“Dark Frontier”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Cliff Bole and Terry Windell
Season 5, Episodes 15 & 16
Production episode 211 & 212
Original air date: February 17, 1999
Stardate: 52619.2
Captain’s log. A Borg probe encounters Voyager. The Borg do their usual you-will-be-assimilated dance, but Janeway beams a photon torpedo onto the probe, which destroys it. Janeway orders the debris brought on board for salvage.
They don’t find all that much useful, though the EMH finds a nifty-keen armature that will help him with surgery. What they need is a transwarp coil so they can use it to access the transwarp conduits the Borg use—the one on the probe self-destructed.
Seven downloads tactical data from the probe and finds that there are three Cubes on a parallel course nine light-years away, but aren’t pursuing them, and are easily avoided. However, there’s also a sphere that was damaged by an ion storm and is in the midst of a regeneration cycle.
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Fugitive Telemetry
Emboldened by their victory over a dinky-ass probe, Janeway proposes “Operation Fort Knox.” The sphere is very much like the Fort Knox Museum on Earth was: a source of fabulous wealth that’s damn near impossible to break into and rob from. But they’re going to try it. As part of the research on how to achieve this heist, Janeway asks Seven to read the journal entries made by the Hansens that they downloaded from the Raven. Torres also has some Maquis tricks that will hide their warp signature from the Borg.
Seven is reluctant to read the journal entries, ostensibly because they are irrelevant. The Hansens were all assimilated, so they failed, so their accounts are of no help, but Janeway knows that Seven finds the notion of reading them painful. Seven eventually accedes to the order to read them.
She reads about how Magnus and Erin Hansen took their little girl Annika out on the Raven in order to track down the Borg. They only had rumors to go on, and they don’t have much support from Starfleet or the Federation, but they head out to try to find out what’s true and what isn’t about the Borg. After eight months of searching, and after an argument over whether or not they should divert to refuel or keep going, they find a Borg Cube. It ignores them, not seeing them as a threat, which confirms one theory the Hansens had about them. They continue to follow the Cube at a safe distance.
When Voyager comes close to the sphere, Seven comes to the bridge. They have 72 hours before the sphere will be operational again, so that’s how long they have to come up with a heist plan. Janeway orders Paris to keep a distance of ten million kilometers.
They run a simulation on the holodeck. Tuvok and Kim plant charges by the generator, and Janeway and Seven place transporter enhancers around the transwarp coil. However, they don’t complete the mission within the two-minute window they have when the Borg sensor array is down, so some Borg drones beam onto Voyager. Janeway is also concerned that Seven froze at one point—she hasn’t been on a Borg ship since Voyager separated her from the Collective.
In Cargo Bay 2, Seven is about to go over more journals when she hallucinates Naomi arriving and bothering her and then turning into a Borg drone. She then hears a voice: the Borg Queen, saying that Voyager’s heist will fail and that she wants Seven back in the Collective. Seven doesn’t understand why she in particular would be desired, but the Queen says that she is unique.
And then the voice leaves her head and Seven is alone in the cargo bay. She continues to read the journals, learning that after three months, the Hansens had followed the Cube into a transwarp conduit. Magnus has constructed lifesign inhibitors that keep the Borg from detecting them, and they beam over to the Cube to observe their behavior.
Seven immediately takes this lifesign inhibitor design to Tuvok and the EMH. The former orders the latter to start fabricating ones for the crew to use, as this will be hugely helpful during the heist.
Janeway summons Seven to her ready room, saying she’s taking her off the away team. Seven’s expertise would be better suited to running tactical in case something goes horribly wrong, but Seven thinks that Janeway is reading too much into Seven freezing during the simulation. (In fact, Janeway is reading exactly the right thing into Seven freezing…) Seven convinces Janeway to let her go on the team.
They commence the heist. A shuttle is sent out as a decoy with faked lifesigns. When the Borg go to assimilate the shuttle, they lower their shields, which is when the away team beams over. Just like in the simulation, Tuvok and Kim place the charges and Janeway and Seven place the transporter enhancers. Voyager beams off the transwarp coil.
Janeway and Seven head toward the beam-out coordinates, but then the Borg Queen speaks to Seven again. Seven halts in the corridor and a force field is erected between her and Janeway. Seven urges the captain to leave her behind, that she’s returning to the Collective. Janeway doesn’t wish to leave her behind, but she doesn’t really have a choice. She joins Tuvok and Kim at the beam-out point. Tuvok notes that the Borg can detect them, even with the inhibitors on. The three beam out.
The sphere goes to transwarp and zips away to a Cube, where Seven is brought before the Queen, who welcomes her home. They don’t wish to reassimilate her, to Seven’s surprise, but instead wish to keep her unique perspective. The Queen says that letting Voyager take her was the plan all along.
On Voyager, they clear away the debris from the Borg probe, intending to melt it down for polytrinic alloys. Neelix asks after Seven’s regeneration alcove, which uses a lot of power. Janeway says to leave it for now. The captain then retires to her ready room; she’s convinced that the Borg influenced Seven in some way. While she’s waiting for the computer to run a scan, Tuvok enters, saying a crewmember has asked to see the captain; Tuvok said she was busy, but the the crewmember was insistent. Janeway’s about to fob the crewmember off on Chakotay when Naomi peeks out from behind Tuvok.
Janeway lets the girl in, and she submits a proposal for a rescue mission to get Seven back. The proposal itself is unworkable, but Janeway commends the girl’s initiative. The computer then finishes the scan, showing that there were Borg communications sent to Cargo Bay 2 several times in the last few days. This confirms that the Borg were influencing her.
The Borg restore Seven’s Borg eyesight, but leave her individuality otherwise intact. The Queen finally explains why: they will use her insight to help them succeed in assimilating humanity, which they have failed to do twice.
The Cube heads to a planet that has been targeted for assimilation. Seven watches in horror as the occupants, members of Species 10026, are assimilated.
Chakotay takes up the reading of the Hansens’ journals and learns that they captured a drone in the midst of regenerating and put a tracker on it, enabling them to pick up the signals the drone got from the Queen. Chakotay reports this to Janeway, including the intelligence that there is a Borg Queen.
Janeway mounts a rescue mission. The Delta Flyer is outfitted with the transwarp coil, as well as various bits of tech the Hansens developed: shielding and tracking that should enable them to find Seven and hide from the Borg.
Janeway, Tuvok, the EMH, and Paris sally forth in the Flyer, Chakotay staying behind at the mouth of the transwarp conduit as backup.
Unable to stand the assimilation of Species 10026 any longer, Seven contrives to rescue four of them. The Queen eventually determines that Seven did so, and moves to bring them back. Seven begs them to be spared, arguing that it’s a waste of the Collective’s resources to go to this much trouble for only four future drones. For reasons the script never bothers to provide, the Queen decides to let the quartet go.
We get one last Raven flashback, as the Hansens’ shielding went down for 13.2 seconds, which was enough for the Borg to detect them. At that point, the jig is totally up.
The EMH suggests trying to send a message directly to Seven through her interplexing beacon. The Flyer arrives at the Unicomplex surrounded by dozens of Cubes, and one gigunda Cube, on which they read the sphere. They have remained undetected, and Paris flies them into the Cube.
The Queen reveals her cunning plan: instead of their usual instant assimilation, they’ve developed an assimilation virus. It will take longer, but will eventually take over an entire planet. She wants to use it on Earth, and she wants Seven to program the nanoprobes that will make up the virus for maximum efficiency. Seven is appalled. The Queen then reveals that one of the drones she has by her side is the former Magnus Hansen.
Janeway contacts Seven through the EMH’s trick, but Seven says “Captain” when she hears the voice, which clues the Queen in. They can’t detect the Flyer, but they know the Hansens’ technology, so they can adapt to it. (Why they haven’t already, since they assimilated the Hansens two decades ago, is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Janeway and Tuvok are equipped with new lifesign inhibitors and beam in, ordering Paris to train weapons on the Queen’s hive. Janeway sticks a Hansen-designed probe on a drone, which walks through one of the force fields. That enables Janeway to reprogram the lifesign inhibitor to allow Janeway to pass through the force field. She leaves Tuvok behind to sabotage the Queen’s chamber’s shields and goes through, the force field burning out the inhibitor.
The Borg find the Flyer and start the you-will-be-assimilated speech. Seven attacks the Queen, but the Queen rebuffs the attack and starts to strangle her, saying the notion of keeping her as an individual was a mistake. Janeway arrives and tells her to let Seven go or the Flyer will fire on the Queen’s now-unshielded chamber. The Queen soon realizes that Janeway isn’t bluffing, but she puts up a scattering field that keeps the Flyer from beaming the away team out. Seven goes to a console and disperses the field, finally choosing Voyager over the Borg. They beam out and the Flyer zips away at transwarp. The Queen’s Cube follows and fires on the Flyer in the transwarp conduit. Paris is barely able to get the Flyer to the rendezvous point, and as soon as they transit to normal space, Chakotay has Torres mine the mouth of the transwarp conduit with a spread of photon torpedoes. The only thing that comes through the conduit is the debris from the Queen’s Cube.
Voyager uses the transwarp coil until it burns out, and it gets them 20,000 light-years closer to home. Janeway checks on Seven, who isn’t regenerating as instructed by the doctor, but is downloading all the Borg tactical data she acquired into Voyager’s database. Seven is surprised that Janeway came back for her after she so thoroughly betrayed them. Janeway says she has a lot to learn about humanity, and orders her to regenerate and finish the download later.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Hansens apparently found all kinds of ways of observing the Borg without being noticed. Somehow, this still works on the Borg twenty years later, even though they assimilated all knowledge of it.
Also, the heist on the sphere involves putting transporter enhancers around the transwarp coil, and I’m wondering why the away team wasn’t standing inside those so they could be beamed out at the same time as the coil….
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is hugely overconfident while facing the Borg, which is disturbing, but she’s also loyal to her people, which is heartening.
Half and half. Torres mentions some “Maquis tricks” to modify their warp signature, and one wonders why she hasn’t mentioned these any of the eight thousand other times in the last four-and-a-half years when hiding their warp signature might’ve been useful.
Forever an ensign. When they’re salvaging Borg debris, Kim yells at Janeway not to touch something. When Janeway asks why, he admits that he doesn’t know, but that it was crawling across the deck a minute ago…
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. When he provides Seven with the downloaded Hansen journals, which he’s also sorted by subject matter, Neelix tells Seven that he wishes he had this much of a treasure trove to remember his family by—all he has is a faded holoimage of his sister Alixia.
Resistance is futile. Even though they’ve had the Hansens’ journals for a year, it isn’t until now that anybody bothers to read them. Seven is reminded of how impressive, daring, and batshit crazy her parents were.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH thinks that learning more about her parents is a big step on Seven’s journey to become more human. He also is able to re-create the Hansens’ lifesign inhibitors and also reuses his trick of communicating directly to Seven’s interplexing beacon.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Showing tremendous good sense, the crew tests out their heist scenario several times on the holodeck.
Do it.
“There are three things to remember about being a starship captain: keep your shirt tucked in, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew.”
–Janeway reassuring Naomi that she won’t give up on Seven.
Welcome aboard. The Borg Queen is back from First Contact, this time played by Susanna Thompson, as Alice Krige was not available. Thompson—who previously played a Romulan in TNG’s “The Next Phase,” Jaya in TNG’s “Frame of Mind,” and Lenara Kahn in DS9’s “Rejoined“—will reprise the role in the “Unimatrix Zero” two-parter, but Krige will return to the role in “Endgame.”
Also back are Magnus and Erin Hansen, last seen in “The Raven,” also re-cast, with Kirk Baily now playing Magnus and Laura Stepp now playing Erin.
And we also have recurring regular Scarlett Pomers as Naomi.
Trivial matters: This story is an odd hybrid. It was always intended to air as a single two-hour movie on one night, just like “The Killing Game” two-parter. But it still had two separate production numbers, two independent production schedules, and a different director for each part. But where “Killing” has remained separated on home video release, “Dark Frontier” has remained a single unit, despite the separated production. (This is in contrast to DS9’s “The Way of the Warrior,” which was produced as a single two-hour episodes, ditto the various two-hour pilots and series finales among the first wave of Trek spinoffs.)
The flashbacks expand on the flashbacks seen in “The Raven,” detailing the Hansens’ mission to learn about the Borg.
The Hansens’ mission would seem to contradict the events of “Q Who,” when the Borg appear to be brand-new to Starfleet, given that the Hansens’ mission to find the Borg and learn more about them happened a decade prior to that TNG episode. However, when they set out, they only knew rumors and innuendo about the Borg and didn’t learn any hard facts until they were long out of touch with the Alpha Quadrant.
The Borg tried to assimilate Earth in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” and First Contact, and failed both times.
Janeway mentions that they’ve gotten the better of the Borg twice, referring to the “Scorpion” two-parter and “Drone.” Chakotay reminds Janeway that Seven said that she would betray them in “The Gift.” The Federation didn’t learn of the Borg Queen until First Contact, which postdated Voyager’s disappearance, so this is the first Janeway and the gang know of the Queen’s existence.
Neelix’s faded holoimage of his sister was seen in “Mortal Coil” and “Once Upon a Time.” It was established that his family was all slaughtered in the Talaxian war with the Haakonians in “Jetrel.”
The EMH first communicated directly with Seven via her interplexing beacon in “Scientific Method.”
Borg spheres were first seen in First Contact. This the first time we’ve seen a Borg probe. The Borg’s use of transwarp conduits was established in TNG’s “Descent” two-parter.
After saying early on in the first season that they an “irreplaceable” stockpile of thirty-eight photon torpedoes, the show has ignored that, as they’ve fired a lot more than that over four-and-a-half years, and Chakotay orders a “spread” of torpedoes fired at the transwarp conduit.
Amazingly, no work of tie-in fiction has chronicled the attempted Ferengi break-in of Fort Knox that Paris mentions.
This is the last Trek episode by prolific director Cliff Bole, who directed 42 episodes of TNG, DS9, and Voyager (among his credits were both parts of “The Best of Both Worlds,” another big-ass Borg two-parter). The Bolians were named for the director.
The Borg examine Voyager and declare there are 143 lifeforms on board, and I can’t even with this anymore. They’re obviously just throwing random numbers out. Oh, and a shuttlecraft is sacrificed to the Borg, so they’re now down ten shuttles. The construction of the Delta Flyer indicates that they have the means to replace them, but still, that’s a lotta shuttles…
Set a course for home. “Voyager is my collective now.” One of the main features of teleplay writing, as opposed to screenwriting, is the tyranny of time slots. Historically, broadcast television has always aired its shows in very specific durations, generally either thirty or sixty minutes. If you’re writing an episode of a show that airs on Wednesday from 9-10pm, it has to fit in that precise time slot—you can’t go over or under that time.
Those barriers started to erode on some cable channels that had less original programming, and a certain amount of flexibility in terms of when the scheduled show could end. As a result, shows on places like HBO, Showtime, and F/X might go long one week without impacting the rest of the channel all that much. And the rise of streaming services has shattered the barrier (witness, for example, the wildly varying episode lengths of the recently completed season of WandaVision on Disney+).
Unfortunately, that also can be constrictive. The decision to do a big-ass two-hour movie was made before a single word of “Dark Frontier” was written, and unfortunately, they didn’t come up with enough story for two hours. The result is a tale that slogs and is chock full of uninteresting filler and repetitive scenes. The flashbacks to the Hansens on the Raven are particularly stultifying, as they add absolutely nothing to the story that we didn’t already learn from “The Raven.”
Worse, those flashbacks provide two major issues, one of continuity, one of plot. The continuity one I mentioned in the Trivial Matters section: the Borg’s introduction in TNG’s “Q Who” gave the impression that they were completely unknown to the Federation (though they were known to the el-Aurians), yet the Hansens were seeking out stories of the Borg—which were widespread enough for little Annika to have a model of a Borg Cube to play with—a decade prior to that episode.
The plot issue is a much much bigger one, though. The Hansens came up with all these nifty-keeno doodads that would protect them from the Borg. But the Hansens were assimilated. We even saw the Borgified Magnus Hansen right there in the episode. We also know from “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” that the Borg instantly absorb all knowledge of folks they assimilate and immediately incorporate that knowledge, as the Borg already had a defense against the Enterprise’s fancy-pants weapon because they had assimilated Picard a few hours earlier. And yet twenty years later the Borg never bothered to create a method of defending against the lifesigns inhibitor, the multiphasic shielding, or anything else? Really? We’re supposed to buy that?
But that would require the Borg to be a competent foe, and they’re very much not that here. One of the reasons why the Borg had been such effective bad guys, especially in “Q Who,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” and First Contact, is because of how incredibly difficult to stop they are. And also dangerous: in all three of those stories, there were casualties on the Enterprise (and elsewhere, viz. Juret IV, Wolf 359, etc.).
Voyager has often been dinged for how they made the Borg toothless, and Exhibit A in that case is this disaster of an episode. Nobody gets hurt, nobody is ever even really in any danger. Seven isn’t reassimilated back into the Collective because she wears plot armor. The Queen’s excuse that she’s unique is nonsense—the Borg’s entire MO is to absorb a species’ uniqueness into themselves. Why depend on one unreliable unique person when that uniqueness can become part of every Borg with the simple insertion of a couple tubules?
The story starts with Janeway posturing at the Borg, which is insane enough as it is, but then the rest of the story justifies her posturing, because everything Voyager tries either works perfectly (despite the fact that it shouldn’t as it’s all based on twenty-year-old tech that the Borg is intimately familiar with) or doesn’t work in a way that still isn’t all that bad, since everyone gets out alive. The Queen’s keeping Seven makes no sense (except insofar as Seven is a main character and must go back to being on Voyager when the episode is over), her plan makes no sense (why do they care that much about humanity? there are plenty of other species in the sea, after all), and her letting Seven and Janeway go at the end is incomprehensible.
Jeri Ryan does a good job with Seven’s coming to grips with her humanity in the face of possibly being stuck back with the Borg, but that’s all the misbegotten mess has going for it.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written several works of Voyager fiction, the vast majority of which doesn’t take place in the Delta Quadrant. The Voyager portion of his two-book series The Brave and the Bold takes place prior to “Caretaker.” His short story “Letting Go” in the Distant Shores anthology focuses on the family and friends of the crew left behind in the Alpha Quadrant. He’s also written two alternate universe versions of Voyager, one in the Mirror Universe (the short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent in the Obsidian Alliances trade paperback, which involves the Terran Rebellion against the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance), the other in a timeline where the Maquis were never formed and so Voyager remains in the Alpha Quadrant (the short novel A Gutted World in the Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions trade paperback). He’s also written Janeway after Voyager returned home in Q & A and Articles of the Federation(the EMH also appeared in the latter).
Before the rewatch, I thought the Borg had seen through Voyager’s cloaking tech and the whole thing had been a con on Seven by the Queen. Which still wouldn’t have made sense but at least the Borg wouldn’t have been nerfed by not adapting to 20 year old tech.
the Queen’s next plot to assimilate Earth was to set off a giant nanite bomb? And just hope no one noticed the nanoprobes until it was too late? If assimilating humans was such a priority why not try sending two cubes instead of one? Or a dozen With orders to blow up the Enterprise on contact? Ugh.
Who would take a child with them while going on a Borg safari??!?!
Great review. I liked this when it first aired but, in my defense, I was a teenager, this definitely doesn’t hold up.
The Borg examine Voyager and declare there are 143 lifeforms on board, and I can’t even with this anymore.
Yeah, uh, let’s just assume a few people were on a shuttle away mission. Nobody important enough to be in the credits.
her plan makes no sense (why do they care that much about humanity? there are plenty of other species in the sea, after all),
Right. The fixation on humanity– or as we’ll see later, Voyager itself– is nonsensical because the collective has barely tried conventional means to assimilate the Federation. One cube, two times, and both times it almost worked. If you care that much, try a dozen. Prior to this, the best explanation was that the Borg were a deadly threat to the Federation, but the Federation was barely a blip to the Borg, somewhere on the “we’ll get around to assimilating them eventually” list. This reimagining of humanity as the Borg’s top priority or whatever is a terrible idea.
Voyager uses the transwarp coil until it burns out, and it gets them 20,000 light-years closer to home.
And they keep going to this well and it keeps not working. Either they’re home or they’re not, the alleged payoff of 20,000 light-years closer is completely bloodless, just like in Timeless and Fury. And it really doesn’t make a difference if Voyager is going to keep running into the same aliens anyway, and we have the Malon coming up again. And Endgame is going to make this even worse, but we’ll get there…
Why are the Borg so dumb now? I guess assimilating Talaxians does that to a collective.
I found this one okay overall, but one big flaw that stands out for me is that Seven is reunited with her father Magnus and sees him killed (presumably) when the Queen’s ship is destroyed… and this goes completely unremarked upon. This deserved to have a lot more focus than it got.
I’ve never seen this as inconsistent with “Q Who.” First of all, that episode never explicitly said that the Federation was unfamiliar with the Borg — just that Picard was. It’s a huge galaxy — no one individual can be aware of everything that’s known within the Federation, or even a sizeable fraction of it. And the Hansens only knew about the Borg from a few scattered legends. There must be thousands of obscure space legends out there — it’s entirely plausible that many of those legends would be known only in certain regions, or only to scholars in the field. How many people today are experts in the myths and legends of every culture on Earth?
Besides, Generations showed the El-Aurian refugees getting rescued by Starfleet 78 years before. Surely some of them must have mentioned the Borg to someone in all that time, so it’s utterly unreasonable to assume they were totally unknown to the Federation until “Q Who.”
The sheer vastness of the amount of knowledge in the galaxy could also explain why the Borg didn’t instantly adapt to the Hansens’ tech. Yes, they had the information about that tech in their collective knowledge base, but they hadn’t needed to use it for twenty years. So the data had probably been declared “irrelevant” and buried in some low-priority file somewhere deep in their information structure. In the intervening decades, the data might have been corrupted or fragmented or misfiled or overwritten — or simply forgotten. Forgetting is an important part of information processing, a means of clearing out unnecessary information to leave room for the important stuff. And we know the Borg are quick to discard anything they consider unimportant.
Quoth Rick: “Yeah, uh, let’s just assume a few people were on a shuttle away mission. Nobody important enough to be in the credits.”
That’s not the problem. There should be significantly less than 143 people on board at this point……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Maybe the non-credit crewmembers have been hooking up like crazy and there are lots of new babies and toddlers running around that no one bothers to mention… I mean, they ignore so many other things on this show, seems like one more thing that the senior staff wouldn’t bother to talk about.
I always had a problem with how difficult the borg say assimilating the Federation is. One cube each time. They even sent two to the poor guys in this episode. I’m sure if they threw 5, 10, 15 at earth, they’d get better results
@6, Oh, whoops, I lost count of where we were (which I can’t feel too bad about since the writers did too). Okay, no idea where the Borg are getting extra lifeforms from. The results of Neelix’s cooking have started to develop sentience, I guess.
Seven has said before that the borg filter information/data by relevence. So while they assimilated all of the Hansen’s knowledge, maybe they don’t keep it in the “quick access” repository of knowledge that they work off of? Especially any technology they consider inferior?
I don’t think the lack of adaption to the 20 year old tech is nearly as big of a plot hole as you seem to think. It’s falling into the same sort of pitfall that people get up to when discussing ‘evolutionary levels’.
The problem with evolution is that it doesn’t result in better organisms, it just results in organisms that are better able to handle whatever evolutionary pressure is on them. But if that evolutionary pressure is removed, it may turn out that the adaptation to the pressure is now not as fit as what the organism originally was, and evolution swings the other way. This can be demonstrated with attenuated vaccines, where passaging the organism or virus is repeatedly grown in a foreign host environment; it adapts to this new environment, and in the process loses it’s efficiency at infecting it’s original host.
Similarly, the study of parasites/endosymbionts has demonstrated that, given the chance, evolution will gladly delete so-called essential genes from a genome. The end result is an organism that can’t survive outside its host.
For the Borg, they may have adapted to the technology, but that adaptation presumably has some sort of cost associated with it. Maybe sensors and drones that can pierce the cloak cost more energy to run, for example. Once the pressure is gone, there’s suddenly a huge amount of pressure to go back to the more energy efficient design and the Borg adapt to that pressure by dropping their current adaptation.
@11/Xomic: Indeed, I’ve assumed something like that must always have been the case with the Borg. What we’ve been shown is that every weapon the Federation uses against the Borg works once or twice, until they adapt and remember it. But that shouldn’t work, because it’s naive and ethnocentric to assume the Federation is the first civilization in the galaxy to invent these weapons. The galaxy is huge and the Borg are ancient. Logically, anything a civilization as young as the Federation has invented has also been invented numerous other times by older civilizations, and thus most any technology has probably been encountered by the Borg before. So if they permanently retained every adaptation, they’d already be a zillion steps ahead of the Federation and nothing would work against them.
The only logical interpretation is that Borg adaptations are temporary — that once the immediate need to defend against a given weapon subsides, once the knowledge of how to defend against it is no longer “relevant,” it gets filed away out of active memory. The delay where a weapon works a few times before the Borg adapt is the delay in identifying the attack and tracking down the right adaptation buried deep in their reserve memory.
After all, “Scorpion” told us that the Borg don’t invent anything, right? They have no imagination. So how can they adapt so quickly to a new attack? Answer: because they already knew how. They just need time to call up the right data out of their huge, galaxy-spanning database.
A step further than that, it always bothered me that Janeway et al didn’t figure the Borg would have done this. It’s weird that the Borg didn’t ever bother to upgrade themselves against this technology, but it is even weirder that Voyager *correctly* guesses that the Borg didn’t.
Yea, this is the kind of human-centric nonsense that I find charmingly nostalgic in TOS, and super irritating and over-done by the time of TNG and VOY.
@5 I agree, it isn’t that weird that Picard wouldn’t know about the Borg. The amount of data that must be getting back to Starfleet HQ on any given day has to be huge, and one imagines that they prioritize creating reports out of hard scientific fact rather than vague rumors. DS9 showed how that is possible pretty well with the Dominion/ Changelings. They first heard stories that sounded more like myths, then more solid rumors, then started to meet people who actually knew of and interacted with the Dominion, and then with the Founders, Vorta, and Jem’Hadar themselves. And then they nearly got assimilated conquered by them.
@12 Also, generally, the Borg don’t lose enough to any given weapon for it to be a problem for them. Starfleet personel beam abord, they shoot a couple of drones, the Borg adapt. Two drones, twelve drones, a hive–it’s not much of a loss for them, at least not as they were portrayed.
@7: Or maybe the Voyager crewmembers picked up a few pets along the way. Companion animals would still scan as lifeforms after all.
On the crew complement issue, I decided long ago that numbers in Star Trek should not be taken too literally. Stardates, distances, sector and starbase designations, ship registries, you name it — none of it has any real coherence or consistency. So if a number doesn’t fit, I just ignore it and treat it as a placeholder for something that makes more sense.
Christopher: I’m making a fuss about it here because the number of people in the crew is something critically important because they’re all alone and stranded. There are no transfers, no crew replacements, nothing like that. On any other show, I wouldn’t give a shit, but for this thing on this show, I feel I have to.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17/krad: I wasn’t advocating, just expressing my own approach. I guess I phrased it poorly by saying “should not,” which sounded like an imperative. I just meant that I got so tired of worrying about the inconsistencies that I decided just to shrug them off instead (at least as a fan, rather than as a Trek writer). But yes, the impossibility of reconciling Voyager‘s crew count is one of the frustrations that led to that decision.
So, are we all agreed that Seven’s parents are the worst parents ever? Yes? Good, meeting adjourned.
I’ve never liked this one because it just seemed like an obvious ratings stunt using the Borg and the Borg Queen. And it worked in that it did cause a ratings surge for the week, but the ends did not justify the means as I feel this was the turning point where the Borg became overused to the point they were no longer scary because Voyager would beat them every.single.time. And every subsequent Borg appearance would produce diminishing returns.
I was always very bothered by the Borg Queen’s statement to Seven that it was always the former’s intention to place Seven on Voyager because there was no way that is possible without defying logic and anyone who saw the events of the “Scorpion” two-parter play out. So the Queen somehow knew that Voyager would elect to go through “the Northwest Passage,” purposefully started a conflict with Species 8472, that every Borg cube in the proximity to Voyager would be destroyed except for the one with Seven, and that she somehow knew Janeway would request a representative from the Borg which would just happen to be Seven as her alcove was mere feet from where Janeway was on that cube. Yeah. Sure, Jan.
It did seem weird that nothing came of Seven’s reunion with her dad and no remarking on his demise. I was hoping she would at least try to kill him herself when she was on the cube to spare him from continuing to exist like that.
I also thought the Borg were impervious to photon torpedoes based on their prior experience with the weapon and their ability to, you know, adapt? But then Voyager was able to destroy the Queen’s cube by mining the transwarp conduit with photon torpedoes.
Ugh. A misbegotten mess.
@17: Maybe they’ve been recruiting along the way, but since alien extras cost extra, we never see them :v
@20/garreth: I dunno… I agree that any villain that gets used often enough will end up getting demystified, but from an in-universe perspective, it makes sense that having Seven in the crew would give Voyager an edge in dealing with the Borg and make them more effective at countering them.
“I also thought the Borg were impervious to photon torpedoes based on their prior experience with the weapon and their ability to, you know, adapt? But then Voyager was able to destroy the Queen’s cube by mining the transwarp conduit with photon torpedoes.”
It wasn’t the torpedoes themselves that destroyed the cube. It was the collapse of the transwarp conduit, catalyzed by the torpedoes. Think of it like blowing out the supports of a mine tunnel so that the whole tunnel caves in.
“I prefer to remain unique.”
I’ve always thought this was one double length episode but some of the comments on these rewatches have made me question that. I’ve always watched it as one and that’s the version I’ve got, so I’m glad that’s the way this rewatch has gone or this review would take a lot of editing!
And I actually found it a pretty good one, even though I agree with much of the criticism and that this really does mark the point where Voyager stops viewing the Borg as a serious threat. I’ve commented in the past on the show’s habit of repeatedly having Seven choose Voyager over returning to the Collective as if it’s meant to be a surprise, but this one does do a good job of twisting it. For a start, there’s never any doubt where Seven would rather be and she’s only gone back to the Borg because she feels it’s the only way to save her new “collective”: It’s a nice moment of resonance when we realise the Borg gave her a hallucination of Naomi saying the same things that the young Annika herself said before being assimilated. And also this one makes it more personal, by having Seven being pulled in both directions by Janeway and the Borg Queen, her two mentor (mother?) figures.
There’s a suitably thrilling final act but a lot of duff notes. Janeway’s survival instinct seems to be on the blink, not only by coming up with this plan in the first place but by spending so long gaping when Seven’s cut off from her. Kim waiting for Tuvok to tell him where to plant the charges when they’ve already rehearsed it seems like wasting time they don’t have as well. And I’ve never really got that false false ending beat of the transwarp conduit reopening only to expel bits of Borg ship. It’s like “Yay, we’ve won! Oh, no we haven’t! Oh. Okay. Yeah, we have.” Somewhat of an anti-climatic raising of expectations that aren’t delivered when our heroes don’t actually have to do anything except stand there looking bemused. If the idea was to show us the Borg Queen has died, well…been there, done that, and she’ll be back next season without comment.
Our first close-up look at the Borg assimilating a planet, although we only get a limited glimpse. Seven salves her conscience by saving someone. The Borg Queen acting as though four people escaping makes the mission incomplete seems unusually obsessive compulsive for the Borg, but then she lets them go anyway, so I guess the whole thing was for Seven’s benefit.
The first Voyager appearance of the Borg Queen and she already knows Janeway’s name: Captain Kathy should be flattered. First appearance of Seven’s purply-pink catsuit, which I think is the last of her major outfit options, not that I’m keeping count or anything. The Hansens searching for the Borg years before the Enterprise-D encountered them is a bit of a stretch continuity-wise, but to be fair “Q Who” and Generations show that Guinan’s people had already encountered them, so as has been said, there may have been rumours floating around in the Federation that Picard and co had missed. Paris implies money ceased to exist on Earth in the late 22nd century, which might give a few people on here hives. Regarding his story about two Ferengi tried to break into Fort Knox ten years ago: In “Who Mourns for Morn”, Quark considered gold “worthless”, but that may be a personal eccentricity rather than typical of the Ferengi. Several people (Janeway, Seven, Chakotay, the Borg Queen) say Seven’s been aboard Voyager two years, rather than about a year and a half: Maybe they were all rounding up?
So, at the end of this episode Voyager makes a transwarp journey that cuts fifteen years off their trip. Given that they cut ten years off in both “The Gift” and “Timeless”, plus a 300 light year jump in “Hope and Fear”, plus nearly five years of normal travel…even with Janeway saying here that they’ve lost two years avoiding the Borg, shouldn’t they be about halfway home by now?
@22/CLB: Sure, but the Borg were the ultimate “evil” villain that were nearly impossible to defeat and used sparingly on TNG to great effect. So it was to my sadness that they were overused to the point that it was no longer a big event when they showed up and they were also defanged because you knew the mighty Voyager would always defeat them and with no casualties to our heroes either.
@23/cap-mjb: “So, at the end of this episode Voyager makes a transwarp journey that cuts fifteen years off their trip. Given that they cut ten years off in both “The Gift” and “Timeless”, plus a 300 light year jump in “Hope and Fear”, plus nearly five years of normal travel…even with Janeway saying here that they’ve lost two years avoiding the Borg, shouldn’t they be about halfway home by now?”
They were thrown 9500 light years by Kes, got another 300 ly through slipstream in “Hope and Fear,” got 2500 ly through the Malon vortex, 10,000 ly through slipstream in “Timeless,” and now 20,000 ly through the Borg conduit, so that’s about 40,800 ly of shortcuts, plus however far they’ve travelled normally in 4 1/2 years, which Star Trek Star Charts pegs as not quite 2,000 ly (given all the stops along the way). So they’re well over halfway home, with only around 30,000 ly to go. By now, they’re fairly close to the Delta/Beta Quadrant border, although there will be no more shortcuts of more than a few hundred ly.
And I always felt they missed an opportunity. By this point, they should have been right alongside the Central Bulge of the galaxy. The stars should be far more close together, far more densely packed. The sky from this point until “Endgame” should have been gorgeous, rich with stars and nebulae, with a near-solid mass of light filling nearly half the sky. But instead we just got the same old boring starscapes as always.
@24/garreth: As I said, I understand why the overuse of the Borg was disappointing from a storytelling perspective, but — as a separate point that does not conflict with or negate that in any way — I also recognize the in-story logic that having an ex-Borg crewmember would make it easier to fight the Borg. The two are simply different ways of looking at it, and there is no need to choose between them, because they are both true.
@20 Maybe the Borg Queen takes inspiration from Marco Inaros (The Expanse- Nemesis Games, Babylon’s Ashes). Whenever anything goes wrong- This was the plan all along!
I was wondering if we weren’t going to find out that this was part of the making of a Borg Queen (assuming multiple hives under multiple queens that are still part of the same collective). Seven has been removed from the collective for a time and developed independence. She can still interact effectively with the collective but she also can and will stand up to a queen.
In that case, it wouldn’t have been the plan that Seven join Voyager, it was simply that it created a situation where Seven could become something more than a drone. The nanotech was just a made up scenario to keep pushing her, and letting the four people go was Borg Queen letting a developing queen have her way.
When Seven called Voyager her collective, the borg queen let them go because that was what she wanted. Each borg queen has identified some new group as her collective–and each has reached a point where, to protect them or ensure their survival, has made them into a true collective.
I can come up with all kinds of reasons that’s a dumb way for the borg to create queens. But, it would account for everything that happens.
***
Other issues:
The 143: Obviously, someone is not using base ten to count in this episode and the translators didn’t catch it. Or maybe Voyager wasn’t using base ten before this and none of us noticed.
Seven’s parents: They might not have known they were looking for a truly dangerous species at the start. But, they had to realize at some point that, no, the Borg are not goldfish, they’re killer sharks. Do not let the little kid near the water.
The Hansens tech: They could have hand waived this by pointing out that the Borg must know about this technology. But, the Borg aren’t up on all of the tech on Voyager. So, they can meld the two to make something the Borg won’t recognize (I realize that’s dumb, but it’s an excuse that sounds good if I don’t try to think about it).
Obvious point, I think, but wasn’t Naomi Wilder (Scarlett Pomers) just totally adorable submitting her rescue plan?
Accepting all the other flaws, and there are plenty, in the series the Seven/Naomi relationship was just terrific.
I was very bothered by this as well. To me this not only spoiled this episode, it retroactively spoiled the story from Scorpion. Janeway’s decision to keep Seven, her discussions with Chakotay about it, Seven’s struggles… It was all part of a super-clever plan and the actions of our heroes made no difference at all? I was very disappointed by this reveal and preferred to think the Queen was lying in order to seem more cunning than she is.
Until that point, I found the episode to be OK. The flashbacks were actually interesting, because they somewhat answered the question why Annika’s parent decided to drag her along. It was a curious look into their obsession and their confidence that they are not in real danger.
I have mixed feelings about the idea that Seven being on Voyager was the Queen’s plan all along. I agree it does have the continuity and logic problems pointed out. But it does help justify how Voyager has managed to survive its encounters with the Borg all this time — because they were allowed to. People have been complaining that VGR weakened the Borg by making them too easy to defeat, but if it only seemed easy because the Borg let them win, that compensates for that somewhat.
And maybe what the Queen meant was not that she somehow arranged the improbable sequence of events that led to Seven ending up on Voyager, but merely that once Seven was alone on Voyager, the Queen saw an opportunity, formulated the plan, and allowed Voyager to keep her, rather than immediately retrieving her or shutting her down.
@3 – CLB: “that episode never explicitly said that the Federation was unfamiliar with the Borg — just that Picard was.”
Any information the federation had about the Borg, even if it was just legend, would have been present in a Federation database that Data would have accessed, and thus he would have reported that information to Picard. The Hansens followed the thing for 3 months before entering a transwarp conduit, and they never once sent their observations to anybody? Were they that stupid?
Well, they did take their kid on a Borg safari, so I guess yeah… But still.
@31 I always figured the Hansens fell a little closer to Doctor Elias Giger than they did to Doctor Richard Daystrom on the sliding scale of scientific competence and respectability. Considering how blurry the timeline is about them, it’s possible that they went from being a couple weirdos chasing vague rumors while they were in communications range, to weirdos chasing very real monsters outside of communications range without much time in between. They don’t seem to be working for anyone except themselves, and given how many full-fledged Starfleet ships we’ve seen go missing over the years that only get recovered decades later by complete accident, I doubt anyone thought of them as anything more than one more ship that tragically fell off the face of the universe. It’s a big galaxy, full of tons of people with harebrained ideas and too much time on their hands, so it seems reasonable to me that no one ever took what they were saying particularly seriously.
@30- I’m reminded of a similar theory on a somewhat larger scale- that the reason the Borg haven’t simply overcome the Federation resistance by sending more than one cube at a time is that they don’t intend to assimilate the entire Federation- they’re perfectly content to dip in every once in a while to assimilate a bunch of ships and crewmembers, pick up any new technology the Federation has developed in the meantime, and be on their way.
I’ve never really cared for that one for the same reasons I have difficulty with this one (and the time-travel plot in First Contact, for that matter). It affords the Federation an importance that feels unearned. Sure, I can believe the Borg to e capable of clever stratagems- they’ve absorbed the collected works of Sun Tzu and his equivalents across thousands of species, after all- it seems to place the Federation in an unearned position of galactic importance, since we haven’t seen the Borg treat anyone else the same way.
Particularly disappointing in Voyager which, in my not especially humble opinion should (and often does!) show us that there’s a big wide galaxy outside the Federation.
@31/Sam: There is nothing in “Q Who” to rule out the possibility that the crew found information about the Borg in the ship’s computer. They never said they didn’t. They cut from a scene on the bridge to a later scene of a briefing where Guinan was filling them in on the Borg, which seems to indicate that they had no other information; but it could simply be that the computers told them only that the Borg were the subject of a few vaguely understood space legends, and so Picard turned to Guinan for more information because she had more direct knowledge.
As with so many supposed “continuity errors” in Trek, this is a case where the new information only contradicts what viewers assumed was the case, and is entirely reconcilable with the strict letter of the text.
I feel like making the Borg so numerous was what stripped the mystique from them. When they were just the occasional cube, they felt bigger and scarier, and more unpredictable, like they really were TNG’s version of the TOS Doomsday machine. The big scary implacable monster from deep space who showed up to ruin your day and then vanished back into the big empty leaving a scattered remanent in their wake.
Voyager turned them into just another alien race. Having Voyager have to avoid one or two cubes in their entire journey, picking their way through a lot of ruined planets and PTSD’d survivors, would have been scarier and more dramatic than this.
I keep seeing people complaining that the Borg stopped being scary, but that raises the question: Is it necessary for them to always be scary? Is horror the only genre they should be used for? Series television gives you the option to explore a given concept from multiple angles, to explore different variations on the theme. That can help keep things fresh.
Besides, the thing we fear most is the unknown, so anything that gets used over and over is going to get less scary over time. Was Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees as scary in the sixth or tenth movie as in the first? Didn’t they eventually get more campy and self-referential than scary? Sometimes a franchise deliberately varies the genre on purpose. Alien was a haunted-house horror movie in space, but Aliens was a military action thriller, and that genre switch has always been cited as one of its strengths. Gremlins was a decent horror comedy with some genuine scares and shocks, while Gremlins 2 was a straight-up live action Looney Tunes romp and all the better for it.
So I’m not sure there’s a way the Borg could have stayed scary, except by not being used at all. So maybe it was best to let our expectations of the Borg evolve over time — to accept that “scary” only works so long and eventually you need to find another angle. Well, maybe.
@36/CLB:
Scary might not be the best word – maybe threat is the word that works best, and by the time Voyager ended, there wasn’t much threat left to the Borg.
@36- Well, I would tend to agree that the Borg couldn’t (1) stay scary if they were going to continue to be used regularly. Familiarity breeds contempt and all, and it’s hard to take seriously the idea that the Borg are an existential threat to the Federation after the third or fourth cunning plan fails.
I think the question is whether the stories made possible by the continued use of the Borg outweigh the cognitive dissonance of villain decay. Different people are going to weigh that differently- I appreciated the stories where Picard has to balance his trauma and personal vendetta against the Borg with his strong ethical principles, and appreciate Seven’s journey in Voyager, but the Borg Queen as the Big Bad of the show didn’t do much for me.
I haven’t followed any of the really long-running horror franchises, but I do wonder how people who did thought “Friday the Thirteenth: Jason Takes Manhattan,” stood up to the original.
(1) Unless, perhaps, they were written by someone far cleverer than me. But what are the odds of that?!
The Borg were just one of several villain races who were gradually neutered during the course of the show. See also: Species 8472, Q. By the time “Unimatrix Zero” rolls around, you can stick a fork in the Borg, because they’re done
(Huh, I thought I published this yesterday.)
As the Re-watch’s resident SF Debris fan, I think Chuck Sonnenburg’s wisecracks from this episode sum up my own thoughts:
Borg-Queen: How can you hope to defeat The Borg in their own lair?
Janeway: With my army of warrior cobalt tarantulas! I’ve been training the entire hive to become deadly warriors!
Borg-Queen: …Tarantulas don’t have hives.
Janeway: And normally they don’t have wings either, but my job is to fix it whenever nature makes an extraordinarily aggressive and terrifying tarantula, and doesn’t make it capable of flying up and latching onto your face! Or have an insatiable hunger for ocular jelly.
Borg Queen: Will you stop talking if we just give Seven back?
Janeway: …Who?
Seriously, I agree this isn’t among my favorite Borg episodes either (though I do love David Bell’s score, especially the climax’s music cue).
Wait, here’s the appropriate SF Debris link for the preceding post.
My bad. Blame it on the Borg Queen, heh.
@36/CLB: You cite the Alien franchise as an example where the genre is switched up between the first and second film, and while that is definitely the case, the titular villain still remains scary despite the genre switch. And I’d say, that even with the countless sequels and prequels, the “alien” in any of its various stages of development was always scary to me. There was always that threat of horrendous and painful mutilation and death whenever one was in its presence.
The Borg were one of Star Trek’s best villains and they were very scary and could have remained so even despite repeated use, if the writers kept them as a viable threat to our heroes. That could have manifested through permanent injuries and death to the crew or destruction of the Voyager itself, but these were consequences the series wasn’t bold enough to tackle.
Therefore, the Borg from “Q Who?” and “The Best of Both Worlds” (and DS9’s “Emissary” via flashback) will forever be my favorite appearances by them as they were still fresh and scary and felt undefeatable. Even First Contact made great use of them because the body horror element was ramped up as well as the zombification aspect.
If this was being reviewed as two episodes, I think the first part would get a pretty high score. Watching it on repeats, I remember it as being the episode that really hammered home to me the fact that the Borg were SCARY, and for the TNG episodes I was disappointed that the lighting and the tension weren’t really up to the standard we saw here. I think the doomed heist that you know is going to fail is actually a really tense plotline, particularly as even the holodeck rehearsals fail repeatedly. And the Borg Queen’s wavy spine creeped me the hell out.
I don’t remember part 2 in nearly so much detail, and the rewatch has given me some clear ideas why.
@42/garreth: “You cite the Alien franchise as an example where the genre is switched up between the first and second film, and while that is definitely the case, the titular villain still remains scary despite the genre switch.”
Analogies don’t have to be exact, and that’s just one example of the larger idea, that a given concept can be approached in more than one way, more than one genre.
And really, it’s one of Star Trek‘s core ideas that we fear what we don’t understand, that fear can be diminished the more we learn. The Horta and the Gorn and the Klingons started out scary but then came to be understood and made peace with. Maybe peace with the Borg is too much to hope for, but it makes sense that Starfleet would gain greater understanding of them, replace fear with comprehension, and devise measures to counteract the threat they pose.
So I can’t really sympathize with the idea that it’s bad for the Borg to become less scary. In the Star Trek mindset, that’s the way it should happen — fear should be overcome with understanding. Fear is a visceral, instinctive reaction to be mastered and defeated, not perpetually ruled by. So it would be uncharacteristic in Star Trek for something to remain equally frightening forever. It may still be just as threatening, but the fear is something to move beyond.
Therefore, the Borg from “Q Who?” and “The Best of Both Worlds” (and DS9’s “Emissary” via flashback) will forever be my favorite appearances by them as they were still fresh and scary and felt undefeatable. Even First Contact made great use of them because the body horror element was ramped up as well as the zombification aspect.
Yeah, the Borg definitely benefited from the big budget upgrade First Contact afforded them.
But yeah, I’m not fond of all-powerful antagonists like the Borg and ironically the Collective getting de fanged during VOY is the reason why.
It’s the old challenge of any serialized fiction: Your hero is only as good as your villain, but while powerful villains can work dramatic wonders, there is a catch. You have to thread the needle so that your heroes can make headway and attain victories without diluting the potency and effectiveness of said antagonists.
Comparing the Dominion to the VOY-era Borg is a perfect example. VOY blew it while the Dominion, even during DS9’s twilight, still pretty much felt like dangerous and effective villains.
I don’t find Dark Frontier to be that bad. I personally have no issue with the notion that there would be those with some awareness of the Borg, even before the events of Q Who. The episode makes enough of an effort to establish the Hansens as being self-made civilian explorers, with little to no Federation support. The galaxy is big enough for me to believe that idea.
But overall I’d say this is without a doubt a step down in comparison to previous VOY two parters. Still, the plot issue of the Borg having possession of the Hansen technology, and not doing anything with it until now, is a minor one for me. I have more of an issue with the whole concept of Seven being tempted to rejoin to the Collective and the way it’s executed.
At this point in the show, there’s no way it can still sell the idea of Seven being tempted. This would have worked better back in 1997, when Seven still had an antagonistic relationship to Janeway and the crew, and was still clinging to her former Borg-self. But by this point, Seven has long since restored a sizable portion of her humanity and developed repulsion for Borg. There is no way that the Seven who’s experienced that tragic loss on the recent episode Drone can possibly succumb back to her old Borg habits. To do that, you need to craft a sizable source of temptation. The episode doesn’t even try on that front. A brief glimpse of her assimilated father isn’t nearly enough of an incentive.
As for the Borg Queen, this was an inevitable problem they were going to face. Doing fresh Borg stories was increasingly challenging, which is why Braga and Moore created the character in the first place on First Contact. She’s portrayed as a spokesperson for the Collective, and with just enough of a personality to serve the needs of the temptation story without discrediting the Collective concept. The way she tempts Data with restoring his humanity provides some genuine tension on that front.
But as much as Jeri Ryan succeeds in selling Seven’s plight, it’s simply too different of a dynamic between her and the Queen compared to what we had with Data. And the stakes are never earned as a result. Add Janeway into the mix, and we get some questionable soap opera theatrics. If Seven is Janeway’s surrogate daughter, then this conflict is between warring mothers. It does not translate well in the final edit. Sadly, it’s a narrative hole that’s hard to get out of. Now that they’ve established a face to the Borg, it’s very hard to go back to the impersonal collective voice, because you’d need to justify the Queen’s absence. But this was inevitable from the day First Contact opened.
Not surprisingly, the episode’s high point is not any of the Queen’s scenes, but the way Seven reacts to the Borg’s assimilation of Species 10026, which reasserts just how established her humanity is now, proving that this whole story was ill-timed (which in turn really hurts the Borg’s credibility as villains).
Also, that was the most anticlimatic chase sequence I’ve seen involving the Borg. This has zero tension compared to previous pursuits. Dark Frontier may have some dazzling VFX of Borg ships and the Unicomplex, but it simply doesn’t sell any tension on this front.
Still, it’s not all bad. I find it reasonably well paced, and the crew is used fairly well throughout. As far as blockbuster two parters go, it’s no Scorpion, Year of Hell or even Killing Game. But I’ll still take it over Basics part 1 any day. The characters are far better written, even if the plot is full of holes. The Borg are the biggest casualty on this one. But it’s still a serviceable two hour event.
The Borg were always bound to have diminishing returns in the fear department the more and more they used them. It’s that way with every horror series. The xenomorph in Alien scared the hell out of me. The xenomorph in Alien: Covenant was a snooze. It practically had contractual obligation written all over its disgusting face.
It was the same with Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, etc. How about the raptors in Jurassic Park? They’re the heroes now. Yeah, it happens. Our brains get used to these images and ideas over time and eventually the fear loses to familiarity. That’s Kevin McCallister going down to the basement and telling the furnace to shut up. And that’s a good thing.
By the way, Star Trek: Enterprise did a pretty effective job making the Borg threatening again in “Regeneration.” But were they scary again? Not really. Not to me, because I knew all about them at that point. Still a fun episode though.
@47:
The Borg were always bound to have diminishing returns in the fear department the more and more they used them. It’s that way with every horror series…Our brains get used to these images and ideas over time and eventually the fear loses to familiarity.
Robert Wolfe’s actually stated that was one factor in the development of DS9’s “To the Death” and its exploration of Jem’Hadar society:
“Our intention was to show that the more you learn about them, the less you want to be around them. If you meet the Borg on a one-on-one basis, they’re kind of cuddly, and when you get to know the Klingons, they’re not so scary anymore. But the Jem’Hadar, when you really get to know them, are damn scary guys.”
Again, I still think DS9 more or less kept the Jem’Hadar as effective, dangerous villains for the duration of its run.
Only in the sense that the Stormtroopers from Star Wars were an effective and dangerous threat. They were mooks whose effectiveness so very obviously depended on the needs of the script. In some episodes they are the same sort of barely even a roadbump to the protagonist’s schemes that their white uniformed spiritual predecessors were, and if the script needed the JH to be formidable then the script wheeled out the recurring special guest star vorta and founders to pull their strings.
I wasn’t talking about being dangerous, though; I was talking about being scary, and how that applies to the question of genre. The Jem’Hadar were scary at the start because they were an unknown quantity with mysterious abilities and motives. But over time, we learned more about what they were and how they worked. They were still a threat, but in a different way in terms of the tone and approach of the story; the focus became less “What is this mysterious threat and can we figure out how to survive it?” and more of a narrative about a known and well-understood enemy force.
@46: I took it that Seven wasn’t tempted by the Borg, but rather that she sacrificed herself to protect the Voyager crew.
@30:
The Borg were just one of several villain races who were gradually neutered during the course of the show. See also: Species 8472, Q.
At least in the case of Q, Voyager wasn’t the only culprit in this. By the time he came to DS9, all that was left from his character was a whiny stalker and a weakling to be knocked out by Sisko. I ean, he always had childish traits (and loved to stalk Jean-Luc), but in the end he was just pathetic.
On a minor note about this episode, it always bugged me that Janeway ordered Seven to read these logs when she clearly wasn’t ready to at this point, or when a holo (sentient or not) determined what was good for her “reasserting her humanity)…
I enjoyed this episode a great deal. I’m astonished some think it made the Borg less scary, when it’s easily the representation of the Borg that most hits home how terrifyingly horrific assimilation really is. Seven really feels it too, and Jeri Ryan does excellent work portraying a strong character suffering from PTSD.
The plot “holes” have been well explained above too, and I think they don’t stretch credulity. In “Q Who” there must have been sketchy info on the Borg in Starfleet databases, but the Enterprise was hardly in dial-up range. Even that ship’s computer can only take so much with it.
As for the Voyager lifeforms count, you’ve well over 100 people of childbearing age stranded from home for what they think may be the rest of their lives. People bonding over their unique predicament. If you can’t imagine that there would be numerous babies born a year then we have very different imaginations…
jmwhite: My issue isn’t with the crew complement getting larger, it’s with it radically changing over and over again, getting bigger, then smaller, then bigger, then smaller. Also, it’s stated explicitly that Naomi Wildman is the only child born on the ship so far.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ah, if that’s been explicitly stated then you’re right, that is slightly different.
Obviously we know that the true explanation is that someone almost certainly got a little sloppy with the script, but we know that voyager offers passage to people along its way. If an in-universe explanation is needed as to why the number of “life forms” is higher than we believe the crew count to be then that’s possibly the best fit.
As I’ve stated before I can’t see any problem with the shuttle count. Voyager has replicators and a large (if occasionally varying) crew with not that much else to do. As well as ensuring that Voyager is quickly repaired from any knocks it picks up, I imagine that shuttlecraft replacement is just something that people do as needed on their 9 to 5.
As for the irreplaceability of photon torpedoes as mentioned (was it in The Caretaker?), we can only take from that that Voyager could not at that time replicate them onboard. Yet shortages have not been a problem. So what must be happening? Either as they’ve met species along the way they’ve managed to bump into enough who have the capability and willingness to trade whatever it is about photon torpedoes that they couldn’t make themselves, and at a rate that’s meant they haven’t at any point become scarce. Or perhaps they’ve even acquired (through trade or self-upgrade) the ability to make them themselves.
Neither of those explanations would have seemed unrealistic if they’d explicitly addressed the issue on-screen. As ever, I never consider anything that could have been fixed with one line of exposition dialogue a plot problem.
You think they could have explained that the Hansens went out after the events of Q-Who and Seven is only as old as she is thanks to a maturation chamber…but no. No one ever does that. The writers just kinda forgot or just didn’t care.
@56/Dorvan 5: As I said in comment #5, there is absolutely nothing in “Q Who” that explicitly states the Borg were completely unknown before — just that Picard wasn’t familiar with them. No one person can know every obscure space legend in the galaxy.
krad, in “Welcome Aboard,” you left off Katelin Petersen, now known as Rye, who played the young version of Annika. I know she wasn’t given a whole lot to do, but I thought she did well enough to get a mention. I felt her fear.
Another bit of wasted potential from Voyager was having Seven’s father right beside her during the climax and not even a thought of trying to save him. If she had it could’ve been interesting going forward. Him gradually reclaiming his humanity while trying to reconnect to a conflicted Seven, who is happy to have him back but still angry that he and her mother got them assimilated.
Also, and I’m sorry if someone has already mentioned this, for some reason Netflix skipped out two scenes from this episode. One in the first half where Tom and Harry are celebrating the probe’s destruction in the messhall and Seven walks in while Tom is referring to the Borg they just destroyed as unfeeling drones. The other’s in the second half where Torres is using info from Seven’s logs to install the transwarp coil and Janeway’s uncomfortable with her going through Seven’s stuff like she’s gone for good. Weird that they were cut.
I fell asleep during this action-packed double episode, which is not the response I assume the show was going for. I guess it can’t have been that good, then.
I found this “movie” entertaining at the very least. There are certainly a lot of things that one might consider plot holes, but nothing that breaks the episode for me. However, this story could have been told in one standard length episode for sure. My favorite part is the Borg assimilating species 123456789 or whatever the number was. I found it appropriately brutal and horrifying.
So my headcanon for this one (and for every subsequent Borg episode) is that the hive mind developed a sort of “neurosis” around humanity and Voyager in particular stemming from the cognitive dissonance between their belief in their own perfection and the fact that they needed human help to defeat Species 8472. The Borg have essentially had a brush with death that was brought upon by their own arrogance and resolved by entities they regard as inferior, and they are not equipped to resolve this conflict with their own sense of identity.
As such, the Queen wants Seven of Nine as an individual, but is not really capable of admitting why she wants this perspective; and all of the Borg’s stupid mistakes here, in “Unimatrix Zero”, and in “Endgame” stem from the fact that they’ve developed a rather large cognitive blindspot with respect to this one particular ship and have no one on hand who can possibly offer them a reality check.