Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Wolf 359

10. Granola Graveyard

In The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, approximately one minute and fifty seconds of screen time is physically spent at the Wolf 359 system. Of that, about twenty-seven seconds are shots of the destroyed fleet at the 'graveyard scene'. To depict those precious seconds, time was also a limiting factor behind the scenes.

As detailed on the DVD extra New Life and New Civilisations, Star Trek: The Next Generation visual effects coordinator Gary Hutzel and team had "literally […] a period of days" to construct battle wreckage from any and all bits of ships they could get their hands on. That included spare parts from The Next Generation and feature models taken out of storage, as well as model kits glued together every which way and battle-scarred. "The Borgs [sic] are pretty good shots," in the words of Michael Okuda.

To film the graveyard scene, ships were hung on fishing wire and captured by motion control camera in three individual passes — beauty, matte, and fire. Wanting to show a sense of scale, but without the time and budget to shoot countless smaller and smaller pieces of ship wreckage into the distance of the battlefield, Hutzel and team also turned to more innovative methods. "[Instead], we would spill granola onto velvet and spread it out," Hutzel noted on the Blu-ray extra Regeneration: Engaging the Borg.

As for non-breakfast cereals, certain much smaller elements of wreckage were, in fact, constructed. Shown in the reference work The Art of Star Trek, a model of a battle-damaged Type 7 Shuttlecraft (USS Liberator, NCC-67016), hatch blown off with dead plastic crewmember inside, was made for the graveyard scene, but never visible on screen.

Minutiae from the scripts also give further (technically non-canonical) detail about the fleet lost that day. The final draft of The Best of Both Worlds, Part II notes that Admiral Hanson's vessel is "Galaxy-class". In a line ultimately cut from the revised final draft of Emissary, Sisko states that "Admiral Hanson has deployed the Gage…," (as well as the Kyushu and the Melbourne), thus adding a potential name to the list of thirty-nine.

For Commander Shelby's list at the viewscreen in The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, a last minute decision in post-production also changed the originally scripted (and recorded) "the Chekhov" to "the Tolstoy". Even with an 'h,' as per the playwright, the Chekhov was a little too close to home.