As the series heads into its fourth season, we find out from Rommie herself, Lexa Doig, what changes are coming the crew's way, including the return of some old enemies.
Warship and android, Andromeda serves in a variety of roles on... well, herself. Lexa Doig explains why the now-filming fourth season of her show will thrill viewers old and new... From the time she was a little girl, Lexa Doig wanted to one day become an actress. However, having grown up around a mother who worked as a neurological unit nurse and several of her parents' friends who were also employed in the medical field, the budding actress began to consider another profession. "I thought, 'Okay, I want to be a brain surgeon,' until I realized all the schooling it required," recalls Doig. "I didn't like school very much so I had to come up with something else.
"At one point I toyed with the idea of pursuing a career as a lawyer just because I like to argue," she jokes, "but I ended up wanting to be an actress. I made up my mind one night when my parents took me to see Porgy and Bess. I really wanted to be Porgy and you wouldn't believe the row that took place within my family when my father desperately tried to explain to me why that couldn't be. All I cared about was that Porgy was the smallest character up on stage and I identified with him. Thank God my parents had an abundance of patience."
Little did Doig or her family know that her future included being one of the stars of the hit syndicated Sci-Fi TV series Andromeda. She plays Andromeda, a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence and the heart and soul of the High Guard warship the Andromeda Ascendant. The AI interacts with Captain Dylan Hunt and the rest of the ship's crew through voice, video images and holograms, as well as an avatar christened 'Rommie.' In early spring, the actress, along with the rest of the Andromeda cast and crew, began work on the show's fourth season. On this May afternoon, Doig is at the programme's Vancouver studios for the last day of filming on the episode Double or Nothingness.
"David Winning is back for this story," notes Doig. "He directed us during the show's first two years but he had other commitments when we did our third year, so it's fantastic to be working with him again. Lisa Ryder [Beka Valentine], Laura Bertram [Trance Gemini] and I are having a great deal of fun shooting this episode's B-storyline. Basically, the ship is constantly being hit with an electromagnetic pulse, which has an adverse effect on anything non-organic. So Andromeda is acting kind of strange and one of the things she does is release a hallucinogen into the ship's atmosphere. Of course, Trance isn't affected but Beka gets high. Meanwhile, Rommie keeps passing out.
"I think we had a little too much fun doing those scenes," laughs the actress. "In fact, this week an executive from Tribune called me and said 'I've been watching the dailies'. I thought, 'Oh God, we're going to get yelled at'. I mean, I was doing pratfalls and Lisa was making Faces. He said, 'No, it's all funny. We're going to keep it in'. The episode's main storyline finds Dylan Hunt [Kevin Sorbo] an unwilling participant in a series of mind games, and there are people who are betting on whether or not he'll survive. That's quite serious, so the B-storyline on the Andromeda could afford to be on the lighter side.
"Something I'm pleased about is that the show's writers seem to be making a real effort this season to come up with more scenes involving Beka, Trance and Rommie. That's not an easy thing, though, as they've never really gone to that place before. It's like, 'Okay, so what do they actually talk about?' I don't think Lisa, Laura or I would even know the answer to that. So it would be interesting to find out exactly what that dynamic is. I can easily see our real-life relationships bleeding into our on-screen ones just because we get along so well. For example, Lisa and I share the same bizarre sense of humour and Laura completely gets us. She's the most amazing straight person. Laura is absolutely brilliant at it and is so much fun to play off of."
Prior to Double or Nothingness, Doig and the fellow castmates filmed Andromeda's fourth season opener. "The thing I loved most about working on this episode was that everything was explained," she says. "I thought that is was very funny that the title of the story is Answers Given to Questions Never Asked. I told this to Bob Engels [series head writer and executive producer] and he said to me, 'You've got it [the in-joke]'. I said, 'Absolutely'. What we were talking about was the story synopsis that Bob Engels has started putting at the beginning of every script. When he joined the show last year we had to get used to his writing style. Bob has a very unique style and one I quite enjoy, but it's different from what we were used to. So sometimes you'd be reading a script and think, 'I don't understand this. This needs to be fixed.' What we didn't know was that it was going to be fixed but in a later episode. Now that Bob is including a mini-explanation with each script, we can see the through-line to the story and are better able to understand where it's going. It's a huge leap for those of us who were perhaps asking too many questions or not the right ones.
"Long time viewers will notice in the season opener that the Commonwealth is making a comeback," continues the actress. "The same is true of the Magog, along with other story elements that quite frankly we, or at least I, thought had gone the way of the dodo. I know The Powers That Be didn't care for certain aspects of the series and things were changed. I sort of came to the conclusion that that's how the syndicated TV market works, or at least syndicated Sci-fi However, some of those concepts were ones that we as actors relied on in order to help explain the universe that our characters live in. So it's nice to see that a few of them are being reintroduced back into the mix."
But when it comes to Rommie, the actress has certainly seen her character develop over the past three seasons. "It's been a gradual maturing," muses Doig. "In my opinion, the Rommie from year one is quite different from the one we saw last season. Part of that has to do with me becoming more comfortable in the role as well as my growth as an actress and a human being. I'm sure there are things I'm probably not even aware of that I subconsciously bring to my portrayal of the character.
"Naturally, the challenge every year is to keep Rommie interesting to the viewers. This season we have an entirely new writing staff, except of course for Bob Engels. I'm eager to see how they approach my character. I know the first script was written with Rommie being very robotic in the way she talked in that she didn't use any contractions. I mentioned this to Bob and explained it wasn't the intention that needed to be changed but just how she said things. And he's cool when it comes to suggestions like that. So this season will be a bit of a discovery process for Rommie and me. I've got to tell you that I've read a couple of the scripts by two of our new writers, Larry and Paul Barber, and they're great. They seem to have found the voices of our characters, especially Beka. So it's all looking good. One thing I'm looking forward to this year is going on location. Just wait and see though, Dylan will probably have Rommie stay on board the Andromeda. Oh well, a girl can dream," she says, smiling.
According to the actress, Rommie will be sporting some new outfits this season on Andromeda. "Look at this," says Doig, reaching behind her and taking one of her costumes off its hangar. "It's two pieces. I'm so excited. I get to wear pants on the show!" she enthuses. "Most importantly, that means I can go to the ladies room without having to do yoga in order to get out of my little one-piece jumpsuits. Those outfits will still be around but at least I'll get to alternate every so often. I actually wore this 'new' costume last season in Day of Judgement, Day of Wrath, but they've made some adjustments to is and apparently I'm getting a second one. It doesn't take much to make me happy."
The aforementioned Day of Judgement, Day of Wrath was Doig's favourite third season episode, mainly because it guest starred her boyfriend Michael Shanks and their friend Christopher Judge [Dr Daniel Jackson and Teal'c from Stargate SG-1]. "Unfortunately, I didn't get to work with Chris," says the actress. "In the episode Rommie goes a little bad and takes off. Chris's character happens to be on board the Andromeda at the time, so he takes over as ship's avatar. At one point his character and Michael's get into a fight. When they were getting ready to film the scene, Chris joked, 'What do you mean this skinny little guy is going to beat me up?'
"I know he and Michael enjoyed themselves because they got to play characters completely different from their Stargate roles. Just like in the first Andromeda episode he did [year one's Star-Crossed] Michael was the bad guy, and he loved that, especially as he got to wear leather. He said, 'This is so neat, I get to be a cool-looking guy on this show.' He's used to be the very studious-looking Daniel Jackson on Stargate, so this was a novelty for him. I thought he did an excellent job in the episode. He had a great time chewing up the scenery. Funnily enough, when we were working on the material at home, he said, 'I don't want to go too big with this. I want to keep it real.' I told him, 'You need to go big,' and ultimately he came to the same conclusion. With Sci-fi the storylines are so fantastical that if you try to keep it natural or 'real' it doesn't come across the same way. So Michael just went for it and it worked."
During the recent hiatus after Season Three of Andromeda, Doig appeared with Kate Nelligan in the Canadian-made mini-series Third World. "Kate Nelligan's character was a very heavily right-leaning politician and I played her campaign manager," she explains. "In real life I'm so liberal it's not even funny, so to mentally have to go in the other direction was an interesting acting exercise.
"I really don't have much to do in the mini-series, but I took the job because it was a brilliant script. I also wanted the opportunity to work with Kate Nelligan, who is an incredibly talented actress. It was a terrific experience."
All too soon the actress is called to make-up in preparation to film her last scene of the day. "I'm off to save the universe again," says Doig."It's a tough job but someone has to do it, and I'm glad it's me."