As mentioned in Part I of our report from last weekend, on Saturday the sun was out and it was actually rather warm as Creation Entertainment celebrated Star Trek and other genre shows in Bellevue for its Seattle-area convention. But true to form for the Pacific Northwest, it wasn't long before the umbrellas had to come out. A little rain, though, would never stop devoted fans from catching up with their beloved Trek icons.

Roxann Dawson & Robert Duncan McNeill

A couple that won't be torn asunder, Roxann Dawson and Robert Duncan McNeill took the stage together as they have at most of their recent convention appearances. McNeill — known familiarly as "Robbie" — began by lamenting, "When did it happen that we became the old guys of Star Trek? It seems like we were the new guys just, y'know, recently." Roxann "thanked" him for that observation, then looked over the audience and said, "So that means if we're old, then you must all be old too. When did that happen?" The remark was met by a few nods and acknowledging sighs.

But the pair had a lot of current Star Trek stories to tell, as both have recently been involved in Enterprise as directors. But first they did a little reminiscing about the "old days" on Star Trek: Voyager. "I always have to remind people that Robbie is actually a very brave soul," Roxann began. "He went through a pregnancy of his own wife at home at the same time that I was in real life — not on-the-show pregnant, we were hiding it on the show ... but I was really pregnant at work and his wife was really pregnant at home, and we ended up giving birth about a week apart. So he went to work and went home and had no respite from the pregnancy thing. It was just an awful situation." Robbie concurred, "It was horrible, it was really horrible!" Roxann noted that her daughter Emma Rose was born on January 16, which coincided with the anniversary of the Voyager premiere three years earlier.

The fans, though, were just as interested in hearing about their experiences as directors. In response to questions, both talked about getting a handle on a story's themes despite sometimes not having the entire story. "We get the script very late, as Robbie can attest, and there are changes constantly being made," Roxann said. "One of the shows I did, I got my fourth act when we were already into four days of shooting. I didn't know the end of the story when we were shooting the beginning. I try to go in there with a strong idea of what this story is trying to say, and sometimes halfway through the writers go, no we're changing it now, it means something else. But I do try to make sure that thematically something is coherent, so when we end up in the editing room we have a story." (Roxann, by the way, will be directing one more episode this season, the next-to-last, and goes into pre-production next week.)

Robbie just finished directing and overseeing the editing of the Enterprise episode "The Breach." "John Billingsley had a big doctor storyline, and we didn't have the third or the fourth act when we started. We got the third act on Day 2 of shooting. And then [John] had a scene one day where he was supposed to kinda break down, but we hadn't seen the fourth act. It was all about some big secret that [Phlox] was going to reveal in the fourth act — and he said to me, what is this secret? And I didn't know, none of us knew. So we made the phone calls and they gave us some idea of what it was going to be. But literally sometimes you can start shooting the episode and you don't know what the secret is that you're hiding the whole episode."

Roxann was asked to confirm a rumor about one of her Enterprise episodes, "Dead Stop" — was the voice of the repair station computer hers? "Well...yeah..." she tentatively admitted, but qualified that it wasn't her idea, and she didn't even think it was a good idea. In the first cut of the episode, no voice talent had been cast so a friend of the editor, a non-actor, filled in the lines. When executive producer Rick Berman saw the footage, he thought the voice was Roxann's and he liked the idea. "So they called me up at home and said, Rick wants you to do the voice because he liked you doing it in the screening. And I went, I didn't do it in the screening," she recounted. "So then he got all excited about the idea that I should do the voice. But I said if they recognize that it's my voice, it would take people out of the show." But Rick was insistent, so she did it. "I didn't know it was you!" Robbie said, and the audience assured Roxann that it was not a distraction. She rewarded them with a whispery, "Access denied." ("You've heard that before, haven't you Robbie?" "You know Roxann, we were getting along so well...")

The inevitable question was asked, are they planning a Voyager movie? "WE'RE planning a Voyager movie — nobody else is planning it!" Roxann exclaimed, then turned to Robbie, "At your house, I'm bringing a camera...!" "There's an idea, make our own movie!" Robbie chimed. But Roxann had to be honest: "I don't think that there will be a Voyager movie ... Really, it's not in our future."

Roxann concluded the appearance with an auction to benefit one of her charities, Camp Heartland, which supports children infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS. She had a script from her first Enterprise episode, "The Andorian Incident," signed by everyone in the cast. But she noted there was one autograph missing that she wished she had gotten — the eminent Andorian himself, Jeffrey Combs. Just then Jeff jumped up on the stage and affixed his sig on the script cover. "I would not be on Enterprise more than once if it wasn't for this lovely lady!" he declared. With his and Robbie's help, Roxann raised $700 from that script.

The Voyager folks all appeared on a sunny Seattle Saturday, but the next day the clouds came back and the drizzle eventually turned into pouring rain. The Sunday crowd was decidedly more female and the fashions decidedly darker as Creation celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (with guest stars that included "Spike" himself, James Marsters). But first up were three stars representing the "dark" side of Star Trek — those Dominion cads, Marc Alaimo, Casey Biggs and Jeffrey Combs.

Marc Alaimo, Casey Biggs & Jeffrey Combs

The ABC of Deep Space Nine bounced onto the stage with Jeff — a University of Washington alumnus — proclaiming, "I'm really pleased to see this big, beautiful DS9 crowd!" to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd. Marc opined, "It was the best of all of them, as far as I'm concerned! ... The people on Deep Space Nine had much more depth, I think, going on for them than the other shows that I've seen." Casey added, "We're having a mud wrestling match with the Voyager people later today. Well, maybe not..."

Casey did make an observation about the place in the show the trio occupied. "You notice, particularly in the last two seasons of DS9, the writers liked our characters so much, and the other recurring characters so much, that [by the latter seasons] we thought it was our show! And that year when the three of us took back the space station, the other guys were getting pretty pissed off!" Jeff interjected smugly, "They were off in some spaceship somewhere — really, who cares." Casey continued, "That's what was smart about Deep Space Nine, they did arcs. That was, I think, a six-show arc ... and all of a sudden the ratings started to come up on the show, and so they said, 'Oh, hey, we gotta keep these guys around some more!'"

They were each asked by the audience if they liked the way their characters died, or would have preferred something different. Casey recounted that when he got the script for the final episode, he found out Damar was going to be killed by some unnamed Jem'Hadar. "I went to the director and said, 'I can't be killed by a nondescript rhinoceros!' So he said, well, what do you want to do? I said, I wanna have a John Woo death..." (John Woo, he explained, is the director of very stylistic "bullet ballet" action movies.) "I wanna have two big guns, and I wanna storm [the Dominion headquarters], and I wanna kill fifty people, and I wanna get shot by fifteen people and die in somebody's arms. So that's what he let me do, he let me die the way I wanted to die."

"Yes, well, they didn't let me die the way I wanted to die!" Jeff answered. "Garak — the one character that Weyoun had absolutely no interaction with in any capacity through the entire series — is the one who offs me." He thought it would have been cool if Weyoun had been the linchpin to Dominion defeat "by defecting and taking all of his knowledge to the Federation, for...compensation." (He didn't explain what he meant by "compensation.")

Casey noted, "And Marc is still floating around in the ether somewhere out there, aren't you?" Marc's story about DS9's final episode had to do with the final fight between Sisko and Gul Dukat. Emphasizing that Avery Brooks is an experienced stage fighter, Marc demonstrated with Casey's help what happened on that final day of shooting that sent him to the hospital and gave him a bruised eye for a week. Basically, Avery accidentally landed a punch on Marc's face, and it was so hard Marc had to be taken to the emergency room — in his Cardassian outfit!

Digressing from DS9 to Enterprise for a moment, one fan asked Jeff how the antennae move in his Andorian costume. Casey jumped up and held two mikes over Jeff's head and said, "They got a guy behind him going like this..." But then Jeff explained that the antenna attachments "have these spine-like things with wires in them that run down into a special cap that's underneath the makeup and wig," and another wire concealed in his neck runs down his back to a radio pack, which receives a signal from a crew member with a joystick, operating it much like a remote-controlled toy car.

Favorite episodes? "'Treachery, Faith, and the Great River' — because it was all about me!" Jeff exclaimed. "No, because it explored Weyoun — there were two Weyouns, a defective one and a not-so-defective one, and it was really nice colors for me to play." Marc replied, "I had several that I really loved. 'Waltz,' 'The Maquis' I and II... All the stuff with my daughter [Ziyal] I loved." Casey answered, "The one that I liked the best is when I finally gave up that horrible kanar." (He mentioned earlier that kanar was actually Caro Syrup, and drinking it was quite awful.) He was referring to "Strange Bedfellows." "That was my favorite because that's when [Damar] got his act together."

Other Familiar Faces

Saturday afternoon some of the popular guest actors who occupied the autograph area for most of the weekend got to take the spotlight on stage for an hour or so. They included Paul Boehmer, the Nazi Captain in "Killing Game," the Borg in "Drone," and "Mestral" in "Carbon Creek"; Martin Rayner, "Dr. Chaotica" (pictured at top of page); Nicholas Worth, Chaotica's sidekick "Lonzak"; Richard Herd, "Admiral Paris" and other characters; Arlene Martel, "T'Pring" in "Amok Time"; Gregory Itzin, several characters, the most recent being "Sopek" in "Shadows of P'Jem"; Anne Ramsay, "Ensign Clancy" in Star Trek: The Next Generation; and Scott McDonald, with five Trek characters to his credit including "N'Vek" in "Face of the Enemy."

Largely the actors talked about their backgrounds and the various roles they've played. For Ramsay (who played Helen Hunt's sister on Mad About You), being on TNG was a dream come true. "I'll never forget being on the Bridge, going to warp — I asked Wil Wheaton, which one do you press for warp speed?"

Martel related how difficult her "T'Pring" costume was. "Everyone else was given these very sexy, slinky, revealing costumes — me, they put in a tent." She said she thought it looked like a maternity outfit. "And, being the Stanislavsky method actress that I am, I said, ah, she's pregnant! She's carrying Stonn's child! That's it! So I gave myself this whole inner life." But the costume itself had wires running through it and it "hurt like hell," so much so it gave her scars. "But I was so excited to be in the show that it really didn't matter, I just transcended the pain."

On Saturday night, the conventioneers were treated to two special shows: Alaimo, Biggs and Combs performed their popular "What Shakespeare Leaves Behind" routine, then McNeill and Dawson did a reading of A.R. Gurney's "Love Letters," a moving dialog through correspondence between a man and a woman in a complex lifelong relationship.

Story & photos by Sandy Stone

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