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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
players and a warm sense of bonding and community. We play at the
turn-of-the-century, 2400, and are located in the Typhon Expanses,
bordering the Neutral Zone, proximate to the Romulan Empire, and near
the Iconian Digs, and are on the first warning route of the original
Borg Incursion.
We have three stations to post from, SB 185, USS Odyssey, and USS
Wraith. They all have general and particular storylines and all
interact. This game is not for the faint of heart! The writing is
superb and comes hot and heavy. We have some open spots and also we
will consider character suggestions. So, longtime RPGers and novices,
check us out. See if you want to make Typhon Station your home away
from home.
(0 comments | Add)
Don't miss a scene! Pre-order the STAR TREK NEMESIS novelization to support TrekWeb!
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Posted:
00:56:35 on December 09 2002
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: TrekWeb Features
Written by Steve Krutzler
This article contains moderate spoilers.
“I was always the girl,” exclaims Marina Sirtis exuberantly when asked about providing a bit of spice in STAR TREK NEMESIS. “But I’m the girl with more to do in this movie!”
Effervescent is the only way to describe this beautiful, bubbling, British forty-something who’s never been afraid to let it fly (and even did so in an episode of ST:TNG) off camera or been shy about her status as the reservedly sexy STAR TREK babe Deanna Troi for over fifteen years. Seriousness has rarely been Sirtis’s forte, a far cry from the coolness of the chocolate-loving Betazoid counselor, and she’s not about to start now.
“I’m not a method actress per se but I do have to actually feel what I’m saying is true. Otherwise, it sucks,” she says bluntly in a deadpan worthy of cast mate Patrick Stewart. Let’s not mince words. “This one was hard. It was hard because every time we did anything it was ‘oh my god this [could be] the last time we’re going to do this,’ so that was hard. We had a director who wanted to approach it like it was the first STAR TREK movie, so every time we said, ‘well, actually, I don’t think my character would do that,’ he’d go ‘I don’t care, do it this way anyway, that’s how I want you to do it’,” she laughs. “For me it was like I had to find a way to make it all work and it wasn’t like the others where I just turned up, put on my space suit and there I was ready to work. This time I actually had to work.”
In NEMESIS, Sirtis’s Counselor displays a range of emotions, from the joy of marriage to the throes of May-December passion with Tom Hardy to the darkness of telepathic manipulation. Troi also plays a pivotal role in the end of the movie, and Sirtis says being pulled in so many different directions required anything but complacency when bringing Deanna to life this time around.
“When you play a character for fifteen years you have all this instant not-thinking-about-responses-to-things because you’ve played the character for so long,” she says. “Then someone comes along and said ‘you know what? Do it this way’ and it just throws you off the track. So you have to find a way to make it true for you and it was harder for me because if it was a new character it would’ve been easier but it was a character who was like a pair of old slippers. It wasn’t something that I was used to having to do with her. [But] it’s your job as an actor. We had it easy for seven years because on TV, as everyone knows, the actors are the most powerful people on the set, the directors come and go. And then we had Jonathan, and that was easy,” she jests playfully.
Marrying Riker was one major element that screenwriter John Logan wanted to inject into NEMESIS to please fans with the notion that these characters are moving forward in their lives. Sirtis says she’s not concerned with the domestication the change could represent bring for Troi, in fact, she jokes about it.
“We won’t see if it changes her because it’s a ‘generation’s final journey’,” she notes humorously. “I think that was done more for the fans than for us. Troi gets to wear a pretty pink dress but I think it’s a cute little hook for the movie. You can’t really delve too deeply into why they’re getting married and it was just a little fun thing to do at the beginning. She’s a good wife, she goes with her husband, an old-fashioned wife! If they make another movie, how are they going to get me back,” she poses with mock self-interest and some rhetorical thunder.
Not all the changes made it onto the screen. With fifty minutes of cut footage, Sirtis was lucky to escape the fate of cast mate Gates McFadden, who unfortunately only has a few scenes in the final cut of the movie. The two women of TNG have frequently been the victim of what some fans see as short-shrift in the features.
“It was a three hour movie and it’s cut down. When the DVD comes out,” she chuckles, “Gates is going to be in it a lot! Unfortunately, we all lost scenes in this movie and it’s basically to keep it under two hours and to keep it moving as an action movie. The scenes that are gone were very chatty. It’s a shame [because] people love scenes. I’ve never lost this much, I don’t think I’ve ever lost—I may have lost 10 seconds here and 20 seconds there—but I’ve never lost whole scenes out of a movie before.”
While Troi’s role in the story is not diminished, there were two particular scenes that beefed it up. Both gone.
“There was an initial rape violation, it’s in the trailer, not in the movie,” she says, referring to the oft-shown scene of Troi clasping her hands together in the film’s trailers and television spots. “I understood why it was gone, I didn’t have a problem with it. There’s another scene that’s gone where I’m walking the corridor with Patrick after he’s met Shinzon and realizes that he’s a clone-sort-of-thing; that was a scene where I was counseling him. Obviously, the original script that we shot, the ending was very different from what ended up in the movie. Originally Gates was going be gone, I was going to be gone, Riker’s gone. It was going to be a much bigger split up of the cast. I thought that the script would probably be [ok in length]—because as an actor you don’t add time on for special effects. I didn’t have an idea that it was going to be this long. It was actually last night that Rick said, ‘John wrote a three hour script.’ I thought it would be about two and a quarter hours—I didn’t think it was long—I mean, LORD OF THE RINGS is going to be like, ‘pack and take your own lunch!’ No actor wants to see their scenes gone out of a movie but everyone has lost scenes, not just me and Gates.”
Whether NEMESIS is really the TNG crew’s final journey is up to the great box office of the galaxy. Sirtis says four years is probably too long between films and if there is another she’d like to see it sooner rather than later. But just in case, the actress says she made sure her last day on set was one to remember.
“The last scene I remember was me, Jonathan, Patrick, Brent, Michael Dorn, was when we go into Shinzon’s antechamber thing. I was crying like a baby at the end of the day! Jonathan and Michael, whose last day it was, were like rats out of an aqueduct—they were gone!”
Humor aside, Sirtis insists that the family so central to this picture really extends beyond the 24th century.
“It is actually true and it’s not the BS that you will get from everyone else,” she affirms. “We don’t play pranks but we do have a lot of fun with each other—we’re all very witty—it’s all about verbal interaction. All new directors are on the phone with Rick saying, ‘this is the most undisciplined cast I’ve ever worked with,’ because we are. But they do hopefully realize within a couple of days that we are the most prepared cast also. No one shows up not knowing their lines, well, Michael Dorn—no (laughter)! There have been times where I have been laughing so hard I was literally lying on the floor and people look at you and go ‘this cast is insane.’ We had a director who directed two episodes in the first season and then refused to ever come back!”
The cuts, the struggles and the space suit matter little at the end of the day. Pleased with more to do in STAR TREK NEMESIS, Sirtis sums up her feelings on the matter succinctly and with an air of comical nonchalance.
“Does it work? Am I good in it?” Heads nod affirmatively. “Ok, it works!”
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