20 Things You Never Knew About Star Trek: Insurrection
11. Ira Stephen Behr And The Paper Tigers
When Piller completed his third version of the script, he showed it to Ira Stephen Behr, who was the showrunner and executive producer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He handed the script straight back to Piller, calling the S'ona a good idea, though describing them as Paper Tigers.
A Paper Tiger is something that seems intimidating, frightening, or even powerful, but is in fact far from it. The first version of the S'ona effectively fell apart on the most casual of glances, leaving them in need of a rapid re-write.
Piller took the script back and began to work on it. The romantic subplot was added, though what was also added was the Collector - the massive ship that comes to harvest the energy of the rings, upon which Picard and Ru'afo have their final fight in the film. Though that final scene would undergo several treatments, and even feature in an unaired ending, it was entirely missing from all early drafts of the script - which would have led to a rather interesting plot hole when it came time to collect that radiation.