Trance Gemini

Andromeda Character


name=Trance Gemini
gender=Female
race=Avatar of a sun
affiliation=Tarn Vedra
New Systems Commonwealth
Andromeda Ascendant
Eureka Maru
portrayed=Laura Bertram
seasons=1-5

Trance Gemini is a fictional character in the television series "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda", played by Canadian actress Laura Bertram.

Her first appearance on the show is as a young, bubbly, purple-skinned alien of an unknown origin with a prehensile tail (somewhat resembling the Marvel Comics X-Man Nightcrawler). She is somehow representing a cartoony archetype of the animal-like, sweet, sensitive and funny fantasy creature and serves as a comic relief. Her way of thinking is somehow 'out of this world' and innocent. For example, her report on Dylan Hunt's rescue was "I looked for you and found out where you were. I travelled to where you were and I got you out." (from Season 1 episode 15 "Forced Perspective").

She was the last member to join the crew of the "Eureka Maru" before they rescued the "Andromeda Ascendant" and its captain, Dylan Hunt, from a black hole. On the "Andromeda", she serves as their environmentals and life support officer, xenobiologist, botanist and physician, and is consequently often found in the ship's hydroponics garden or medical deck.

She is mysterious about her true nature, but has made accurate guesswork that saved the crew of the "Andromeda" on many occasions. This ability has also helped her in gambling games, espionage and thievery when she and the crew needed it.

In mid-season two, Trance undergoes a physical transformation via the effects of a Tesseract machine, which folded space and time. She changes places with a being that tells her that she is an older version of herself. The "new" Trance is still played by Laura Bertram and has the same facial features, but has a very different personality and a golden skin tone instead of purple.

Trance is the avatar of the original Vedran sun, which was built to destroy the Abyss and has special powers and abilities. For instance, she can transform herself into a model of her sun and go supernova at will.

She plays a critical role during the Nietzschean Secession, in which the crew of the "Andromeda" fought with former crewmember Tyr Anasazi to obtain passage to the Route of Ages.

When the crew was in Seefra, Trance was in her sun state known as the "core creature". Once she was in her humanoid form, she had no recollection of who she was or what she was capable of. On Seefra-2, she met a man named Ione who was really the missing moon of Tarn-Vedra. Later, the Nebula sealed her into Methus-2, the artificial sun of the Seefra system, but thanks to Dylan and Rhade, she was rescued.

Unfortunately, she found out that her people (the Lambent Kith Nebula) were under the spell of the Abyss, but she used her sun to destroy it.

Alternate History

In Robert Hewitt Wolfe's original plan for Andromeda, Trance's people (still solar avatars) would have been the Lightbringers, or Lucifers, who fought a war in "Heaven" (the original state of the universe as a small perfect space with all matter and energy pressed tightly together) resulting in the Big Bang. The Spirit of the Abyss would have been an embodiment of Love (the twisted stalker kind of Love, or gravity) trying to crush the universe back in on itself. Rather than being the Vedran sun, Trance Gemini would have been, "a sun in the Gemini constellation dreaming it's a person", hence the name. The original vision was lost when Wolfe was replaced as head writer/producer by Bob Engels, but was released as a 20-page online story entitled " [http://web.archive.org/web/20060621045350/http://rhwolfe.com/Coda/Andromeda___Coda.pdf Coda] ".