Episode Behind the Scenes

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A working title of this episode was "Da Vinci's Day Out".
Initially, however, the plot did not include the holographic recreation of Leonardo da Vinci. Despite receiving no credit for contributing to the episode, it was co-executive producer Brannon Braga (one of many persons who added to the writing of the script) who had the idea of reusing the historical character herein; this possibility was inspired by the third season finale "Scorpion", an episode that features the Leonardo hologram and that Braga co-wrote (with Joe Menosky, another writer who worked on this episode). Joe Menosky recalled, "[Freelancer] Jimmy Diggs came in and he pitched something that had to do with the Doctor's portable emitter and a character getting away with it. Because we had liked da Vinci in 'Scorpion,' when Brannon was listening to Jimmy's pitch, he just thought this is a cool way to get da Vinci off the ship and have an adventure. The way we work collaboratively in a situation like that, where there is no real story except 'da Vinci's day out,' we'll sit around and talk about it, all of us as a staff. What could we do here?"
Joe Menosky generally disliked the way in which the story continued to be developed. "This is when the collaborative process collapses [....] I had massive disagreements every step of the way with how this story should go, and I lost the argument every step of the way," Menosky related. "Somebody in the room said, 'How does he get off the ship?' I said, 'That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter how he gets off the ship. That's like a one page or two lines of tech dialogue that you brush off, and you're on to the adventure.' I lost that argument. Everybody said it does matter how he gets off the ship. So we came up with this [....] story for how you get the mobile emitter off the ship [....] [It] drove the rest of the story in utterly the wrong direction. I couldn't argue my way out of it."
For this episode, Joe Menosky used personal knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci's life and surroundings to write about how the historical figure might interpret an alien planet. "I do know late 15th century Italy and da Vinci's life really well," Menosky confidently remarked, "so that every one of his statements is how a late 15th century Renaissance Italian would interpret an alien world."