Star Trek: Voyager Producer Dishes on Seven of Nine

[Voyager] needed a kick in the ass. Creatively, we needed something. A Star Trek series, in my opinion, is only as good as its captain, and Captain Janeway was a great captain, but she didn’t have her Spock or Data, really. We just didn’t have that special science-fiction character like Spock or Data, the striving-to-be-human character. The idea of putting a Borg on board gave us a chance to have a wild child there. That was the metaphor, a wild child, and Janeway would be her mother and try to tame her and help make her human again. That was a new take on that kind of character. That’s not to diminish the Doctor, Bob Picardo’s character. He was great, but he really wasn’t a foil to Janeway. He wasn’t someone Janeway could play off of. — Brannon Braga to StarTrek.com

Braga goes on to call Kirk a sex addict. We’d classify him more in the horndog territory… like an honest and romantically successful Zap Brannigan.

So… nothing like Zap Brannigan, I guess.

To me, Seven of Nine added a nice touch of magic that the show needed at the time. The fact that she was a beautiful woman was just, to me, a benefit. A lot of people thought it was in poor taste that we had a buxom babe, but I’m like, “Have you actually watched TOS?” That was babes on parade. Kirk would be considered a sex addict by today’s standards. A certain sensuality has always been at the heart of Star Trek. So I’d dispute that criticism of Seven. I thought the character was a great addition to the show. And it kind of lit a fire under the cast, too. It was very controversial. We got rid of Kes and brought in Seven of Nine, and some people in the cast were upset about it and some thought it was cool, but at the end of the day I think it did all the right things creatively to the show, in my opinion.

(via Blastr.)