“The three of us sat down, and I don’t remember it being tortuous in any way,” Berman recalls. “We were given some time to come up with the premise. With Next Generation off the air, it gave us an opportunity to create a new starship and crew. Voyager was done back in the day when you would create a premise, create characters, and then start writing. We had some general ideas of where we wanted everything to go, but we hadn’t developed multi-seasonal arcs at all.”
Voyager brought together two disparate crews, from Starfleet and the Maquis, and forced them to gel as the USS Voyager warped her way home from deep in the Delta Quadrant. During the seven-year journey, Captain Janeway and her crew explored strange new worlds and sought out new life and new civilisations. Fans embraced most of the characters – particularly Janeway and The Doctor – but by season three, the powers-that-be informed Berman that the Kes/Neelix coupling concerned them.
“Michael, Jeri and I analysed it, and we realised that Kes just wasn’t clicking,” Berman says. “It was a shame, because Jennifer Lien was very talented and it was sad to see her go. The studio felt pretty strongly – we didn’t really disagree.
“We’d wanted to put a little sex appeal into the show and, simultaneously, we’d been thinking about a character who’d been assimilated by the Borg and was rescued, so we could have a partial Borg character on board. That it’d be a beautiful female… I don’t know whose idea that was, but that was the direction we went.”
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