Star Trek Background Articles

• The Borg Grail has been updated with a report of a recent appearance by Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) at Pages Bar in London, on the 16th of September. The article includes a report of the Q&A session, from which you can find a few highlights below:

  Question: About character development on Voyager…

  There hasn't really been any because she's hardly been on it. Though she has done another episode that 'hasn't been shown yet' (I thought this was a reference to 'Lifeline', which had not yet been shown on TV in the UK at the time. However I have since heard a rumour that she's in a season 7 episode). She thinks her character wasn't really essential for the plot, and was brought on largely for ratings. Someone then shouts out something about her legs, which she obligingly displays.

  Question: Something about the movies…

  The biggest part gets the biggest pay packet, and she's quite happy about that. She only had to come in for a couple of weeks, while Patrick was there the whole time. In fact she probably got paid more per word than he did.

  Question: Does empathy give Troi the ability to state the obvious?

  'Take a ticket behind Patrick!' Now if she gets lines like 'I sense he's hiding something' then she refuses to say them and raises hell to get a re-write. One time in a scene where she had a line like that Patrick replied 'We know that, you stupid woman' then went and hid behind Brent. She told him 'I don't know what good you think hiding behind him's going to do. He hasn't got super-human strength in real life you know…'

  Click here for the full thing. Thanks go out to Star Trek Central for this!

• Kevin Thompson at the Palm Beach Post has written an article on the impending end of Voyager, dealing with regret UPN has about one of its classiest shows ending, and the lack of this regret by many of the Voyager cast members. The report contains the interesting news that UPN entertainment president Tom Nunan is expecting to get first dibson Series V, though the article notes this is far from certain.

• And finally, Peter Mucha at the Philadelphia Inquirer has written an interesting article on how the most recent Star Trek series haven't done much to introduce radical new sci-fi concepts:

  Next fall, yet another series in the Star Trek franchise is expected, but producer Paramount hasn't revealed its direction. Let's hope it's as far ahead of its time as the original Star Trek was back in 1966. That show dreamed of faster-than-light travel; transporters that could disassemble, send and reassemble people; and medical scanners that fit in a hand. Before anyone landed on the moon. The show even pioneered TV's first interracial kiss.

  In 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation added an android, a virtual-reality area called a holodeck, nanotechnology, and a society of computer-linked beings called the Borg.

  Since then the vision has hardly advanced at all. The third series, Deep Space Nine, was retired last year, and now Voyager has the stage to itself. With lively stories and special effects that put the original series to shame, it's good TV. But except for its holographic doctor (who, of course, looks human), where's the next level of gee-whiz?

  The full article can be found here, and mostly class for Star Trek to show some more non-human aliens. Thanks go out to Michelle Erica Green for the last two articles!

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