Meanwhile, filming continues on Alice, which is essentially about a haunted ship. “It’s kind of like Christine, that Stephen King novel, done Sci-Fi style,” elaborates executive producer Brannon Braga.

Robert Duncan McNeill, who plays Tom Paris, adds: “The story of Alice deals with my character’s obsession with fast ships and that classic male connection to toys and gadgets. We happen to come upon a junkyard in Space, and we trade for some things we can use on the ship, and while we’re looking at what this guy’s got, I find this old, beat-up shuttle, and I fall in love with it; it’s this fixer-upper kind of thing. And I convince everyone that it’s worth trading for and I can fix it.

"So we get the shuttle, and Paris becomes obsessed with fixing up this shuttle. But it’s not an ordinary shuttle, it’s haunted by this technological ghost. It has a personality and a life of its own – and it starts to control Paris in a lot of ways.

"It’s kind of creepy. And it’s a good character episode, because it allows Paris to deal with someone different, other than Harry or B’Elanna or the people he’s always dealing with, so he’s a little freer to express how he feels and where he’s at right now, after six years of being on Voyager.”

Melissa J Perenson

Images © Paramount
Feature © Visual Imagination 1999. Not for reproduction.