10 Star Trek: The Next Generation Episodes That Were Almost Completely Different

While the development of the Borg storyline did have to take several detours along the way, Paramount knew that they wanted to end Season 3 with an almighty cliffhanger for them with the planet Earth itself hanging in the balance. How they did that, though, was the source of some debate.

Initially, the show's writers had resisted the suggestion that the Borg needed a "queen bee" character. They felt that subverting the usual trope of a singular primary antagonist was the true appeal of them as a race, and that by giving them an appointed mouthpiece a lot of that menace would be lost. Regardless though, the Season 3 ender was going to require some back and forth between the crew of the Enterprise and the enemy vessel, so a compromise was proposed.

Given their raison d'être of combining the organic with the artificial, the initial treatment for the episode had the collective abducting both Picard and Data, before successfully merging them into a single lifeform. A super-borg that had the experience and humanity of Picard, with the incredible strength and computing power of Data.

The idea was tossed around for several rewrites until nobody in production could devise a single logical reason why the Borg would actually go to all this trouble when they could just kidnap Picard and use him as a regular drone.