Time And Again Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > TIME AND AGAIN > Behind the Scenes
 

 Jeri Taylor: "The original pitch was what if you were in Dresden 24 hours before the fire bombing and knew it was coming? What would you do? That just seemed like an irresistible kind of a premise. We weren't necessarily thrilled with the way it came out for a variety of reasons. I also think this is one where people have the response, 'Oh, another time-travel or screwing around with time story. Haven't we seen a lot of that?' We have gone to the well too many times with the time-travel thing, and I sort of wish that this episode would have been shown second season. It was just a compelling story with a high-concept idea that we couldn't resist. The major dissatisfaction was that I don't think anybody knew what happened. The end was so confusing that most people said, 'Huh?' I don't think we did our most effective job. I think that was the script and not the producing in selling exactly what happened."
   
Michael Piller: "I was a little disappointed with the location stuff we did. We got caught in the rain and it looked kind of bleak. I think the director was under a great deal of pressure to get everything done. I liked the idea of it and I liked what we did but it didn't really deliver the goods. I liked the idea of going back and forth between two time periods." Janeway was put at the centre of the action because "We did it deliberately. It's another experiment from Deep Space 9 I think we learned from. It was terribly important for us to establish this captain's anchor position, and we didn't do it that well in the first seasons of Deep Space 9."
   
Michael Piller explains how budget was a real problem and that an ambitious show had to be cut down due to its expense. "Originally we had planned to make two towns, one before the explosion and one after the explosion, and we couldn't afford that. So essentially the second version of the town as a much darker, smokier, less distinct place."
   
Kenneth Biller, story editor, on the aliens: "They looked human except they have different hair and costumes. It's unfortunate that our first episode of a show, where we're 70,000 light-years away, had aliens that looked completely human. The good thing in the episode were getting to see Tom Paris and Janeway develop their relationship, but the show also suffered from child-actor syndrome. If you remember, there's a kid that Paris is accused of threatening, and you ultimately wish he had."
   
The scenes at the gates of the alien world's polaric energy reactor, were filmed at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant. Filming was also done here for scenes from "In the Flesh", and earlier for TNG's "Justice", TNG's "The First Duty" and DS9's "Homefront".