The studio had asked for a two hour series ender by December. Michael Piller pulled out the elements of a 'time-slipping' story by Brannon Braga (with Worf and Alexander) and followed Ron Moore's suggestion of a bookend to the series by revisiting the Q Coutroom saga of the pilot "Encounter at Farpoint" while at suggesting paying homage to Slaughterhouse Five with the three era crew.
	Piller sent a memo on February 7 to his co-writers hitting on two main themes - the idea of family in each time period - "the cast, the crew, the fans, the writing staff... all the families of Star Trek The Next Generation" and also the fact that every moment is precious, something he hit home on in writing DS9's pilot "Emissary" - "You can revisit it, you can remember it, laugh about it, hold reunions, go to conventions, show reruns forever, but you can never live that moment again."
	Originally, a fourth timeline was to have been included in the finale, a revisit of "The Best of Both Worlds".
	Due to Moore and Braga's commitments to finishing off "Genesis" and "Journey's End", they were left with just six days to finish a draft. In the words of Jeri Taylor, "A two hour show - they should have had a month to write it!"
	Director Winrich (Rick) Kolbe on the finale - "I don't think we ever had a production meeting with a full script. It always was 'Well we have Part I and an outline for Part II, we have Part II and an outline for Part I, we have everything but Act 10'... it was difficult."
	Brannon Braga on the problems with the finale - "Everything that could go wrong went wrong. We were running out of time; we couldn't get the story approved - and this was to be expected, since there was a great deal of scrutiny on everyone's part and rightfully so. But things were heating up with the movie, we had to rebreak the finale three times, we had to rewrite the whole script twice; Ron's dog got sick; we had a computer failure and lost an act... There was a two-week period there were we wrote like three hundred pages! But the time it was over, I got some sort of carpal-tunnel syndrome between my thumb and wrist from hitting the space bar."
	Michael Piller caused a major ruckus when he restructured the whole of Act II, getting rid of many of the character moments including Picard's future crew "stealing" the mothballed Enterprise from a museum! The actors were all unhappy with the changes, and Patrick Stewart called a weekend meeting requesting that the moments be restored.
	Rick Kolbe on the problems of Part II - "I knew there were problems, structural problems in Part II. But I think we might have gone a little too far in solving those... and it lost the charm and the freshness of the original."
	Michael Piller on the restructured Part II - "I won't argue at all with the fact that we lost some cute things, but it wasn't good storytelling. The problem was, the future Picard needed a ship, and he got one by going to Beverly... And just because the writers wanted to go and hijack the Enterprise because it would be neat - 'OK, you've got the ship, now go get another one, too' - didn't make it good storytelling."
	Rick Kolbe got extremely frustrated with the ongoing distractions throughout the shooting of the finale, including the fact that Gates McFadden had to leave long enough to film a new pilot up in Oregon, something which would lead to a seventeenth shooting day at Kolbe's insistence. Kolbe recalls - "For a time I felt like I was the only guy doing anything, and it came to blows about halfway through - we had a big argument. And I said, You gotta focus on THIS show!... and then everybody - producers, cast, crew - just came together; it was amazing!"
	The studio was besieged with reporters and media covering the shooting of the finale. An exhausted Patrick Stewart had several run-ins with camera crews when he objected to being filmed when rehearsing.
	Patrick Stewart on the exhaustive finale - "I was at times anxious as to whether I would get through that last period of work, and I'm not being melodramatic. This was followed then immediately by the final two hours, and I was in every single scene of the show ... Towards the end I just got so tired ... I was just trying to do the best job I could. And at the same time there were a lot of people with other needs and demands and I found it all just a bit distracting."
	Rick Kolbe on fatigue and the finale - "I was about as dead as you can be, which is not something I like to do, especially on a two-hour show ... It was the end of the season, everybody was basically tired and worn out, and tempers were short."
	Eleven takes were needed to film Q's courtroom entrance on the floating camera crane.
	The shooting of the primordial Earth sequence took place on DS9's Stage 18 cave set.
	Ron Moore on a temporal headache - "Since the feature's [Generations] not anything like this, we had to get out of that by the end of the show. Rick Berman felt strongly a bout that - we have to keep our options open. It was all about just playing with the audience's expectations."
	Cut scenes include Worf asking Riker's permission to date Deanna, a straight rehash of his bungled attempt in "Eye of the Beholder". Another scene had Alexander tell his father he knew he'd just been with Troi because "you're always in a good mood after you see her" and in effect give his permission for them to go on.
	The future Worf was initially a Council member on the Homeworld.
	Another dropped scene, dubbed by Ron Moore as "too contrived" had Lwaxana Troi in the future bring the news via long-range transporter (see "Bloodlines") of Deanna's recent death - providing the first step in the Worf-Riker thaw.
	Yet another dropped scene set up Geordi's surprise career as a novelist. Present-Geordi was to confide that he'd probably always be in Starfleet disagreeing with Data over great literature, preferring holodeck version to the original prose.
	Ron Moore revealed his first idea was to have Geordi marry Aquiel (see "Aquiel"). Moore remembers - "And everybody said, 'You really want to summon those bad vibes, the way that show turned out?'. And we said, 'Maaaaybe not!'"
	Critters of the Cinema had a field day with ten of its cats on set as successors to Monster and Brandy's "Spot". Bacall, Uma, Zeke, Bandit, Wendy, Shelley and doubles Crystal, Sinbad, Sascha and Justin filling in for Aspen, Caesar, Buffy and Fido!
	A scene which was dropped from the past timeline had a conn officer named Sutcliffe upset at the perverseness of that era's Picard and finally request a transfer. Actor Christian Slater (Star Trek VI) was scheduled to play the part until it was pencilled out. Later attempts to get Slater to appear as the Romulan commander didn't work out.
	Ron Moore on blasts from the past - "Tasha was something that would tie us into the past, and so's O'Brien, and Troi's hair and go-go boots and the ships on the wall in the obs lounge."
	Colm Meaney took a break from filming DS9 to appear in the finale.
	The clip of "babyface" Riker was inserted to provide a link to the Season 1 era from "The Arsenal of Freedom".
	Future-Data's housekeeper Jessel was a repeat of the Turn of the Screw homage seen earlier in "Sub Rosa".
	Patrick Stewart was the one who pointed out the logic problem that the anomaly would not have occurred had Q not sent Picard in the time motion in the first place.
	Several details were not altered for the past-Enterprise including the set and carpet colour, main viewscreen details and Q's courtroom chair.
	The observation lounge ships are the originals, safely stored ever since Production Designer Richard James opted not to return them when the set was rebuilt.
	In total 31 sets had to be ready or revamped for the time switches, including 4 all new sets at a total cost of $281,000.
	Michael Westmore (Makeup) regretted not being able to experiment more with aging and youthening the regular cast, but opted not to shave Denise Crosby's head as Yar.
	Mike Okuda redid the ship's bridge plaque, replacing the original's Production Staff "Admirals" with Starfleet personnel mentioned in the series - including the Utopia Planetia technicians seen earlier in "Eye of the Beholder".
	The Shuttle 07 "Galileo" was the art department's final parting homage to the original series.
	Dan Curry created the radiant anomaly and primordial Earth, matting in backlit lava and rocks against actual ocean footage enhanced with "Boraxo spray"
	Eric Chaubin provided the matte painting touch up for the Picard vineyards, this time shot near Temecula when the Lancaster area used in "Family" was found to be drably out of season.
	Beverly's medical vessel the U.S.S. Pasteur was christened Hope class after the World War II hospital ship.
	A scene cut for time had Martha Hackett (T'Rul, DS9 "The Search", Seska, Voyager) as Androna, a Terellian.
	Ensign Chilton was played by Alison Brooks, Brannon Braga's girlfriend.
	Michael Piller summing up AGT - "It's not like it's a perfect episode - it was done in quite a hurry - but I'm quite proud of it, and proud that we've done something very much Star Trek, very much that deal with this strange universe, the universe of ideas."
	Ron Moore summing up AGT - "It's the kind of show that could only be done done now, and by people who know it forward and backwards - and have done it for a long time."
	Brannon Braga summing up AGT - "It was a tall order, but I think we pulled it off by the skin of our teeth. And I got to blow up THREE Enterprises in this one!"

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