Linda Park in science fiction after Star Trek Enterprise

Since Star Trek Enterprise, Linda Park has made few forays into science fiction.

Twenty years ago, Linda Park wowed Star Trek fans with her talent and beauty as NX-01 chief communications officer Hoshi Sato on Star Trek Enterprise. Since the show’s end, Park has kept her career going at warp speed.

She’s had starring roles in several other series. She played Officer Michelle Lance on the sadly short-lived NBC police procedural Raines (2007), opposite Jeff Goldlbum. Park’s character wasn’t originally written as a woman or an Asian, and Park is proud this role did not conform to limited and limiting stereotypes.

In ABC’s Women’s Murder Club (2007-08), based on novels by bestselling author James Patterson, Park played Deputy District Attorney Denise Kwon. In Starz’s first original series, Crash (2009), she played children’s book author Maggie Cheon.

Park played a documentary director, Jennifer Lim, in Adoptable! (2016), a fictionalized version of actor Scott Lowell’s search for his birth parents. And she joined Amazon’s recently completed police procedural Bosch in its third season (2017) as teacher and Los Angeles Crisis Response Team member Jun Park.

She’s also made memorable guest appearances on high-profile series like Law & Order: SVU, The Mentalist, House, Castle and Grey’s Anatomy.

Unfortunately for science fiction fans, Linda Park hasn’t made too many return treks to the genre since her days aboard Enterprise. Even so, it hasn’t been entirely absent from her resume.

Linda Park uses her brains to battle big bad bugs

In 2009, Park appeared in Infestation, a comedic horror flick clearly paying loving homage to Saturday matinee “giant mutant insect” movies of the 1950s like Them!.

Her character, Leechee, isn’t a major role. But she is smart.

She establishes the bugs are blind, improvises a scientific examination of their venom, and—appropriately enough for a former communications officer—determines when one of them is calling for help.

Alas, this kind of science fiction doesn’t generally reward the scientifically minded. Leechee doesn’t appear after the first half hour. She’s even relegated to an offscreen death.

You can watch Infestation on YouTube for free (with ads). Park appears sporadically from about 15 minutes in until Leechee volunteers to stay behind—bad move, Leechee!—at about the 31 minute mark.

Linda Park returns—sort of—to Star Trek

In 2016, Linda Park returned to the Star Trek universe—or at least to some ambitious fans’ version of it.

In the Rigel 7 Productions film Star Trek: Captain Pike, she plays Captain Grace Shintal. Catch a glimpse of her commanding a Constitution-class starship in this teaser:

As you saw, Park’s not the only Star Trek alum gracing this fan film. The cast also includes Dwight Schultz, Chase Masterson, Robert Picardo, and Mr. Chekov himself, Walter Koenig.

It’s unclear whether most of us will ever see this take on Christopher Pike’s command of the Enterprise.

The project only reached 68% of its funding goal, and the imminent arrival of the new, official series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds isn’t likely to leave much room for fan productions covering the same era of Star Trek history, no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears have been poured into them.

We can, however, watch Park play Amber Earhardt in a Star Trek-adjacent project, Snoop Dogg’s live action and puppet space opera parody, Unbelievable!!!

Unbelievable!!! boasts more than 40 Star Trek performers in its cast, including Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Tim Russ, Nana Visitor, Garrett Wang, and even Koenig and Nichelle Nichols. It also has a score from Gerald Fried, who is, as Syfy Wire notes, the original series’ last living composer.

IMDB user reviews of Unbelievable!!! are not kind.

But if, like Park and her fellow Star Trek stars, you’re willing to not take our favorite franchise so seriously for a little while, you might find this self-proclaimed “different kinda’ trek” lots of fun.

Linda Park in the reimagined space race of For All Mankind

Most recently, Linda Park is portraying Amy Chang in the Apple TV+ counterfactual series, For All Mankind, which debuted in 2019.

In this series, co-created by Star Trek and BSG veteran Ronald D. Moore, the Soviet Union won the race to the moon. As part of NASA’s efforts to catch up in this never-happened history, the agency diversifies its astronaut corps far quicker than it did in real life (efforts in which Nichelle Nichols played a key role).

Earlier this year, Park’s character anchored a news report in what the star called on Twitter her “Connie Chung homage.”

For All Mankind will hopefully reimagine several years’ worth of space race history.

Naturally, we hope to see Star Trek Enterprise and its characters, including Hoshi Sato, return to the screen someday.

But until then, let’s also hope the talented Linda Park takes on more roles in science fiction!