Who the frell is Charlie Quizzlink?

[WarpTenLizard]

Voyager's crew manifest apparently includes someone named Charlie Quizzlink.

Since hot-links aren't allowed, you'll have to find his Memory Alpha article on your own. But that isn't hard to do, since he's one of the first results if you Google "Quizzlink." Because "Quizzlink" isn't a real name.

Charlie Quizzlink is never shown onscreen or even referenced in dialogue. His name appears in a crew manifest for Voyager, in two episodes ("Non Sequitor," and "11:59.")

So who is Charlie Quizzlink, and what's up with his weird last name?

Perhaps "Charlie Quizzlink" isn't a real crewmember, but a code of some kind. Maybe some classified file is hidden under the name of a decoy crewmember. Or maybe "Charlie Quizzlink" is like "Alan Smithee," a pseudonym for officers whose names are off the books for whatever reason. Maybe "Charlie Quizzlink" is some code or alias used by Section 31.

Alternatively, this is the future, so maybe Quizzlink is an actual surname in the 24th Century. Maybe during or after the Eugenics Wars, people created surnames based on (what was to them) archaic technical terminology.

Maybe Quizzlink is an alien surname, that just happens to sound like an Earth term for a link to an online quiz.

For some reason, this unnamed crewman from "Twisted," who looks extremely irritated to see B'Elanna enter the Mess Hall, really feels to me like he could be Charlie Quizzlink. He just has the feel of a snotty British schoolboy.

As to why he's so affronted to see the Chief Engineer enter the Mess Hall, there are three possibilities that immediately come to mind. He could be one of the original Starfleet crew, who took umbrage to a Maquis getting the position of Chief Engineer. Or he could be a Maquis mad at Torres and Chakotay for "selling out." Or, he could simply he irritated because she's the eighth person in a row to enter the Mess Hall saying "How the hell did I end up here?"

As for real life, I'm guessing the name "Charlie Quizzlink" was the result of someone on production staff having to come up with a long list of random names in a hurry, when the Internet was in its infancy, and they couldn't find endless name lists online to help them out, so they had to use their imaginations. If I'm not mistaken, there's another crewmember listed named "John Schoolcraft." Maybe someone on production was really scrambling to think up surnames, while also helping their kid with their homework.

What are your thoughts on Charlie Quizzlink? (Or John Schoolcraft?)

 

[Lynx]

I must admit that I've never seen this name before, even though I've gone through the crew manifest a few times.

But from now on, the guy on the picture in the original post will be Charle Quizzlink.

As for the Voyager crew, once upon a time I made a list of Voyager crewmembers but some problems occurred which I describe below (copied from the Kes Website):

After spending some time at the Memory Alpha website, I decided to make an attempt to come up with a list of the Voyager crew, including characters which are mentioned in the Voyager pocket books. However, it should be mentioned here that the list is incomplete since it does not include crewmembers mentioned in books written after Kes's departure. The list does not include characters who arrived after Season 3 such as Seven Of Nine, The Equinox crew and the Borg kids but includes characters who were on screen or mentioned in later seasons since I assume that they were on the ship in the first three seasons.

However there are still some interesting things here. First of all, the list includes 218 names. If we omit the Maquis members (31 total including 11 characters mentioned in books) and characters who came on board after Voyager's arrival to the Delta Quadrant, such as Kes, Neelix, Naomi Wildman and later additions such as Seven Of Nine, The Equinox crew and such, we'll discover that Voyager, when it arrived in the Delta Quadrant, had 184 Starfleet crew members, not 141 which is the official number. These numbers include Tom Paris and Tuvok but not The Doctor since he wasn't regarded as a Starfleet crewman when the ship arrived in the Delta Quadrant.

However, if we omit the characters mentioned in the Voyager books, (65 characters total) then we can bring down the Starfleet personnel to 119 which is more acceptable. If we omit the crewmembers whose names were visible on lists in alternate universe or dream sequence episodes like "Non Sequitur" and "Projections" (32 crewmembers) we are down to 87 names.

If we omit the crewmembers whose names were visible on lists in alternate universe or dream sequence episodes like "Non Sequitur" and "Projections" (32 crewmembers) but add the crewmembers mentioned in books, we will have total 186 crewmembers. If we omit the Maquis (31 total including 11 characters mentioned in books) plus Kes, Neelix and Naomi Wildman, we will be down to 152 Starfleet crewmembers when Voyager arrived in the Delta Quadrant. There might also be crewmembers listed here as Starfleet who may have been Maquis. The list on the Memory Alpha page don't always state if some character visible only for seconds or mentioned in some conversation or report was Maquis or Starfleet. There are at least 16 such characters which are questionmarked here.

All of that is, of course idle speculation.

I didn't add the list of crew members here because it would make this post longer than it already is but the crew list can be found at the Kes Website.

However it might need an update.

But I also have another theory which would solve the probllem with how many crewmembers there were on Voyager:

It was stated that Voyager had 141 crewmembers but my list on the Kes Website has 218 names (not including Charlie since I didn't know about him when I made the list).

My theory is that Voyager had more than 141 crewmembers from the start. The reason for that was that Voyager had a "second mission".

On board the sheip was a Commando Force whose mission was to establish a "bechhead" in the badlands from which Starfleet could conquer the Maquis bases in the Badlands one by one.

This special force was lead by Lt. Cavit.

When Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant and Lt. Cavit was killed off, the whole "second miossion" was forgotten atd the members of the commando squad were integrated in the Voyager crew. Who those members were and if Charlie belonged to them is a question which we don't know about.

 

[Tosk]

No rank pips for this dude?

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

A corruption of "Quisling", perhaps?

Quisling - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I've often thought that there will be new surnames in the future, from people's desire to create a new identity for themselves, either to escape a bad past, because they don't know where they come from (certain records would have been destroyed in the 20th and 21st centuries, people would be orphaned by war, etc), to mark their new start on a colony world, etc. So you could have surnames like Warpman, Star, perhaps people named after the ship they took to a new colony planet.

 

[Michael]

Since hot-links aren't allowed, you'll have to find his Memory Alpha article on your own.

So-called “hot-linking” is in regards to images hosted on off-site webspace, not URL links in general. They used to be frowned upon because when you display an image that’s hosted elsewhere in a post here, you are literally stealing someone’s bandwidth. But this has nothing to do with just sharing text links in general. So here’s the link to the Memory Alpha entry for Charlie Quizzlink.

“Quizzlink” sure sounds funny as a name, but I guess it’s not too weird to be someone’s actual last name. They often would slip in references to actual people in these kind of inserts, so I wonder if this is maybe someone’s real life acquaintance?

 

[PatB1974]

This is a new one on me. I'll have to read about this now.