Trekipedia

Ballard, Lyndsay

Ensign Lyndsay Ballard and Ensign Harry Kim were classmates from Starfleet Academy who were both assigned to the U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656 and were stranded with the ship in the Delta Quadrant in 2371. On Stardate 51563, Ballard and Kim went on a dilithium extraction mission together in the Vyntadi Expanse, where they detected dilithium on a Class-M planet. But when they landed their shuttle and began to explore, they discovered it was a trap set by a Hirogen hunting party, who reconfigured a power cell to give off false dilithium readings. As Kim and Ballard were headed back to the shuttle, they were 10 feet away when Ballard was hit with a neural disruptor. By the time Kim got her back to Voyager, she was dead. Kim gave the eulogy at her funeral, where he noted that she had a favorite saying taken from an old Klingon battle cry, “Own the day.” Ballard was buried in space with a torpedo casing as a sarcophagus.

Jhet’leya

Her body drifted for several weeks when it was recovered by the Kobali, a species that procreates by salvaging the dead of other races. She woke up in a stasis chamber surrounded by Kobali, who told her they used their technology to reanimate her. After the reanimation process, they spent months altering her DNA. They gave her a Kobali name—Jhet’leya—and placed her with a family to help her acclimate. Her Kobali father was Qret and she had a “sister” named Tynsia. She was prohibited from contacting Voyager because it was part of her kyn-steya, or past life. After spending two years letting her new family think she had accepted them, earning their trust, she stole a shuttle and started looking for Voyager. It took her six months to find it, with the Kobali chasing her the whole time.

Ballard rejoined the Voyager crew, on approximately Stardate 53678, in her previous post in Engineering. She also became reacquainted with Ensign Kim, with whom she had been friends since they lived across from each other at the Academy dormitory, who professed his love for her. Meanwhile the ship’s Doctor was able to affect cosmetic changes to make her look human again, but physiologically she was still Kobali, with a six-lobed brain and a binary cardiovascular system. Her taste buds were also still Kobali, which prevented her from enjoying her favorite foods, such as Jiballian Berry salad.

Her Kobali father, Qret, tracked her down and insisted she rejoin the family, but Ballard refused, and Captain Janeway pledged to protect her. In spite of her budding romance with Kim, Ballard never truly felt at home again on Voyager, and she had trouble reconnecting with her past. When her Kobali physiology began to re-assert itself, and when the Kobali attacked Voyager, she became convinced she belonged back with the people who gave her a second chance at life. She voluntarily returned to her Kobali life, but this time she was able to say a proper goodbye to her good friend Harry.^[1]

Portrayed by Kim Rhodes.