Episode Behind the Scenes

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The idea of an episode about The Doctor's holo-imager was conceived by intern Eileen Connors. This thought was added to by Brannon Braga, who came up with the concept of a "latent image" holding the key to something secretive in The Doctor's past.
While writing the episode's teleplay, Joe Menosky – who wanted the episode to have "some kind of dramatic resolution" – struggled with the scripting of the conclusion. Menosky recalled the original version: "Janeway is holding this vigil, and because of her exhaustion, she just drifts off to sleep. [The Doctor] has something dark and sad and also moving to say. He looks up and she's asleep. He gets up, picks up the book and he reads a little, end of story." Extremely uncomfortable with this version of the final scene, Brannon Braga made changes to it. Menosky commented, "He just cut out a bunch of dialogue. He restructured certain things [....] In the newer version, despite the fact that 90% of the dialogue is there, the structure of the scene was different. [Janeway] ends up leaving." The used edit of the ending was not selected until later in the installment's evolution.
It was Joe Menosky who first informed Robert Picardo, the actor of The Doctor, about this episode. Picardo recalled, "He first told me about the script saying, 'I'm working on something where The Doctor basically discovers he has a soul.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, The Doctor has to make a 'Sophie's Choice'."
Robert Picardo was delighted with this episode, citing it as "perhaps my favorite show, dramatically" and expressing his reasons for liking it so much as "because it was so different [...] and I love the writing in [it]."

The actor additionally enthused, "I was proud of that show. I thought it was a great idea to have The Doctor's adaptive programming double-cross him, so to speak [....] That he would relive [a strictly objective] moment of decision over and over again, and torture himself with the guilt of having saved one of two equally injured people because of a personal relationship, was a great concept for an episode."

A particular scene that delighted Picardo was the one in which The Doctor changes from conversing with Neelix in the mess hall to questioning, aloud, his reasoning for "killing" Jetal. "I think it's as nice a dramatic moment as I've had on the show," enthused Picardo.

 Another of his favorite scenes from the installment was the final version of its conclusion. "In trying to reconcile those feelings [of tragedy and guilt or doubt about choices], people create art, which is why I love the last scene. I think it had a very unusual ending for one of our episodes. The poem [that The Doctor reads, from the book La Vita Nuova] says something like, 'Here begins a new life.' I think it worked on two different levels. The poem was suggesting how, having had this experience, the rest of The Doctor's 'life' would be changed. The other level is that, I think that you could say that it's his true, first-hand, emotional discovery of art. That poem, which was written a thousand years ago, could reach across a millennium and touch his own experience deeply and perfectly [....] It was not wrapped up in a neat package by the end."