6. Hoshi Sato
You could arguably rearrange Malcolm Reed, Hoshi Sato, and the fifth entry on this list in any order you want and you won’t really have too many people arguing with you. The biggest folly of the show was the underutilization of these three characters. Hoshi was played by Linda Park, and Park brought a presence to the character that frankly deserved far more time to take center stage than the character actually ended up getting.
Hoshi was a linguist specialist and served as the first point of contact with many of the known and unknown aliens that the Enterprise dealt with. This set up a ton of possible story arcs for the character. Did we get any of them?
Not really.
What gets Hoshi higher on the list than others, is that she had a few really interesting episodes where she took point and got to show her complex personality. In “Civilization“, we saw her go undercover, and if that wasn’t enough to show you how delightful Park was as Hoshi, there’s the Enterprise’s trip to the Mirror Universe, which arguably gave us one of the better characters in the show.
Hoshi was also a pioneer. She ended up being one of the first characters in the franchise’s timeline to use a transporter. In the episode “Vanishing Point”, Hoshi gets scrambled a bit in the transporter, which causes her to fade out of existence. She’s then forced to face off with aliens who are undetectable to the naked eye.
It set up a great moment for Archer when he was compelled to call Hoshi’s parents to explain to them the dire situation their daughter was in. It was one episode that really did Hoshi some serious justice. There just should’ve been more.
While Hoshi should’ve gotten more time, her character was enjoyable and layered. Fans still remember the time she went a little to Gordon Ramsey when it came to her cooking. Fans wanted to see more of that side of Hoshi. The side that made her relatable.