Dreadnought Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > DREADNOUGHT > Behind the Scenes

Dan Kern, who plays Kellan, played Lt. Dean in TNG's "We'll Always Have Paris".
   
The boy Kes knew called Tarik was named for Tarik Ergin who plays Lt. Ayala (the minor crewmember who appears most often throughout the series; in Season 5 he also plays Satan's Robot in several episodes). In this episode Ayala is seen on the bridge, facing the main viewscreen for a moment, when Dreadnought hails Voyager, and then he goes to attend the Ops II section to the right of the master situation display at the rear of the bridge.
   
The episode's director, LeVar Burton, plays chief engineer Geordi La Forge in TNG.
   
Many of the Cardassian symbols and interfaces from DS9 are re-used on the Dreadnought interior set.
   
Jeri Taylor, on Roxann Dawson (then billed as Biggs-Dawson) who plays Torres: "Roxann, in some amazing way, is able to find all of the gray in between Torres, and she's very, very rich. This is a character with a lot of sort of self-exploration to do. She is the character that many people might identify with. She has some aspects of herself she wishes she didn't have. It's like, 'I know I wish I didn't keep losing my temper. Why do I do that? Why do I always make that same mistake?' And what she will come to wrestle, as all of us like that must do, is to accept herself for what she is and go on rather than wishing she could purge herself of something that she just doesn't find comfortable. There's a lot of passion there, a lot of good juice for a writer. She's really sort of eclectic. She's human and Klingon, and the human part of her is Latino, so she's got all this wonderful kind of ethnicity rolling around in there."
   
Roxann Biggs-Dawson on Torres: "I figured, well, I'll just learn as I go along. It's been a great learning experience because gradually I can peel away the layers of this character. I just learn more every week about her, and it's been really fine. Even when I'm not featured in a particular episode, I feel that the writing has been so strong that each episode has something to reveal to me about who Torres is and helps me fit more of the puzzle together. Also, I think if I wear this make-up any more than I am, I'd never have another job in my life because my skin would be completely ruined. I'm at my tolerance level as it is, absolutely. I think with Worf (the main Klingon and who is also a Starfleet crewmember in TNG and DS9 and in several Star Trek films) it was more of an external Klingon struggle and with B'Elanna it's more internal. In that way, it's very contemporary. I just think we're living in a society now where there's a lot of internal struggle as everyone tries to figure out where they belong. The world has gotten so populated and so huge, and there are so many moral and ethical issues just trying to figure out where you belong in the whole human thing that the internal struggle is very much a part of the here and now and how we face the world we are living in."