Cathexis Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > CATHEXIS > Behind the Scenes
 

 Holocharacter Mrs Templeton is played by Carolyn Seymour, who was born in England. She plays Commander Toreth in the TNG episode "Face of the Enemy".
   
In Janeway's gothic holonovel, Lindsey Haun plays the holodeck character Beatrice Burleigh in "Cathexis", "Learning Curve", and "Persistence of Vision". However in the episode "Real Life", she played Belle, the daughter of the Doctor in his family holoprogram.
   
Lt. Durst is played by Brian Markinson, who plays the eccentric Dr. Geiger in the DS9 episode "In The Cards".
   
Janeway's holonovel was originally the opening for "Eye of a Needle" but later appears in "Cathexis" due to time constraints. In the original scene, the holoprogram is interrupted by Kim coming to the holodeck to tell Janeway that he may have found a wormhole. In this episode, the scene is interupted when Kim makes a com. call to Janeway to inform him about the returning shuttlecraft carrying Tuvok and Chakotay.
   
Brannon Braga: "I thought the episode was going to be horrible. I didn't have a good time writing it. Basically: a twist on the alien invasion story in that the alien is actually Chakotay's sub conscious mind. In the end, though, it's really not about anything. Not my greatest shining moment. It's got tension and action at a point when we needed an infusion of that, but that's about it."
   
David Livingston's reservations are about the use of Chakotay's medicine wheel, which became a key plot point. "I wanted to actually paint it onto the set because it's what B'Elanna would have done. She doesn't care if she's defacing anything. She's going to come in and take care of her friend. They resisted it, and instead we had this piece of skin with a design on it hung in there. I think it would have been more fun if she had painted it onto the wall of the set regardless of the consequences."
   
Jeri Taylor: "A show that sounded better in concept than it turned out to be. Some people liked it, but I wasn't sure it was entirely successful. I thought it was a little confusing and so is the twist. It was talky and not as compelling as it should have been."
   
Kenneth Biller: "I love the twist. I think it represented an interesting game of cat and mouse during a period when we were stuck doing a whole bunch of bottle shows."
   
Michael Piller: "There were logic problems. I was not comfortable with the logic of a lot of the things going on. And I thought that once the possessions became known, Janeway was acting like the alien through the whole thing. It just seemed like it was very eerie and moody, but there's not a lot of logic to the way people were acting in the show. The idea of doing 'Ten Little Indians' (a murder whodunnit by Agatha Christie) with the murderer changing places was a fascinating idea, but it got very complex and dry and was a hard premise to solve. It's one of my least favorite."
   
Tim Russ: "The whole bridge scene with the phaser battle and stuff was different originally. It didn't make any sense. It wasn't consistent with Vulcan attributes, and we had to change it. I said to Jeri Taylor, 'You cannot execute this kind of thing in the story because it makes no sense. It's not consistent. It's a physical fact.' In the script, they had Tuvok blinded by the flash, but Vulcans have a secondary eyelid to protect them, and that's been established in the TOS episode "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" Amazingly, the director brought those points up in a story meeting because she had problems with the scene because it didn't make any sense in terms of filming and blocking. We both were sort of in league for different reasons, but she brought it up in a story meeting, and they just basically dismissed her. What we run into, even in Star Trek, is that in most television there is a certain degree of mediocrity. Hell, you can see mediocrity in a hundred fifty million dollar film where they completely forgot what the story was about. In television, what I see these days is that people just want to get from point A to point B, and they've got a great plot twist and it butchers all the character development, but 'Gee, it's a great surprise.' Well, it's not justified, and to me it's not justifiable to jeopardize the integrity of the character in order to get a rise out of somebody because then you've just made the thing inconsistent."
   
Tim Russ says he is also disturbed by the show's pervasive use of technobabble - "It's one of the reasons I never really got warmed up to TNG. How can you warm up to something that you're not really understanding entirely? Half of that stuff is made up. I think they're hurting the broad base of their audience by doing that. It bothers me a great deal. I think they should use technobabble much more sparingly. it takes the same amount of time to say the same thing, but in a way that makes sense: 'Sensors indicate there's something out there. It's approaching at such and such miles an hour.' That's not complicated."
   
Originally Jeri Taylor had planned to make Janeway's holodeck novels a pioneer adventure, but perhaps because of the easy comparisons that could be made to 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' she adopted the Jane Eyre-tinged story line. In addition, as narrated by Poe, Kate Mulgrew did not wish to get on a horse, and the cost of location shooting was prohibitive. "The holonovels are something that she does like. I read adventure novels and thrillers-as a stress reliever. So these are like reading in the twenty-fourth century. You go and you actually play one of the characters. So it's the only place where she can forget about being a captain for a couple of hours and get into a completely different situation, where she has a husband and she has children and she lives a life utterly unlike the one that she lives. It's more that kind of motivation than an intellectual curiosity about a period of history. In my heart I would like to see her sort of finish this novel and start another one next season. Whether that will happen, I cannot say. We may return to a different novel for her, but that was one of those things that we were not getting the feedback from the fans that seemed to justify its continuing. A lot of people had problems with Janeway being in what would be considered a servile position. A lot of people just aren't fans, as I am, of Gothic novels and just sort of didn't get it. I thought it was great fun, but I'm never afraid to cut our losses if something isn't working. We wrote a conclusion in which everything got knitted up, because I thought it was a shame to just leave it."