This episode had an extremely difficult gestation. According to Ira Steven Behr, "It was one of those back-breaking, horrible, horrible experiences," although he does acknowledge that "it was terrific at the end."

The original pitch by Mike Krohn was intended as a bottle show, and while the basic man-against-machine element of the plot was fine, the problem, according to Ronald D. Moore, was in trying to find a way "to make the jeopardy intriguing, to find the inner story."

By the time of production, virtually every writer on the staff had had a go at the script, but every single draft was rejected by Michael Piller. According to Behr, Piller called him at 8:00am on a Monday morning to tell him, "I hate to say this Ira, but I'm not buying any of it - it's not working."

In the end, after much work, the staff finally got together a script which Piller approved, and the episode was green-lit, but even then, there were more problems. According to Behr, "The writing process turned out as painful and disgusting as we thought it would be." However, he does acknowledge that "in the end, it turned out solid, with some nice twists and some great stuff for Garak and Dukat, and the paired up teams."