“Infinite Regress”
Written by Robert J. Doherty and Jimmy Diggs
Directed by David Livingston
Season 5, Episode 7
Production episode 203
Original air date: November 25, 1998
Stardate: 52356.2
Captain’s log. Seven is in the midst of her regeneration cycle when she starts to hear tons of voices. She leaves her alcove, and stalks through the corridors, finally arriving in the mess hall, where she starts ravenously and sloppily eating some meat. Her reflection shows a Klingon male.
Kim reports to the senior staff that there’s a massive debris field ahead that looks to be the remains of a Borg cube. The only way to determine what destroyed it is to examine it up close, and Janeway has no interest in hanging around the debris in case the Borg come to investigate themselves.
Neelix also mentions that the “midnight snacker” has struck again.
Naomi follows Seven while the latter performs her duties. Naomi thinks she’s staying hidden from Seven, but Seven disabuses her of this notion. The girl explains that she’s trying to be a model of efficiency so Janeway will make her Bridge Assistant, and Seven is the most efficient person on the ship. Seven admires her goal, but feels she is too underdeveloped.
Then, suddenly, Seven’s entire demeanor changes. She smiles broadly, acts like she’s never met Naomi, and offers to play a game with her. They play kadis-kot in the Wildman quarters, until Torres calls for Seven, and she suddenly reverts to her normal personality with no memory of anything that has happened since the corridor.
Seven reports to Torres, who has found a subspace frequency. Seven confirms that it’s a Borg interlink frequency, used to integrate the minds of Borg drones.
Then Seven’s personality changes again, this time to a Klingon, the son of K’Vok, who wants to take Torres as a mate. She bites Torres, takes down the security guards who try to stop her, and then roams the corridors. Security traps her in a force field, but when Tuvok arrives, she’s changed personality to that of a frightened little girl named Maryl. But when she stands up, she becomes a Vulcan subaltern named Lorot. In that persona, Seven agrees to be accompanied to sickbay. But en route, the Klingon persona reasserts itself and Tuvok is forced to stun her.
Seven awakens hours later in sickbay, a cortical inhibitor on her neck. She still hears voices—as she has just prior to every personality shift—but now they don’t effect a switch. The voices are of beings the Borg assimilated when she was a drone. The voices threaten to overwhelm her until the EMH adjusts the inhibitor. She has no memory of playing kadis-kot with Naomi nor of trying to mate with Torres.
The EMH has found several neural patterns in her brain in addition to her own. They are assimilated people whose neural patterns are stored in her (and every drone’s) cortical implant. But somehow, thirteen of them have become active and are manifesting in her randomly.
Seven mentions the interlink frequency Torres found before the impromptu Klingon courting ritual. Tuvok says that they’ve traced it to the Borg debris Kim found. The signal travels through subspace, so running away from it might not do the trick: they have to turn it off. So Janeway sets course for the debris, and hopes they don’t encounter any Borg.
The EMH accompanies Seven as she goes about her duties, to be on the lookout for more personality changes. Neelix offers his services as morale officer, and also gives Seven a drawing Naomi made for her to cheer her up.
Seven and the EMH look at her regeneration logs, and apparently Seven made some data entries that she doesn’t recall. One is a log entry by a Starfleet officer on the U.S.S. Tombaugh she assimilated thirteen years previous, another a woman dictating a letter to her significant other.
Voyager arrives at the Borg debris, and they find the source of the signal: an object that Seven identifies as the vinculum. It’s the central processor of a Borg ship, from which all activity is coordinated. It’s the source of the signals to her cortical implant, but they’re coming through erratically and haphazardly while it tries to reintegrate her into the collective. Seven wants to beam it aboard, as trying to disable it remotely might harm her. Janeway reluctantly agrees.
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As soon as it’s aboard, Tuvok puts it in a level-ten force field and Paris zooms off at warp nine. However, the vinculum’s proximity forces the EMH to adjust the inhibitor again, lest the son of K’Vok once again try to mate with Torres.
Torres, Seven, and the EMH discover a computer virus in the vinculum, that seems to have been put there by the cube’s last contact: a shuttlecraft from Species 6339. This shuttle was from one of the species’ few survivors. It looks like they used that shuttle as a Typhoid Mary to infect the Borg, forcing the drones to hear the voices of many of the neural patterns in their cortical implants. Seven hypothesizes that the drones destroyed themselves once they became “defective” in this manner, and it led to the destruction of the cube, since it affected all of them.
Seven searches for any remnants of Species 6339. But then a Ferengi personality takes over, that of DaiMon Torrot. She’s taken to sickbay—after being assured that the treatment is free of charge. Then she starts cycling through several personalities, including a woman who was at Wolf 359, before it becomes too much for her, and the EMH is forced to sedate her.
Tuvok and Torres try to disable the vinculum, but like all Borg tech it adapts, and their attempts to stop the signal instead make the signal stronger. The personalities are now zipping through her brain like crazy. All of the EMH’s treatments have failed; Tuvok recommends a mind-meld. The EMH is horrified at the notion, but they’re out of options. Tuvok needs two hours to meditate.
While Tuvok prepares himself, Voyager finds a ship from Species 6339. Their captain, Ven, explain that they created that weapon to destroy the Borg, and that Voyager must put it back with the debris. Once another cube comes to investigate, the virus will spread to them. Thirteen of their people sacrificed themselves for this, and it can’t be in vain.
Janeway is more than happy to return it, once they’ve cured Seven. But Ven says they didn’t develop any kind of cure—why would they? Ven insists on it being returned now, or they will fire—and the vinculum has already survived the destruction of a Borg cube, it will also survive Voyager’s destruction.
Tuvok initiates the mind-meld while Voyager comes under fire from Ven. Tuvok’s entry into Seven’s mind manifests as a Borg cube filled with different beings pulling at him and shouting at him. He manages to make a connection to Seven, buried deep. He is able to bring her personality back to the fore.
Once that happens, the EMH tells Janeway she can beam the vinculum into space. She does so, Ven stops firing, and Voyager buggers off at warp nine.
Seven needs a week to regenerate and recover. When she does so, she tells Janeway that she’s grateful to the crew, and Janeway suggests she express her gratitude by helping Torres recalibrate the warp plasma manifolds. Seven agrees, but first goes to Naomi and gives her the material she will need to study in order to eventually become Bridge Assistant. Naomi willingly takes on all this learning, and then Seven makes one more request: teach Seven how to play kadis-kot. Naomi smiles and then deadpans, “I will comply.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? A vinculum is the central processing unit for a Borg cube. Presumably it controls all the control nodes that we saw on the cube in TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds” that the away team fired upon.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is not at all thrilled with the idea of getting anywhere near the Borg debris, and is even less thrilled to have the vinculum aboard, a fear that is justified by it resulting in Voyager coming under fire. But she also will do what it takes to protect her crew.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok saves the day with a mind-meld. Because he’s just that awesome.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix is frustrated with Tuvok’s inability to discover who the “midnight snacker” is. Tuvok dryly recommends armed guards, while Neelix asks if he can put locks on the fridge.
Neelix also attempts to help Seven out in his function as morale officer, which Seven politely declines (a declining that the EMH not-so-politely sustains).
Resistance is futile. Borg drones have the dormant neural patterns of all the people they’ve assimilated in their cortical implants. The drones in the destroyed cube and Seven all find out how much it sucks for them when they become not-so-dormant.
She also bonds with Naomi.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH does everything he can to help Seven, though he objects to the mind-meld, surprisingly referring to it as “Vulcan mumbo-jumbo,” even though he’s seen how effective it can be several times.
Do it.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant, the son of K’Vok will not be joining us.”
“Glad to hear it. Does this qualify as our second date?”
“Just think of me as your chaperone.”
–Seven reassuring Torres, Torres and the EMH acknowledging with humor.
Welcome aboard. Scarlett Pomers is back as Naomi, while Neil Maffin plays Ven.
Trivial matters: This story takes a pitch by Jimmy Diggs about a Borg vinculum and attaches it to an idea in the writers room about Seven experiencing the personalities of the people she’s assimilated.
Naomi first expressed her desire to be Janeway’s Bridge Assistant in “Once Upon a Time.”
This episode introduces the board game kadis-kot, which will continue to be seen throughout the rest of Voyager’s run, and also be mentioned several times on Discovery.
The U.S.S. Tombaugh is named after the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
The Ferengi are identified as Species 180, which is a surprisingly low number. Then again, the Ferengi were the first ones to find the Dominion, too…
Most of the personalities Seven channels are from the Alpha Quadrant, but one is from the Delta Quadrant: a Krenim scientist, who has a conversation with Janeway.
Set a course for home. “Too many voices!” Oftentimes, a science fiction show will do an episode whose express purpose is to be an acting exercise for one of the stars—or several, in the case of the inevitable body-switching episode that so many genre shows do. In the case of the person-gets-personalities-downloaded-into-them trope, TNG did it with Data in “Masks,” and Stargate SG-1 dipped into that well twice with Daniel Jackson, in “Legacy” and “Lifeboat,” and we get it again here.
Mind you, Jeri Ryan is very much up to the task. She’s an amazingly chameleonic actor, which has only become more evident as she’s continued in her career (and arguably put to best use during her time on Leverage playing a grifter), and she’s just superb here. My favorite is her Ferengi, which is especially hilarious, but she’s equally convincing as a little kid, as a Vulcan, and as a Klingon.
I was worried that Voyager wasn’t going to give the vinculum back, thus being once again responsible for allowing the Borg to continue to thrive. Of course, the Borg do continue to thrive anyhow, but that just means that the Borg who did eventually come to investigate the vinculum were able to find a way to adapt to the virus. (It is what they do.)
Props also to director David Livingston for his surrealistic direction during the mind-meld sequences, beautifully using a variety of nonstandard camera lenses. It’s a powerfully effective visual, as Tuvok tries to plow through a crowd worthy of the 6 train at rush hour to fish Seven out from the recesses of her own suddenly-very-crowded mind.
But ultimately, the episode feels too much like it was an excuse to give Ryan a chance to do something other than a monotone for part of an episode. Well, that, and get the Seven-Naomi friendship off to an entertaining start…
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido wrote a short story for the forthcoming charity anthology Turning the Tied, which features stories about existing characters in the public domain by some of the best tie-in writers in the business, including fellow Trek scribes Greg Cox, Robert Greenberger, Jeff Mariotte, David McIntee, Robert Vardeman, Aaron Rosenberg, Scott Pearson, Kelli Fitzpatrick, Derek Tyler Attico, and Rigel Ailur. Keith’s story is about Ayesha, the title character in She by H. Rider Haggard. You can preorder the book now from Amazon.
This is a great acting showcase for Ryan, but unfortunately the story around it is so thin that is comes off as being just that and not much more.
One thing I do find interesting is this glimpse into the species of the Delta Quadrant and their attempts to deal with the Borg. The Borg are obviously a problem in the Alpha Quadrant, but not to the same extent that they seem to be in the Delta Quadrant, where they are always right next door and civilizations are getting gobbled up left and right. Here we basically see people actually desperate enough to go through with what Picard refused to do back with Hugh, and (spoiler alert) we will see this kind of thing again with Icheb’s people. It’s a clever plan, and clearly shows that Ven has an understanding how exactly how the Borg function- he doesn’t need to outright kill them, because he knows that detracting from their “perfection” and efficiency will cause them to kill themselves.
And yea, thank the Prophets that Janeway only did what she needed to do to help Seven, and didn’t get up on her moral high horse about using that thing to destroy the Borg.
An okay episode, but my problem was that I’d already seen this premise done better in the novel Seven of Nine by Christie Golden, which — in one of those coincidences that was all too common when lots of Trek novels and Trek episodes were both coming out frequently at the same time — was published less than three months before this episode aired. That novel also dealt with Seven being overwhelmed by other drones’ memories, but it tied into Seven’s backstory from “The Raven” and was more character-driven, less just a technical problem to solve. The episode is perfectly okay on its own, but it feels inadequate coming so close on the heels of the novel’s deeper dive into the same concept.
I also disliked the idea of the vinculum (a Latin word meaning a bond or fetter, something tying things together), and more generally how it reflected Voyager‘s approach to the Borg. “Q Who” and “The Best of Both Worlds” had established that Borg ships were extremely hard to damage because they had no centralized systems; every function was distributed uniformly throughout a cube so that there were no weak spots you could target. But VGR repeatedly retconned that and treated Borg ships exactly like any other kind of ship, with distinct, centralized computer and power and weapon and engine nodes that you could target and destroy. It robbed the Borg of one of their greatest advantages — to use a video gaming term, they nerfed the Borg to make them easier to defeat.
It also beggars probability that nearly all the personalities Seven manifests are from familiar Alpha/Beta Quadrant species, which would surely be a tiny fraction of the number of species the Borg have assimilated since Annika was first taken. It’s pretty contrived.
This episode is worth it just for Ryan’s deadpan delivery of Seven’s serious suggestion to Naomi: (“Your objective is admirable. However, your neocortical development is incomplete. You would require several months of accelerated growth in a Borg maturation chamber.”). From Seven’s perspective this is perfectly logical, yet also of course totally ludicrous, and one of my favorite Voyager funny moments.
The “midnight snacker” thing seems strange. It’s played for laughs, but somebody screwing with the ship’s food supply is a serious issue, and it could mean either there’s a stowaway on board or the ship has picked up some sort of parasite. Tuvok should have taken this more seriously. Obvious precaution is to just put a camera in the galley and review the footage if it happens again, which would have busted Seven here (since Neelix refers to “another incident” this has happened before).
Plus, there’s always somebody on duty– mid-rats exist on real navy ships for a reason, and like a submarine the shifts would be more evenly split because there’s not a day/night cycle to care about. So I’d expect like a typical ship of this size, there’s one galley but it’s always open, and if you’re there when Neelix is off duty you can still get dried fruit and go bars. So Seven just got lucky nobody was around to see her, I guess.
Yeah, the lack of any kind of security in the mess hall makes nothing like sense.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
On a plot level, Infinite Regress can feel like something that’s been done before. But even though the plot is mainly an excuse for the actor to play with multiple personalities, Ryan’s level of commitment more than lives up to the premise. It turns an otherwise okay episode into a great one. And at least, the plot isn’t as offensive as the TOS finale, Turnabout Intruder, a story also tailor-made as an excuse for Shatner to overact.
While I enjoy Ryan’s playing different personalities, the scene that really gets me is when she’s overwhelmed by the deafening shouting happening all around her. Ryan plays the suffering and anguish to perfection. Its scenes like those that really justify and elevate the show as a whole. Having Livingston as director really helps here, as pointed out. That mind meld is one of Voyager’s better sequences. And it’s great to see the Seven/Naomi banter in full force. A great new dynamic for the aging show. Regress might not as strong a Seven outing as Drone, but one I’m happy to consider as a very positive entry in the season.
2/Christopher: I think the personification of the Borg into a more individual threat – less of a collective force – was more or less inevitable when they did First Contact a couple of years before, introducing the Borg Queen in the process. Ever since they did Best of Both Worlds, the writers were saddled with a Borg problem, in that they no longer could make something that would top that two parter. I, Borg was the only thing they could come up with. A fascinating story in its own right, but the Descent two parter showed the pitfalls of that approach. Which is why I think First Contact and then developing Seven herself were turning points in their approach to maintaining the Borg in the overall franchise. They’d more or less beaten the collective force approach to the ground, and were trying to adapt towards something that could keep them relevant without being redundant. Of course, this creates a new set of problems, which we’ll cover when we get to the Queen’s reapperance on the upcoming Dark Frontier.
A minor point that jumped out at me- that Voyager has meat for Seven to be sloppily eating in the dead of night suggests that either Neelix is replicating meat ahead of time and storing it for some reason (maybe he’s marinating it?) or Voyager is supplementing their occasionally restricted replicator rations with hunting parties on some of the worlds they come across.
(I suppose vat grown meat as a dietary supplement to the hydroponics bay might also be a possibility).
@5/Eduardo: The issue of making the Borg more personalized is separate from the issue of making their technology centralized. Making them more personal is necessary to generate more stories, since you can only tell so many stories about a faceless force of nature. But taking a technology defined by its complete decentralization and lack of specific weak points and just forgetting that completely and giving them the same kind of “central nodes” as any other species’ technology — that’s just getting lazy.
@6/benjamin: After season 3, you almost never hear any mention of replicator rations, except in cases like “Year of Hell” and “The Void” where special circumstances demand rationing. The only times after season 3 that replicator rations are mentioned casually as a normal thing are at the end of this season, in “Warhead” and “Equinox.” But that strikes me as a continuity error, because the rest of the time it seems pretty clear that they no longer have any need to ration replicator use. No doubt they’ve managed to repair the damaged power systems that required it early on.
@7/Christopher- We’ll have to put it down to Neelix doing extended prep work then. No one wonder he’s upset- that was probably a special meal he had planned for some crew member’s birthday in the works!
cuttlefishbenjamin: It was, in fact, a special alien wildebeest of some kind that he was saving for an ensign’s birthday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@9- That explains it. And if we take it that the replicators are more or less fully functional (and anatomically correct? Wait, no, wrong technology) these days, it does go some ways towards explaining Neelix’s occasional insecurity/desire to crosstrain. After all, we’re already outside his area of known space, and I always assume the main advantage he offered as a cook was his background as a scavenger/scrounger who could stretch three pots of soup from a handful of beans.