Behind the Scene Bullets / Tim Russ Interview

TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > FUTURE'S END PART I & II > BEHIND THE SCENES > 1

   
In real life there is no Metro Plaza, where Rain Robinson arranges to meet Henry Starling. Scenes of this plaza were filmed at the Music Center on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles.
   
Other notable locations in Los Angeles were the Santa Monica Pier and Griffith Observatory. The 'wrap party' for the filming of the first season of TNG was held at Griffith Observatory.
   
The park is on the Paramount lot. The studio's administrative offices can be seen in the background.
   
Christian R. Conrad, who plays the villainous henchman Dunbar in this episode, plays a miner under the command of Commander Nocona in "Homestead".
   
With minor changes, the same cockpit interior is used for the Federation timeship Aeon, Kovin's spacecraft in "Retrospect" and Kes' shuttlecraft in "Fury".
   
On Rain Robinson's desk is an action figure based on the Talosian aliens in TOS's 1st Pilot "The Cage" and "The Menagerie". Those TOS events occurred after 1996, occurring in the 23rd century. Suggested excuse: it came from data downloaded by Starling from Braxton's 29th century Federation database.
   
The ancient DY-100 interplanetary space vehicle called S.S. Botany Bay was built on Earth and launched from there in 1996. The Botany Bay was a sleeper ship with nuclear-powered engines carrying the former dictator Khan Noonien Singh and his followers, who had escaped from Earth after the terrible Eugenics Wars. The Botany Bay traveled for some 300 years with most of its passengers preserved in suspended animation before being discovered by U.S.S. Enterprise NC-1701 near the Mutara Sector in 2267 (TOS: "Space Seed"). Albeit that the events of Future's End occur in an eventually unrealized timeline, the launch of the Botany Bay must have taken place earlier in 1996 than when an away team from U.S.S. Voyager beams down to Earth in 1996, because a model of the Botany Bay is a desktop decoration in Rain Robinson's SETI laboratory at Griffith Observatory.
   
A conjectural model of the Botany Bay, built by Greg Jein for a photograph in the book 'Star Trek Chronology', was equipped with several space shuttle-style solid rocket strap-on boosters, suggesting how the 1996-vintage spacecraft might have got into orbit.
   
Tim Russ: "Those two shows (Parts One and Two) are one of my favorites because the concept, again, the story's great. Time travel's always fun. But what's even more fun is to be able to go to the beach and work. I enjoy doing that. I mean, I kind of miss it because the shows I worked on prior to that we were always on location, so we were always in different places all the time, which gives you, you know, you never get tired of it. There's something that's always a new challenge, a new space to work in. We had a dozen locations, and we could play those environments in a different period in time. It was fun, a lot of fun, and I enjoyed that tremendously."