Working diligently as a freelance director before The X-Files beckoned, Rob Bowman honed his craft on many TV series (as he discusses in STARLOG #220, now on sale). The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and VR.5 were two recently cancelled series where Bowman weaved his camera magic.

Brisco County, Jr. starred Bruce Campbell as a bounty hunter living in the Old West, in a universe reminiscent of The Wild Wild West. "The opportunity to do that show came from my friend Bryan Spicer, who directed the pilot. He put my name in the hat to direct an episode. It was the Wild Wild West meets It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World!" laughs Bowman.

"Bruce Campbell is certainly one of the most vividly gifted, comically physical actors I've worked with in a long time," grins Bowman. "He has a very funny way way of... you know, it's that Evil Dead thing that he's so good at. That hero with his obsessive drive to overcome and strapping chainsaws to his hands. He's a very funny actor."

From the 1800s, Bowman escaped to the hi-tech, surreal modern world of virtual reality.

"It was incredibly difficult and challenging because I had to work extremely long hours. It's a feature-type of a show. I shot mine in seven and a half days. We don't even do X-Files in that time! It was as difficult if not more than X-Files."

In "Love and Death," Sydney (Lori Singer) uses her high-tech equipment to prod a Committee member to return to work, but in the course of her VR trip, she discovers the man is an assassin, and there's a price to be paid for her discovery.

"Stylistically, it was a real fun show to work on. I got to try many new things, it was a very young crew that was willing to try different things. It was very brave of the producers to hire many breakthrough people to do a very sophisticated show, and what you get is a great look, something that you've not seen on network television before."

Collaborating with Singer, Bowman found a film actress who had very strong ideas. "She definitely has her own opinions about how things should go, and how she should look," notes Bowman. "I respect that. Ultimately we have to come up with what's best for the show, and Lori wanted to throw in her ideas and talk about it and come up with what we thought was right."

David McCallum, who played Sydney's father, was a source of joy for Bowman, who fondly recalled him from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. He found McCallum enthusiastic about working on the show, and willing to be thrown into a water tank for several hours, to film scenes of his character's drowning.

Unfortunately, the show's ratings prompted its cancellation, although fan groups (including a coalition calling itself Virtual Storm) have petitioned Fox to reconsider. Bowman wishes them luck. "Once the network makes a decision like that, it's hard to reverse it. I would like to see it come back. I would like to see the show have a life."

Bowman also directed 12 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Among them was "Q Who?" - which introduces the Borg. They'll return as the antagonists of the next Next Generation feature. "They are the great white sharks of space! That's why they'll outlast the Federation," says Bowman. "The Borg represent all the things that we fear: something unstoppable, unemotional and unresponsive to impulse. They just live and breathe."

Bowman's glad to have helped breathe life into the menace. "I think [writer] Maurice Hurley is the father of the Borg. I can only take credit from executing the script."

"That was a very good episode. It was fun inventing the Borg, coming up with the way the costumes look and the skin color and the hi-tech cyborg skew to them."

Of Star Trek Generations, Rob Bowman says that the 1994 effort is "a movie that I was looking forward to happening, mostly for the cast. It's a show that lends itself to a feature level. I'm happy for them and I hope they make 10 more movies and they continue to be as successful as they've always been."