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TREKCORE >
VOY >
EPISODES >
YEAR OF HELL PART I > Behind the Scenes
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This episode's plot was primarily influenced by
"Before and After", a third season installment of
Star Trek:
Voyager that gives a preview of this episode by featuring both
the Krenim and hints of a timeline in which Voyager undergoes
the "Year of Hell", becoming badly damaged in the process.
Episode co-writer Brannon Braga explained, "Although I don't
like to do episodes that rely on other episodes for exposition,
I loved the phrase 'Year of Hell' that Ken Biller came up with
for that episode. I loved the look of the show. I loved the look
of a destroyed Voyager. I wanted to do a whole two-parter like
that." This episode's other co-writer, Joe Menosky, remembered,
"This started with the phrase 'Year of Hell' which came out of
'Before and After'. Brannon loved the image [....] The optical
of the hull of the ship messed up in 'Before and After' because
we were being attacked by the Krenim [...] stayed, especially in
Brannon's mind. He kept saying, 'I just want to wreck the
ship.'" Menosky
also related, "What Brannon often does is come up with an image
before there's even a story idea [....] The imagistic
inspiration for 'Year of Hell', without which it wouldn't have
been created as an episode, was the ship all wrecked, a great
look." |
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The reuse of the phrase "Year of Hell" suggested
other elements, such as having the two-parter span a year.
Brannon Braga remembered, "The notion of having a story that
took place over the course of a year [...] I thought was a very
fresh structural approach." The event also implied a reuse of
the time-meddling Krenim. Joe Menosky commented,
"We tend to do
one big time thing a year, we're thinking should it be time
travel? Despite the fact that it wasn't time travel the Krenim
used some kind of temporal thing in their torpedoes."
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Indeed, considering the Krenim's destructive
temporal capabilities led the writers to explore time travel in
an unusual way. Joe Menosky recollected, "Brannon said, 'Time is
a weapon. What does that mean?' I said, 'What if there was this
big Death Star-like weapon, and you target a planet, and it
blows it out of the time continuum? What you have done is erased
a thread from the time continuum, everything resets, and
suddenly the present is different.'" Braga was ultimately of the opinion that
Annorax's meddling with time was analogous to an example of
alternate history. "If you can imagine, to use an analogy, that
the Nazis, after losing the Second World War, invented something
like [Annorax's time ship] to erase the Americans from history
so that they never existed. It would change the outcome of
things," Braga speculated. "But what the Nazis don't realize is
that the Americans provided a crucial antibody that helped the
Germans fight off a deadly virus, and so they realize they've
got to do something else to history. But that doesn't work
either. When you pull one thread, another comes undone."
By having the time continuum
messed around in such a way but without departing from the
present, the writers managed to come up with a method of doing a
time travel story without actually doing time travel. "That was
enough for us to start running with this as an episode," Menosky
recalled. |
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Tuvok was originally to have been more badly
wounded in this episode rather than losing only his eyesight.
"We were actually going to have him blind and missing a leg,"
Brannon Braga remembered, "and we were going to do a Forrest
Gump-type of digital effect. He was going to have many physical
problems, but for production reasons, we ended up with just
blindness." |
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Voyager's engineering and sickbay departments are
not shown in this episode. This is because, to reduce the costs
associated with preparing the sets to be seen as battle-damaged,
the writers were asked to place the action on as few of the
Voyager standing sets as possible. As
such, the events aboard the ship take place almost entirely
within the corridors, on the bridge, and in the mess hall. |
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This installment's final draft script was submitted
on 5 August 1997. |
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The writing of this episode proved to be generally
easier than what would follow: the development of most of the
two-parter's conclusion. |
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