TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > 11:59 > Behind the Scenes

	This episode was inspired by an undeveloped Q episode for Star Trek: Voyager, thought up by John de Lancie, and was originally to have included a recurring character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. "For awhile [Executive Producer] Brannon [Braga] and I were thinking about doing Janeway's distant ancestor and Q in the year 2000," explained Supervising Producer Joe Menosky. "We also thought about Janeway's distant ancestor and Guinan, and this might have been a Whoopi [Goldberg] episode."
	It was important to the writers that this episode be timely. Said Brannon Braga, "We wanted to do a show dealing with the millennium, before the millennium came. We wanted to tell a story of Captain Janeway's great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, played by Kate Mulgrew [....] It's a story about history, and how history can be misinterpreted."
	When it came time to actually write the installment, the writers attempted to involve no hard science fiction in the episode and opted to include no guest stars from previous episodes. Joe Menosky stated, "Our original inspiration for this was to do an episode where we didn't see Voyager at all. All we saw was Kate Mulgrew playing a distant ancestor [of Kathryn Janeway]. The idea was to tell a quintessentially Star Trek story without any science fiction. I wrote a teleplay, and it was a very painful [script] to write, because our premise wasn't working. We realized that we couldn't tell a story just on Earth without having Voyager to ground us in some way. We ended up doing a third of the episode set on Voyager."
	Joe Menosky, Brannon Braga and director David Livingston found Kate Mulgrew's turn as Shannon O'Donnell to be notably successful. "Kate really loved playing a character that was not herself," Menosky stated. "She plays the founder of the Janeway clan, but she's a very reluctant hero, and a very damaged hero. She walks around with her hands in her pockets, and her head slightly bowed. She's a more withdrawn and vulnerable person than you can ever imagine Janeway being. It was quite nice to see her do that performance." Livingston concurred, "What's wonderful in [the episode] is that Kate plays a totally different character [....] It's a wonderful character study. We cut back and forth between Janeway and Shannon, and you get to see this wonderful contrast between these two." Braga enthused, "It's a real acting tour de force for Kate Mulgrew."
	David Livingston was delighted with Henry Janeway's bookstore in this installment, describing it as "wonderful." He also opined, "The bookstore was phenomenal, one of [Production Designer] Richard James' best sets."
	The exterior of the bookstore was filmed at Paramount. Joe Menosky stated, "David Livingston did it on the New York Street on Paramount lot. They brought in tons and tons of snow and blew it all over the street." Livingston himself remembered, "The production values were great. We shot it on the backlot at Paramount, and made it look like a Midwestern city. It was supposed to be in the winter, and we had snow, and we shot both day and night."
	David Livingston was also pleased with the makeup that Kate Mulgrew wore, in the role of the elderly Shannon O'Donnell. "The makeup looks wonderful on her," the director remarked. "Kate said when she looked in the mirror it scared her, because she looked so much like her grandmother."
	There is a model of the Apollo Lunar Module hanging from the rear-view mirror of Shannon O'Donnell's car. According to the unauthorized reference book Delta Quadrant, this was a commercially available model kit.
	Joe Menosky regretted the decision to exclude science fiction elements from this episode. He related, "Ultimately, to me, it was a lot of domestic scenes, which I am not interested in writing [....] More than anyone, I wish that we had had something of [the hard science fiction] element in to drive the plot. [Executive Producer] Rick Berman called to say he loved it. I just kind of shrugged. You just never know." Conversely, David Livingston expressed his interested reaction to the episode; "The story is really intriguing [....] I hope that the audience and the fans will be intrigued by it."
	According to the book Delta Quadrant, an advertisement for The Planetary Society that aired during this episode's third commercial break involved Robert Picardo, standing on the set of Voyager's sickbay, as he encouraged children to design Mars colonies for one hundred people.