March 28 2024

TrekToday

An archive of Star Trek News

Robert Picardo Talks 'Flesh And Blood'

By Christian
October 13, 2000 - 11:45 PM

The Cinescape Insider E-Letter, the weekly newsletter from Cinescape.com, features a preview of an interview with Robert Picardo (the Holodoc) that will be appearing on Tuesday on the site. In the interview, he told Cinescape's Gregory L. Norris and Laura A. Van Vleet that in the episode "the Doctor is kidnapped and basically becomes sympathetic to his kidnappers":

"If you recall, the Hirogen commandeered Voyager and they were attacking our crew members and hunting them to death, or to serious injury at least, on the holodeck with the safety protocols off. [...] At the end of that episode, Captain Janeway gave the Hirogen some of our holographic technology so they could satisfy their biological urge in virtual reality without killing all these other species that they're constantly hunting to death. So in this script, after three years of programming their prey to be more devious and more adaptive and more lethal or dangerous, the prey have basically started killing the Hirogen. The prey are these holograms, who are trained to elude them. The Hirogen have given them an adaptive learning matrix based on the Doctor's own program, and these guys have learned and learned and learned and sort of risen up against their oppressors."

"The holograms are lead by a character named Iton, who is a Bajoran. They all look like aliens we've seen in the Alpha Quadrant, because they are from the Voyager database. [...] It will be the first time that our Voyager audience will see certain aliens that appeared in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. For example, the Jem'Hadar. So the holograms hijack the Doctor's program because they want him to modify the giant photon emitters that they are going to put on the surface of a Y-Class planet where the atmosphere is so toxic, even their former predators, the Hirogen, can't exist. Their goal is the creation of an idyllic, peaceful community where they can live because they're tired of running and being slaughtered over and over again. Iton, their leader, is a very charismatic and charming man who starts progressively to seem more and more like a religious zealot. It's a bit of a parable, I guess, for the creation of a cult and how ideals can be perverted. It will remind a viewer of Waco, perhaps, or even of Castro's lofty ideals when he took power and then what happened subsequently to Cuba."

The full interview will appear on Cinescape this Tuesday.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
XML Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!

Find more episode info in the Episode Guide.

You may have missed