Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Inner Light" is sacrosanct now. Nothing could have made this episode better than it was. Before it came to be, however, there were plenty of ideas that would have made it a very different story, one that, most likely, wouldn't have been as good as the original. Let's face it. Nothing could be as good as the original.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation writer who penned the episode, along with Peter Allan Fields, Morgan Gendel, in The Fifty Year Mission The Next Twenty-Five Years From the Next Generation to J.J. Abrams by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, shared that at one point during the creation of "The Inner Light," Michelle Forbes' Ro Laren was going to be a part of the episode. And not just that, she was going to have to marry Patrick Stewart's Captain Picard! Gendel doesn't indicate how that idea came to be other than to say that it was an alternate reality that also involved Picard and Riker [Jonathan Frakes] being struck with a probe that takes them to a planet which is involved in a war.
The premise was that everything was happening seemed real, but it wasn't. While Picard and Riker were busy on the planet, everyone else aboard the Enterprise was in comas. It was Michael Piller who decided the story should be about Picard alone. And that was why the Enterprise didn't factor into the episode as much. Piller said, "We're not going to need to cut back to the ship that much. The story is going to be with Picard."
Although "The Inner Light" is a masterpiece, one can't help but wonder what was going through the writers' minds when they came up with the idea of Ro Laren and Captain Picard getting married in this alternate reality. What would have been the purpose? Would it have been the two of them living a full live together on that planet? Ultimately, Piller made the final decision, and we got the beautiful story of Picard's alternate life on another planet, a life where he gets to marry, have children, and build a different kind of legacy than the one he built as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.