BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [BASICS]
The Writers/Producers Speak

Jeri Taylor, executive producer: Did we know when we wrote the cliffhanger how we were going to get them out of there? No. I think, by the end of the Season, the writing staff was so exhausted and just trying to make it to the end of the Season, and you know you've got a great cliffhanger and you're done and you want to go off and just sort of sleep for 6 weeks, and then you come back and you're faced with the problem of what do we do? how do we get them off of there, and that's one of those corners that you paint yourself into. So we had our work cut out for us when we came back. And we got them off.

Maje Culluh confiscates combadges before leaving in Voyager

the Kazon-Nistrim who have captured Voyager leave Hanon IV, leaving the crew stranded there without any technology

Hanonians - a primitive society

filming the episode

Michael Piller: The last thing I wrote for [Star Trek Voyager] was [Basics]. And it wasn't by chance that it was named [Basics] and it wasn't by chance that it was about some very fundamental issues confronting this Starfleet crew. Because it was my message to the franchise to say the key for success, the way to make this show work, the way to make this franchise fresh, is to stay with the basics that Roddenberrry set forth to us to begin with, to do the stories that have themes, to always ask what is it about. [Basics] was a show about this very high-tech crew suddenly stripped of all of their technology, their ship taken away, and sent to this prehistoric planet. What do you do if you don't have your toys? What a great theme. I just couldn't get enough of stories that had great themes, provocative material that made us think as an audience what would I do in that circumstance. That's what Roddenberry taught me, and that was my last message to the staff of [Star Trek Voyager].