James was the showrunner on The Closerand Major Crimes and a very dear friend of mine and Jeri [Ryan]’s, and he had been hired to come very early on, one of the early executive producers and writers of a spin-off of Star Trek. We didn’t know what it was. There was no Picard yet. It was a spin-off of Star Trek. Alex Kurtzman, James Duff, and I believe maybe one other writer was involved at the time, and James really wanted it to be a Borg spin-off. That’s why he talked to Jeri and I, and really started talking to them about it being this Borg storyline. And somewhere within that he discussed it with us maybe a year before it even happened. And they didn’t have Patrick yet. So I think then they went and made the pitch to Patrick. But had Patrick not done it, some kind of show about the Borg would have happened. It would not have been Picard, it would have been a show about the Borg. And you can even tell how heavily Borg-influenced it was. So the Borg was really the the kernel, from what I understand of of the beginning of that idea. And once Patrick became involved, the pieces began to fall into place, and we were set up and given deals to come be a part of the show. What I was not told was that I was getting killed, because that was not James’s plan. And James left the show before they began filming. He had a creative differences and left, I think, weeks before I even began. I’d signed my contract, and the people that were left, I think, then made that decision without my being told or even knowing about it through gossip. I read it in a script.
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