TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > PARALLAX > Interviews

The following interviews are taken from and around the filming and subsequent airing of Star Trek Voyager's "Parallax". To jump to a particular interview, use the following links:

Michael Piller • Jim Trombetta • Jeri Taylor • Brannon Braga

	Michael Piller "I wanted the ship out there and into danger to see how the crew reacted. So we created this strange time-space anomaly that we were involved with, and then we were going to see how this crew would work together. What appealed to me most about 'Parallax' was how it illuminated the relationship between Chakotay and B'Elanna and Janeway: how Janeway was going to deal with this first issue with the Maquis, how Chakotay was going to be the man in the middle and how, ultimately, B'Elanna was going to fit into this crew. Essentially she went from being the most outside force on the ship to being brought into the inner circle." [On the crew coming together.] "What made this show work for me was that this was a show about a crew coming together and not about a ship in jeopardy. Ultimately, what worked was the triangle between Chakotay, Janeway and B'Elanna. The more time we spent with that, the better the show became."
	Jim Trombetta, Writer "That story was very complicated and possibly wasn't completely doable. The way it should have come out was there really shouldn't have been two Voyagers, there should have been three. I wanted them to send the hologram doctor to each ship by crushing him into a burst of energy, sending him to the next one to warn them. It would have started out with him arriving on their ship trying to warn them but not being able to do it because he's all garbled. The original idea was more metaphysical and less character. It was what's going on and how do I figure it out?" [On the Maquis vs the Feds.] "I think that this idea of the Maquis is great. To have this nebulous group of people that are freedom fighters in space seems very real and plausible. Something like that will be almost inevitable. The only thing about it is that the setup of Star Trek is that the Federation and Starfleet tend to assimilate everything to themselves. Even if you have these Maquis that aren't Starfleet and they're a little tougher, more sarcastic and nonperformers, maybe even mentally ill, you know once they get on that ship they're part of Starfleet, even though they may argue about it once in a while. Look at Paris, they treat him a little too much like he's a juvenile delinquent who needs to have his wrists slapped to get on the straight and narrow. It's like the first time I came in to pitch and I said something about a luxury liner, and Michael Piller said there's no luxury liners in the Federation, there's no money, they don't need money. I said to him, 'Boy, I sure wish I lived there, because if I did, I wouldn't be sitting here.' They're real big on those virtues of the Federation. I just have a horribly feeling that the Federation will really turn out to be the Soviet Union, and everybody would be sitting around black marketing and the insulation coming out of the corner and people saying like, 'Oh, you mean you don't like the Federation? I thought you liked it.' That's just my own personal opinion. I think that if you're gonna have the Maquis then you can't really do them because you're saying there's a problem with the Federation and it really isn't all that great. Babylon 5 has a much more realistic kind of government where the president has been killed by the vice president and so forth."
	Jeri Taylor "We bought the idea of the quantum singularity and then tried to make a story out of it, and several people added to it. The original writer had a vision for it and Brannon [Braga] took it over. We had planned originally to make B'Elanna the chief engineer and Tom Paris the conn officer in the pilot, and then it just seemed overkill, so we lifted that out and attached it to this. I think a nice arc occurs between B'Elanna and Janeway from conflict and scepticism to a real bonding, problem solving and, ultimately, affection. I also liked the fact that Brannon set up the conditions of the crew and the ship, giving us things that we were able to have fun with. For instance, the replicators are not fully functional, so people are on replicator rations. They have to get food and grow food."
	Brannon Braga "Too much tech, but some clever twists and some great character work. All in all, a good episode. Jim Trombetta came up with the idea of our finding a ship in a quantum singularity and there were aliens trapped in there that we helped. What I did was cut out the aliens and say, 'Wouldn't it be cool if in fact it wasn't another ship, it was us and we've been trapped all along?'"