meetings are strongly discouraged to prevent the further spread of the Phage, and those infected are shunned by healthy Vidiians out of fear of contamination. The Vidiians also capture other species to work for them as slaves doing manual tasks, such as mining. In the years following Voyager encounters with the Vidiians but prior to their return to Earth, a committee of alien intellectuals known as the Think Tank claimed to have cured the Phage. Background Concept and creation Prior to the announcement of a new Star Trek incarnation, Star Trek: Voyager co-creators Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor conceived of the basic concepts and characters during secret developmental meetings. Taylor, Piller, and producer Brannon Braga developed the premise behind the Phage and the Vidiians' motives for harvesting organs from discussing ideas that fulfilled the following questions: "Who's interesting? What's interesting? What's an agenda we find interesting?" According to Taylor, the Vidiians were first imagined from an "idea of a culture that was dying of an incurable virus that would go to any lengths to make themselves and their species stay alive". Taylor originally envisioned the Vidiians as reminiscent of the Maya civilization, especially relative to practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Braga, however, has connected the alien species to European history, questioning if Europeans would have pursued similar methods if the bubonic plague had persisted as a pandemic. Braga stated that the Vidiians were partially inspired by Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, emphasizing that he wanted to portray them as sympathetic. In his book Star Trek: Parallel Narratives, Chris Gregory attributes the development of the Vidiians to Braga's affinity for the horror genre. During the writing and development of the episode "Faces", executive story editor Kenneth Biller had difficulty writing the primary Vidiian character as a sympathetic villain. He looked to Gene Roddenberry's approach to portraying antagonists in the Star Trek franchise: "[A]liens should never be patently evil. They may have a set of values that differ from our own, but be careful of making them mustache-twirling villains." Taylor used the following description to summarize the show's approach to the alien species:Initially called the "Phages", the show's producers changed the alien species' name to the "Vaphorans". Following the completion of the script for the debut episode, the species' name was revised again to "Vidiians" to prevent potential pronunciation issues for the cast. Introduced in the first season, the Vidiians