What did you know about Voyager before you started?

When I started out on Voyager, they had to tell me everything about Star Trek, because I knew nothing about it. I had never seen the original series, I had never seen The Next Generation. I think I’d seen a couple of episodes here and there - of the original series, probably. Never seen Voyager. Didn’t know what a Borg was. They gave me a copy of First Contact, the movie, so I could at least see what a Borg was.

They also gave me a copy of the Big Star Trek encyclopaedia, whatever it is, so that I could bone up on my Star Trek knowledge. Fortunately, it sort of worked for the character that I wouldn’t know any of the back stories of the people on Voyager, because she was coming in cold, like I was. That was actually helpful as opposed to detrimental.

Most of my research was sort of done on the job and they made it very clear when I signed on, that we were creating something completely new. This wasn’t a Borg that had been seen before. She wasn’t an automaton, like the drones that we had seen, but she wasn’t as free as the Borg queen, which was initially very scary, because I knew enough to know that Star Trek fans have very proprietary feelings over every aspect of the franchise. You don’t want to be the one to come in and tinker around with their favourite villain and be pegged for screwing up the whole franchise. So that was a bit nerve racking, in the beginning, but I think they did a wonderful job of developing this new hybrid Borg.