Episode Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > HOPE AND FEAR > Behind the Scenes

Much consideration went into deciding what the finale of Star Trek: Voyager's fourth season would be. Executive story editor Lisa Klink remembered that the series' writing staff "talked about the story a lot! We [went] [...] through lots and lots of different ideas and different feelings about what kind of note we wanted to end the season on." One of the earliest ideas for the installment – as devised by co-executive producer Brannon Braga and producer Joe Menosky – involved biomimetic lifeforms (aliens ultimately established in Season 4's "Demon" and the fifth season outing "Course: Oblivion") being welcomed to the Alpha Quadrant in the guise of Voyager's crew.
The ultimately-used storyline for this episode reuses the concept of ship-generated slipstreams, that idea having temporarily been considered for the third season finale "Scorpion". "I knew the slipstream idea would come in handy someday," Brannon Braga noted.

Early in the story's development, Braga began to invent the USS Dauntless, conceiving of it as an unnamed, bullet-shaped and highly advanced craft. He also envisioned a clash between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine. Joe Menosky recalled, "Brannon had an image of Seven at the helm of one ship, Janeway at the helm of the other, and them heading toward each other at breakneck speed, as if we were going to bring to a culmination the character arc that had been established between them [...] – the struggle, and Seven finding her identity, but it being not at all the identity that Janeway would have preferred. This was supposed to be an exploration of that."
Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky wrote some of their thoughts into a preliminary beat sheet that was deliberately open-ended, offering scene ideas for only the first two of the episode's five acts. It began with a teaser that was an extremely accurate description of the episode's eventual teaser, though the holographic game played by Janeway and Seven – establishing, in the episode, the conflict between them – was (in common with the installment itself) not yet named. The first two scenes in the first act were also similar to how they ended up, one of the differences being that Chakotay was absent from the second scene. As the character of Arturis had yet not been invented, the key for deciphering the transmission was a frustrated Janeway spilling, during the second scene of the first act, coffee on her desk. She hurried to Astrometrics, rousing Torres, Kim and Seven, to whom she then relayed her revelation: using a "fluid" decryption algorithm. The team excitedly got to work. As Seven was curious how spilled coffee had inspired her, Janeway gave Seven another quick lesson on intuition (much like the one in the teaser). Next, Starfleet's message finally played, notifying the crew about slipstreaming. Seven warned that all contact had been lost with every Borg cube that had ever tried to use it. Janeway nonetheless chose to risk using it, accentuating the tension between herself and Seven. The second act featured the crew modifying Voyager for the mode of travel and accessing the nearest slipstream, only to find it was "some kind of intergalactic highway" on which being on Voyager seemed so antiquated as to feel akin to "driving a horse and buggy."
The beat sheet submitted two main possibilities for the rest of the story. In the first, Seven suffered a seizure and The Doctor realized she was unable to survive in the slipstream. Though Seven was willing to forfeit her own life to enable Voyager's crew to proceed, Janeway was insistent on saving her entire crew, a judgment that Seven disputed. The beat sheet criticized this possibility by saying it "feels a little like 'One'." In the other possibility, Voyager was attacked by an alien ship, indigenous to the slipstream and occupied by a crew that regarded the newcomers as trespassers. A brief battle ensued, at slipstream speeds (a similar sequence having temporarily been considered for "Scorpion"). Voyager captured the enemy craft, whose alien crew abandoned it. Since Voyager was unable to remain in the slipstream any longer, Seven suggested that the Starfleet crew proceed in the other ship. The conflict between her and Janeway was ignited, Seven herself eventually taking command of the alien vessel. The beat sheet proposed that something would go wrong in the final act, with the two women coming face-to-face in a risky situation but Janeway being proven right, beating Seven at their "game" once more. The beat sheet noted of the second option, "There's a lot to figure out here!"
On 2 February 1998, a story break session regarding the season finale was held. Even by the time the meeting began (at 9:30 a.m.), the writing staff was still generally unsure about the season finale. "We didn't have any clear vision of what we wanted to do," reflected Jeri Taylor, whose office served as the meeting point. "It was a most unusual situation, something that had never really occurred before." Hence, the story break session began with discussion, for two hours and twenty minutes, about alternatives for the season finale, such as the never-developed plot involving biomimetic lifeforms.  "We were feeling the time crunch," Jeri Taylor noted, "and we were madly scrambling to come up with something else."
Following this, the group started to consider the beat sheet, with suggestions about the nature of Janeway and Seven's holographic game. The next subject was whether Seven would actually commandeer an alien ship, as proposed in the second offered continuation. Brannon Braga and producer Kenneth Biller agreed that Seven would, by this point in the series, consider herself to be a better captain than Janeway but Braga admitted that he didn't really like the thought of Seven departing alone, despite the fact he had been the one who had devised this possibility. Ken Biller wondered who might follow her, if she did take over the craft. The topic then changed to the identity of the alien menace, who was referred to as one male rather than the group that appeared in the beat sheet. After Biller started to contemplate what the alien's motive might be (suggesting he might want information on Voyager), Jeri Taylor suggested vengeance, much to the approval of everyone in the room. "Up to that point," Taylor remarked, "the ideas about this character's motivation were very intellectual. They were in the head, and to me, that's dull [....] Revenge is a visceral, emotional, hot-blooded kind of motivation that makes drama pop. That's what made Brannon and everyone else respond. So we began looking around for 'What was the revenge for?'" Still searching for an answer to this question by 11:45 a.m., the staff departed for lunch.
Around this point, Brannon Braga sought advice from executive producer Rick Berman, as the chemistry in Jeri Taylor's office hadn't seemed to be working. "There wasn't a real strong direction in that room. It was kind of all over the place," Braga related. "So I met with Rick and he really helped put things into perspective." Owing to Braga's absence, however, Taylor found him difficult to track down and the break session was not reconvened until after he returned.
Although the alien was still referred to as "Yoda" in the second-act notes, the character became much younger than first conceived, during the episode's development. "There was never a decision to make him younger; he simply evolved that way," clarified Jeri Taylor.
Frustrated with the break sessions, Brannon Braga decided to take the notes on the episode back to his office and continue to craft the story there. He later commented, "It was really the first time we'd hit a wall all season. We had some difficult episodes this year, but it was the first time we just totally short-circuited. It was the end of the season; everyone was tired. But we knew we had to do something special [....] And I realized that there were too many voices in the room. I just needed to sort through what I thought the end of the season should be about [....] We had the first couple of acts down. But we couldn't figure out where to go from there. It was just figuring out how we would tell it."
In the early hours of the morning on 4 February 1998, a solitary Brannon Braga was able to concentrate more on what he wanted the episode to involve. "I wanted it to be a bittersweet retrospective of Season Four," he said, "and yet a good action story." Braga additionally remembered, "We thought it would be nice to do a show that reflected on the year. We knew we had a strong year, and wanted to do an episode that had some repercussions from the previous year, [and] dealt with some of the themes that year had introduced."
Another of Brannon Braga's aims was that the installment would show "consequences to Janeway's making a deal with the Borg, and to bringing in Seven of Nine." Thus, Braga introduced the concept that the alien's quest for justice was not against Seven, but was targeted at Janeway for having forged an alliance with the Borg at about the start of the season.
Brannon Braga sensed a leap was made while working out the structure of the episode with Joe Menosky, over the telephone. "Our breakthrough was when we decided that Janeway and Seven shouldn't be on different ships fighting each other," Braga explained. "That's artificial. We were straining to do something that never would be believable. They should be working together." In this way, Menosky felt that Braga achieved another objective of his, making the episode less of an exploration of Janeway and Seven's discord. "It ended up being something that was more a recap of that, and a summing-up of the season in a strange sort of way," Menosky opined, "revisiting that dynamic between them but not forcing it so dramatically and obviously out into the open."
Brannon Braga perceived that the development of co-operation between Janeway and Seven inspired some additional story material for the episode. "After that, we just came up with ideas left and right," he observed. One of the newly conceived concepts formed the basis of the scene that involves the pair of characters escaping imprisonment via Seven's Borg implants. "They would have to get close. Janeway would have to [...] touch Seven. We liked that image," Braga offered.
The writing staffers took the rare decision for the season-ending story to be in the form of a stand-alone episode. Jeri Taylor remarked that the story didn't "deserve" to be a two-parter or a cliff-hanger and went on to say, "We had something that probably could have been pushed, shoved, stretched, folded, mutilated and turned into a cliff-hanger, but that's just not the way we like to tell stories." Brannon Braga concurred, "We didn't have a show that demanded a cliffhanger."He stated further, "[Doing] a cliff-hanger [...] felt obligatory [....] Instead we had a stand alone story that kind of reflected on the year."

Joe Menosky remembered that another reason why the episode was not forced into becoming a two-parter was that the writing staff tried to avoid doing too many of them in the course of the series. Similarly, Braga said that the decision was made "to mix things up a little bit" and expressed that there was a fear that the episode, if done as the first half of a duology, would not be able to outdo the year's previous two-parters. The decision to have the season finale be a stand-alone episode was welcomed by Paramount Pictures. "The studio called and said, 'If you don't want to do a cliffhanger, we don't mind,'" recalled Menosky. "They weren't pushing for a big two-parter and a big cliffhanger."
The fact that this episode required only one main guest star, to play the role of Arturis, was a budget-saving measure.
Having been absent from the series during its first three seasons, Seven of Nine actress Jeri Ryan was (initially, at least) under the mistaken impression that this episode was the first Star Trek: Voyager season finale to not be a cliffhanger. Ryan liked the installment, partly owing to the fact this season finale is a stand-alone episode. "The season was wrapped up reasonably well at the end of the episode," Ryan stated. "It brought the relationship between Janeway and Seven full circle [....] It was an interesting show because the crew's hopes were raised so high that they'd get home and then they were dashed again." Further praising the episode, she said, "It's just a big, good episode, with a lot of sort of storyline development and a lot of nice character development as well, which is interesting."
Jeri Ryan believed that Seven of Nine seems puerile in this installment. "This is Seven experiencing a lot of growing pains – 'cause emotionally, she's a child, still – and this is her sort of hitting her pre-teen years," the actress opined, with a laugh, "And not really knowing where she belongs." Just before filming a scene of this episode, Ryan observed, "The relationship between Seven and Janeway has developed into the mother and the unruly teenager [....] Now in the final episode [of the season] I think she's sort of the 13-year-old who doesn't really fit in anywhere, doesn't know where she belongs and is impudent, and acting out and lashing out at Mom."
Janeway actress Kate Mulgrew likened the crew's gradual decryption of the Starfleet message to "a very complicated treasure hunt," (echoing Janeway and Chakotay referencing the transmission as "treasure") and felt that her character's suspicions regarding Arturis gave her a chance to show she was "not the captain for nothing." Summing up her opinion of the installment, Mulgrew stated, "I think it's a very good resolution to what's gone on, all season."
Exemplifying how she typically analyzed character actions and motivations, Kate Mulgrew talked, during production, about Janeway's appeal to Arturis in their final moments together; "The Voyager crew is under duress here. If the captain shows any kind of hesitation under those circumstances, she could lose her support. So there's an action–the action is to 'get out,' right? To save myself. There's an obstacle–the obstacle is 'the guy'–and he's giving me the reasons that he's going to kill me. There's an objective–the objective is to 'make him understand that I did the only thing I could do when I sided with the Borg.'"
Visual effects supervisor Ronald B. Moore was impressed by the acting of Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan in the episode's teaser. "Both Kate and Jeri were just marvelous," Moore enthused. "They did a perfect job with it [....] I think this scene is some of the best interplay we have between Janeway and Seven. The look of Seven's face at the end of the teaser when she gets hit with this disk is priceless."
Prior to appearing in this season finale, Torres actress Roxann Dawson had hoped – in November 1997 – that her pregnancy in the fourth season would not cause her to miss any of the season's final episodes. Dawson had also made an unused suggestion about the content of the data stream featured here.
Since she had departed the series in the second episode of season four, this was the first season finale not to feature Jennifer Lien as Kes.