hop, he knew he wanted to tell stories in that musical genre.

Nicole deBoer (Ezri Dax) talked about filming The Dead Zone in Canada, where she and the rest of her family are from and where she recently had a baby. She found it easier kissing Bashir than Worf because of the Klingon false teeth and found it amusing that in the episode where alternate universe Ezri kissed the Intendant, the entire crew was crowding in to watch.

A team of Deep Space Nine actors followed her, including Armin Shimerman (Quark), Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun), Wallace Shawn (Zek) and Max Grodénchik (Rom), where Shawn said that being a Ferengi was "the best use of being short that I've ever had" but declined to repeat his iconic line from The Princess Bride because he didn't want to be overly identified with the role.

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