"She's got a worm in her belly! Oh, that's disgustin'. That's interestin', but that's disgustin'."
– Darlene Kursky, 1953 ("Far Beyond the Stars")
Darlene Kursky was Douglas Pabst's new secretary at Incredible Tales in 1953.
Kursky was a fan of science fiction which made her a natural fit for her position and endeared her to the magazine's staff of writers. When Benny Russell submitted "Deep Space Nine", his story about a space station, Kursky loved the idea and found one character in particular, a joined alien with a "worm in her belly," to be "interestin', but disgustin'." She told Russell that "Deep Space Nine" was the best science fiction story that she had read since The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein. (DS9: "Far Beyond the Stars")
Darlene was played by actress Terry Farrell. She found the character's line about an alien having a "worm in her belly" funny. Regarding the role in general, Farrell commented, "I didn't have very much to say. I got this tape on the New York accent. Then I looked at my lines, and I only have like six lines in the whole script. So that took a lot of the stress off." (Cinefantastique, Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 49)
The authors of the Star Trek Encyclopedia (4th ed., vol. 1, p. 448) thought Darlene Kursky "might have existed in some alternate reality, or perhaps only in certain reaches of Ben Sisko's mind."
External link[]
- Darlene Kursky at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works