TREKCORE > VOY > EPISODES > SCORPION PART I & II > BEHIND THE SCENES > Interview Coverage

	Brannon Braga on 'Scorpion': "For me, [Scorpion] was definitely a defining moment in the series. Seven of Nine came in, it was our first huge two-part episode. We pulled out all the stops. It was a two-parter with a satisfying ending. To me that was a creative turning point - the show started coming into its own. Seven of Nine is interesting. I was sitting at home late one night and I was watching a videotape of one of our episodes. It had a Borg mummy in it or something [Unity]. I just thought, "What if we had a Borg on the ship?!" So I called Joe Menosky and pitched this idea. We talked about what it would mean to have a Borg character. It would be really cool. Then I called Rick Berman. It was late but I was so excited. He liked the idea and had a stroke of genius - make it a Borg babe. We talked about it for a couple of hours and we thought: "This is a cool idea. This could be just the thing we need"
	John Rhys-Davies plays the hologram of Leonardo da Vinci. Rhys-Davis is a Welsh actor well-known in TV and films e.g. as Gimli, son of Glóin, in the film trilogy 'The Lord of the Rings' (2001-3), as Prof. Maximillian P. Arturo in "Sliders" (1995-1997), Challenger in "The Lost World" and its sequel (1992), as Sallah in two Indiana Jones films (1981, 1989), and he appears in the mini-series of two of James Clavell's books "Shogun" (1980), as Vasco Rodriguez, and "Noble House" (1988) as Quillan Gornt. He also plays Macro in the BBC's acclaimed "I, Claudius" TV series (1976) in which Macro murders his superior officer Sejanus, the character played by Patrick Stewart (who plays Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek The Next Generation.)
	Rhys-Davies was a guest at Creation Entertainment's 12th Annual Grand Slam Star Trek convention on 29th March 2004, at which he reminisced fondly about his time on Voyager: "Why, it was great fun, I believe that Kate [Mulgrew] originated the idea of using either Picasso or da Vinci on the show. I was lucky that they chose Leonardo!"
	Alan Sims, the show's properties master, says of "Scorpion, Part I": "There was a mechanical torso, a skeletal wooden structure, that supposedly Leonardo designed. It was just a piece of business on the side, underlaying the conversation between Janeway and himself; but it was a very expensive prop to make: extremely labour-intensive. I and my manufacturer just worked from the description in the script and put it together. It was made up of wooden gears and a wooden structure that looked like a rib-cage, basically from the waist up, and included a mechanical arm. It was driven by remote control, so I had servos and relays and operated it off camera by a radio-control, but it was to look as if it was operated by little weights that Leonardo had created - it had little sandbags as weights on different parts of the unit, so it looked like the weight would start the movement and then the gears inside the torso would move, which in turn would help the arm move up or down. All of the mechanical parts, the gears, were manufactured by a computer process that cut everything. It was a very expensive unit, one of the most expensive I've had. It was a fabulous piece and I was very proud of it."
	The window and surround (i.e. the arch, glass and even the pattern of the glass segments) in da Vinci's studio is the same as used in Janeway's gothic holonovel, in "Cathexis" et al.
	Rick Berman: "I believe the reintroduction of the Borg into [Voyager] had a lot to do with the success of our second film, [First Contact], which was one that was focused purely on the Borg and which introduced us to the character of the Borg Queen. That really was written and produced during the Second Season of [Voyager]. The thought of continuing with the Borg was extremely tempting. By the Third Season of [Voyager], we started bringing that to fruition."
	Jeri Taylor: "The thinking was of course that the Borg were the most phenomenal villains that Star Trek had known to that point, and they had originated in the Delta Quadrant, and we were in the Delta Quadrant, and so it just seemed inevitable that they would eventually encounter them, and they did."
	Rick Berman: "One of the interesting things about the Borg that just by their definition they were able to be anywhere that we went. The same thing with Species 8472, a species that can come out of nowhere through wormhole-like anomalies, subspace this and that, creatures that you can run into in the Second Season or the Seventh Season."
	Jeri Taylor: "Brannon [Braga] is one of those incredibly creative people who's always got his synapses firing way out there on the horizon, and he had wonderful wonderful ideas throughout the whole thing. It would've been impossible to do the series without Brannon, and so that Species was his idea."
	Garrett Wang (Harry Kim): "I like that episode because all of a sudden now you have an enemy which is even more fearful than the Borg, an enemy that can single-handedly take out the Borg, who could that be, you know?! Well, up to that point, I mean, the Borg was the end-all, be-all of all enemies. Nobody could beat them. Well now, you've got these guys. They're from a part of the universe that is fluidic space, what, it's all fluid?! They can survive in our space without any type of life support. So that episode was for me....I loved it. It introduced a new villain. The sci-fi fan in me really enjoyed working on the episode for that. I mean, I wasn't too happy that for most of that episode I was on a biobed with green gloop on my face - who else but Kim needs to be tortured, you know, and in the biobed?! No one else, just Kim!"
	Bryan Fuller, executive story editor, co-producer: "Originally Seven of Nine was coming on as the wild child, raised by the Borg instead of by wolves, and she was being taught to be human again. The assimilation process is a violation, a rape that strips everything you are away from you. Janeway's and Seven of Nine's is a more human relationship, a meatier relationship than even Kirk and Spock. Janeway was trying to save this woman's soul after it has been stripped away by the Borg. That's a big story. It's all very powerful, and it translates better than the Kirk-Spock dynamic. It's a mother trying to save her daughter. It's all about redemption. When Seven came aboard Voyager, the show came into its own. Everything seemed to snap into focus in a way it never had before."
	David Livingston, director of 'Scorpion, Part I': "That was fun, because we got to deal with CGI figures. Star Trek had not always been on the cutting edge of CGI technology. They continued to use real models and shoot motion control shots etc. And when it got to [Scorpion] there was no choice but to create a CGI model. We couldn't do something realistic. The artists and the post-production people created this terrifying creature that you see sort of at the end of [Scorpion]. It was kind of played a little bit like 'Alien', you know. You don't really get a huge look at it, which to me is always the best way to portray these things. You look at them too long and too closely they start to fall apart a bit."
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