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even just casually looking up Roxann Dawson directing Star Trek episodes in the late 90s/early 00s brings up interesting pictures

directing Ethan Phillips and Tim Russ for the Star Trek: Voyager season 6 episodes “Riddles”, her first Trek credit as a director. The episode aired on November 1999. (Images taken from this tumblr post, which I believe are sourced from the Voyager DVD extras)

directing Star Trek Enterprise “The Andorian Incident” (with I think Jeffrey Combs), the first of ten directorial credits on the show, August 2001 (image taken from Memory Alpha)

directing Star Trek: Enterprise “Vox Sola”, likely in January 2002 (first image taken from Memory Alpha, the second one is a screenshot I took of this video that I believe was part the Enterprise DVD extras)

directing Connor Trinneer and Scott Bakula for Star Trek: Enterprise “Dawn”, which aired in January 2003 (first image taken from Memory Alpha and the second one from this tumblr post)

directing Star Trek: Enterprise “Exile”, which aired in October 2003 (Image taken from this tumblr post)

directing Star Trek: Enterprise “Chosen Realm”, together with Director of Photography Marvin Rush, October 2003 (Image taken from Memory Alpha)

#shes literally soooooo #teehee

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Thinking about how in the Naked Time, both Kirk and Spock admit to being lonely. Kirk knows that as captain he can't date or marry anyone on the Enterprise and Spock as a Vulcan doesn't feel like he can form friendships at all, "when I feel friendship for you I am ashamed." and Kirk saying, "I've always known I'll die alone" in the Final Frontier. And Spock dying on the other side of an impenetrable barrier to Kirk, reaching out but not touching. And Kirk going through hell to bring him back to life, always saying he's married to the Enterprise and he doesn't need a woman but blowing the whole ship up for Spock, the first person Spock recognises being Kirk. And what if I just killed myself.

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Roxann and Garrett’s panel at Fedcon 2014 in which they:

Curtsy

Tell the story of when Tim Russ farted and the set had to be evacuated (x)

Discussed physical fitness

Look too cute.

Again, many thanks to gloriousunderstanding for providing the video!

#my harrylanna heart 🥺🥺🥺🥺

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Look. At. Her. Arms.

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Star Trek Deep Space Nine 6.16 | Change of Heart

#PREEEEVVVVVVVV

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i’m watching the decon gel self-massage scene from bounty and had to pause to look up which pervy director was responsible for these lingering close-ups of t’pol sliding her fingers under the edge of her underwear and it was. roxann dawson.

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love b'elanna's maneuvering around deference and authority. where she definitely means it. but you get the sense it's not so much about the person but the structures of authority. she's an engineer forced to be creative within the severe limitations of the "stranded" condition. and it's almost like she might prefer that. to operate within a structure. to pull out amazing feats in metered verse. to have a role.

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I've been crediting the way Chakotay dismisses B'Elanna's vision in “Barge of the Dead” mostly to the events of “The Fight” and how Chakotay was (understandably) afraid of the barrage of images from the depths of his mind, and how this fed into the fears he has about his grandfather's condition and his own predisposition to it. As a result, he is more diffident about helping other people assigning meaning to their visions, not trusting himself as he used to any longer. After rewatching “Mortal Coil” though I think Chakotay is, also understandably, very wary of validating anyone's mystical experiences (or lack thereof) surrounding death, because one such experience very nearly brought Neelix to suicide and Chakotay almost didn't realize it in time. The way B'Elanna's talks about her own vision can't not recall what Neelix went through, in Chakotay's mind; B'Elanna almost died, and now she feels like she needs to die again. Add to this the history B'Elanna has with self-harm and unnecessary risk-taking behavior from “Extreme Risk”, a history that Chakotay knows all too well, and his mind is made up. He cannot allow this to happen on his watch, especially not to B'Elanna, so he dismisses her recollection of the vision, he downplays it even if it comes across as him not accepting B'Elanna's culturally-informed perspective on her own experiences. In short, I think a mix of fear and guilt is what makes Chakotay unable to appreciate the difference between Neelix' nihilism and his loss of purpose and B'Elanna's longing for meaning and closure through ritual.

I don't think the Voyager writers thought this through as much as I am here, mind you. They likely just had Chakotay play the 'voice of reason' because they couldn't have Janeway doing it, or the parallelism between B'Elanna finding peace with (the memory of) her mother and B'Elanna's acceptance of Janeway's trust would have collapsed, making the episode less incisive. (We can also talk about how yet again the show paints Janeway as a mother figure, in my opinion the lowest-hanging fruit possible, but I digress.) That it sort of contradicts Chakotay's pre-established characterization and background was likely not a big consideration, which is unfortunate. However if we don't take the 'reset button' for granted, this behavior from Chakotay can be taken a sign of the way he changed throughout the show, even it's sort of negative character development. He's more afraid, and more rigid in his understanding of others than at the beginning of the journey, especially when it comes to B'Elanna. The years of survival on Voyager have taken a toll on him. I obviously still think he was wrong to dismiss B'Elanna and that the show needed to handle that conversation between them with a lot more care for both characters, but keeping “Mortal Coil” and “Extreme Risk” in mind definitely helps with lessening the sting of a scene that otherwise seems to come out of nowhere.

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hehehaha

#IT THEMMMMMMMM

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Star Trek: Voyager Bliss

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also really interesting to me the way that everyone is always like 'b'elanna you should embrace your heritage more' 'b'elanna why don't you like being klingon' 'come on these three fun facts we learned about your culture make it seem so cool' until she says hey i have to induce a coma so i can enter my people's afterlife and save my mother. and then they say woah there we meant you should learn some drinking songs or wear fur more often not this crazy shit. like yeah putting yourself at risk of death may seem a little extreme but klingon culture is always extreme! fundamentally klingon culture as it stands in the 24th century is incompatible with a lot of federation values and morality, which makes it very interesting but also very difficult for starfleet officers to accept anything but a heavily diluted version of it and i don't think that some of the voyager crew realised until this episode that encouraging b'elanna to accept her heritage might mean her doing things they can neither accept nor rationalise.

it's one thing to tell her she's wrong and that they wouldn't reject her for being klingon and another thing to confront a cultural obsession with death.

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the voyager crew's condemnation of b'elanna's actions in barge of the dead is really interestingly similar to the enterprise crew's condemnation of the Hegh'bat in ethics and the ds9 crew's in the sons of mogh. there have been several notable occasions when klingon values demand that a character kill someone else, and those ruffle some feathers but are ultimately allowed, whereas in these three instances the idea of suicide according to klingon culture is met (initially) with a hard No. i think the only reason they allow b'elanna to induce a coma and return to the barge of the dead is that she doesn't want to Die, just induce a death-like state that the emh can resuscitate her from, unlike worf or kurn requesting to be flat out killed and being flat out denied.

to clarify, i'm not trying to say that anyone on next gen or ds9 was necessarily wrong for how they reacted to these situations, and i'm not trying to weigh in on any kind of debate about the topic of assisted suicide itself -- i'm more interested in the fact that the desire for vengeance, like jadzia's in blood oath or worf's in reunion, is a much more easily accepted example of culture demanding death. i think that the human/non-klingon crew are more ready to understand the desire to kill someone who's done bad things and hurt innocent people because it's a desire they've, if not felt, then at least considered before, the aspect of klingon culture isn't so important because they can fundamentally relate -- but the desire to die in the name of values they don't understand or place equivalent importance on is significantly more foreign, they don't relate, they see it as alien. that's the desire that gets equated to lunacy, despite coming from the same place culturally as the need for vengeance. it isn't necessarily that one is more morally acceptable than the other, that's impossible to objectively judge, but the fact that one is less foreign and more explicable in human terms. the other is an uncomfortable reminder that klingon culture, the culture of crewmates, friends, partners -- is, ironically, alien.

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4x12 “Mortal Coil”/7x02 “Imperfection”

I did not realize until now that in “Imperfection” Seven was essentially repeating to B'Elanna something she had already told Tuvok on “Mortal Coil”, but with the exact opposite sentiment. I cannot imagine a more effective way to show how much she's changed in those four years as a liberated former drone, and how differently she sees her time in the Collective.

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I genuinely wonder why the Voyager writers consistently wrote Seven as being obsessed with B’Elanna and Tom’s relationship. As far as I can remember, she never shows the same amount of interest in anyone else’s relationships. What was the thought process there? Because I have trouble reading it as anything other than Seven having a crush on B’Elanna and being jealous…

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This bit of dialogue from “Scientific Method”... I know that they're mostly just joking here and it ends with them reaffirming that their attraction is real, but. This is a wild conversation to have on what pretty much is their first ‘official date’. “What if it was the aliens doing medical tests on the crew that made us so horny for each other?” okay Tom? Why are you bringing this up out of nowhere?? I also love how B'Elanna's first thought is 'uh maybe the aliens were there for months'. What??? And the fact is, there is the suggestion at the very beginning of the episode that they were being observed by the aliens doing experiments, specifically while they were together!!

I don't know man, I understand that getting emotionally close with the person you've been having sex with all around the ship is kind of awkward, and that being with someone new can be disorienting but this is uh... a lot to take in. It's hard for me to not look the questions they're asking each other as something they've been considering on their own, consciously or not, and the episode actually does very little to dispel the notion that they've been manipulated to get at this point. It matters, obviously, that left to their own devices they decide to pursue the relationship anyway, but the question of what would've happened without outside interference remains.

(And for someone like me who is interested in the theory that B'Elanna might be closeted in the show, this bit of dialogue is especially noteworthy, and it fits into a pattern of her attraction to men being shown pretty much only when alien interference is involved.)

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good job team

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everything reminds me of them

#seven of nine