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7 February 2011
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Interviews | Robert Duncan McNeill
Blah Blah Blah


Any fantastic techno-babble line you�ve had to struggle with?

Picture I struggle with any techno-babble line. I was the worst, I am absolutely the worst at that stuff. I think they realised it early on, �cos they stopped writing very complex fake science language for me. But also it was part of my character. My character was the one when everybody else would say, it�s the blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and I�d say, �OK, so we�re going to blow up, right?� - I�d say the plain English version. But what�s the difference in learning it? It�s very hard to learn � for me, it was very hard.

Whenever I got something that was describing some, part of the ship, or how the mechanics worked or the science worked, I would always try to figure out something that I could understand like, my car engine, it�s like the transmission connected to the... What I mean is that I�d try to connect it to something so, even though I was saying 'The plasma conduits' or something, I would be thinking, in my mind, that we�re talking about the transmission or the carburettor or something. That was the only way I could feel that when I said it, I was actually making sense of it. Otherwise, I just got lost. Garrett Wong was fabulous at the techno-babble, he could just go, l-l-l-l-l, he was great.

Did you all get your scripts and look through them thinking, my God, this is a good one or a bad one?

Yes, yes, we did. Yeah, we would.


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