Posted:
20:26:32 on February 08 2002
By: Alexander Chase
Dept: Enterprise | www.stenterprise.com
Sci Fi Pulse has posted an interview with Jolene Blalock by Ian Spelling and published in this month's British Edition of Starlog Magazine. Blalock talks about ENT, the challenge of Trek's technobabble and her character, the emotionless Vulcan Sub-commander T'Pol.
On her ENT character, "T'pol, right now, is the voice of reason.... She's the voice of responsibility, but I can't say that she's not-questioning herself about "what am I doing on this ship?" She does her job well. She's very competent. She's extremely well educated. She's from a superior race. She is the person for this job, and yet she does not receive one "Thank you". So I can't help but feel that T'pol is thinking, "What am I doing here?" Except there is a bigger purpose to all of it. She believes in this mission and in human capabilities. They are resourceful. They do get by, in their own way. There's much to learn from the humans, and she is learning from being around them."
On Trek's infamous technobabble, "It's lots of technobabble... Sometimes it can be a huge pain because we don't just get the technobabble, but we also get a pronunciation cheat sheet. You get the words and instructions on how to say them. One vowel can really mess you up. It's really weird. We had one episode at the beginning, 'Flight or Fancy', where we were standing there looking at this ship that was basically dead in the water. Archer looks at it and says, 'These look like scorch marks', but in my mind, I kept hearing 'Skid marks'! Then my dialogue was 'It's dehydrated residue, and it looks like it's been created by some strong particle impact'. All I could picture was somebody crapping their pants, like skid marks. Strong particle impacts residue. It was very funny."
On the future of ENT and her character, "We're just getting started. I can tell you a little about what's coming up, but I don't want to get into detail. I will say that T'pol is learning about human behaviour. She's learning how humans all work at a very basic level, about our humanity, about how we're affected by what's around us. It's quite a beautiful thing to see. She's very Vulcan, but she understands emotion. Vulcans were once very emotional. When they felt anger, they felt anger. They felt every range of emotion, happiness, love, kindness, rage, but they felt it to such an extreme, it was to the detriment of their race. Only through meditation did they actually learn to control these emotions, which they did to preserve their race. So what's going on inside them is like a volcano. It's like a ball of frustration, of emotion, and they've learnt to suppress it and feel it's the most logical way to go through life. So T'pol is affected by everything she sees the humans around her going through, but at the same time she works to bring a sense of responsibility and logic to matters. She'll say 'Let's think about our actions before we act', not after."
For the rest of the interview, check out this page.
See Also: STENTERPRISE.com
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