It's late afternoon in August, and a triumvirate of Voyager actors – Robert Beltran, Ethan Phillips and guest star John Fleck, who plays an alien trader – are messing around on the set during the rehearsal of a scene in the transporter room. Under the watchful eye of director David Livingston, the actors choreograph the shot – although Beltran leads the way with colourful, impromptu rewrites of the dialogue that soon have Fleck and Phillips improvizing, too.

This is the kind of easy atmosphere that the Star Trek: Voyager set has become known for over the years. And that comes as little surprise, considering the series is entering its sixth season already.

“It’s the beginning of the show and the crisis of the week hasn’t quite happened yet,” explains Beltran of the levity. “It’s not serious, and there’s no crisis at hand. Yet,” he laughs.

Keeping things light-hearted is Beltran’s way of getting through the sometimes rote material. “It’s really the only way to get through a show like this. You can look just as silly taking a show like this too seriously. I take the work seriously, but at the same time you try to have fun; otherwise, it makes for very long, long, boring tedious days. Johnny [Fleck] and I always have a lot of fun working together.”

Livingston, who’s overseeing the set-up of this connection scene in the sixth episode, Alice, takes a break for a moment to explain the action. While the scene being shot was originally written to be filmed in a corridor, Livingston had another idea in mind. “I thought it would be better to keep all of the action inside the transporter room, because the transporter room has a lot of cool stuff to look at,” explains Livingston, who tabled his vision to the producers and had the new location approved before shooting today. “This way, when [Fleck’s character] first comes in, he would immediately go into his looking around to find out what he wanted off of our ship.”

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Feature © Visual Imagination Ltd 1999. Not for reproduction.