Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine were sound stage neighbors

The world of Star Trek is whacky. Not just on-screen but behind it as well. The things you don’t realize or don’t know about really do make things rather interesting and raise far more questions than you really want to ask or answer. That’s how we felt after this past episode of the Delta Flyer’s podcast.

Hosted by Star Trek: Voyager alums Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill, the podcast explores both Wang and McNeill’s time on the show as Harry Kim and Tom Paris respectively. Each episode comes with some backstage conversations, notes, anecdotes, some poetry, and an episode recap.

It was on the Basics Part 2 episode of the Delta Flyers that we found out a fun, yet aggravating tidbit of information; both Voyager and Deep Space Nine were shot next door to one another on Sound Stage 16 (Voyager) and 17 (Deep Space Nine).

Why is this troubling? Think about how easy it would’ve done to do a crossover episode, or have a few for that matter.

Yes, the storyline of Voyager doesn’t seem to allow itself to such a novel idea but that’s where you’d be wrong. After all, the pilot of Voyager literally saw Voyager start at Deep Space Nine. In fact, Quark was one of the first characters Harry Kim ever had to do deal with on camera. In fact, it’s one of the best scenes in the series; as it perfectly sets up Kim (naive) and Paris (cocky) for the rest of the season.

So if the two shows were in such close proximity, why couldn’t they do more crossovers? They could be in the form of flashbacks, holo-programs, doctor visits, and even video calls. Granted, we did get another infamous crossover (kinda) in season five of DS9, with “Doctor Bashir, I presume”, which sees The Doctor’s creator, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman makes an appearance, played by Voyager’s Rober Picardo.

While not every episode needed to have one, it would have been nice to get one at least once a season while both shows were filming.

Oh, what could’ve been.