20 Things You Never Knew About Star Trek: Insurrection
9. The Pitch
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is many things, but light it is not. So, when Rick Berman and Michael Piller chose to use it as a jumping off point for the film that they wanted to be lighter in tone than what had come before, this left people scratching their heads a little. To quote Piller, they knew it would be foolish to 'out-Borg the Borg', and a curveball needed to be thrown.
In Heart of Darkness, a team is sent to retrieve a man who has gone mad in the jungle. In Heart of Lightness, as Piller jokingly called it, Picard is sent to retrieve a friend of his from the Academy. He has apparently turned mutineer against Starfleet and is attacking ships in the Briar Patch. When the Enterprise-E arrives, they find that he looks exactly the same as Picard remembers him from all those years before.
This was the same Fountain of Youth premise that evolved into the Ba'ku planet itself. The idea of Picard's Academy friend melted away though, eventually being replaced with a shady Starfleet Admiral instead.