“Collective”
Written by Andrew Shepherd Price & Mark Gaberman and Michael Taylor
Directed by Allison Liddi
Season 6, Episode 16
Production episode 235
Original air date: February 16, 2000
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. For the second time in three episodes, Chakotay, Neelix, Paris, and Kim are on the Delta Flyer. Their poker game is interrupted by a Borg Cube that snuck up on them, er, somehow. Warp drive is knocked offline, and Kim goes down below to fix it. But the cube pulls the Flyer in and knocks the crew out.
Chakotay, Neelix, and Paris wake up in a holding area where they see a couple of corpses that look very much like botched attempts at assimilation. They worry that Kim is already off to be assimilated—or not, if those botchings are any indication.
Voyager tracks the Flyer’s ion trail to the cube. There’s a fight, but the cube fights erratically and poorly, and Tuvok is able to take out the cube’s weapons with surprising ease. Also the cube has suffered damage that should have been repaired by now.
Seven soon realizes that there are only five drones on the cube where there should be thousands. The “you will be assimilated” speech is rejected by Janeway, and a tense negotiation ensues. The Borg ask for Voyager’s navigational deflector in order to contact the Collective, in exchange for which they’ll release the hostages.
Voyager will be crippled without their deflector, so Janeway stalls, asking to send Seven over for proof of life for the hostages (and for Seven to assess the situation). The Borg agree.
Seven beams over to find that the five drones are all adolescents, who were removed from their maturation chambers prematurely after the rest of the drones were killed. They wish to contact the Collective and be reassimilated—their damaged communications have also cut them off from the rest of the Borg.
They bring Seven to where Chakotay, Paris, and Neelix are being held. As Seven is leaving, Chakotay asks Seven to give Kim their regards. The Borg react to this not at all, and now it’s clear that Kim is still at large. Seven asks to take a drone corpse back to Voyager for examination.
The EMH autopsies the drone and discovers that it was killed by a pathogen that specifically targets bionic life forms. It’s harmless to fully organic beings, but fatal to a cyborg species. Janeway orders the EMH to reproduce the pathogen and also instructs the bridge to try to contact Kim on a non-Borg frequency.
Buy the Book
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Kim remained unconscious in the bowels of the Flyer, and he wakes up to Voyager trying to contact him—but he has to make adjustments to his combadge to reply, which he does.
Janeway and Seven beam back to the cube and make a counteroffer: come back to Voyager, have their implants removed, and be individuals again. First rejects this notion, just wanting the deflector. Janeway tries another tack: Seven will repair their cube. First accepts, and Janeway beams back with a warning not to return to the cube.
Seven speaks with Second while making repairs and asks him about his pre-drone life. He says he doesn’t remember. Seven also fixes his vocal processors, which First had said couldn’t be fixed until they returned to the Collective. Also he realizes that Seven’s hair reminds him of his mother…
Seven has learned that the Borg did receive a communication from the cube, but deemed the survivors not worth the trouble and have cut them off permanently. The drones don’t have the skill to decrypt the message, so they’re still laboring under the delusion that they can return to the Collective.
Kim, guided by Tuvok, works his way to the shield generator so he can sabotage it, allowing Voyager to beam the away team home. Meanwhile, Seven continues her repairs. First accuses her of stalling, while Seven tries to explain to them that they don’t need the Borg to pursue perfection. Then a maturation chamber, which contains an infant, malfunctions. Seven has it beamed to sickbay.
The EMH is able to save the child. He also tells Janeway he has re-created the pathogen and is appalled to see that Janeway is still considering using it. But she needs to have it in reserve in case things go pear-shaped.
Kim is captured by Third. First confronts Seven with the spatial charges that Kim was placing. Kim has been infected with nanoprobes, which will kill him like the other people they tried to assimilate. First goes back to demanding the navigational deflector.
Seven plays the only cards she’s got left: she tells them that the Borg cut them off, and gives them the means to decrypt the message. First doesn’t believe it at first, but when he realizes the message is genuine, he decides that they will just keep assimilating people until the Collective realizes they’re worthy. Because that would totally work.
The cube hits Voyager with a tractor beam that is literally trying to tear the deflector off the hull. Tuvok reports a fluctuation in the cube’s shield grid. Not enough to beam a person out, but enough to beam the pathogen in. Instead, Janeway, loath to kill the kids, orders a feedback pulse sent through the tractor beam. This weakens both the tractor beam and the cube’s shields enough that they can beam Chakotay, Paris, and Neelix back. But Kim and Seven are in an area that’s too heavily shielded.
First is panicking, and doesn’t know what to do. Seven urges him to drop shields and surrender, but he refuses. Voyager’s actions will cause the shields to overload and the cube to blow up. First tries to fix it, but is hit with a console as it overloads, and he dies. The other four agree to return to Voyager with Seven.
The EMH is able to cure Kim and remove the Borg kids’ implants. Seven also was able to retrieve some biographical data that the cube inexplicably had on file. (Why would they even care about that?) Second is Icheb, Third is Mezoti, and the other two, who are twins, are Azan and Rebi.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Despite the fact that Borg systems are supposed to be decentralized, Voyager is able to do bizarrely specific damage to the cube…
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway has to convince Seven that she is pretty much the authority figure for the Borg kids. Seven is reluctant to accept this responsibility, which just makes Janeway smile knowingly.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok is all for releasing the pathogen pretty much from jump. Bloodthirsty cuss, ain’t he?
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. By contrast, the EMH finds the notion of releasing the pathogen to be appalling.
Half and half. Torres is at ops for the entire episode, because the chief engineer has nothing better to do than run a bridge station instead of her engine room, and because the producers have given up on even pretending that there’s anyone in the crew beyond the opening-credits regulars.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is supposedly playing his first-ever poker game on the Flyer. He has a flush, which is a good hand, though he would’ve lost to Paris’ full house…
Forever an ensign. Kim uses the poker cards to mark his trail back to the Flyer from the shield generator, which winds up a waste of time, as he’s captured.
Resistance is futile. Seven quickly takes charge of the Borg kids, and becomes the authority figure that First has failed to be.
Do it.
“They are contemptuous of authority, convinced they are superior—typical adolescent behavior for any species.”
–Tuvok psychoanalyzing the Borg kids.
Welcome aboard. Ryan Spahn plays First, while we get four new recurring regulars in Manu Intiraymi as Icheb, Marley S. McClean as Mezoti, and Kurt and Cody Wetherill as Azan and Rebi. All four will next be seen in “Ashes to Ashes,” and they’ll continue to recur to the end of the series, with Icheb also appearing in Picard’s “Stardust City Rag” (played by Casey King).
Trivial matters: This episode explains the disparity between the revelation in TNG’s “Q Who” that the Borg are made into cyborgs from birth and the later insistence that all they do is assimilate. What Riker found in “Q Who” was apparently one of the maturation chambers, where they put infants they’ve assimilated.
While the four surviving teens all become part of Voyager’s complement, it’s never made clear what happened to the infant.
Mezoti is Norcadian, the system Voyager visited last time in “Tsunkatse,” and mention is made of their twin suns (which gave Neelix a sunburn in that episode).
The Borg tried to convert the Enterprise-E’s navigational deflector into a communications beacon in First Contact.
Set a course for home. “The Borg, negotiating?” This is an important episode for the show, as Icheb in particular and the four Borg kids in general become important supporting characters for the remainder of the show’s run. This is especially heartening to see given that they totally forgot about the four Equinox personnel who joined the crew.
But the episode that introduces them is a tiresome, predictable slog. Having run out of ways to convincingly have Voyager survive encounters with the Borg (and not even trying to be convincing in “Dark Frontier“), they decide to have Borg kids! Our heroes can beat them, because they’re just a bunch of dopey teenagers!
Sigh. There’s just nothing to say here. Every beat is predictable and we get nothing to ameliorate the predictability. Seven’s actions with the Borg are just her repeating what we’ve seen her learn since she came on board, Ryan Spahn’s First is a tiresome whiny teenager, and the other four don’t really make much of an impression in their inaugural appearance (though Manu Intiraymi shows signs of the interesting character he’ll become).
Worse, the most Trekkish aspect of the story is handled with no kind of interest or urgency, to wit, the argument over whether or not to use the pathogen. This same argument was compelling in TNG’s “I, Borg,” and is lifeless here. (Speaking of TNG, a poker game? Really? It’s especially disappointing because not only is it rehashing TNG’s thing, Neelix opening the episode by talking about hearts made me think they were playing bridge, which would’ve been way cooler—and appropriate for four players.)
Warp factor rating: 5
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Well, I certainly expect a bright future for Icheb. Keep an eye for this kid. He’s going places!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
It’s Borg of the Flies! Yep, a pretty mediocre episode. It’s pretty clear by this point that one of Voyager‘s big jumps forward must have taken it over a number of sharks.
Keith, only Icheb remains a regular to the end of the series. Mezoti and the twins leave at the start of “Imperfection,” the second episode of season 7.
The fact that the kids even appeared again at all was a genuine surprise to me. I assumed they’d just disappear down the same rabbit hole as the Equinox crew members.
(Speaking of TNG, a poker game? Really? It’s especially disappointing because not only is it rehashing TNG’s thing, Neelix opening the episode by talking about hearts made me think they were playing bridge, which would’ve been way cooler—and appropriate for four players.)
I thought they were playing hearts, but nope we’re in for another round of string-betting and pot-splashing. Trek poker scenes could often be good, but were terrible depictions of poker.
And also it’s strange that nobody was standing watch– despite whatever sensor nonsense they throw out there, the cube is still plainly visible to the Mark 1 Human Eyeball, surely the Delta Flyer is capable of throwing an alert when a large object detectable by a passive sensor is in-bound, even if the computer can’t tell what it is. But I guess to even make this opening kind of work, the crew has to be derelict in its duty, so poker game it is.
Every beat is predictable and we get nothing to ameliorate the predictability.
Yeah– plus it’s obvious they’re not actually going to have the crew kill a bunch of kids, yet First is a stubborn git whose ticket has to be punched by the end of the hour. So the character has to die without it technically being anybody’s “fault.” Exploding console it is. I mean, if it’s good enough for Seska…
Seven also was able to retrieve some biographical data that the cube inexplicably had on file. (Why would they even care about that?)
This I think is a little more justifiable. I don’t think we know the exact circumstances of how these lot got assimilated, but the Borg also assimilate computers and databases. The information ultimately comes from databases the Borg have a copy of because they assimilated the ships these kids were on. It was just sitting in an archive somewhere, along with the technical data the Borg actually would have been interested in. Maybe the Borg hang on to everything because they don’t know what will be important later, or maybe whatever purge they do to distinguish between relevant/non-relevant hadn’t been completed yet.
@4/dunsel:
A ship coming in at warp speed would be completely invisible to the human eyeball (or to any other non-subspace sensor or telescope) until it dropped out of warp, as the light from the ship’s travel would be moving more slowly than the ship itself.
That’s one of the things I think Trek gets wrong far too often, portraying warp speed as just “really really fast” instead of what it really would be if it existed IRL, which would be “so fast that the human mind is simply incapable of comprehending such speeds.”
But yes, the ship should have long-range subspace sensors that would pick up any approaching ship.
There is a nice bit of continuity between this and the Icheb-centric “Child’s Play” three episodes hence. It will turn out there’s more to the story of the Borg cube’s breakdown than we thought.
Although there’s also a major discontinuity, because the Borg baby disappears and its fate is never addressed. Brannon Braga later claimed that the baby was returned to its people offscreen.
Rebi and Azan are barely teens and Mezoti is still a tween (I’m basing this off the age of the actors when the episode aired and the fact that child actors typically play somewhat younger characters then they actually are). Essentially we have 2 teens and 3 kids all in various states of dopiness. At least Icheb gets a real character arc and isn’t turned into the Wesley Crusher of the Delta Quadrant.
@5, I don’t think the idea is that the cube dropped out of warp right on top of them– they don’t even notice it until Paris sees it out a viewport, and they’re just lucky the cube didn’t randomly approach them from an angle not visible out a viewport. The cube was obviously at sublight for some amount of time before the crew can scramble to their stations and react, whether that was a few seconds or an hour of indecision. Clearly the expectation is for the ship to alert them if something like that happens, since Neelix asked why that didn’t happen, yet it doesn’t, despite “large, unknown object” is exactly the sort of thing it should be looking for.
And just from a story mechanics perspective all of this is unnecessary. They could all be at their stations, just have the cube overtake them by virtue of being faster, and it’s the same episode.
Tiresome slog is correct. I remember back in the days that TNG’s “I, Borg” aired that there was this complaint that it was a good story but it didn’t need to use the Borg because it humanized them and thus made them less scarier, and it could have been any enemy of the Federation that took the Borg’s place. At least though, it was a good episode, and Star Trek: First Contact came several years later to make the Borg fearsome again. By the time we get to Voyager, not only are the Borg no longer fearsome, but here we have whiny teen and pre-teen Borgs throwing hissy fits and being petulant. It totally destroys the race as villains when I now have this image in my head.
Icheb would turn out to be a nice addition at least as the son/mother dynamic with Seven that would develop was a good one.
Even if Braga says the Borg infant was returned to its people that still should have been mentioned in-story. As it is, it makes it seem like the story totally forgot about it.
We get another grouping of Paris, Kim, Chakotay, and Neelix on the Delta Flyer just two episodes after “Memorial.” It’s like they’re their own special clique. Maybe the writers could have at least swapped out this particular group with a couple of other characters?
I think it would have been awesome if the episode was entitled “Borg Kids” since the producers would at least be acknowledging and winking at the audience that they recognize how silly this story is. Or maybe, “And the Borg Children Shall Lead.”
@@.-@ Cap’n Dunsel: Thank you for “Mark 1 Human Eyeball”. I will be chuckling over that one for the rest of the day.
S
Two slogs in a row. My Mark 1 Human Eyeball is badly damaged from these last two episodes. Any time you bring kids into an existing adults only show, you’ve just jumped the shark. Nobody likes raising kids, let alone watching them! (OK, maybe some personal bias there)
I will reiterate how ridiculous it was for Voyager to assert that the Borg don’t procreate drones but only assimilate them. What is the point of adding a species’s biological distinctiveness to the Collective if all its members die out after a single generation? Any such addition would be temporary. The only way to keep that distinctiveness in the Collective on a permanent basis is if drones are procreated or cloned. Also, just from a numerical standpoint, assimilation wouldn’t be as effective at maintaining or increasing the Collective’s numbers as drone procreation would be. It’s like hunter/gatherer subsistence vs. agriculture. Growing your own is far more efficient and productive than foraging. And the Borg are supposed to be all about efficiency.
Not understanding how evolutionary biology works is a hallmark of Voyager, going back to the idiocy of Ocampa reproductive techniques in “Elogium”………………………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@13/krad: It’s not even as deep as evolutionary biology. It’s simple demographics — birth rate vs. attrition rate.
“I can’t believe we’re negotiating with adolescent drones.”
Given recent comments, I was expecting this episode to get a mixed reaction (and it’s even more negative than I expected!) but I rather like it. It does manage to defang the Borg a bit more (Janeway seems surprisingly keen to tangle with a cube, as if she’s used to coming out on top in these engagements). But the result is rather disturbing, with the would-be drones being a rather uncomfortable mix of Borg and children. Wanting to be a Borg is perhaps a scarier concept than a mindless drone…and also a lot more unstable.
One weakness is the way Chakotay’s party just disappear about a third of the way through the episode: We don’t see them again after Seven checks on them. Whilst the subject matter does justify Seven being the main focus, this is one of the most blatant examples of focus shift ever: Given that, as many of us have mentioned, we had a curiously identical shuttle crew just two episodes ago, I’m almost tempted to wonder if the actors were shooting location scenes for “Memorial” simultaneously with this.
The Doctor is the voice of morality again, being aghast at the idea of germ warfare: It’s a nifty moment when he produces the pathogen at the same moment Janeway is cradling the Borg infant. It’s overkill here but it feels like it’s something that should have been kept in reserve for future encounters. (And it makes more sense than the idea you could wipe out the Borg by showing them a confusing picture!) Tuvok being the first one to vote for the lethal option has been a running theme at least as far back as “Basics”: He does take the security chief thing a bit far sometimes.
And frankly, it’s a relief to have the ship gain some extra members to its complement who aren’t forgotten about as soon as the credits roll: Although, as has been said, the four older Borg children will be seen again but the infant is never mentioned after this. (The Voyager Companion rather dismissively states “since the infant is not mentioned again on the series, it is assumed that she did not survive”: I guess Braga decided to go for a kinder explanation!) I didn’t quite grasp until now that Mezoti’s species are the ones from the previous episode: Maybe it’s no wonder they never answer Voyager’s calls! I’ll say it here, although I’ll probably say it again: Mezoti always made more of an impact on me than Icheb, so I was very sorry to see her spuriously dumped half a season later. Her little scene with Kim is the perfect mix of childlike innocence and subtle menace.
Trigger warning, especially for New Yorkers: The BBC had this episode scheduled to air on 11th September 2001. As a result of the events of that day, it was swapped round with “Spirit Folk”, which was presumably considered less violent.
@15/cap-mjb: “(And it makes more sense than the idea you could wipe out the Borg by showing them a confusing picture!)”
That was basically a more elaborate version of Harry Mudd’s “I am lying” gambit — trap the computer brain in an insoluble paradox. Or maybe Spock’s “Calculate pi to the last digit” gambit, a bottomless computational pit. With computer science more advanced at the time it was written so such simple ploys wouldn’t have seemed credible anymore. Basically it’s a memetic virus rather than a biological one.
We’re in the doldrums of season six now! Lots of bombs and stinkers on the way. Perhaps the writing staff was getting burnt out by seasons end. Borg kids? Check. “Fair Haven” sequel? The audience will love that! Evil Kes? Sounds like a winner!
Yeah, the wrestling episode looks positively brilliant compared to a lot of the dogs we got in the back half of the sixth season. We’ve still got “Ashes to Ashes” (the annual Harry Kim episode crashes and burns as they tend to do), “Spirit Folk” (the only reason why “Fair Haven” wasn’t the worst episode of the season), “Fury” (an appalling mess), and “Unimatrix Zero” (stick a fork in the Borg; they’re done) left to go.
Mezoti and the twins leave the ship early next season, which is too bad because I agree, Mezoti did make more of an impression here than Icheb. Icheb will, of course, become a far more interesting character than his debut here.
Poor Icheb.
This episode though, blech. I kept checking to see how much time was left. I totally forgot about the Borg infant, because, not suprisingly, the writers did too.
They also swung and missed when Kim says walking around the Cube brought up bad memories. I immediately thought back to “Scorpion, Part I”, with Kim’s near-fatal first encounter with Species 8472, but no. Childhood memories of a haunted house? Lame! Why can’t the writers remember these people have pasts on the show?!
Yep, that’s all I got. This one really was a slog.
I’m more forgiving of this one. At this point, they’d pretty much exhausted the possibilities for fresh Borg stories. Last season’s Dark Frontier was proof of that, given how that two parter got mired in soap opera theatrics and pretty dull action set pieces. Collective isn’t a perfect episode, and it suffers from a lot of the same pacing issues and lack of tension, but it works well enough as a character piece for me, especially where Seven is concerned.
Parts of it remind me of DS9’s Valiant. The concept of kids running their own ship led by an arrogant leader. Obviously, it worked better on DS9, partly because we already knew Nog from the start, and the arrogant Red Squad cadet made more of an impression than this episode’s First (and I assume his taking charge – even though the Borg don’t have individual leaders, other than the Queen – was a result of his individuality asserting itself the minute they were untethered from the collective). It’ll take longer for us to get to know Icheb. Mezoti definitely makes more of a first impression here.
I don’t think the lack of threat stems from them being teenagers, but from being disconnected from the greater collective. In that sense, they’re on the same level of a threat as Hugh or the folks in season 3’s Unity.
@2/Christopher: I don’t see this as much of a shark jumping moment. While the Borg children were part of a move to improve ratings, it had precedent. It was proven child characters could thrive on Voyager, as seen with Naomi Wildman – who was a clear success as a secondary character. Her banter with Seven was all the motivation they needed to try and build on that. The obvious next step was to have the next youth character be a Borg. Adding someone like Icheb was only natural, especially taking the events of season 5’s Drone into account.
@20/Eduardo: The shark-jumping is well past by this point. I was talking about the weakness of season 6 as a whole, especially by this latter stage. It’s the nadir of Voyager‘s run.
Although conventional wisdom holds that adding new child characters to the cast is one of the classic shark-jumping moves (see the related “Cousin Oliver” trope).
@@@@@ 20 –
“Parts of it remind me of DS9’s Valiant. The concept of kids running their own ship led by an arrogant leader.”
Exactly how I felt. It’s like Voyager took a look at The Valiant and said “Hey, let’s do that but with the Borg”. As if the Borg weren’t enough of a laughing stock/shadow of their former selves already.
I wonder, what was Voyager’s bigger sin: defanging the Borg or immediately abandoning the Maquis/Starfleet conflict that was supposed to be the basis of the show?
Definitely the latter. The Maquis “situation” was essentially resolved by the end of “Parallax” – the series’ second episode! – when Torres was installed as chief engineer. From then on, the crew was hunky-dory except for the occasional “Maquis episodes” which came out usually once a year complete with leather outfits. It’s amazing that both TNG and DS9 made better use of the Maquis when they were intentionally created for Voyager.
@23/Austin: I think the Borg’s “defanging” was inevitable the more they were used. Familiarity breeds contempt, and the more a villain is used, the more often the heroes win against it, so it’s kind of inevitable that they come to seem less menacing. So that would’ve happened eventually with any show that made heavy use of the Borg. And once they added Seven as a regular character, that made it inevitable that there would be more Borg stories. And I think it’s safe to say that Seven’s addition to the show was a net positive. All in all, then, I wouldn’t call it a “sin,” just an inevitable consequence of the choices they made, or a necessary tradeoff for what was gained through the development of Seven’s character.
As for the Maquis, I think the show did make use of the concept up to a point. Basically, they were trying to follow DS9’s precedent of getting around the Roddenberry/Berman-dictated perfection of Starfleet characters by including non-Starfleet characters as a source of conflict — characters who were more flawed and contentious and didn’t share the same philosophy as the Starfleet crew. This was used to some extent in various episodes in the first couple of seasons, notably with B’Elanna; but it was used more as a way of generating villains within the crew, like Seska, Jonas, and Suder — characters who, by their very nature, couldn’t stick around permanently. So it didn’t really provide the same kind of ongoing clash of viewpoints and values that DS9 had with main characters like Kira, Odo, and Quark.
If anything, the biggest letdown wasn’t in the development of the Maquis, but in the development of Chakotay. He was the one who could’ve most vividly embodied the separate, non-Starfleet viewpoint, like Kira did in DS9, but instead they made him someone whose identity was as much grounded in Starfleet as in his homeworld and the fight for it. And, of course, much of his character development fell prey to the bad advice of their fake “Native American expert.”
At least the development of lack thereof of the Maquis and Chakotay was confined to Voyager. The reduction of the Borg to punchline was something that affected the entire franchise. Just look at Picard’s “Just open the door and let all the air out” solution.
Paris should’ve been rebelling against doing stuff on the Borg ship like trying to take down the force field. “Hey, I won the poker hand, remember? I get to take the morning off from duties!”
Not really sure why Harry was saying what playing cards he was placing at intervals. Was he memorizing the cards? Surely just placing a card along his path was sufficient to mark it.
@27/Quasarmodo: Harry said he could use a distraction from his surroundings, so maybe he was making a little game out of the cards. Or maybe he wanted Tuvok to know which cards were where and in what order, so that he could follow the trail if necessary.
“They are contemptuous of authority, convinced they are superior—typical adolescent behavior for any species.”
Says the experienced father.
@29: I wonder what rebellious Vulcan teenagers are like?
@30/terracinque: Well, one rebellious Vulcan teenager we know ran off to join Starfleet rather than the Vulcan Science Academy like his dad wanted…
See also the Tuvok flashbacks in “Gravity.”
I’m always mystified by the impulse that many series have to shake things up later in the runs by adding children into the mix.
I disagree with the naysayers. I found this an exciting and heartfelt episode. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, or I’m just not Trek enough.
I don’t mind at all that the Borg were defanged. A scary enemy only gonna be scary for so long, and perfection has its limitations. If the kids, particularly the eldest, were annoying, well Tuvok was right. I see Christopher Bennett already got the “Borg of the Flies” joke, but I think that is part of the point.
Sure, you could argue that they should have just stopped using the Borg at all. But that would have had to happen at “Q Who.” They became fascinating, and to remain fascinating their definition had to expand.