Episode Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > VIS À VIS > Behind the Scenes

This episode had the working title "Perspectives". The term ultimately used as the title of this installment, "vis à vis," is a French term literally meaning "face to face".
ctor Dan Butler likened this episode to a certain film. "It's sort of [an] homage to Face/Off," Butler reckoned, "the movie with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta."
This episode's writer, Robert Doherty, was – at the time of writing the installment – an assistant to the producers of Star Trek: Voyager.
Seven of Nine actress Jeri Ryan was impressed by Dan Butler's acting here, in his various roles as Steth as well as Tom Paris and the alien intruder when each of the latter two are occupying Steth's body. "He's got a tough role to play," the actress related about Butler, "and he's doing a really good job."
Actor Robert Duncan McNeill appreciated that this episode gave him an opportunity to play the rebelliousness of a young Tom Paris. "It's fun, in this episode, to play those qualities that I came on playing, you know? It's always fun to play the bad guy! It's the Paris that we know now, [who] is a good guy, but he's got this secret in this episode, you know. And so, it's great. Everybody thinks he's still the good guy, but he gets to cause some trouble."
This episode's production period included 6 January 1998, a day on which Jeri Ryan became distracted by the prosthetics that Dan Butler wore. "Jeri [...] had a very difficult focus problem," Butler remarked, "and would go, 'I was staring at your nostrils and, you know, [the forehead prosthetics].'" The day after this incident, an amused Ryan herself commented, "Well, it's a little problematic, because he's got [two noses] and you look right in his [upper] nostrils, so it was throwing me off a little bit yesterday. It's like a magnet; you just look right at it. And, of course, he's [pointing at it] and blowing both noses, which doesn't help, doesn't make things any easier." The activities on the day when Ryan made that statement included not only video interviews with her, Dan Butler and Robert Duncan McNeill but also the shooting of the scene in which the alien intruder transfers between the bodies of Steth and Paris.
The songs playing at the beginning and end of the episode in the holodeck are "Night Rider" and "Let's Go Trippin'" by Dick Dale. Ronald B. Moore – this installment's visual effects supervisor – was influential in selecting this music, particularly the former composition. "Since it was a '60s kind of thing I was able to get them to use music from Dick Dale," Moore recalled. "Dick came down, and I was able to give him a tour of the set." The song that plays in the episode's final scene was a result of a recommendation from Dennis McCarthy, who had once been a member of Dick Dale's backing band and was now the composer of this episode. Moore offered, "I was told that he heard the music and said, 'I used to be a Deltone.' This is a small world. He suggested that they close the show with another Dick Dale song. They got to [do that]." (Cinefantastique, Vol. 30, No. 9/10, p. 103)
CGI involved in the design of Steth's ship was done by Digital Muse, under the supervision of Ron Moore. To create the effect of both Steth's ship and a shuttlecraft individually emerging from coaxial space, Moore took inspiration from origami and decided to surround each craft in an outline of energy. "To create these ships that unfolded, I decided to do kind of a literal thing, so that a ship would be like origami and unfold," Moore remembered. "We could get a little bit of energy to outline the shape, and then inside it we would see the ship unfold and fill it up. That would give it shape, so you'd have a feeling that it was a ship you were looking at all the way through, yet it was still unfolding. The problem with putting energy on the outside, it makes it harder to see what's inside. So it was a delicate balance [....] Energy defined the shape."
Showing Steth's ship destabilizing in the teaser involved coloring the energy outline in shades that were unusual for the craft. "I tried to show that [with] color [....] When Steth was having trouble we had a lot of reds and oranges start running through this shell which was normally blue and green," Ron Moore explained. "I've found that in the [compositing] bay, I have some control, and do the final tweaking there. That's what we did with the color."
Ron Moore found some difficulty with visualizing the morph in the scene wherein Paris and the alien impostor, disguised as Steth, swap bodies. "Digital Muse did some nice work on that," Ron Moore commented. "It got really confusing when we got Steth and Paris together up against the wall. This is Paris to Steth, this is Steth to Paris. I was afraid I was going to get one of them wrong."
The creation of the scene in which Paris, in Steth's body, is confronted by Daelen's ship and a pair of Benthan patrol ships utilized CGI models designed by the visual effects company Digital Muse. Ron Moore said of the vessels, "We weren't going to see them much, just [in] a couple of shots [....] I would get sketches from Muse and pick a direction that we'd want to go, make whatever changes we felt necessary. That's what we did for both [ship classes]. We wanted to play this size thing a little bit, with the biggest one being Daelen's ship." The size differential helped make it conceivable that the arrival of Daelen's ship would intimidate the Benthan crafts into immediately departing, relieving the visual effects artists of having to create a big battle.
This episode was enjoyable for Ron Moore. He happily stated, "That was a fun show for me."
The design of Steth's ship was re-used in a number of subsequent Voyager episodes ("The Voyager Conspiracy", "Drive", "Workforce", and "Workforce, Part II"). Interestingly, it also appeared in an episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly.