“Star Trek: Insurrection” saw the U.S.S. Enterprise-E traveling to the very remote Ba’ku homeworld, a planet surrounded by radioactive rings that, through a quirk of science, regenerated the cells of living beings. The rings cure them of diseases and keep them young for centuries. Anij looks like a 39-year-old human woman but was in fact over 300. Picard and his crew have to defy orders to stop a shady, plastic surgery-addicted species called the Son’a (led by F. Murray Abraham) from stealing the Ba’ku radiation from themselves. The Son’a plan would involve the forced relocation of the Ba’ku citizens, who live a gentle, tech-free, agrarian lifestyle.
Picard, naturally, feels that a forced relocation is too barbaric a trade-off, and stages an insurrection. He sides with the Ba’ku after spending a romantic night with Anij who explains the attractiveness of a slow, uneventful, meditative life. She reveals tantalizingly that she never gets to see bald men on a planet of unaging immortals, while Picard admits he’s attracted to older women.
Story writer and producer Rick Berman recalled that in early drafts of “Insurrection,” there were actual on-screen kisses. He said:
“There was a little romance cut out of the final film: a couple of kisses. And there were some heated debates as to whether the kisses were in the right place. Those who were against the kisses were against them primarily because the first one was during an altered reality sequence where the water slows down and the hummingbird slows down. There were those among us who believed that we were right in the middle of this exodus, there was a lot of action going on, and for those two characters to start making out seemed to not necessarily be appropriate at that moment.”