Episode Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > VOY > MORTAL COIL > Behind the Scenes

This episode takes its name from part of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet: "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause..."
This episode underwent numerous rewrites. Although the episode does not credit her for her work, freelance writer Kathy Hankinson pitched the premise that would eventually develop into this installment. Her original idea involved a death fetishist with an immortal, regenerating body who, merely for fun, repeatedly fooled The Doctor into killing him. The members of Star Trek: Voyager's writing staff immediately found this plot concept appealing, thinking it was "interesting" and "weird." They subsequently began to contemplate its primary theme of death, wondering both how they could do an unusual spin on a near-death experience and exactly how the revived person would be brought back to life.
The writing staff then came up with the idea of having Borg technology be the revival method. Co-executive producer Brannon Braga said of the episode, "It started off broad, bringing back the dead using Borg technology."

The writing staff also initially decided that the main character would be Ensign Samantha Wildman. Staff writer Bryan Fuller remembered, "We were going to do this Pet Sematary episode where Ensign Wildman goes on a shuttle mission and dies, and Seven of Nine brings her back to life using Borg technology, except that now she's 'zombie mom.' She's not all there. Wildman's more connected with death than life, and her only link to life is through her daughter. She wants to kill her daughter, though, to bring her back to 'life' so she can share that experience with her. Really a creepy, morbid story! I thought, 'This is going to be so much fun to write. There has been nothing on Star Trek remotely like that, ever.' So we broke the story, and everybody was pretty happy about it."

This early version of the story was ultimately deemed to be too extreme, however. While Bryan Fuller was working on the script over a weekend and was about halfway through the scripting process, he received a call from Brannon Braga, who told Fuller to stop working on the script and relayed news to him that executive producer Rick Berman as well as Paramount Pictures studio executives didn't like the story; they had objected because they didn't want to see a young mother die and try to kill her own daughter. "I can understand why," Bryan Fuller remarked, "but now we have to re-examine how to tell the story. I was already halfway through it, and time was short."
The writing staff subsequently re-broke the story, at which time it was decided that Chakotay would be the person who was revived from death, influencing him to subsequently question his Native American beliefs. Bryan Fuller thereafter started to write this revised version of the story. After he spent four days of working on the rewrite, he again received a call to stop working on the script. He explained, "They decided to stay away from Native American spirituality. Plus, afterlife beliefs tend to be very paganistic and materialistic, and many Native American cultures frown on it. They think it's tasteless, because it becomes very prideful and egocentric." As a result of the producers' objections, the story's main character finally changed to being Neelix.

Brannon Braga and staff writer Joe Menosky eventually worked on the rewrite. Menosky noted, "Brannon and I did rewriting on it, but Bryan did a really, really nice first draft."
At one point of this episode, Seven of Nine describes the Kazon as having been rejected for possible assimilation by the Borg, on the grounds that they would have "detracted from perfection. "This may or may not be an in-joke by the producers, based on comments made by Jeri Taylor that she had never really liked the Kazon as a major enemy for Voyager, and regretted having used them so heavily in the first two seasons. However, the Borg's view of the Kazon does contradict a statement made by Locutus of Borg in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II", that the Borg "only wish to raise quality of life, for all species."
The final draft of this episode's script was submitted on 17 September 1997.