TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > ENDGAME > Behind the Scenes

	Prior to the writing of this episode, an ultimately undeveloped two-parter was to have seen Voyager apparently return to Earth with a fireworks display, as happens in the first few moments of this installment. However, the vessel was then to have been revealed as a biomimetic duplicate of the actual Voyager.
	Kate Mulgrew was involved in selecting the story choices used in this episode. "I said, 'I think Janeway has to go down with the ship, but not at the full cost of her being,'" Mulgrew recalled. "We had to figure out how to do that." The way in which the writing staff tried to work this idea into the episode was originally somewhat different from how it turned out, involving a concept that went on to be cannibalized for the two-parter "Unimatrix Zero" and "Unimatrix Zero, Part II". About this idea, writing staffer Bryan Fuller recalled, "[It] had Janeway, in a bold move, allowing Voyager and its crew to be assimilated. That would become a poison pill for the Borg. As we were assimilating the Borg ship from the inside, and re-assimilating ourselves, we would use a Borg trans-warp conduit to get back home. The idea was this great final image of the Borg armada approaching Earth, and then out of the belly of the beast of the lead ship came Voyager, destroying all of the other Borg in its trail. It felt like an epic conclusion to Janeway's journey with the Borg, and freeing Seven of Nine. That got abandoned somewhere along the road." This episode marked not only Fuller's final Star Trek contributions but also those of fellow writer-producers Kenneth Biller, Robert Doherty and Michael Taylor. Mulgrew's idea that Janeway make a partial sacrifice, to save Voyager, in this installment led to the concept of Admiral Janeway making such a sacrifice whereas the usual version of the character persisted.
	Kate Mulgrew enjoyed this episode. She said, "The sharp edges of loneliness, I think, were very much in play for Janeway [generally]. And that made the ultimate sacrifice that much more delicious. The admiral sacrificed her life so that the captain could persevere. That's who I really was as Janeway [....] I was very proud of 'Endgame', partly because I had a hand in the choices, the story. I loved it. There's no way you're going to satisfy everyone after a seven-year investment. How can you? There's no way. You can't do it. It's heartbreaking, an ending of any kind. But I thought our finale was a pretty good way to say goodbye." Of how Janeway's sacrifice was finally executed in the script, Mulgrew also noted, "I thought it was splendid." Mulgrew's most lasting memories from the final days of filming were "mostly how hard it was to say goodbye." Towards the end of the shooting period, she recalled some very memorable advice which Patrick Stewart had given to her in the first week of production on Voyager's first season. "He said, 'If you do this well and approach it with vigor and discipline, this will be the work that will make you the proudest of any work you will do.' And that's exactly how I felt the last days, with tears running down my cheeks [....] I remember thinking how foolish human beings are. We think it's long, but it's nothing. It's a moment. I was very proud."
	Whereas Susanna Thompson had previously portrayed the Borg Queen on Voyager, this episode features a return of Alice Krige to the role, she having originally established the part in the film Star Trek: First Contact. "When they asked me to do the finale," Krige explained, " I believe it was because Susanna was doing something else. I was very happy to go back and join everyone."
	With numerous years having passed between the production of First Contact and her work on this episode, Alice Krige found that appearing in this installment vastly differed from her previous Star Trek appearance. The amount of difference actually led Krige to unexpectedly become panic stricken, very shortly before reprising the role of the Borg Queen. "It was very different in that this time (on Voyager) I was actually working with two women (Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan)," she said. "There's a very different energy to that; delightful and just as interesting and just as challenging, but quite different." Krige also stated, "I was thinking, 'Oh goodness. That kind of sexual tension that existed between Data and the Borg Queen, and indeed Picard and the Borg Queen, I am now doing it with two women!' I called one of the producers and said, 'Now what?' And the producer, with good insight, said, 'Don't worry. Just think of the Borg Queen as omni-sexual.' Well, it just became very interesting. The thing about the Borg Queen, Data, and Picard is it's all about power. There really was no reason why she wouldn't use the same energy on Seven of Nine, to manipulate her. With Janeway, it was too fairly formidable opponents coming up against each other."
	Alice Krige purposely limited the ways in which she prepared for this episode, reviewing neither her own work on First Contact nor any of Susanna Thompson's portrayal of the same character. This choice was not motivated out of any sort of disrespect for Thompson, having nothing at all to do with the actress. Krige speculated, "Whoever had played the role, I would have made the same decision." [5] Explaining why she made the choice, Krige conceded, "I thought to see someone else's performance would throw me off course. It was already going to be fairly different because it was the Borg Queen with two females, as opposed to the Borg Queen with two males [....] I just felt it wouldn't help the process." She also related, "I didn't want something in my head, in my imagination. I needed my performance to happen in the moment." Krige did, however, request to receive and read all the Voyager scripts featuring the Borg Queen, including the new teleplay for "Endgame". She indeed read the scripts, despite not watching any of the episodes.
	Admiral Paris actor Richard Herd admitted that his "only frustration with Voyager" was with the conclusion of this episode. He went on to explain, "I was hoping [...] when I finally had a chance to see my son, that we’d have had a few sentences. I was hoping to say, 'It’s been so long' or 'Welcome home, son.' But we never had that opportunity to talk, just to stare at each other. When I was looking at him, all I was doing was looking at a piece of masking tape on the wall that they could match with Robbie’s eyeline. But it worked."
	Robert Beltran, a noted critic of the writing and characterizations on the show, had several gripes about the final episode. He complained that the episode was written with a lack of care, too quickly wrapping up some well-established story arcs. Additionally, Beltran theorized that the episode was written out of frustration over Voyager's audience ratings, stating about the writers, "They took it out on us by saying, 'This show's no good. Let's get it over with as quickly as possible so we can fix it for the next one.'" Beltran also rhetorically asked about the installment, "This is what we're going out with?" and claimed the episode made him feel vindicated about his belief that the writers were "idiots," saying it was unfortunate that the fans were "going to have to sit through it."
	Garrett Wang had mixed feelings about this feature-length episode. "I think the first hour of the finale was fantastic, very exciting, well written, good pacing," he commented. "Everything was great about the first hour, but then the second hour it just seemed like it tied up all of the loose ends very quickly. So, the second half of the finale I was not happy about, and I especially didn't like the fact that we ended the series in Earth's orbit. We don't even step foot on Earth. Hello! After seven years, I think the fans wanted to see us actually step foot on terra firma." Wang went on to say that, if he had been running Star Trek: Voyager, he would have kept the series finale's first half exactly as it is but ended the series with a caption reading, "To be continued at a theater near you," an advertisement for a two-hour Voyager movie that he would then have done. In addition, Wang once commented that the series finale of Voyager should have included his character of Ensign Kim having a passionate affair with Captain Janeway.
	This series finale had the same director as the series finales of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise, Allan Kroeker. This was also the final Star Trek episode that Production Designer Richard James worked on.
	It was the night before Alice Krige began to be involved in this installment's production, as she was preparing for her scenes, when she suddenly became worried about the differences between the Borg Queen's pair of adversarial relationships in First Contact compared to those herein. Krige thereafter found that her part in this episode's filming schedule was "very intense," later reporting, "We filmed my work on Voyager on two very, very long days, because I had to fly to England to start another project. We did two 20-hour days." Krige was delighted that this episode, however, reunited her with several Star Trek production staffers. "What was lovely was there were members of the First Contact crew," she reminisced, "who were either on the lot, working on other things, or who were on Voyager, and everyone came in to say hello. That was lovely."
	While speaking with Scott Bakula during a panel at DragonCon 2010, Garrett Wang recalled that – during production of the final scene of "Endgame" (and of the series) – Kate Mulgrew was in a bad mood, which set the tone for all the actors on the set and made the entire cast's energy level go down. Also, during the filming of reaction shots on the bridge when Voyager arrived at Earth, Wang made the choice to cry as an expression of Harry Kim's joy at returning home but his reaction shot was moved to the announcement of Miral Paris' birth, an editing arrangement Wang was not pleased with.
	Robert Duncan McNeill regretted that some of the main cast were absent for the end of production. He remembered, "The last day of shooting on that episode was very bittersweet because our entire cast wasn't there [....] So on that final day of Voyager there were only a few of us left because the rest of the cast had already shot their final scenes. I wish we had had the chance on that last day, or even with the last scene, to have scheduled it in such a way so that all the actors could have been there."
	Shortly after the filming of this episode, the standing sets for the interiors of the starship Voyager were disassembled. Michael and Denise Okuda witnessed the engineering set stripped to its skeletal frame, which had been standing ever since Star Trek: Phase II.