Episode Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > DAY OF HONOR > Behind the Scenes

Bryan FullerBryan Fuller (executive story editor) on "Day of Honor": "It's important to explore natural relationships, and people enjoy watching characters fall in love. We wanted to have a show in which characters have relationships with each other. When love happens between characters you care about, you can connect with it all. Tom and B'Elanna seemed a natural pair. They already were bickering with each other, and that happens when you truly don't like each other or you're starting to develop some feelings. They each humanised each other. B'Elanna was becoming relentless in her attitude, and Tom started out as nothing but a cocky flyboy. It resulted in characters that were more and more likeable."
Jeri TaylorJeri Taylor (Voyager Executive Producer) on "Day of Honor": "Tom and B'Elanna seemed to have an adversarial relationship. They didn't each bump each other the right way but I started thinking that often that kind of conflict is covering inner feelings that are not acknowledged by either participant. They are feeling something else but don't want to face it. And so it comes out as conflict. For me it was a natural outgrowth of what had gone on before, so in [Day Of Honor], once again they are stranded. Put two people on a desert island and things will happen. So they're hanging out in space and the admission is finally made."
Dan CurryDan Curry (Visual Effects Producer) on "Day of Honor": "The critical thing about shooting [Day Of Honor], especially for television where our time and budget is so limited, is to create the illusion that they are drifting and not just posing. So working with the special effects department, we put the actors on teeter-totter see-saws and turntables, depending on what action had to be depicted. So, in a case like that, it's critical to come up with storyboards that would convey the images we needed to tell that part of the story. Then we knew what rigs we'd have to create to make the images successful. Time is television's greatest enemy so we have to make quick decisions and move fast. So we limit storyboards to where they are an important tool in helping to find the way to tell that story with images. We only storyboard things that are technically difficult or critical."

Roxann DawsonRoxann Dawson (B'Elanna) on shooting "Day of Honor":
"I was very early on in my pregnancy at that point and very few people knew about it. To be three months' pregnant - most women know what that feels like - and then to be strung up in a harness and suspended in space in spacesuits and helmet that had very little air and to have fans that went on and off to enable you to breathe was very uncomfortable. It would've been uncomfortable if I wasn't pregnant. I was between three and four months' at that time. Few people knew. Robbie (Robert Duncan McNeill who plays Tom Paris) knew and took good care of me. He made sure every fifteen minutes we had a break. Nobody knew why he was being so insistent about it but he really did take good care of me and I got through it. I think it was a very pivotal episode for our relationship and it was important that it came out well. I think it did, but it was torturous doing it, I have to say."
Alan Altshuld, who plays Lumas of the Caatati, plays the Takarian sandal-maker in the Season 3 episode "False Profits".
This episode is the first appearance on Voyager of the EV suits that were previously used in Star Trek: First Contact. Tom Paris actually mentions the term "first contact" during the EV sequence. In every episode of Voyager or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that features these suits, no more than three are shown on screen at once, as that was how many hero suits were used in First Contact. This was likely due to budgetary constraints.
The novelization of the episode gives the names of the two Cataati who dealt with Voyager as Agron Lumas and Temmis Rahmin.
In the season 2 episode "Investigations", Neelix reads from the communications logs and finds one titled "Voyager to Cataati". Given that the events of season 2 take place at least 10,000 light years away from where Voyager encounters the Cataati in this episode, it is safe to assume that the writers simply recycled the name for use here.