10 MORE Star Trek Moments You Never Knew Were Improvised
2. Subspace Supplements
Continuing with the comedy, and now twice the photons and forcefields, in Star Trek: Voyager's Message in a Bottle, both EMHs (Mark I & II) were pretty much making it up as they went along. Sent back to the Alpha Quadrant over the Hirogen's intragalactic phone network, it took a good deal of improv. before the Doctor could actually speak to Starfleet. A little neurozine here, a touch of the multi-vector assault mode there, and the Romulans were eventually dispatched.
Behind the scenes, Robert Picardo was also making phone calls, over much shorter distances, to writer/producer Brannon Braga. As Picardo noted in Cinefantastique, vol. 30, no. 9-10,
I have gotten into the habit of calling Brannon with joke suggestions, and I scored pretty well on [Message in a Bottle].
Picardo was particularly proud of one exchange he managed to get into the episode. During the scene in which the Doctor takes the helm of the Prometheus, the script originally only called for him to say, "Stop breathing down my neck!" to the Mark II. It was Picardo who came up with what followed:
Mark II: "My breathing is merely a simulation.
"Mark I: "So is my neck. Stop it anyway."
As Picardo quipped in Star Trek Voyager: A Celebration, "I thought that was a pretty good Frasier and Niles hologram exchange".