The Actress Who Played Star Trek's Suspiria Also Starred In A Huge '90s TV Show
"Star Trek: Voyager" Season 2, Episode 10, titled "Cold Fire," serves as a sequel to the series' two-part premiere. In those prior two episodes, the USS Voyager crew meets a being called the Caretaker, responsible for an alien species known as the Ocampa. In "Cold Fire," the Voyager crew encounters an entity called Suspiria who serves a similar role to the Caretaker for a separate group of Ocampa. While Suspiria's natural appearance is amorphous, at one point she takes on the guise of a young girl, played by an actor named Lindsay Ridgeway.
Unsurprisingly, given her character's youthful appearance, Suspiria was just Ridgeway's third screen acting role, and fourth TV role overall including some voice acting work for the "Sonic the Hedgehog" cartoon. Ridgeway's "Voyager" episode premiered in 1995. One year later, she became a significant part of another major '90s TV series when she joined "Boy Meets World" as Morgan Matthews, taking over for Lily Nicksay.
Ridgeway appears in a total of 75 episodes of "Boy Meets World," debuting 14 episodes into Season 3 and remaining with the show until its finale. So, while "Voyager" may have cast Ridgeway in a big-time network TV show first, it was "Boy Meets World" that became what most would likely consider the defining role of her career.
Lindsay Ridgeway's time on Boy Meets World makes up the bulk of her acting work
The real reason Lily Nicksay left "Boy Meets World" didn't surface until a 2022 episode of the podcast "Pod Meets World" featuring Alan Matthews actor William Russ. According to Russ, whose character is Morgan's father, Nicksay wasn't having all that great of a time working on "Boy Meets World." This got the attention of series creator Michael Jacobs and led to the mutual decision to replace Nicksay, leading to Lindsay Ridgeway landing the part in her stead.
During the time Ridgeway was still a part of the main "Boy Meets World" cast, she worked sporadically on some additional projects, like a horror movie called "Daddy's Girl" and an episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney" based on Disneyland's Tower of Terror ride. After the "Boy Meets World" series finale in 2000, she only worked on two additional screen projects, lending her voice to an episode of the cartoon "Totally Spies!" and reprising the part of Morgan in a 2017 episode of "Girl Meets World." In total, her 75 episodes of "Boy Meets World" eclipse the entire rest of her filmography.
To dedicated Trekkies, Ridgeway may well be inseparable from the character Suspiria on "Star Trek: Voyager." But to plenty of '90s kids, Ridgeway is Morgan Matthews first and foremost.