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The scenes where a
number of the crew are on the planet collecting supplies
under Neelix's and Chakotay's direction were shot at
Vasquez Rocks, a familiar Star Trek location (e.g. TOS
episode Arena). The same location is seen in
"The 37's"
to represent a different planet. |
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Robert Scheerer,
director and a veteran of
TNG and
DS9, refers to the McCarthyesque story in the TNG episode
"The Drumhead":
"It was different in the sense that
it was a mystery. It was something that is hard to
categorize very easily, but it was a rare episode in that
regard. It was something that was fun to do because of
that - to take the scenes like the ones with Carey who was
also suspected and try and turn that into as much of a
diversion as possible so that it wasn't clear who it was
that was causing all the problems. And even though it was
clear very early on who it possibly was, I tried very hard
to prevent it from being obvious until the last possible
moment that it was revealed to be Seska. I approached it
on the basis of a mystery, which is something you don't
get a chance to do very often with Voyager. Originally
they called the episode Seska which obviously gave away
everything. They changed that before we shot. I kind of
liked the fact that it was not someone who was very
well-known among the crew. She'd done three or four of the
shows beforehand, and I suspect she may be back later on.
We worked very hard on that. Martha Hackett was a very
good actress and we particularly took care that her
relationship with Robert Beltran was a genuinely loving,
warm relationship and that her caring for him had nothing
to do with the fact that she was a spy who was trying to
get home." |
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The story was set up
early in the Season with the introduction of Seska, a
disgruntled Maquis officer in the episode
"Parallax". Jeri
Taylor explains: "Seska came about
in a not very planned way. State of Flux was one of the
first stories that we bought, and we realized it would
probably be a good idea - since all of these people are
new - if we did some stories in which we established this
character before we did a whole episode about her. It
would have more emotional resonance for the audience, and
so we started doing that. Then we found her character to
be very useful because she could be the voice that wanted
to take the technology and go home in
"Prime Factors" and
that's a very good thing to have. You don't always have
rumbling in the lower decks or mutinous people on purely
Starfleet ships. Seska gave us conflict and bite, and we
actually pushed State of Flux further down the line so we
could use Seska. She was very well established by the time
we got to it." |
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Michael Piller:
"This is a show that I worked on
quite a bit. It has a good pay-off. I felt the most
important challenge was to keep the audience guessing
until the very end. It's a very tricky, complex mystery
story which is so intricately woven that the audience
might believe she's innocent of the crime until the very
last moment, and then, of course, the revelation comes. I
thought it was a very rewarding story." |
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Jeri Taylor's in
response to Piller: "The show was
OK. It worked better than it might have simply because we
had Seska in the earlier shows. People had a sense of who
she was. Michael did an interesting thing when he gave
Chakotay and Seska the backstory that they had been
romantically involved, which had not been in any other
versions. I think that made Chakotay's struggle all the
more poignant. You really saw what the stakes were for him
because of that, and ultimately he did the right thing and
what his duty compelled him to do. Those are always good
stories." |
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Creating the visual
effect of the Kazon melted into the machinery of their
ship was one of the most difficult production tasks of the
episode, and the art department hired an outside
special-effects lab to create the elements for the shot.
David Livingston: "The art
department was concerned that it would be hard to kind of
meld a body-form around a desk and make it look realistic,
but it was so dark in there I don't know if the audience
got the full impact of it. It was the old 'Star Wars' deal
where Harrison Ford (as Han Solo) is frozen in carbonite
in the wall of Jabba the Hutt's palace." |
