Blass recalls the setup that would see Vadic looking at her ship’s viewscreen from her captain’s chair, and how he and the other showrunners, including chief showrunner Terry Matalas, realized something needed to be made more dramatic. The chair, he recalled, needed to be bigger. Blass said:
“It started out that it was just gonna be a viewscreen shot. And then Terry’s like, when we saw her first day of work, we’re like, ‘Yeah, she’s killing it. We need to make this bigger thing.’ So I worked with her and … Obviously, her father was in [‘Star Trek VI’]. And, he had the chair! ‘Cry “Havoc!” Let loose the dogs of war!’ And we wanted to … give a slight nod to that. But she’s also, like, “I’m trapped in this chair. So I want it to be part of [me].’ She told me how she wanted to sit.”
Note: Blass got his Shakespeare slightly wrong. The line from “Julius Caesar” is “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” Blass also admits he was a fan of Amanda Plummer’s work, saying:
“Amanda Plummer! ‘The Fisher King’ is one of my go-to favorite movies. To work with her! And then she’s just the sweetest, nicest person. And then, all of a sudden, just this attack of Vadic comes out of her. But just getting to work with her, and to make her feel like this chair was something special … we had a lot of fun with that. [… T]hat was a set that we knew that we didn’t have a lot of money to do. So we put in the money and we made a cool chair. And the rest of the set was something different.”
Not every captain gets a full-blown recliner.