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	The Void was a plot element that executive producer Brannon Braga considered to be risky. He remarked, "To kick off the season, why not have Voyager hit a region of space that is utterly devoid of anything? It's a dangerous way to start a story, of course." However, Braga also hoped that the region would add a particularly realistic element to the episode. "These are the realities of space travel," he said, "and I hope it adds something of reality to the show. A little more down and dirty, maybe."
	The emptiness of the Void caused some consternation for the visual effects artists. Mitch Suskin remembered, "That certainly had us tearing our hair out [....] The audience can assume that, even though you usually don't see the sun, or whatever is lighting the Voyager, it's obviously being lit by something. When there is nothing there, we have no way to cheat the lighting." Nevertheless, the visual effects artists had to devise a lighting scheme that made the starship Voyager seem as if it was being lit merely by its own lights. Suskin offered, "We went through numerous iterations, with Mojo at Foundation Imaging trying to make that work."
	Prior to the airing of this episode, Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky were both enthusiastic about the installment. Braga referred to it as "a sweeping adventure" and described the issue of Voyager finding itself in the Void as the ship's "greatest predicament yet." Joe Menosky said of the episode, "It gets the season off to a pretty good start [...] and it will have a very interesting coming together at the end." Sometime thereafter, however, Braga and Menosky became considerably less confident of the installment. Braga admitted, "I don't feel that the night aliens and the Malon freighter guys were all that captivating. I liked it, but I wouldn't say it was one of our best." Menosky's disgruntlement with the episode w as more about the effectiveness of Janeway's depression. He complained, "I don't think it was really sold. If you are going to have a big crisis like that, you can't do it in the course of a single episode, wrap it up at the end and make it believable. It was the wrong way to go, and it did not come off particularly well, no excuses. It was just a lot of pieces of different story elements."

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