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.