Rick Berman: Obviously, when a series goes into its Second Season you have 26 episodes of backstory that you didn't have a year earlier. You have the ability to develop very specific relationships between different characters because they've had 26 adventures together. They know each other. They've got a richer background simply because they've been in 26 episodes of a television series. As soon as those characters are more richly developed the writers have a lot more fun delving more deeply into those characters and that's what you always tend to do in a Second and Third year of a series.

Michael Piller: I have very very warm feelings about Season 2 of [Star Trek Voyager], for a lot of reasons. I think we did some excellent work on Season 2. I think, in retrospect of 12 years or whatever it was I've done on Star Trek, it ranks as one of the top four Seasons that I would say that I was involved with. I think what we did in the Second Season of [Star Trek Voyager] was begin to take creative risks. And even though we didn't always succeed I thought we'd succeeded enough that we did distinctive television. And I live for that, I live for those episodes that stand the test of time. Now I think you'll find more of them in the Second Season of [Star Trek Voyager] than in many Seasons of any Star Trek series. I think it's a Season that Gene Roddenberry would've been very proud of.

[#32 Meld] deals with violent tendencies

[#34 Death Wish] deals with suicide and the rights of the individual

[#35 Lifesigns] deals with deformity

[#39 The Thaw] deals with innermost fear

Jeri Taylor: It is not as though we started the Season saying, you know, "Here's our goal for the Season." I don't think any of us could do that because it's a very moment to moment kind of creative effort. The characters evolve as you tell a story about them and if you try to preconceive what a character might be at the end of a Season you might be doing them an injustice because of all the things that might have come before that, so you really can't try to map an overall arc. You have to take it a step at a time, and I think that keeps the whole thing more spontaneous and much fresher, but it's also much more arduous because you have to be on the balls of your feet at all times and ready to adapt and even throw something out and go with another story because maybe the story that you were developing makes no sense for the character.

Brannon Braga: We were trying to do a lot of different things but don't know that we settled immediately on what exactly the focus of the show was, and we really did.... The first couple of Seasons were very eclectic and we were trying a lot of different things. Some of it felt familiar, like [TNG], which was a complaint that some viewers had about the show. I also think that we were successful in doing new things as well. You know, we were trying to discover what was the soul of the show.

Jeri Taylor: One of the things that we discussed in the Second Season was the idea of conflict on the starship. We had in the First Season some of the built-in Maquis-Starfleet tension that it was possible to draw on, but we decided that as time went on those kinds of conflicts compared to what they were facing in their efforts to fight off hostile aliens and get home again would not be maintained, that those would really simmer down and that in general people would pull together toward the common goal. So we wanted to make the crew knit and unite as a unit, starting with the Second Season.

Maquis crewman Hogan challenges Janeway's policy, with Maquis crewman Jonas nearby [#30 Alliances]

Jonas tries to kill Neelix [#36 Investigations]

Rick Berman: In every episode of any Star Trek series you have to create something new every week. The heart of these series has always been the characters, and we have in the case of [Star Trek Voyager] we had nine regular characters that we dealt with and those characters and their character development and their relationships are always the key.

Janeway and Tuvok are close friends; she values his counsel [#30 Alliances]

Janeway and Chakotay become close friends, [#41 Resolutions]

Jeri Taylor: In science fiction you have a pretty broad latitude with how you jump-start stories. We didn't have the luxury of going into the backstory of any of our characters because they're way way way far away from their backstories or anybody that they knew. So this became a device to provide some dimension, some layering, some texture for the characters, to give the audience an insight into what their life had been like wherever it was before this, not unlike the snippet you mentioned earlier when Janeway was talking with her fiance back on Earth and so that you knew that it had cost her to make this trip, and it cost everybody, and I think that enriches the character to let the audience know what that cost is very specifically.

Janeway's fiancé Mark, though here actually a Bothan, is seen

Chakotay's father, Kolopak, is seen in [#25 Tattoo], here talking to young Chakotay

Rick Berman: As far as where the ship goes, what kind of adventures the ship gets is not that different to be flying an attempt to get home than it is to be off exploring space as we did in [TNG]. There were obviously slight differences but we wanted to make it very clear that this was not a ship that was just trying to get home, not very exciting or not exhibiting a great sense of exploration if all you're trying to do is get home, so it was made very clear by Captain Janeway that however long it was going to take them to get home they were going to continue to explore space.

Jeri Taylor: We wanted to try that kind of storytelling. That is also a tightrope to be walked and there are those in television, the studios, the network, who are not necessarily that happy when you do a serialised kind of story because they of course want stand-alone episodes, because in syndication those are going to play, and if you have three or four stories that must be knitted together then if someone misses the first one are they completely in the second one, so it's a dangerous kind of storytelling, but we had not done it before so we wanted to experiment with that and to see if it moulded itself to a Star Trek setting.

Seska informs Chakotay she is pregnant after taking some of his DNA [#27 Maneuvers]

Seska uses her baby to lure the Voyager crew into a trap [#42 and #43 Basics]

Michael Piller: I felt that we needed to be more ambitious. I liked what we had done in the First Season of [Star Trek Voyager], but one of the things that happened when I went out into the real world, because the Star Trek universe, the job, is sort of like going to college. There's a protected environment, there are walls around you, that you say: "This is our place. I feel safe here." You go out in the real world and you see that things have changed. 'E.R.' for example, which was done, created the same time, suddenly many people were talking faster, and scenes were shorter or they were longer in the case of 'E.R.' And in some ways from getting a new fresh look at the outside world I felt that we were sort of looking a little slow and dated. I wanted to push the unit that Second Season to see if we could raise the bar. I think we did. But I also drove people crazy.

Rick Berman: One of the problems with having a show that goes from here to there as opposed to a show where you're just out adventuring is that you are going to eventually leave certain groups behind and would have to be continually coming up with new group. The Kazon were the first group of aliens that we were forced to leave behind.

Michael Piller: One of the most difficult things you can ever do if you're doing a new Star Trek series is to try to create new aliens that are interesting, that live up to the great aliens that we've created over the years, and this was particularly a challenge on [Star Trek Voyager] because we had deliberately sent our ship into an unknown area of space. And we knew none of the aliens that we were going to encounter. The Kazon, which were the centrepiece aliens of our pilot, and would be for the First Season, were originally meant to be teenagers. They were based on Los Angeles street gangs. We thought about the Kazon as these sort of street gangs in space that killed each other off in these sects (we called them sects to separate them from gangs) but the idea that none of them lived to be more than 20, 25, because of the violence that just ruled this area of space. So for us to be caught, even though we had one ship that had better technology, to be caught in this area that is ruled with this massive violence that is continuing on a daily basis, with rivalries and battles on a daily basis, seemed like a wonderfully dangerous kind of environment to put us into.

The Kazon proved to be a source of contention among the writing staff throughout Season 2. Michael Piller championed their inclusion in the seasonal story arc despite the fact that most of the staff found they were not 'working' as adversaries. They're just sort of big, loutish characters that cause our people to overact. For some reason, they all turn into moustache-twirling villains as soon as they get that make-up on. They had a cartoonlike quality that I think was not our finest hour.

Michael Piller: I'll be curious to know what the audience's perception is, if our investing in the Kazon this Season worked. I've been very satisfied with the impact of the arc. The stories have taken us from a beginning to a satisfying end. I think they've helped define what our life is like in this Quadrant. Our intention was to create a sort of disorganised anarchy, them-against-them as much as them-against-us. The wish that I had, which was not fulfilled, was that we would only cast people between 18 and 25ish so that these would be young, angry people who never lived to be old enough to have the kind of experience and perspective on the world that, say, the Klingons and the Romulans might have. They were much more emotional, short-fused, and therefore had fewer expectations, which I think is indicative of street gangs today. Older actors gave more polished performances and as the Season progressed I think they got older and older still and, as a result, I think we didn't fulfil the full potential of the Kazon, even though I think they were written pretty well. I think they ultimately came out being sort of Klingon-ish and I regret that we didn't stick to our original vision of keeping them young. That document (by Kenneth Biller detailing the Kazon's history and customs) came out of research that Ken did for [#21 Initiations]. He felt it would be valuable, because we were going to invest a whole Season into these guys, to provide writers with a clear backstory so everybody would be working from the same page. I think it influenced the Season greatly. It was an enormous contribution.

Kazon-Ogla youths in [#21 Initiations]

Kazon warriors, publicity shot from a UK VHS cover

foreground: three of the First Majes of the Kazon Order, [#30 Alliances]

the Kazon-Nistrim strand the Voyager crew on the primitive planet Hanon IV [#42 and 43 Basics]

primitive natives of Hanon IV [#42 and #43 Basics]

Brannon Braga: In my opinion, the [#5 Phage] aliens were our first successful aliens on [Star Trek Voyager] and it would take us... We were always trying to find interesting new memorable aliens in Star Trek. And it's one of the difficult things because the Borg and the Klingons don't come along every day.

a Vidiian, the commander of the Vidiian ship that attacks one of the two USS Voyagers, [#37 Deadlock]

Michael Piller: The best villains think they're the heroes of the piece. Whatever they're doing they're doing for what they consider to be a just cause. Yeah, there's pure evil and that's fine, but I find that kind of boring over time. The idea of the Vidiians are people who needed to harvest organs sounds horrifying and yet if you look at it from their point of view as a race that is dying, that has to regenerate itself somehow, you can understand where they're coming from.

Brannon Braga : I thought it would be interesting to create a species that half really creepy-looking and Frankenstein-like, with cobbled together body parts and they steal organs, but they had a very sympathetic backstory. You know, what if the bubonic plague had never been wiped out, what if it had decimated Europe, what would Europe be like today, what if they were still living with it today? What would they be like? What desperate measures might they have gone to? How would it have affected their culture?

the Doctor and Danara Pel, [#35 Lifesigns]

Jeri Taylor: One of the challenges that you fight in a long-term series, and which this one was destined to be and this was then also part of a franchise, that it had had three incarnations before this, is to keep the story-telling fresh. How do you do that? That is the constant battle - is to come up with stories with ideas which, if not completely new, at least have a fresh spin on them so that it doesn't seem to be recycled.

Brannon Braga: Somewhere round the neighbourhood of the end of Season 2, when we said: "Look, we've got to vamp this up. This is feeling too familiar. We've got to start telling bigger stories and more wild stories, and really breaking out, it became more of a challenge."

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].

the Kazon-Nistrim strand the Voyager crew on the primitive planet Hanon IV [#42 and 43 Basics]

a man-eating indigenous land eel of Hanon IV [#42 and #43 Basics]

Season 3...

Brannon Braga: It was really a group effort. It was me and Rick and Joe Menosky and a group of writers we had there at that time. We all had a lot of things we wanted to do, and one of the things that I knew I wanted to do was, I got this crazy idea in my head that we would do, we would make it a tradition to do great epic two-part episodes. I think after the first two-parter we did together, which was a time travel show called [Future's End] it was just so much fun to paint on a bigger canvas.

Janeway "accompanies" Tuvok back to 2293 when he served under Captain Sulu on the U.S.S. Excelsior [#44 Flashback]

Henry Starling threatens the future when he launches in the stolen timeship [#50 and #51 Future's End]

Brannon Braga: Another thing that I set out to do was tell more plot-driven stories and tell bigger stories, you know, get these characters on big grand epic sci-fi adventures, and just kind of push our production team to their limits and see what we can accomplish. I guess the third thing we decided to do was get the Borg more involved in the show. After the movie [Star Trek VIII: First Contact] came out we were kind of staying away from the Borg to give [Star Trek VIII: First Contact] its breathing room. But once the film was released it just seemed to me that the Borg could be to [Star Trek Voyager] what the Klingons were to [TOS] or [TNG] or the Cardassians were to [DS9]. We needed our own villain to help define the show.

Rick Berman: I believe the reintroduction of the Borg into [Star Trek Voyager] had a lot to do with the success of our second film, [Star Trek VIII: First Contact], which was one that was focussed purely on the Borg and which introduced us to the character of the Borg Queen. That really was written and produced during the Second Season of [Star Trek Voyager]. The thought of continuing with the Borg was extremely tempting. By the Third Season of [Star Trek Voyager], we started bringing that to fruition.

Jeri Taylor: The thinking was of course that the Borg were the most phenomenal villains that Star Trek had known to that point, and they had originated in the Delta Quadrant, and we were in the Delta Quadrant, and so it just seemed inevitable that they would eventually encounter them, and they did.

[#68 and #69 Scorpion]

[#68 and #69 Scorpion]