“Scorpion” (Part 1)
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by David Livingston
Season 3, Episode 26
Production episode 168
Original air date: May 21, 1997
Stardate: 50984.3
Captain’s log. We open with two Borg Cubes. They’re doing their usual shtick about how resistance is futile and you’ll be assimilated, and all that jazz that we’ve been hearing since “The Best of Both Worlds,” but the recitation is cut off mid-word by a blast that annihilates both cubes.
Voyager is starting to approach Borg space, which they learned when one of the long-range probes they sent ahead of their position found a Borg Cube and was destroyed.
This is the scariest part of their journey home, as they have to fly through a large swath of space that is controlled by the Borg. They’ve been prepping for this for the last several months, ever since they came across the first signs of Borg activity in the Nekrit Expanse.
Before the Borg destroyed it, the probe found a small strip of Borg space that is completely free of Borg ships, which they’ve nicknamed “the Northwest Passage,” after the sea route that runs between the northern part of North America and the Arctic. The plan is to go through that passage as fast as possible. Tuvok says that weapons are being retuned to rapidly modulate through upper EM frequencies, though that isn’t likely to stymie the Borg for long. Kim has set up long-range sensors to specifically look for transwarp signatures.
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The EMH and Kes have been studying the Borg corpse they retrieved from the inactive Borg Cube in the Nekrit Expanse. At this point, the EMH has figured out how assimilation works: nanoprobes are injected into a living being through indestructible needles that can seemingly penetrate any organic material. The nanoprobes immediately attack the blood cells. He’s working now on a way to at least slow it down—he has no idea how to entirely stop it, as the nanoprobes are too robust.
Kes gets a telepathic vision of multiple dead Borg piled on top of each other. It’s the first of several visions. Tuvok helps her deal with this psionic onslaught.
Kim detects fifteen Borg vessels all heading right for them. The ship goes to red alert—
—but then they shoot right past Voyager. One cube pauses to quickly scan them, then rejoins the others for the “run away!” maneuver.
The notion of the Borg running is insane, to say the least. Janeway reads over the logs of other Starfleet vessels that encountered the Borg, including the Enterprise and the Endeavour. Chakotay reassures her that the crew will be behind her, and that she’s not alone, even though she thinks she is.
Tuvok calls Janeway and Chakotay to the bridge. The fifteen cubes that blew past them are now unmoving and inactive. Janeway has Paris set a course, and they find that all fifteen cubes have been destroyed. The only life sign is a biological entity attached to one piece of hull.
Chakotay, Tuvok, and Kim beam over. They find a ton of Borg corpses, including one pile of them that looks exactly like one of Kes’ visions. Chakotay and Tuvok go to investigate the biological entity while Kim tries to download the Borg tactical database.
Kes feels the presence of the aliens that attacked the Borg—she sees a premonition of Kim screaming in agony and tells Janeway to get the away team out. She also tells Janeway that they shouldn’t fear the Borg—they should fear this new species, who transmit a message to Kes: “The weak must perish.”
One of these guys attack the away team, wounding Kim and infecting him with a disease. They manage to beam back before anyone else is hurt. While the EMH tries and fails to treat Kim, Torres learns that the bad guys are referred to by the Borg as “Species 8472.” The Borg can’t assimilate them, and therefore know nothing about them.
However, they now know the reason why the Borg avoid the Northwest Passage: it’s filled with quantum singularities (which everyone thought was why the Borg avoided it) which 8472 uses to travel.
The EMH has determined a way to cure 8472’s weaponized disease using the Borg nanoprobes.
With the Northwest Passage now off the table, Voyager has two choices—try to get through Borg space, or remain in the region between the Nekrit Expanse and Borg space and try to find some other way to get home. Chakotay is rather fervently advocating the latter notion.
Janeway hits on an idea: an alliance with the Borg. Offer them the EMH’s method of fighting 8472’s disease in exchange for safe passage through Borg space. Only the EMH has it, and he can’t be assimilated. If the Borg try to assimilate them or betray them in any way, she’ll delete the EMH. (She assures a crestfallen doctor that it won’t come to that.)
Only after the rest of the senior staff leaves the meeting room does Chakotay raise his objections. He tells the fable of the scorpion and the fox (which is usually about a scorpion and a frog, but whatever): the scorpion asks the fox to take him across the river, and the fox refuses on the grounds that the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion insists he won’t and the fox swims across with him. The scorpion then stings the fox, which causes the fox to die and the scorpion to drown. When the dying fox points this out, the scorpion says, “It’s my nature.”
Chakotay thinks trusting the Borg—who have murdered so many people—is a spectacularly bad idea. But Janeway thinks it’s the only chance they have to make it home.
They approach the Borg. At first they’re ready to just assimilate, but when Janeway proposes her deal, they transport her to the cube. In mid-negotiation, however, 8472 attacks.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Borg learn by assimilation, which means they know nothing about 8472, whom they can’t assimilate. However, the Voyager crew’s cruder means of research serves them well in this instance, because they can learn about 8472 through observation.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway is completely focused on getting home, to the exclusion of all else, to the point where she considers making a deal with the Borg to be a viable option.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. In the months since they took a Borg drone corpse on board, the EMH has been studying how assimilation works, and learns that nanotechnology is a big part of it. He comes up with a method of fighting 8472’s disease by using the nanoprobes the Borg use for assimilation.
Forever an ensign. Kim gets hit with 8472’s weapon. The disease is so virulent that the EMH can’t even sedate him.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix has plenty of supplies, and has come up with ways to stretch out their existing food, given that resupply won’t be happening while they plow through Borg space.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Chakotay tries to invite Janeway to dinner after mentioning that she hasn’t eaten or slept in days. She declines. Their private conversations modulate interestingly between captain and first officer and two confidants who know each other extremely well.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Janeway has re-created Leonardo da Vinci on the holodeck, and wants to spend her spare time apprenticing under him in a holographic medieval Florence. He takes some convincing, but he finally agrees to take her on. Later, staring at shadows on a wall in Leonardo’s studio gives her the idea of making the deal with the Borg.
Do it.
“Three years ago, I didn’t even know your name. Today, I can’t imagine a day without you.”
–Janeway being sappy at Chakotay.
Welcome aboard. The only guest is the great John Rhys-Davies playing a holographic Leonardo da Vinci. We’ll see him again in “Concerning Flight” in season four.
Trivial matters: This is Jennifer Lien’s last appearance in the opening credits of the show. She’ll make three more appearances, in “Scorpion, Part II” and “The Gift” in season four and “Fury” in season six, where she’ll be listed before the guest stars as “also starring.”
The notion of having Janeway visit Leonardo da Vinci on the holodeck came at least in part from Kate Mulgrew, who did significant research into Leonardo’s life to prepare for the scenes.
When Leonardo offers to take Janeway to Santa Croce to pray, I squeed a bit, as when my wife and I spent part of our honeymoon in Florence, we stayed half a block from Santa Croce. It was one of the best parts of a great honeymoon.
The novel Places of Exile by regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett in the collection Myriad Universes: Infinity’s Prism presents an alternate timeline that splits off from this episode: Janeway listens to Chakotay and doesn’t ally with the Borg, and Voyager instead settles down in the region of space between the Nekrit Expanse and Borg space, allying with the various local nations to form the Delta Coalition.
Janeway references Starfleet’s first encounter with the Borg in TNG’s “Q Who,” specifically mentioning Q tossing the Enterprise into the Delta Quadrant in that episode. She also mentions the Battle of Wolf 359 from TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” and DS9’s “Emissary.”
One of the captains Janeway quotes is Captain Amasov of the Endeavour, a tribute to the late science fiction grandmaster Isaac Asimov, best known for his fiction about robots (and who was also a friend of Gene Roddenberry’s). Amasov appears in two comics, the story “Loyalty” by F.J. DeSanto and Bettina Kurkoski in the TNG manga volume Boukeshin; and Alien Spotlight: Borg by Andrew Steven Harris and Sean Murphy. The former specifies that the Endeavour‘s encounter with the Borg was at Wolf 359, and that the Endeavour was the only ship to survive that battle.
The crew first encountered evidence of the Borg at the end of “Blood Fever,” and found a dead cube and brought the Borg corpse on board in “Unity.”
The needles used to insert nanoprobes into assimilation victims were first seen in the movie First Contact. Their specific function is explained here for the first time.
Janeway quotes Marshall McLuhan to Leonardo: “All invention is but an extension of the body of man.”
Set a course for home. “What if I made an appeal to the devil?” I want to like this episode a lot more than I actually do. I approached this particular rewatch with only vague memories of what happened in this season-spanning two-parter and I was very disappointed to get to the “To be continued…” caption to find that the only thing I remembered that was from this part was the teaser. Everything else I recalled happened in Part 2.
And that’s mostly because there’s only really about fifteen minutes’ worth of story here. Which is too bad, because there’s also some really really powerful stuff in this first part, there’s just not enough story for an hour.
The most common traps that two-parters fall into are to have Part 1’s that show great promise only to have Part 2 be a letdown (an issue that plagued all of TNG’s season-spanning cliffhangers), or to have Part 1’s that are all setup for Part 2 (TNG’s “Unification” especially had that problem).
“Scorpion” is most assuredly the latter. It starts out hugely promising, with one of the best teasers in Trek history: the Borg having their assimilation mantra interrupted by being blown to bits. That’s the first of three compelling visuals, beautifully filmed by director David Livingston and the special effects crew led by Ronald B. Moore, the other two being the fifteen cubes zooming past Voyager like bats out of hell without really stopping, and those same fifteen cubes blown to bits, in an eerie mirror of the Enterprise’s arrival at the Starfleet carnage at Wolf 359 in “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.”
But so much time is spent talking about the Borg threat and worrying about the Borg threat and reading about the Borg threat. There’s also the mystery of Species 8472 (and seriously, they couldn’t come up with a better name for them?????), which is well played, and the aliens themselves are effective in their sensibly minimal screen time (given the limits of 1997 CGI).
The best part of the episode, though, is one of those talking scenes, because it’s one of the better arguments made on a Star Trek series, as Chakotay argues against making the deal with the Borg. Robert Beltran again delivers when given good material, and his argument is extremely compelling.
And that’s the real problem. I’m watching this scene, and I’m on Chakotay’s side, not Janeway’s. Making a deal with the devil is never a good idea, you always pay a high price for it.
Janeway’s motivations are confusing here. She wants to get everyone home, yes, but it’s only been on this level of obsession once before—in “The Swarm,” where all of a sudden, she was willing to violate a nation’s sovereign territory to shave fifteen months off the trip home. But aside from that, she’s had none of this urgency, and it’s kind of out of left field here.
Again, we’re talking about the Borg. These are the guys who introduced themselves to the Enterprise by killing eighteen people, who wiped out dozens of outposts along the Romulan border and the colony on Juret IV, who massacred the fleet at Wolf 359, and laid waste to the fleet at Earth just a few months prior to this (though Janeway is unaware of that last one). This is not who you make a deal with…
There’s some powerful stuff here, which sets up the second part—which we’ll deal with next week—and the rest of the series, truly.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been doing readings of his short fiction since the pandemic started. Check out his “KRAD COVID readings” YouTube channel which includes, among other things, his readings of his Star Trek short stories “Letting Go” (from the Voyager anthology Distant Shores), “Broken Oaths” (from the Deep Space Nine anthology Prophecy and Change), “loDnI’pu’ vavpu’ je” (from the Tales from the Captain’s Table anthology), and “Four Lights” (from the Next Generation anthology The Sky’s the Limit), as well as an excerpt from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella Here There Be Monsters. There’s a new reading every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
This episode is full of things that scream “THIS IS A BAD IDEA!” For starters, the thing about the Northwest Passage is that no one actually managed to find it (because it’s all ice) and tons of people died in the attempt. So maybe don’t name it that, team. Then, as KRAD pointed out, making a deal with the Devil is never a good idea, because the Devil is *always* going to come out on top in that deal. Also, they are 70 (or more, since they keep stopping to mess around with things) years from home. At this point, going around isn’t actually going to make all that much difference. Their best bet is to find some sort of negative space wedgie or technology that can jump them home, and they honestly have a better chance of that going around Borg space than through it.
This episode also suffers on rewatch from the fact that we know Species 8472 will actually turn out to be sort of ok and reasonable- whereas the Borg cannot, by their nature, be reasoned with. So instead of Janeway choosing between the rock and the hard place, she is choosing the rock over a sort of bumpy path. This episode is also ALWAYS the one I think about when we get to Equinox and she has the nerve to get all uppity about the choices the Equinox crew made. I know that they do follow up on how her choices here impact the other people in the Delta quadrant (in a rare and quite good bit of actual continuity and repercussions), but there is never any real impact to *them.* This is a huge moral failing on the part of the captain and her crew, and not only do they not suffer any lasting impact from it- they don’t honestly seem to feel all that bad about it. Even when Janeway is called out on it in the later episode she basically just says “I did what anyone would have done,” which not only isn’t true, it isn’t even true of her own first officer!
Wait, why can’t the EMH’s program be assimilated? Isn’t the whole point of the Borg that they consume technology. You wouldn’t need to assimilate humanoid officers to learn how to access the EMH’s program, especially since the Borg have know how to use and interface with Federation technology.
Back in June, in the rewatch of “The Chute,” I posted an excerpt from the letter I got as part of my season 3 pitch packet when I got to pitch for the show. The letter said “It’s time for our crew to stop moaning about how far from home they are and begin to embrace their adventure.” Which is what they had promised in interviews before the show even premiered, that the whole “lost in space” angle was just the setup and that overall it would become a show about exploring strange new worlds rather than a Gilligan’s Island format that was constantly about failed attempts to get home. And for pretty much all of season 3, they kept that promise, telling stories about Voyager‘s interactions with the civilizations and threats of the Delta Quadrant, rather than their attempts to get away from the Delta Quadrant. The only real exceptions were “False Profits” (which was written and filmed in the season 2 production block and thus didn’t reflect the new story direction) and the nominal A plot of “The Swarm.”
So I find it deeply bizarre that with “Scorpion,” they did such a drastic about-face. Once Janeway proved that she was so fanatically obsessed with getting home that she’d make a deal with the Borg just to get marginally closer, once it became clear that she’d risk the death or assimilation of her whole crew and abandon her moral principles just to shave a few years off their already unreasonably long journey, it became impossible for Voyager to be about anything but the quest for home ever again. I’ve never understood why they chose that reversal — indeed, that betrayal of their promise.
This is why I wrote Places of Exile. I felt the show took the wrong turn here, decisively and irrevocably, and I wanted to tell the story of how I felt it should have gone instead. I wanted to show what could’ve happened if Chakotay’s side of the debate had won out — if Chakotay had chosen his words a little differently, was less confrontational and didn’t harden Janeway quite so much to hearing what he had to say. I loved the idea that a simple difference of word choice in a debate could make a profound difference in everything that followed.
I’m also really proud of the worldbuilding I got to do for Species 8472 and fluidic space in PoE, explaining just how fluidic space worked and the nature of its life forms. I’ve rarely had a more satisfying opportunity as an SF writer to explore a truly alien environment and worldview.
Keith talks about the limitations of CGI at the time, but looking at it from the perspective of a viewer in 1997, I found it impressive that the tech had finally advanced to the point that a TV series could do an all-CG alien species and break away from the humanoid norm at last. I always found it ironic that TOS had so many more nonhumanoid “monster” aliens than TNG/DS9/VGR did, despite having less sophisticated FX technology. CGI finally let Trek begin to invent some really exotic aliens again, though it wasn’t until Enterprise that they embraced it more fully.
This was the first time I recall hearing the scorpion fable, and I never really cared for it. As I think I mentioned in an earlier comment thread, it seems an incongruously ugly and cynical notion for Trek, that evil can be an innate racial trait, that some whole species are just intrinsically untrustworthy. It certainly seems out of character for Chakotay, who’s usually so open-minded about other cultures.
@2/smoliva: It’s not that the Borg can’t assimilate the EMH, it’s that he’ll delete himself before they can.
“Resistance, in this case, is far from futile.”
That’s one of the shortest teasers in the franchise’s history and one of the most effective. Back in “Unity”, the crew debated the repercussions of there being something out there that could destroy the Borg. Here, they encounter it. We see a Borg fleet for the first time, over a dozen of the ships that are a match for a Federation fleet on their own…and they lose. Is Voyager next?
This episode is full of sparkling lines of dialogue, and book-ended by two very different scenes between Janeway and Chakotay. The first in the ready room shows them as close as they’ve ever been, standing shoulder to shoulder to face what’s ahead: “Three years ago, I didn’t even know your name. Now I can’t imagine a day without you.” But once Janeway reveals her plan to her bewildered but loyal crew, Chakotay does what a good first officer should: He waits until they’re alone, then reveals his opinion without denying her authority. But he doesn’t really have a viable alternative, just vague suggestions, and Janeway’s mind is made up. The trust between them is gone however: “I guess I’m alone after all.” This is something that will carry through into Part II.
Any hope that the Borg being on the run will help Voyager out disappears when they encounter Species 8472. Later appearances will sadly see them watered down beyond recognition, even more than the Borg are, but here they do make the Borg seem like the lesser evil. Negotiating with the Borg seems like a tall order but there seems to be no room for manoeuvre with their new arch-enemy.
Torres invents a new transporter lock on the fly and some quick reflexes from Paris jump Voyager out of the immediate danger. It’s then up to the Doctor to provide an innovative solution. (Unfortunately, Borg nanoprobes will pretty much be his go-to solution from henceforth.) If they are going to strike a deal with the Borg, then the episode does a good job of convincing us that Voyager can come up with an answer that they can’t.
Kes’ last episode on the opening titles gives her more to do than many recent installments, although she’s still sidelined a bit, especially in the first half: We don’t even get to see her visions of Voyager being destroyed. (She does get to sit at command point, for I think the first time since “The Cloud”.) Given that Harry Kim was apparently a favourite for the chop, the fact he spends the last third of the episode being eaten alive by 8472 in sickbay seems significant: It’s easy to imagine a version where he doesn’t recover from the infection. (Instead, he just walks back onto the bridge as if nothing happened at the start of the next season.) John Rhys-Davies makes the first of two appearances as the Leonardo da Vinci hologram: As has been noted, he’ll be back in “Concerning Flight” next season. Apropos of the comments on holodeck attire on the last episode, he seemingly thinks nothing of Janeway wearing Starfleet uniform for her visits. Maybe she told him she was from Venice. Tuvok claims the Breen use organic ships, although this doesn’t seem to be the case with the ships later seen in DS9 Season 7.
I will voice my thoughts on the appropriateness of the scorpion fable next episode. It was the first time I’d heard it too but I’ve come across it a few times since.
The episode doesn’t quite manage to end on a high note (the last shot is basically Voyager and their new Borg allies escaping from danger), but the final moments with 8472 casually destroying a Borg planet do at least underline their implacable nature.
This is where Voyager came into its own. Scorpion Part 1 was an excellent season finale and brought Voyager in a new direction. The stakes were higher, the storytelling was tighter and moved very quick. Everything about this episode worked and set up loads of moments for Part 2.
And Jennifer Lien as Kes finally got to shine. And this continued in the first two-episodes of Season 4 where Jennifer really showed us what she can do and how Kes could have developed over the next few seasons. Sadly we won;t see that.
Loved the Janeway/Chakotay moments – they were the episodes highlights. It really gave us some emotional stuff and showing the vulnerable side of the Captain. Something we don’t see often in Star Trek.
One thing I wish had come up was the EMH’s mobile emitter.
Putting the ship into a position where they could be assimilated would be devastating to the crew, of course… But putting the Doctor’s 29th century technology within reach of the Borg (especially as they just made the Doctor a high-value target anyway) is pretty negligent.
It’s a piece of technology from 400 years in the future. If the Borg got their hands on it, it would be an incredible leap in their technology that would probably doom the rest of the galaxy.
In three seasons we go from Janeway blowing up the array in Caretaker so it’s not abused to be willing to help the Borg commit genocide. Sigh…
@6/AGrey: The galaxy does not exist at a single technological level. There are civilizations in it that are hundreds of thousands, even millions of years beyond the Federation, and civilizations that are still in the Stone Age. The Borg themselves are thousands of years older and more advanced that the Federation, so technology 400 years ahead of the Federation’s state of the art should really be quite backward to the Borg.
Although it’s true that “Drone” in season 5 will portray mobile-emitter technology as beyond the Borg state of the art, as little sense as that makes.
But then, maybe it’s not about advancement. After all, if the Borg are thousands of years older than us, why would they be interested in our technology anyway? The answer is that technological progress, like biological evolution, is not a ladder, not a one-dimensional progression. It branches out along countless different paths, different approaches that are just different and can’t necessarily be reduced to a linear “higher/lower” metric. The Borg are looking for tech that’s different from what they already have and might provide options and approaches they didn’t have already.
I am admittedly biased toward Borg episodes, I just love them. I remember on first watch the teaser was a total “holy shit” moment as they had finally gotten to Borg space (after hinting at it and then not talking about it for a few episodes) and the BAM the cubes destroyed. I actually liked that they never named Species 8472, it made them seem even scarier.
@3, if you will allow me to fangirl for a moment I LOVED PoE so much! For years this episode stuck in my brain as a what if.. what if Janeway had made a different decision or things had gone differently with the Borg alliance in part 2 and I thought your fleshing out of that idea was freakin awesome
Also one of the best moments of this episode has to be Janeway doing Picard. Nearly rivals Riker doing Picard in “The Pegasus.
@@@@@ 3, Christopher, on fables: Despite their reputation, an awful lot of talking animal fables are less concerned with morality than with fairly grim readings of the world and the best way to navigate it without something awful happening to you. This, I think, is ultimately where we get the Reynard the Fox cycle, where he’s entirely wicked, and achieves the gratification of his whims and the destruction of his enemies entirely by ruthless trickery.
That said, I think there are two points with regards to Chakotay’s invocation of the fable. One is that while the Borg are more or less an entire species, they’re also a single group consciousness. Judging all Kazon by the actions of a few would be wrong, but judging the Borg as a single entity is closer to judging the trustworthiness of someone’s head based on the actions of their hands.
The other is that Chakotay spent a good chunk of his life engaged in a guerilla war against a treacherous and deceptive foe. I don’t think the Scorpion and the Frog does a good job of describing the Obsidian Order- one can imagine Garak somewhat smugly remarking that he would have used a slow acting poison that would only take effect once he’d safely stepped off the frog’s back on the far side- but you can imagine Renegade Maquis Leader Chakotay thinking in those terms, even if one would expect “Three Year Loyal Starfleet Officer Chakotay,” to have embraced some more Federation principles of tolerance.
@@@@@4, Cap, on holodeck attire- one imagines that, just as LARP groups maintain a wide variety of standards on authenticity of garb and gear, there’s probably a range of settings that determine how easily a program will accept the users as belonging- focusing on the Klingon’s forehead might just be an annoying distraction when playing a James Bond scenario for relaxation, but could have value if you’re running a simulation of an undercover First Contact.
@9/borgqueen: Thanks!
@10/Benjamin: “while the Borg are more or less an entire species, they’re also a single group consciousness. Judging all Kazon by the actions of a few would be wrong, but judging the Borg as a single entity is closer to judging the trustworthiness of someone’s head based on the actions of their hands.”
Yeah, that’s a fair point. It’s just that, as I said, this was the first time I heard the fable, and it just seemed like it was too cynical for Trek, whose message is usually that there’s always a way to get through to someone and reason with them as long as you don’t write them off as hopelessly evil.
And yes, I’m sure it’s easy to program holodeck character to accept the players no matter what they’re wearing or how they behave. Just like the NPCs in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy MMORPG won’t give a player quizzical looks if their username is FireflyRulz47 or something.
I remember I said this back during the DS9 re-watch a few years ago, but it was an interesting bit of…thematic synchronicity in how DS9 and VOY both ended their respective Seasons in 1997.
“Call to Arms” and “Scorpion” saw our Starfleet characters at the forefront of an invasion. But it was also just ironic that Sisko and the Feds were trying to save the Alpha Quadrant while 70,000 light years away, Janeway and company were introduced to a threat worse than the Dominion that was putting everybody at risk…and neither side of course realized it.
Can we take a moment and discuss the utter heinousness that was the CGI alien? I mean, it was some kind of unholy combination of cartoon and early CGI. Evidently I had repressed my memory of it, as I burst out laughing when I rewatched the episode.
@10: Chakotay was with the Maquis for ~3 years, but had been a Starfleet officer for far longer than that. You make it sound like he had been fighting with the Maquis his entire adult life, and that he’s new to Starfleet, but that doesn’t track with either info about his backstory that is revealed over the run of the show, or the events that lead to the Maquis’ formation back on TNG and DS9.
Various episodes show Chakotay graduating in 2348, and joining the Maquis in 2368. Voyager starts in 2371.
I was definitely on Chakotay’s side here. It was a breath of fresh air to see his advice get taken in “The Omega Directive” (not that it’s the only example).
Actually, I loved, loved this episode and its conclusion until I saw the Janeway / Chakotay conflict in this part and how Chakotay was chewed out again in the second part. Call this conflict what you will (powerful, controversial, good writing, etc.) but I have never since desired to see this two-parter a second time.
Austin: As I said in the review, for 1997, it was pretty damn good, and 23 years later, it’s not that bad. Maybe it’s because I grew up watching Doctor Who‘s cheap-ass monsters, but 8472 didn’t bother me. *shrug*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Re: CGI. For television in 1997 I would say it’s actually very good. Especially since 8472 wasn’t humanoid and there was something creepy about their 3 legs and how they could turn their bodies around in those legs. But also Trek has never been about badass fx and the story of 8472 and how they could ACTUALLY RESIST THE BORG made it ok that the CGI wasn’t perfect. (Although, again, 1997…television)
Re: the fable. I’m actually ok with Chakotay’s view on this as mentioned above, the Borg could be considered a single entity. But also because he’s been a Maquis, yes only for a few years but I always got the impression, a sympathiser/ holding those ideals for much longer and he has spent that time painting the Cardassians with that wide of a brush. I think it was intentional that it was him, an ex-Maquis that held this view and not someone that has always been a loyal Starfleet officer. There is also the element in him of the old fighter that is done with the violence and willing to give up the mission of getting home to avoid more possible violenc
13. There was some truly awful CGI in 90s television, and movies for that matter. 8472 wasn’t one of them.
@13/Austin: For television in 1997, Species 8472 was not just pretty damn good, it was pretty much unequalled. The Video Toaster had made it possible for TV shows to achieve elaborate CGI effects without needing a feature budget, and a lot of the CGI aliens and monsters you saw on shows like Babylon 5 and Hercules were fairly crude-looking, but Star Trek had just about the biggest budget and the most skilled FX supervisors of anything on TV at the time. So this was the best there was. No, it’s not as good as today, but the Wright Brothers weren’t incompetent just because they didn’t make a modern passenger jet. What we have today only exists because it was built on the achievements of the past.
Keep in mind also that TV was not HD yet. If Species 8472 looks fakey today, that’s because the FX weren’t rendered at HD resolution. On the TV screens of the time, it looked great.
@14: I’ll admit I had a different sense of Chakotay’s relative time with the two groups, but I’m not sure it matters that much. Whatever Chakotay’s experiences up to Caretaker, he had developed a set of beliefs and traits that fit better with the Maquis than Starfleet. As the series go on, he and the rest of the Maquis seem to have largely (re)adapted to their role as Starfleet officers- see the difference between their actions as projected by Tuvok in Worst Case Scenario (and remember that Tuvok had lived and worked along the Maquis) and their actual accommodations with the Starfleet crew.
So perhaps it’s a mistake to call on Maquis Chakotay and one Starfleet Chakotay, but I’m comfortable saying that Chakotay has developed as a character over the course of these first three seasons. (Character development, of course, happens most strongly when we’re watching the characters, except for minor characters who are entirely likely to reemerge after a disappearance as complete monsters and/or badasses).
Sorry, I should have clarified: I’m not talking about CGI reaction back then. Right here and now the CGI is unintentionally comical and just plain hideous. Can you watch that scene today and not be pulled out of the episode by how horrible it looks? Back then, sure, state of the art. Especially on the old TVs back then. I watched it myself and didn’t have the reaction I did yesterday when watching the episode. At least the OS aliens were guys in costume. Your brain kinda accepts that, despite the corniness when watched today. But this CGI…something in my brain just can’t accept it like guys in bad costumes…
Seriously, though, take a look again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wivplBVrxeM
I think the visuals in this episode have stuck with me more than any other episode of Star Trek. I love the scene of tiny Voyager getting tossed around in the wake of a fleeing Borg armada. (I don’t think it makes much sense why they would get tossed around in space like that, but it sure looked great.) The incredibly creepy pile of Borg bodies also still holds up and I still love the very alien design of Species 8472. There are all of these great images sprinkled throughout Scorpion part 1 that make it a very tense and memorable episode.
I actually love the name “Species 8472.” They don’t identify themselves, they just come in and start destroying everything. So the only name we have is a Borg designation. It adds nicely to their mystique.
I think Janeway’s proposition of an alliance with the Borg would be better received if the episode had really conveyed that Species 8472 was a threat to the quadrant. At the moment they just seem to be destroying the Borg, so who cares? The only clue they might be a threat to everyone comes from Kes and even that communication comes from the pilot of a bioship that Voyager had just boarded without invitation. If we had seen 8472 indiscriminately destroying everything they happen across or destroying Borg and non-Borg planets alike, an alliance with the Borg would seem like a better and better option. As it’s written, it strains disbelief that Janeway would commit to this course so wholeheartedly and so quickly.
@14: There wasn’t a Maquis until 2370. Chakotay would have been with them for less than a year.
Chakotay might not have been with the Maquis all that long, but it wouldn’t be out of the question for him to have been pretty anti-Cardassian (and/or developed a resentment of the way the Federation always seemed to let the other party violate their treaties) much earlier than that. Chief O’Brien’s hatred of the “bloody Cardies” goes back pretty far, and Chakotay is already from a group of people who have deep historical reasons to feel angry when their homes are taken from them (as they were both during European colonization of the Americas, and as the Federation attempted to do back in TNG), and there seem to be at least some amount of Maquis who felt there was a strong connection between them and the Bajorans in terms of how the Federation failed them. One of the things I liked about the way DS9 introduced the Maquis was that is made clear that there was a decent amount of not only Federation citizens, but Starfleet officers, who were willing to give up *everything* they had ever worked for to join the Maquis- and that rarely happens overnight. It always suggested to me that there were at least *some* amount of people in Starfleet who were there because there wasn’t really another place for them to go- not because they were 100% in agreement with the Federation’s values and beliefs (note: this also matches my own experience in the US military). It is possible that Chakotay wasn’t so much a true believer in the Federation as he was someone looking to get away from home and have an adventure, so he went to Starfleet because it was the only game in town. When the Federation made it’s deal with the Cardassians (and then, inexplicably, started helping the Cardassians fight the Maquis instead of having them deal with it on their own)- the Maquis likely was a better fit for what he actually felt at the time.
I think a lot of people are starting with the assumption that not only was Chakotay a Starfleet officer- but that he was a super gung-ho one. It might not have been that he had some sort of change of heart that made him join the Maquis so much as he had been trying to cram his beliefs and values into his job in Starfleet.
@21/Austin: “Can you watch that scene today and not be pulled out of the episode by how horrible it looks?”
Yes, I just did, twice (thanks for the link). Partly because it’s not that bad — indeed, I’d say it’s no worse than a lot of the CGI in the Arrowverse TV shows today — and partly because I was born in 1968 and I spent the first half of my life watching special-effects creatures that didn’t look anywhere near as good as that. So I actually have a functioning imagination and the ability to look beyond the surface unreality of an effect to appreciate what it’s meant to represent.
This was the first season finale to really work as such. Learning Curve was the anomaly of the week episode, and Basics Pt. 1 was just plain bad. Scorpion has the scope, the visuals, the stakes, the threat. And it had the buildip thanks to Blood Fever and Unity. Voyager’s been building to the Borg reveal, only to up the ante and introduce someone just as deadly. It’s one of Voyager’s better finales (if not the best one).
But it’s interesting that unlike season-ending cliffhangers such as Best of Both Worlds, Scorpion doesn’t really have a nail biting final scene. The planet being blown up and Voyager being pulled alongside the reeling Borg cube make for a great visual effect, but it’s not really a cliffhanger moment. I’d argue Scorpion would actually work better as a two hour movie, combining both parts rather than having the summer break in-between. Much like Killing Game and Dark Frontier, it’s almost as if this is consciously designed to be seen in one go.
It should be noted that Kim being infected by the virus was contract related, just in case the producers decided to cut Garrett Wang from the show. He was treading water at that point, and Kim could have easily perished from that virus, had Rick Berman and the network not decided to do away with Jennifer Lien instead.
Count me as one who enjoys the term Species 8472. It feels very old-school B-movie sci-fi terminology.
And the CGI was groundbreaking for 1997. DS9 was a couple of weeks away from showing the nastiest, most dynamic space battle seen at a Trek TV show at that point. Babylon 5’s own CG was evolving every season (that show’s final TV movie, A Call to Arms, would have stunning shots). And in just over a year, we would see the full scope of Voyager’s VFX evolution thanks to the show’s 100th episode. That shot of Voyager crash-landing on ice was literally ground breaking for 1998. I’d argue it still looks better than BSG’s own VFX, which were done years later.
The thing about the Janeway/Chakotay argument that always gets to me is that this should have been their standard mode throughout the show’s whole run. Chakotay can and should call out Janeway on her recklessness. A good first officer challenges the captain to be better. Voyager would have been a much better show had this been the standard.
Krad has a point. There’s not a lot of story in this finale, but I feel the tension and anticipation is more than enough to hold things together for 45 minutes. A very effective finale for me, capping off a surprisingly mostly good season. And a definite improvement over those first two seasons.
At this point I cannot help but think of the wartime alliance with Stalin, after he had killed tens of millions of Russians, allied with Nazi Germany earlier in the war and presided over a regime famous for its lies and deceit. Or Nixons understanding with Mao after he had killed tens of millions of Chinese.
The real world is not a morality play and the extent to which you can trust people depends partly on their character, and partly on the likely consequences to their cause of betraying you. The main reason to distrust the Borg is not that they have killed a lot of people, but that they have done, and are likely to do, deals with very few. The value of their word to them is therefore probably quite slight.
@27 And while a deal with the Devil is certainly never a good idea, if you are going to do it, you should probably at least do it with your eyes wide open. Janeway and co make *very little* attempt to figure out what 8472’s deal was (and, as we learn later, they *can* in fact be reasoned with), and sort of just assume “they can beat the Borg. The Borg are bad. Therefore, 8472 must be *more bad* than the Borg.”
It also seems like a pretty direct violation of the Prime Directive (and solely for the benefit of Voyager, at that). This is Borg space, and the space wedgies that 8472 use seem to be organic to it. This is entirely an issue between the Borg and 8472, and there is no good reason why Voyager should be involved *at all.* It isn’t the first time they’ve knowingly decided to violate another species space, but it is certainly the time when it has the biggest impact, and all to shave a year or two off a voyage that most of the crew can’t expect to live to see the end of anyway.
@28/wildfyrewarning: The PD forbids Starfleet from taking sides in an internal conflict, e.g. the Klingon civil war in “Redemption” or the Circle uprising on Bajor, but it’s not forbidden from entering an alliance against a mutual enemy (as when both those cases turned out to be the result of outside interference by hostile powers). However, one would expect them to make every possible attempt to find a peaceful solution first. And it wasn’t clear at that point whether 8472 was really an enemy to the Federation, beyond Kes’s psychic perceptions.
@3/ ChristopherLBennett Point taken regarding the Doctor deleting himself to avoid assimilation. Then again, didn’t we just see in “Worst Case Scenario” that deleting stuff from the computer doesn’t mean it’s really gone? And presumably, the Borg managed to assimilate the LCARS equivalent of an “undelete” utility at some point. :-)
Compare Janeway and Chakotay’s conflict in this episode with the discussion they had in the previous season’s episode “Alliances” where Chakotay proposed an alliance with the Kazon as something the Maquis would have done and Janeway rejected the idea on the grounds that it was against Starfleet ideals. Their positions are reversed here. Also look at their conflict in the upcoming “Equinox” 2 parter. As the series went on Janeway started behaving more like a Maquis and Chakotay started behaving more like a Starfleet officer.
Just completed a rewatch of DS9, so I’ll probably need a Trek break. (Might do a BSG (rebooted) rewatch next.)
But I did watch this 2-parter and “The Gift,” plus the earlier Voth episode. STO features the Voth and Species 8472, called the Undine in game, prominently. You can even fly Undine and Voth ships. I also have a Voth science officer (a rebel to the orthodoxy and defector) on a couple of my ships.
Both Voth and Undine are part of a 3 way conflict in the interior of an Iconian Dyson sphere. It’s several zones that show the scale of the sphere very well: big enough to have spaceships flying around even more massive towers. though, why they butt heads in a relatively small volume when there are vast planet-sized areas available elsewhere doesn’t make much sense.
One of the Undine becomes Tuvok’s nemesis. Tuvok is an admiral by 2409 and spearheading an exploration of the Iconian sphere. One mission has the player beaming aboard the station near the sun at the center of the sphere. Tuvok is accompanied by one Dr. Cooper, who is bit a bit player and background character prior. Turns out “Dr. Cooper” is a disguised Undine. The moment when he says Tuvok’s name (who’s distracted) after he shifts into his normal form, drawing it out– “Tuuuuvaaak…” –is one of my favorite moments in the game.
Don’t remember if shapeshifting is ever attributed to species 8472 on Voyager, but seems to come too close to the changelings on DS9. The infiltration by Undine shapeshifters is however an early part of STO’s storyline in the 25th century. One of the first missions involved the discovery of a Vulcan ambassador who’d been replaced (similar to how Martok was replaced on DS9).
STO gameplay update: latest aquisition (Cryptic is actually run by Ferengi and the players are encouraged to chase the shinies) is a Kelvin timeline Vengeance-class dreadnought. It’s captain is an Andorian named J’horel. His ship is called Krypton.
Players seem very disaffected with the game these days. Cryptic is monetizing everything they can, seemingly riling the player base very few weeks. There was an outcry recently when they put Riker’s ship from Picard into a gamble box, which means you can’t buy it directly. Even if you could, the base price for ships in their store is $30. Some are released bundles that cost far more. A recent revamp of the T’Liss warbird was discounted at $120. With gamble boxes, you could potentially spend $200, $300, or even more, and not even get the ship. Cryptic calls it the Inquiry class. It’s not aesthetically pleasing (actually looks ugly to me), which is ironically leading those who do aquire the ship to kitbash, which means fitting it with parts from other ships, or changing it’s hull materials.
Someone mentioned Garak’s likely take on the scorpion fable, which reminded me of this moment:
Boy Who Cried Wolf
Bashir is telling him the story and Garak’s moral to the tale is obvious “that you should never tell the same lie twice.”
@krad wrote:
Which “they” — the writers or Voyager’s crew? Our protagonists initially have only the Borg designation to work from, as UFPers they’re probably too polite to invent a name for a sentient species that hasn’t introduced itself, and soon enough they have Seven reinforcing the numbering scheme. Moreover, they might choose to maintain a clinical detachment, as one would do with a strain of virulent pathogen, because it’s a while before meeting some as individuals who aren’t unrelentingly inimical — viz., the shapeshifted ones training to infiltrate the UFP.
Star Trek Online later dubbed them the “Undine”, alluding to fluidic space (“unda”, Latin for “wave”) and to water nymphs (per Paracelsus et al.).
A pivotal “moment” in the series for sure, I’ve heard this episode described as one of Voyager‘s best. But I think this review does a good analysis in describing it as mostly set-up for the conclusion, which I agree with, and I believe the second part is superior because that’s when the eventful stuff actually happens. Still, this is a tense and exciting episode.
It’s a turning point in the series because it buckles down on the premise of Janeway and gang making a concerted effort to get home. And as CLB noted, this is a sudden change away from the embrace the adventure premise, which I believe they should have kept to, and should be the mantra of Starfleet anyway. I mean, you sign up to Starfleet to explore and there is inherent risk that something negative can happen (being assimilated by Borg, experimented on aliens from another universe, etc.) or being away from “home” away from loved ones and family for a very long time. They are explorers after all. They should be geeking out about getting to explore the Delta Quadrant and being the first ones from the Federation to do so. And if the writers wanted to still have conflict aboard the ship it could be generated from the fact that there are Maquis aboard that do want to get back to the Alpha Quadrant because they didn’t sign up for Starfleet and want to rejoin the fight against the Cardassians.
Count me as another person that is taken out of the story upon the sight of the CGI Species 8472. While I recognize that the computer graphics were state-of-the-art for the time, I just can’t buy into it as real and would prefer an actor in a costume. Even the CGI renderings of ships whether Voyager itself or the Borg cubes, while impressive, just don’t carry the same “weight” as models. That’s what I love about TNG is that the ships feel “real.” The Chakotay/Janeway scenes were great. And their discussion/debate here will come to a head next episode which is another highlight.
Kes was put to good use here and will be as well in her guest roles next season. It’s almost as if she’s taken on the Counselor Troi role here, giving an insight into the minds of the aliens they encounter and providing counsel to the captain, but being far more powerful than Troi obviously.
Austin: “Can you watch that scene today and not be pulled out of the episode by how horrible it looks?” Yes. Easily. Next question. :)
phillip_thorne: By “they” I meant the writers. I see several folks’ points about how it adds to their mystery, that they refuse to even identify themselves, just show up and make the weak perish, but it’s a really clumsy name…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@35/garreth: “While I recognize that the computer graphics were state-of-the-art for the time, I just can’t buy into it as real and would prefer an actor in a costume.”
Whereas I can’t buy an actor in a costume as a real alien. They’re both unrealistic in different ways. And it’s that difference — that decision not to just keep doing the same damn thing we’d seen hundreds of times before but to try something new — that made it impressive. Or at least refreshing.
I mean, for pity’s sake, it’s from another universe, an environment totally unlike ours. Making it humanoid would’ve been an insult to our intelligence. And an animatronic puppet couldn’t have moved with the same speed and ferocity.
I think the 8472 looks fantastic, not just for it’s time either. It’s a truly alien alien, and the way it looks and moves with its body shape is very well executed.
I know it isn’t real, but I know the Borg are just fellas in costumes, but knowing that doesn’t affect my viewing experience either.
@37/CLB: Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and really like when a non-humanoid alien is depicted whether it’s the Tholians, or Sheliak, or Horta. I’m just saying as depicted here, Species 8472 looks obviously like a CGI creation. I just feel like I’m watching a video game and the actors are acting and reacting against an empty space with the CGI added later. Try as I might, I can only suspend my disbelief so much.
And not all actors in a costume have to depict a humanoid alien. The original alien (and ensuing variations) in the Alien franchise are actors in costumes but it’s not humanoid and damnit if it doesn’t come across as “real” and scare the bejeebus out of me!
@39 – I’m glad someone is with me on the CGI! Reading all the comments defending it, especially @38 where he says it looks great today, had me thinking I was taking crazy pills. Look, Kirk fighting the gorn is incredibly cheesy today. But at least it’s real. My mind just can’t accept the CGI in this episode. It’s like if Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes characters suddenly walked popped up in an episode as an alien species, ala Space Jam. The alien was too unreal for me…like a crossing of PS1 graphics and cartoon animation mixed together.
Funny enough, the CGI of 8472 bothers me way less than the stark green-screening of Janeway on the Borg cube. The cube background is so flat and lifeless, even just looking at the screenshot in the post.
A couple more thoughts:
I thought the visual of the pile of Borg bodies was very well done: surreal and creepy.
And while the question at the end of “Blood Fever” about who could defeat the Borg was foreshadowing of the events of this episode, it doesn’t actually serve as an answer of what force defeated the Borg, or at least killed that one drone, in the former episode as Species 8472 had nothing to do with that.
I used to detest bad CGI (and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “good CGI”) for precisely the reasons some of the detractors here state: It always looks unreal and at odds with the live action. (Star Trek:Insurrection and Babylon 5 were particularly bad at this, as we suddenly cut from the actors on the set to an animated sequence of the spaceship exteriors and it felt jarring every time.) But after 20+ years of exposure, I’ve kind of got used to it and just accepted that that’s how effects are done these days.
This isn’t showing up on the menu thread, by the way.
Watching this in 1997, I was blown away. That the show actually took the time to set up reaching Borg space made this episode feel like a true payoff. Seeing those powerful Borg cubes just casually blown to atoms…still a great and terrifying visual 23 year later.
And then we see a freaking fleet of Borg ships that will presumably swat poor Voyager like a fly…but they just zoom on past. Yowza.
The away mission to the decimated Borg cube, accompanied by Jay Chattaway’s great score, gave that whole sequence a perfect dark and eerie atmosphere. (I wonder if Berman gave Jay Chattaway the green light to go for it, as was done for Ron Jones for “The Best of Both Worlds” seven years earlier). Count me as one who is still impressed that they pulled off Species 8472 visually in 1997; the effect definitely works for me. Some truly great, memorable stuff, IMHO.
No, there’s not a lot of story, but talking here is more of the good shit: Janeway channeling her fellow captains, and Chakotay’s adorable reaction, made that an unintentionally fun little bit.Then the sappy bit right after (which as already been said made for a very interesting bookend to the episode). Watching Janeway on the Borg Cube, you see she’s not quite sure if she really wants to do this, if she’s thinking maybe she should have listened to Chakotay, but she haltingly plows on negotiating with…the freaking Borg Collective (!!!).
As this was Jennifer Lien’s final regular appearance in the series, I wish we could have seen more of what Kes was seeing. Still, Kes does get a pivotal role in this and the following two episodes.
This episode was definitely setup, but to me it was very effective setup, unlike the blah that was “Basics, Part I.” And, again, the season was leading up to this, and here we are. This was the end of an era of Voyager, rand and although I didn’t know it when I watched this in May 1997, the next episode would be the start of another.
The cube background is so flat and lifeless, even just looking at the screenshot in the post.
Count me among those who think a CGI alien can be less effective than one in a costume; it’s noticeable even eight years later in the 2005-6 series of the Doctor Who revival, where they use costumes for the monsters in some scenes and CGI in others, and the CGI versions move as if they don’t have mass.
@11.ChristopherLBennett: The problem is that neither the Scorpion nor the Borg are intrinsically Evil, they are simply at the mercy of their own intrinsic reflexes & instincts, which have to date served them well but in the present circumstances bring about their doom.
I prefer to regard it not as a warning that some people are hopelessly Evil, but as a caution that some Good Ideas just won’t work out no matter how much you want them to – because the World was not assembled for your convenience or comfort.
On a less melancholy note, I’ve been fascinated by the USS Endeavour (NCC-71805) ever since I learned it was the only Starfleet vessel to survive both Wolf 359 and the Battle of Sector 001; Defiant is undoubtedly a “tough little ship” (“Little?”) but by the sounds of things NCC-71805 schooled her! (In the sense of having taught her everything she knows, rather than any Macho nonsense).
This fascination is, admittedly, partly inspired by the British Connection via the name ‘Endeavour’ but also due to the adventures of NCC-06 in Mr Christopher L. Bennett’s RISE OF THE FEDERATION novels; who knows, perhaps he’ll someday turn his talents to some of those other ships that bore the name Endeavour (I’d bet the oddity of NCC-25330 still being active a whole year after NCC-39272 was last mentioned has at least a short story in it somewhere, presumably of the timey-wimey, wobbly-wobbly sort!).
Maybe I’m getting my timeline wrong here, but it always kind of bugged me that the Doctor “discovered” the Borg nanoprobes. Wouldn’t Starfleet have already needed to discover that in order to reverse Picard’s Borg-ing (and it was just never mentioned on TNG)?
@39/garreth: “I’m just saying as depicted here, Species 8472 looks obviously like a CGI creation.”
And? So? A Vulcan looks obviously like a guy with rubber ears. Rygel from Farscape looks obviously like a puppet. A tauntaun or a rancor looks obviously like a stop-motion animated creature. Godzilla looks obviously like a stuntman in a rubber suit. Peter Pan flying in a stage show is obviously hanging from a cable. Bugs Bunny is obviously an animated cartoon. A kabuki puppet is obviously being manipulated by black-suited puppeteers standing right there on the stage.
Yes, these things look fake. But everyone knows it’s fake. Nobody expects otherwise. We’re not here to be fooled into thinking something is real. We know it’s an artistic creation. So we suspend disbelief and just let ourselves experience the story. A successful illusion isn’t one that perfectly matches reality so that we don’t have to do any work for ourselves. A successful illusion is one that impresses us enough with its artistry that we’re willing to play along even when we see the unreality of it.
Now, I agree with the comments several people made that a CGI creation can rarely look as convincing as a physical one. But you can’t always get convincing FX. For most of my life, I never expected FX to be completely convincing. Usually, as with cartooning or live theater, the artifice is obvious, and all that matters is the artistry. CGI is just one more tool in the kit, one more medium to add to the wide range of options. I don’t like it when it’s used for things that practical effects can do better, but there are times when it’s the best tool or the only tool for the job. And it was the only way that a 1997 TV show could achieve a viable nonhumanoid alien of such size and speed on a TV budget and schedule.
“The original alien (and ensuing variations) in the Alien franchise are actors in costumes but it’s not humanoid and damnit if it doesn’t come across as “real” and scare the bejeebus out of me!”
The xenomorphs seen in the films are humanoid, obviously conforming to the upright-biped body plan of a human being. That’s built into the concept — that the mature creature adopts the body morphology of its host species (which is how we got a dog-shaped xenomorph in the third film). It’s a clever way to justify the aliens having a humanlike shape without falling back on the implausible contrivance of parallel evolution (although it requires the equally implausible contrivance of genetic compatibility between alien species).
@44/Dante: You’re right about Chattaway’s score. Rewatching that clip reminded me that this was one of the few times he was allowed to do a score with an actual leitmotif in it, rather than the boring atmospherics he was usually required to do. He could do really good work when he was allowed to (“Tin Man” remains an outstanding score), but mostly he obeyed Berman’s “elevator music” policy so faithfully that his work got pretty tiresome and repetitive. This was one of the few exceptions.
@47/ED: I just used “evil” as a shorthand. That’s not the point. I just don’t think it fits Federation values to believe that if an entity behaves in a harmful way, you should just shrug it off as an incurable racial attribute and deny any chance of negotiation or understanding.
@50/CLB: Like I was saying, I can only suspend my disbelief so much. An actor in Vulcan rubber ears reads fo me as “real” because it’s physical and solid and actually exists in that space. Cartoony CGI from 1997, not so much. That’s great that it doesn’t take you out of the story but I’m not going to lie about my own thoughts and feelings to conform to any group think on the matter. I’ve already acknowledged and praised the VFX team for what they created and animated on the show given the technical limitations of the time.
And I can concede that the xenomorph in the Alien series is actually humanoid but it furthers my point that a human actor dressed up in a suit can give a very effective and convincing performance that at least to me, I can suspend belief and fool myself that it’s a terrifying creature we’re seeing and not a dressed-up human.
@51/garreth: So how do you feel about the stop-motion creatures in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, or for that matter King Kong or Ray Harryhausen films? For that matter, how do you feel about live theater? Or animated cartoons? Or books? There’s more to entertainment than just how realistic something looks.
Also, there’s plenty of cartoony CGI today too. It’s not a matter of technology or advancement; even today, it takes a lot of time, skill, and hard work to make CGI constructs look organic and lifelike. As I said, I don’t see any significant difference in realism between Species 8472 in 1997 and the Dominators or King Shark or even the Flash’s digital “stunt double” in the Arrowverse today. It all looks artificial, but that’s the tradeoff for being able to depict something that would be otherwise impossible to depict on the available budget. And that’s more important to me.
@garreth @51 Interesting… I take it there were quite a few things in the Original Series (phaser blasts, the side-view of the Doomsday Machine, the shields worn by Loki and Bele, the torture machine on Stratos, etc.) where you were taken out of the story for brief moments?
@52 – For me personally, anything real or tangible I’m ok with, unless it is just way too cheesy. I will know it when I see it. But I agree there is still a lot of really bad CGI out there. The stuff in big budget blockbusters are generally pretty good and I usually don’t have a problem with it (except the de-aging stuff. It’s still not there). But bad CGI yanks me out almost every time.
@40: I’m sorry, but have you played a PS1 game recently? They do not look good by any standard. Comparing videogame computer graphics to those designed for live action film production is inane, unless you’re trying to be hyperbolic for comparison’s sake.
This is a PS1 game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7fhvnjo-Hs
Species 8472 is leaps and bounds better rendered and animated than that.
Count me in as someone who loved the CGI back in 1997. The 3-legged 8472 alien looks fab. (if you compare it to some of the Bug shots in Starship Troopers I think it looks much better). Though I will agree that Janeway on the Borg catwalk bridge doesnt seem as good.
I will also say that the Species 8472 music theme is the first decent Star Trek TV music that we had heard from about TNG Season 5. After suffering through so much muck it was great to get some exciting music!
@55 – I was referring to FMVs, not gameplay. Should have probably clarified.
@52/CLB: A bunch of those things you mention do actively signal in my mind that it’s clearly the work of visual effects magic and it just depends on how “real” it comes across or not whether it distracts me from the story at hand or I just go with it. Context matters too. If I’m watching an animated movie then I know going in what “world” I’m immersing myself in. If I’m watching something live-action with human actors and then all of a sudden I see a blatantly cartoony CGI-rendering, then yes, for that moment I’m pulled out of the story or maybe even openly having a laugh at how silly it looks. That in no way diminishes my level of appreciation for skill, time, and hard work that went into rendering those CGI creations.
@53/erikm: Regarding TOS, that series often came across to me as kind of cheesy and over-the-top regarding the visual effects and make-up elements so I went going in knowing what to expect, and a lot of it is kind of laughable to me, but I still admire the artistry at hand and the limited budget the production had to work with. And I still think TOS is a quality and imaginative series.
@58/garreth: By the standards of its day, TOS’s visual effects were anything but cheesy. They were groundbreaking, beyond anything seen in TV before, and TOS’s visual spectacle was cited as one of the main factors prompting people to buy color television sets at the time. Indeed, according to the book Inside Star Trek, that’s why the show got renewed twice despite inadequate ratings — because the loss in profits to NBC was made up for by the gain in profits for its parent company RCA, owners of the patent on color television.
If aspects of it were over-the-top, that’s because they were made to be distinguishable on the small, low-resolution, often staticky TV screens that people had at the time. Subtlety just wouldn’t come through.
@59/CLB: I have no doubt that the VFX for TOS were considered state-of-the-art for their time and the awe and wonder they inspired in their contemporary audience. Likewise, I grew in the TNG-era, and even while a lot of their VFX was considered state-of-the-art and I was a young kid during its first run and thus easier to impress, there are still going to be some special effects that are “bad” or at least laughably silly. For instance, the alasomorph shape-shifting effect in TNG’s “The Dauphin” in particular stands out in my mind.
@60/garreth: Yeah, the allasomorph effect was an attempt that didn’t work out. But at least they tried something new. Better to experiment and occasionally fail than to avoid pushing the envelope at all.
@49/ViewerB:
TNG had already introduced nanites (3.01 “Evolution”, written by Wagner and Piller), so if the writer’s room had wanted the Borg to use nanotechnology (3.26 and 4.01 “The Best of Both Worlds”, also by Piller), they could’ve said so. Instead, the technobabble is different.
In my head-canon, the assimilation tubules and nanoprobes are a recent addition to the Borg armamentarium. The Borg in TNG-TV vs. First Contact (1996) look different not because of an improved makeup-costume budget (like the Klingon redesign of ST:TMP), but because their technology had changed between stories (like Starfleet uniforms). But the flashbacks to Annika Hansen’s childhood show that at least some Borg had the “newer” design even 20 years earlier — so, a refinement to my theory: the Borg use a phased rollout schedule (it’s “more efficient” by some measure), and those cubes seen in TNG “Q Who?”, BoBW, and “I, Borg” are still using older versions of carapaces and assimilation tech.
@62/philip: The Borg are spread out across the whole galaxy. The ones the Federation encountered in TNG must’ve been from the far fringes of Borg territory, the most remote cubes. That could explain why they use a different technology or don’t have the full “upgrades” yet.
Funny thing about effects, sometimes it’s harder to go back.
I was terrified by the Wyrrn (whatever) from Dr. Who’s Ark in Space as a kid. I saw it again on Netflix and laughed at being afraid of bubble wrap, green paint, and a strange bug puppet.
You could argue it’s a “you can’t unsee it” moment for some people. Like when I noticed Billy Zane’s fake hairline in Twin Peaks.
“Delta Quadrant”
In Q, Who, Didn’t Q send the Enterprise to the *beta quadrant*?
@65 The Borg’s home is definitely and firmly established as being in the “Delta Quadrant.” That Borg cube in the Beta Quadrant (yes, you are correct, that’s where Q sent the Enterprise) might have been on its way to assimilate Earth as implied by the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Regeneration.” If not, it was probably exploring space looking for targets or on some kind of mission.
Moderators: This still isn’t on the series page.
@65 and @66: Beta Quadrant? Says who? That term hadn’t even been introduced then. All we’re told is that they were in Sector J25, 7,000 light years from their previous position and less than three years travel from the nearest starbase. So, yes, a lot closer to Earth than Voyager is. But given that we’re told in that very episode that Guinan’s people were wiped out by the Borg, and they’re responsible for the destruction of Federation outposts in “The Neutral Zone”, and we later learn that Seven and her parents were deliberately searching for the Borg years earlier, then the Delta Quadrant clearly isn’t the only place where you find Borg. Q probably thought that having them run into one Borg cube would prove his point without dropping them right into the middle of Borg territory.
@68 Oops, yes, I forgot about what Guinan said. In any case what I meant was, the Borg were from the Delta Quadrant, it was their HQ / home.
As for the Beta Quadrant, says a couple of reference books (namely Star Trek: Star Charts and Stellar Cartography: The Starfleet Reference Library) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/System_J-25
@69: Ah, okay. Canonically dubious then, but at least that’s a sensible retroactive use of the Beta Quadrant, tying in with the on-screen depiction of it as an area near Federation space but largely unexplored.
The Star Charts layout of the quadrants is based on the one that the shows’ art/technical staff established in the writers’ technical manuals during the shows’ production, with the “Prime Meridian” dividing the Alpha and Beta Quadrants passing from the center of the galaxy through Sol, so that the Solar system is half Alpha and half Beta in much the way that London straddles the Eastern and Western hemispheres. DS9 used “Alpha Quadrant” for the whole Federation and its neighbors as a shorthand, much the way we refer to Europe as “Western” even though most of it is in the Eastern hemisphere. Klingon space is in Beta as established in ST VI, and the maps put Romulan space there too.
But we mustn’t forget that the quadrants represent entire fourths of the galaxy, so they’re quite huge and encompass many things, just as hemispheres of the Earth do. Most of the Beta Quadrant is unexplored, yes, but then, so is most of the Alpha Quadrant. Explored space is a tiny patch around one part of the border between Alpha and Beta. If the galactic disk is the size of a vinyl LP record, the explored space around the Federation is no wider than a quarter, and the Federation itself is smaller than a grain of rice.
In any case, if you go counterclockwise, the quadrants are Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma, oddly enough. So Delta is adjacent to Beta, and so a path from the Delta Quadrant to the Federation, or vice-versa, would be within the Beta Quadrant.
Funny the directions these comments take. The SFX convo is at best tangentially related to the episode but it’s got more space here than responses to the review. To throw my hat into the ring, I was slightly bothered by the CGI on 8472, but not enough to take me out of the show. Especially on this first appearance, where the wonkiness is well-hidden by the atmosphere of the cube, the greenish yellow lighting and the smoky air, plus the excellently building music and tension of the scene make the appearance of the creature much more effective. They would be less impressive when seen in the light of day; but, for 90s tv it’s still good.
“Scorpion” itself is a great episode I think. Probably the third or fourth best Borg episode in the franchise (counting both parts as one episode, which I always do for 2 parters). I actually don’t get the knock that Krad makes on there not being enough story. Stories are about doing one or both of 2 things: either giving us a message, or entertaining us. “Scorpion part I” isn’t dense enough to tell us much, but it is entertaining throughout, so it has enough story for its purposes. The build to the Borg encounter, to the Borg graveyard, to the 8472 reveal, it’s all very well done. And the conversations in between the action, especially between Janeway and Chakotay, keep the tension up and give us some lulls between set pieces. It’s a really well-constructed episode that doesn’t drag like other episodes light on plot do.
The only major issue for me is Janeway’s decision. It does give us the great conversation and conflict with Chakotay, but really, Janeway is a fool for approaching the Borg like that. It all works out in the end for her because it always does, but if we were supposed to be on her side this time I really really wasn’t. Chakotay is entirely right, the Borg are basically incapable of cooperation with others, and it’s a real stretch in my mind that they make them do so at all for this story. Allying with your greatest enemy against a bigger threat is a neat story idea, but the particular circumstances of this case make it unworkable in my opinion. It’s still a good story but it requires setting out on the long path Voyager would follow to watering down and neutering the Borg as a whole.
So, a lot of comments about immediate-and-20-years-later reactions to the CGI for Species 8472, but what did the artists (concept artist Steve Burg, VFX producer Dan Curry, Ron Moore, Foundation Imaging’s Ron Thornton and John Teska) think about their work, since they were well aware of the technique’s benefits and limitations? Here’s a 2008 article on Forgotten Trek (adapted from a 2001 article in Star Trek: The Magazine), and slightly different text and images in a three-part story at TrekCore.
Re: the index page; the post has been added (again) and should finally be visible–there seems to be a bug keeping some posts from showing up in the series index, so we’re looking into it. Thanks!
The meridian passes through Sol? But Sol moves. It’s orbiting in the galaxy. And moving up and down relative to the plane of the galaxy too.
I’d think that a line between the center of this galaxy and the center of Andromeda, which is on a collision course for us anyway.
@74/phillip: Thanks for those articles. They give a good sense of the creativity that went into 8472 and the difficulties the animators faced.
One conceptual problem that I had to deal with in Places of Exile was, if these guys come from a universe that has no planets, just one big mass of fluid, then why are they evolved for walking in gravity? They should be swimmers. So I took advantage of their ability later established in “In the Flesh” to alter their physiology and posited that the walking form had been engineered especially to function in our universe.
@76: I was unaware of that fact – very cool to know! But at least we have 4.5 billion years to prepare! :op
@76/wiredog:
According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia (1994), the current system of quadrants was established by TNG 3.08 “The Price” (1989), and the entry shows the (counterclockwise) Alpha-Beta-Delta-Gamma arrangement, with Earth on the Alpha-Beta border. (That’s how the diagram is marked — “Earth”, not “Sol System” or “Sector 001”.)
Not on the timescale of the stories Trek deals with, and that’s far from the only gloss-over-the-astronomical-details of which Trek is guilty. Some of the novels allude to the challenge of establishing borders in a mutable galaxy, and we occasionally meet characters who are sufficiently picayune to voice “but actually…” objections. (Novels have space for interesting-to-some-authors-and-readers technical digressions, which the TV eps don’t.)
The entries on Star Trek Dimension (astronomy and cartography) point out that onscreen maps have never been labeled, so the out-of-sequence Greek letters in the printed reference works can be safely disregarded (on the spectrum of “if you want to argue evidence, start with the aired material”). If anybody in the Trek production office has admitted to a goof (“wait, the third letter is gamma?”), I haven’t found it.
@73/erictheread: I agree with you regarding Janeway’s decision to ally with the Borg: it’s very reckless. I know the writers did it do give the story dramatic heft and it refocuses the premises of the series on its pursuit to get home above all else. But in spite of liking Mulgrew as an actress, the writing doesn’t do her any favors when she’s shown as in this story not thinking through the implications of her decisions and also doing things that are reckless to settle a personal vendetta (we’ll see that when we get to “Equinox”). I’m listening to the Delta Flyers podcast lately and interestingly even Robert Duncan McNeill often chimes in with the comment that he thinks Janeway’s decisions are often reckless when it comes to her crew.
@76/wiredog: “The meridian passes through Sol? But Sol moves. It’s orbiting in the galaxy.”
Yes, of course it does. That’s exactly why you need to define it in relation to a specific star — because it’s a given that everything moves in space and so there’s no meaningful way to define a fixed boundary. All you can do is define a relationship between two points and use that as your referent, even while everything remains in constant motion.
Besides, the Sun’s orbital motion isn’t that fast, only 220-250 km/s, which means it would take 1200 years or more to move a single light-year. So while it’s true that the relative positions of stars in local space will change over time, it’s on a time scale much greater than an individual lifetime and therefore won’t have much more relevance to people’s lives than, say, the gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation that requires occasionally adding an extra second to the length of a day to bring things back in line.
“And moving up and down relative to the plane of the galaxy too.”
It should go without saying that any “border” in 3D space is a plane, not a line. The quadrant boundary is a plane perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disc.
@79/phillip: “The entries on Star Trek Dimension (astronomy and cartography) point out that onscreen maps have never been labeled, so the out-of-sequence Greek letters in the printed reference works can be safely disregarded (on the spectrum of “if you want to argue evidence, start with the aired material”).”
It’s odd that they’d say that, because this map elsewhere on their site certainly looks identical to the map seen here in a screencap from a scene in Voyager‘s astrometrics lab, and even in the blurry screencap you can just barely make out the quadrant labels. Also, the relative positions of Voyager and Earth on the map leave no ambiguity as to which “side” Delta is on.
“If anybody in the Trek production office has admitted to a goof (“wait, the third letter is gamma?”), I haven’t found it.”
I’m sure they know what order the Greek letters go in. They just chose to assign them left-right-left-right rather than counterclockwise.
@76/wiredog: “The meridian passes through Sol? But Sol moves. It’s orbiting in the galaxy.”
Yes, of course it does. That’s exactly why you need to define it in relation to a specific star — because it’s a given that everything moves in space and so there’s no meaningful way to define a fixed boundary. All you can do is define a relationship between two points and use that as your referent, even while everything remains in constant motion.
Besides, the Sun’s orbital motion isn’t that fast, only 220-250 km/s, which means it would take 1200 years or more to move a single light-year. So while it’s true that the relative positions of stars in local space will change over time, it’s on a time scale much greater than an individual lifetime and therefore won’t have much more relevance to people’s lives than, say, the gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation that requires occasionally adding an extra second to the length of a day to bring things back in line.
“And moving up and down relative to the plane of the galaxy too.”
It should go without saying that any “border” in 3D space is a plane, not a line. The quadrant boundary is a plane perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disc.
@79/phillip: “The entries on Star Trek Dimension (astronomy and cartography) point out that onscreen maps have never been labeled, so the out-of-sequence Greek letters in the printed reference works can be safely disregarded (on the spectrum of “if you want to argue evidence, start with the aired material”).”
It’s odd that they’d say that, because this map elsewhere on their site certainly looks identical to the map seen here in a screencap from a scene in Voyager‘s astrometrics lab, and even in the blurry screencap you can just barely make out the quadrant labels. Also, the relative positions of Voyager and Earth on the map leave no ambiguity as to which “side” Delta is on.
“If anybody in the Trek production office has admitted to a goof (“wait, the third letter is gamma?”), I haven’t found it.”
I’m sure they know what order the Greek letters go in. They just chose to assign them left-right-left-right rather than counterclockwise.
I enjoyed this more than Krad did, and would rate it highly. All the talking and discussion make it clear Voyager is in a situation where there are no good options. This becomes more and more obvious as the episode goes on, eventually making Janeway’s decision to try to make a deal with the Borg understandable, if not necessarily the one the viewer would go with (If I’d been asked for my tactical input, I’d have suggested trying to thread the needle along the edge of the Northwest Passage, trying to keep distant enough from the 8472 ships to avoid provoking an attack, while still being close enough that the Borg wouldn’t want to risk sending a force, especially for just one ship). The whole thing creates a great sense of tension, which is an excellent build-up to the cliffhanger ending. My only complaint is having the 8472 ships destroy the Borg planet – this is Star Trek, they should have been able to come up with something better than ripping off Star Wars.
I always felt that it was an adequately explained that Species 8472 was a galactic threat. But memory is a funny thing as I was certain that at some point in these two episodes that Species 8472 was firmly established as having the goal of cleansing or purifying the rest of the Galaxy when they were done with the Borg that made it less a pure deal with the devil as much as “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. I agree with cap-mbj, that their later appearance watered them down substantially rather than being an unstoppable extradimensional threat as portrayed here.
I don’t view the Borg as a species, as much as a virus. They remind me of Mordon Solus’ rumination on the Collectors in Mass Effect 2, when Shepard asked if they could be helped, “No! No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive system, replaced by tech. No soul, replaced by tech. Whatever they were, gone forever. Understand now? No art, no culture. Closer to husks than slaves. Tools for Reapers. Protheans dead. Collectors just final insult. Must be destroyed.” The Borg don’t add biological or technological distinctiveness to their own, they absorb it, extract the nutritional value and erase the texture and the flavor, so that no one else can ever experience it. They obliterate distinctiveness. No Borg drone is distinct the only distinctive thing about the Borg is how they are indistinct in the most terrifying way. They aren’t a representation of the mosaic of galactic civilization, they are a forcefully homogenized data archive of galactic civilization and they don’t even share their information, so they’re not a useful archive. So portraying them as the Scorpion in the parable rings true. The Borg cease to be the Borg when they can be negotiated with, they cease to be the Borg when they don’t want to assimilate you (unless you’re like the Kazon and would detract), they cease to be the Borg when they cease to be a nightmare.Q’s entire point throwing Picard and Company into the jaws of the Collective was to show them there’s something out there implacable, that could not be negotiated with, that didn’t care about enlightened values, or mutual cooperation. To not assimilate someone, is in fact against the Borg’s nature. They don’t negotiate or share because it is not efficient. “The Borg way is the only way”.
That said, I’m not opposed to the idea of Borg that aren’t monsters. Star Trek Online has Voyager’s Borg Cooperative becoming a full fledged nation of freed drones. But the Queen’s Bloody Collective is villainous because it is subordinate to a directive that says consume everything and give nothing back.
The Concept of this episode is absolutely phenomenal though, and one that should’ve been the absolute highlighted crux of Starfleet vs the Borg every single time. The Borg are superior, but they have a critical flaw. For all their knowledge they are void of creativity. Starfleet is filled to the brim with creative people who are inspired and directed to be creative, who love to research and learn. That the Collective can only learn one way and if you nullify that you can defeat them every time is magnificent.Something that actually gives the crew leverage over the Collective.
It distills the Borg’s motivations towards Starfleet and Earth to their most “primal” motivation. The desire to improve themselves. It also illuminates the great tragedy of the Borg. If they ever assimilated humans they would destroy that creativity and thus fail to eliminate their flaw. But the Borg are not actually humanocentric so it actually magnifies the tragedy. I imagine they’ve tried it over and over again. Numerous brilliant civilizations that have similar creativity and energy, and the Borg assimilate them and in doing so destroy that which they so want to integrate into themselves, never realizing that the drive to assimilate, the Queen, the entire subjugation into the collective is what actually has destroyed the Borg’s creativity, their ability to generate new solutions from imagination, the ability to make leaps through research rather than simply stealing knowledge. And until they give that up, they’ll never achieve perfection.
@76/wiredog, That’s true, but it takes thousands of years for appreciable change in stellar configuration. I am curious which way it goes though. Will the Sol System move into the Beta Quadrant or will the Alpha Beta Boundary move with the Sol System. The entire Galaxy moves at inconsistent rates through the Galactic volume meaning that it’s logical to have a common reference point even one in motion.
@84/Mr. D: Very good insights into the Borg. I would’ve said a cancer rather than a virus, but otherwise I agree with your characterization.
However, I can accept their willingness to negotiate in a unique circumstance like this. Two things to consider:
1) The Borg have never been this badly on the ropes before. They’re losing badly. And the thing they’re good at is adapting — trying new things when their usual tactics fail. If they fail to beat an enemy on their own, an alliance is a new tactic worth trying.
2) Jumping ahead to Part 2 here, but the Borg never intended to honor the alliance. They always would’ve betrayed Voyager and assimilated it anyway. So it’s not really a change in their approach, just a stratagem toward their same, unwavering goal.
“I am curious which way it goes though. Will the Sol System move into the Beta Quadrant or will the Alpha Beta Boundary move with the Sol System.”
Naturally, the latter. As I said, with everything moving, the only way to define a boundary is relative to two or more specific points. So the boundary would move with those points — much the same way the Greenwich Meridian moves with London as the Earth rotates around its axis.
After all, the Sun does move at 250 km/s. It wouldn’t make any sense to define the boundary as where the Sun was at the specific past moment when the law was enacted or whatever, because the Sun would already be moving past that boundary before you even finished enacting the law. The only meaningful way to define it is relative to the Sun itself, and therefore moving as it moves.
Essentially, you treat the Sun and the galactic barycenter as defining the x-axis of your coordinate system, and define all other positions relative to that frame of reference. So within that frame of reference, the Sun and barycenter are treated as motionless.
@79: Well, in terms of on-screen evidence, Voyager’s “Renaissance Man” basically confirms that the Beta and Delta Quadrants are adjacent, since the Doctor makes up a story about an ultra-powerful alien race whose territory covers areas of both.
Easily my favorite Janeway episode and the one episode that I feel really showed her as the way a captain should be. She showed her willingness to go harder and farther than anyone to get them back home. It honestly irritated me every time the ship diverted from its hard march the way home and if anyone seriously argued. “We’re not going to focus on trying to go home anymore” then I think they were wrong. No wonder Ron Moore went mad in the writers’ room.
I also support her decision to ally with the Borg. The only reason Species XXXX backed down from universal genocide was because Voyager armed the Borg to fight back.
@87/C.T Phipps: “…if anyone seriously argued. “We’re not going to focus on trying to go home anymore” then I think they were wrong. No wonder Ron Moore went mad in the writers’ room.”
The shift of focus away from the journey home was exclusive to season 3. Ron Moore’s brief tenure was at the start of season 6. The one has nothing to do with the other.
I still think that Voyager‘s approach to a 75-year journey home was monumentally stupid. Just pointing their ship in that direction and hitting “go” was ridiculous. The ship was badly damaged and depleted, they had no allies… just wandering off into dangerous unknown space was insanely reckless, like trudging off into the desert without getting food or water or gear or maps first. The first priority should’ve been to tend to the crew’s safety and well-being and to repair and resupply the ship. Getting home was, by definition, a much longer-term goal. They should’ve found some local power to make an alliance with, drawn on their protection and resources while they repaired the ship, used that foundation to research methods for communicating with the Federation or finding/creating a wormhole or something. They should’ve searched for other Alpha/Beta Quadrant ships abducted by the Caretaker (like Equinox) and built a larger convoy (or ragtag fugitive fleet, if you prefer).
Now that I think about it, the entire first season should’ve been about preparing for the journey home — getting to know the lay of the land, feeling out allies, negotiating for resources, seeking information about possible shortcuts or faster propulsion methods, repairing and upgrading the engines, training new crew to replace the ones who decide to stay behind and make a life there, etc. That would’ve been a great way to make use of the DQ setting, still hitting a lot of the same beats but in a more coherent and logical way. Then at the end of the season, once they were really ready, they could’ve set out on their quest, using the knowledge and advances they’d gained to shorten their journey.
And really, 75 years was too long. That was a best case, not taking delays into account. So it was unrealistic to expect that any of the crew would make it home in their lifetimes (not even Tuvok, as he’s already middle-aged for a Vulcan), so the entire quest felt like an extended exercise in self-delusion. The premise would’ve made more sense if they’d been something like 20-25 years from home.
I LOVE the name of the species. What number would you have suggested?
Rich: my issue wasn’t with the number picked, it’s that everyone just stuck with the incredibly boring Borg designation rather than let them have their own name.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@90/krad: I like it that they’re so alien that they don’t have a name in our terms. Any name given to them would not be their own; at best it would be a translation of their concept for themselves. (“It calls itself the Horta.” How? It makes grinding rock sounds!!)
Still, I guess Voyager‘s crew could’ve come up with their own name for them. But they didn’t encounter them often enough for it to become an issue.
@91/CLB:How about, the “fluidic space aliens?”
@92/garreth: That sounds messy.
Star Trek Online went somewhere similar by calling them the Undine, after a mythical water spirit.
Species 8472 in Star Trek Online has two names actually. The common Undine and the Klingon specific Qameh Quv (apologies if I messed up the spelling) meaning “Replacers of honor with dishonor” as they use their shape shifting capability to replace key operatives in the major powers of local space. I personally like using the Borg designation in this case, sounds badass and unknowable. There’s also a greater mystery in the name. I’m always drawn to Hudson and Elisa Maza’s conversation in the Gargoyle’s premiere miniseries/TV Movie where they discuss human’s need to name and classify everything which resulted in his name when he lost the snark battle. If you snuck into the government storehouse after Raiders of the Lost Ark, you wouldn’t know that item 10,526 is the Ark of the Covenant. Such an impersonal name for something so dangerous imparts a wonderful mysteriousness to the name. The only thing that ticks me off is that it has that accursed 47 in the middle of it.
@85/ChristopherLBennett
I was going back and forth between cancer and virus, it’s a cancer because it’s something originating within the Body Galactic, and growing out of control by co-opting other cells and organs, but I chose Virus because it’s the most direct line from their method of assimilation. It also applies to both biology and technology. Though yes a virus doesn’t purely co-opt the cells but destroys them to reproduce whereas a Cancer cell makes more cancer.
On a side note I’m convinced that the Romulans developed Thalaron Weaponry as a more direct and brutal means of combating the Borg. If Seven had been a Romulan instead of a human *chef kiss*. It would’ve been Romulan arrogance on top of Borg arrogance and she and Torres would’ve hated each other even more! The Romulans were the only other civilization in local space that was as concerned with and interacted with the Borg as much as the Federation.
We’re losing the war, we need to adapt, Adaption strategy: Tactical Alliance with lone Starfleet Vessel with unique weapons innovation. Yeah that does make sense. And yes their sudden but inevitable betrayal is right there in the title. In actuality all the Borg did was be patient with their food. If there was any benevolence there it would’ve been the Lion and the Mouse, not the Scorpion and the Frog.
As for the Stellar cartography it makes me think that the other powers de facto accepted the designations because the Federation actually advanced mapmaking information more than anyone else. Starfleet is dedicated to going out and seeing everything and exploring space so the Federation would have the best maps in the game and be happy to share them for the most part. So everyone in this region of space uses Federation Starcharts. Starcharts that put the Federation Capitol System on the boarder.
@94/Mr. D: As I said in comment #71, Star Charts was just reflecting the galactic layout that the shows’ own art department devised behind the scenes years earlier. The book’s author Geoffrey Mandel and contributing artist Doug Drexler were both members of the shows’ art staff.
@3/ clb, “…once it became clear that she’d risk the death or assimilation of her whole crew and abandon her moral principles just to shave a few years off their already unreasonably long journey, it became impossible for Voyager to be about anything but the quest for home ever again. I’ve never understood why they chose that reversal — indeed, that betrayal of their promise.”
Personally, I neither see the moral conundrum nor the betrayal of their promise. The following are Viktor Frankl quotes:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Traditionally, the Greeks thought temperament guided such a response. Jung believed collective stimulus guided and integrated with major archetypes to produce a response. Campbell suggests collective myth is the influence leading to a response. To an extent, what belies Janeway’s response, or whether she’s uniform in her response is irrelevant. Her temperament and archetype is always been conviction if not confidence in her decision-making process.
Janeway is simply consistent with being human. It was her choice at a point in time to cross the Northwest Passage. Your assertion based on the letter and the theme of Season 3 is that Janeway’s primary objective is exploration when it was never in doubt that it was to get home and keep her crew safe. Exploration is the corollary to not “moaning” the objective. It’s a response to how to continue the journey home. That response can change given an event, new information, or new circumstance.
“…cynical notion for Trek, that evil can be an innate racial trait, that some whole species are just intrinsically untrustworthy. It certainly seems out of character for Chakotay, who’s usually so open-minded about other cultures.”
I’ve echoed this before. I’m uncertain why everything is construed as a racial or prejudicial commentary. These two parts are a parable. Who’s The Scorpion? The Borg? Species 8472? The Federation? Janeway? The individuals, species, or entities in the Delta Quadrant who affronted or will in future attack Voyager? Who’s The Frog? The Assimilated? The victims of 8472’s genocide? Cultures adversely affected by The Prime and Temporal Directives? Janeway’s crew? The parable suggests that we should reflect upon our natural tendencies, predisposition, temperament, or being because there are dire consequences when we do not.
There’s no issue with Chakotay’s character either. People react differently after a traumatic experience especially when confronted with the source of that trauma. His response is isolated and not a reflection of being less open-minded. Addedly, we cannot be sure his subjugation by ex-Borg was his motive. His rationale could be construed as that of a good first officer – as a foil to Janeway.
@96/Chip72: I don’t know why you’re talking in terms of Janeway’s motivations. Janeway doesn’t exist. She’s an imaginary construct. Her actions are exclusively the result of the writers‘ decisions, not her own. What I don’t understand, as I explained, is why the producers of the television series Star Trek: Voyager committed at the start of season 3 to move away from “quest for home” stories, yet then permanently repudiated that choice less than a year later.
“I’m uncertain why everything is construed as a racial or prejudicial commentary.”
“Everything” has nothing to do with it. It’s about this specific fable, whose moral is that no scorpion should ever have been trusted “because it’s my nature” to be untrustworthy. That is explicitly a statement of species essentialism in and of itself, and I therefore think it’s an ugly idea to apply that moral as an analogy for any category of sentient beings.
I think it would have been better for the legacy of The Borg is after the second part of this story they were not seen again in Voyager, apart from of course Seven of Nine. They should have remained primary an enemy of TNG. Species 8472 made a great impact here but become yet another opportunity wasted going forward. It was great to initially see John Rhys Davies in this a magnificent actor who would cement his legacy further just a couple of years later in Lord of the Rings…before tarnishing it quite a bit with some rather unpalatable political statements.
@krad: I’d add to the Trivial Matters Da Vinci’s appearance on Lower Decks. I know it’s not Rhys Davies, but it’s still based on these VOY appearances.
I agree with you about Janeway making an alliance with the Borg, but at least this show remembers to paint it as a bad idea, and the Borg as evil; unlike Discovery’s crew getting al chummy-chummy with Emperor Georgiou.
@1 – wildfyrewarning: That’s what Janeway should have done from the start: seek out Species 8742 and ally with them.
@83 – Geekpride: That sounds like a pretty good ide.
Squeed? You learn a new word every day. Was Q Who set in the DQ or did Q send the Enterprise to a more distant sector of the AQ? Does anyone else think the 15 cubes bearing down on the helpless Voyager would have made a hell of a teaser too and an even better way to let the crew know they’ve reached Borg space? The Borg designate everything by number, not by name, and that includes species, Krad.
Robert Beltran gets the episode’s best line, “How much is our safety worth?” I love that line for the way it flies in the face of this ship’s mission statement. Janeway does become more obsessive about getting Voyager home from Scorpion onwards. At the end of TNG and VGR’s third seasons, they may have been potentially about to lose a cast member, before they did in they’re fourth.
1: I wish VGR hadn’t defanged Species 8472. 2: All the data would have been deleted from the EMH program before the Borg could assimilate it. 3: I could never figure out what was the A-plot of The Swarm. The CG in Babylon 5 never looked too convincing except when it came to the Shadows – they’re unreality made them creepier. Chakotay’s experience in Unity probably left him with a bad impression of the Borg. 9: The best Picard impression was Q’s in Tapestry. 12: I wonder how the Dominion would stand up to the Borg or Species 8472?
13: They do what they can within the limits of CGI. After the twin hits of Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, it’s amazing how quickly the technology was embraced, so it’s understandably still rough around the edges. But Species 8472 are one of the few Star Trek aliens to feel genuinely alien. 23: How long were the Maquis building their ranks before they went public in 2370? 26: I’d say Scorpion’s level of continuity is pretty consistent, unlike The Best of Both Worlds. I applaud S3 for trying to do something different but it suffers from some of the same problems as VGR’s first two seasons.
28: I’m not sure how vast Borg space is and it’s not until Kes mentally sends Voyager 10,000 light-years that it’s no longer an issue. 29: Species 8472’s “malevolence and cold hatred” is quickly forgotten after Scorpion. 37: “I can’t buy an actor in a costume as a real alien” – does that include Alien (1979)? 39: When Alien 3 turned to CGI, the effect didn’t work at all. 43: Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were the films that launched the CGI revolution and both showed how dazzling it can be when it falls into the right hands. 49: Did VGR coin the term nanoprobes? I remember the mention of biochips in I, Borg but are they the same? And I think you mean Borgification.
50: “Peter Pan flying in a stage show is obviously hanging from a cable” – especially if you’ve seen Peter Pan Goes Wrong. And much music in Trek is just anonymous white noise. 54: I remember when I first saw The Scorpion King 😱 60/61: As unconvincing as what they turned into? 71: If Voyager hadn’t found a faster route home, would they have needed to travel through the Beta Quadrant eventually to make it? 77: Would they make better swimmers with that third leg? 80: Kate Mulgrew blamed Janeway’s erratic behaviour on the writing more than her own shortcomings.
83: The whole point to that ending is if Species 8472 is capable of global destruction, God help us all! 84: Why do people mix up what happens in Pt2 with Pt1? 85: Some ST species are characterised like a disease. 90: Were Species 8472 the 8472nd race the Borg encountered? 91: The most alien thing about them is their eyes – their pupils are cross-shaped. 97: Can you classify the Borg as sentient? 98: Due to falling ratings, VGR came to rely too much on the Borg as a crutch. And what political statements did he make? 99: What’s a pretty good idea?
Geekpride’s idea:
“If I’d been asked for my tactical input, I’d have suggested trying to thread the needle along the edge of the Northwest Passage, trying to keep distant enough from the 8472 ships to avoid provoking an attack, while still being close enough that the Borg wouldn’t want to risk sending a force, especially for just one ship.”
On making a deal with the devil and selling him the deltaquadrant Janeway, doing business with a loan shark is not a good idea. In hope and fear she nearly gets her but kicked for this war crime against the locals
So many fans have pointed out that Q saved the Federation by sending the Enterprise-D into the path of that Borg Cube, but what I think this episode shows is that that single act also saved the Borg. If humanity had just been assimilated “The Best of Both Worlds,” then Voyager wouldn’t have been on hand in “Scorpion,” and the Borg almost certainly would have been exterminated by Species 8472.
Considering this episode in light of Prodigy’s most recent one, “Let Sleeping Borgs Lie”:
I think there’s a lot of course correction for Kathryn Janeway in this episode and I wonder if it’s Mulgrew’s influence as I have a much more consistent grasp of her character than I do from Voyager (and I just rewatched the series). To be blunt, Hologram Janeway is SCARED of the Borg and pretty much tells the crew to run away from them. It’s a vulnerability that adds to the character and fits much-better with what we know of the Borg while regular Janeway never did run from the Borg but more or less ran at them.
But for Scorpion and the Prodigy episode? What I like is no Queen.
Part of what I like about this episode is the Borg are also treated as far less personal in their evil and no less malevolent for it. The Borg aren’t doing this because they get pleasure from evil like the Borg Queen or sadistically tormenting Seven or
Doctor Jurati. No, they’re an assembly line and the rest of the galaxy is parts. It’s like my best friend, Michael, has the same opinion on Davros for the Daleks. The Daleks are infinitely better and more terrifying without Davros because the Daleks are terrifying due to their lack of individuality and indifference. This episode nicely conveyed the Borg are dangerous because we’re ants to them.
I think the lack of the Queen benefits the story even if the Borg are a little too weak in the face of the new threat and Janeway brushes off the danger too easily.
“The best part of the episode, though, is one of those talking scenes, because it’s one of the better arguments made on a Star Trek series, as Chakotay argues against making the deal with the Borg.”
This is the prime example for me that shows Janeway being a highly incompetent captain. This is a decision that affects the life of the entire crew. They have time to make a decision, there is no immediate rush. Still, instead of consulting with her team or even the entire crew, she makes a super risky decision alone that is ethically and morally questionable and with a slim chance of success. Sure, it works in the end, because she’s that awesome and because more seasons are coming, but come on. There could have been so many alternatives. Going around, turning back, trying to slip through without being detected in the heat of a full scale war, just to name a few, etc etc.
No matter what the topic is, she has to make all decisions alone. Not only this is a dumb approach, it would have been super demotivating for me to work with her.
And very interesting to compare with Picard, who did ask for ideas, opinions not only in briefings and staff meetings, but also on the bridge and he considered them every time (forget season 1).
Oh and when she says to Chakotay that “so i am alone after all”. that’s such a manipulative statement. She dismisses all his inputs and is not willing to reach a common decision and then she’s complaining that he is not thrilled for her wonderful plan…
Other than that, i really like this episode. I don’t mind that it’s more a preparation, i think still it does not get boring and the pacing works for me.
Someone may have mentioned this in all these comments, but the thing that bugs me the most about Janeway’s decision is how she reacts when Chakotay disagrees with her. She quips, “Then I guess I’m alone, after all.” That just seems so petty and unnecessary.
@107 / Thierafhal: well, just one comment above yours. :)
@105-108: The thing that I find frustrating about Voyager in general is that there’s absolutely no reason that the ship shouldn’t be a democracy, at least outside of, say, combat situations, and in fact, I think that it’s almost inevitable that it would become one, or at least develop a much more loose-y goose-y command structure. The military command hierarchy is tens of thousands of lightyears away and a third of the crew never signed onto it in the first place; and yet, everyone is willing to follow Janeway, even when she proposes courses of action that pretty much all of her subordinates consider ludicrous (in this case, proposing an alliance to the Borg).
I guess that Paramount in the 1990s probably didn’t want to be seen to undermine their first woman captain by making her captain just on a pro-tempore basis, or by giving pushback to her orders; but it feels like a missed opportunity to explore the nature of authority.
@108/th1: Wow, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “don’t I feel like the F’ing Idiot!” I guess the lesson should be the in the face of so many comments, at least look at the very last one 🤣
@109 / jaimebabb – yeah. i’m no military expert, but i would expect that at least by the 23rd century a starship captain is aware of different decision making approaches and how to use them in different contexts – so while i would not expect “democracy” on the ship, but I would expect different approaches for different types of decisions…
But no, let’s build this hero-cult where the single leader will make the best decisions at all times…
@110 / Thierafhal – I was actually glad to see the same opinion from someone else, confirmation bias is cool. :)