“The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”
Written by Michael Piller
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 4, Episode 1
Production episode 40274-175
Original air date: September 24, 1990
Stardate: 44001.4
Captain’s Log: Majel Barrett intones, “Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation,” followed by highlights of Part 1, ending with: “Mr. Worf—fire.”
The modified deflector fires, and has absolutely no impact on the Borg cube. When they assimilated Picard and made him into Locutus, the Borg absorbed all of the captain’s knowledge—and therefore knew of the modified deflector weapon and adjusted their defenses accordingly.
The Borg continue toward Earth. Firing the weapon burned out several of the Enterprise‘s systems, so they must remain until repairs are effected. Riker contacts Admiral Hanson, who has gathered a 40-ship fleet at Wolf 359. Shelby points out that with Picard’s assistance, the Borg will be ready for Starfleet. Hanson slaps Shelby down, saying that Picard would never help the Borg under any circumstances, which mostly proves that Hanson is a moron. Following this idiotic declaration, Hanson gives Riker a field promotion to captain.
On the Borg cube, Picard’s assimilation continues. More electronics are grafted onto his person, and the color is drained from his flesh. A single tear rolls down his cheek.
Shelby, La Forge, and Worf are all involved in trying to get the ship up and running again. Shelby makes the case to Riker for being his new first officer, and she and Riker almost start to come to something vaguely resembling a rapprochement when Hanson contacts them from Wolf 359. “The fight does not go well, Enterprise,” Hanson says through a badly garbled comm line before all communications are cut off. Riker hopes that it’s due to Borg interference. (This is, as we will discover, a forlorn hope.)
Once repairs are complete, the Enterprise heads for Wolf 359 at top speed. Riker officially makes Shelby first officer, and gets a report on possible new defenses. A heavy graviton beam won’t work; Crusher and Data propose creating nanites that could infiltrate the Borg, but it would take two to three weeks.
Riker admits that this would be the part where Picard would give an inspirational speech, and further admits that he wishes Picard were here to deliver it, because he could use it, too.
The Enterprise arrives at Wolf 359, which is a graveyard of broken and destroyed ships. (One of the hulks they see is the Melbourne, the very command Riker was offered in Part 1.) They pursue the Borg ship, which survived the attack wholly unscathed. Riker tells Shelby to prepare to separate the saucer, as she had previously suggested. Shelby points out that Picard was briefed on that plan (when she went over Riker’s head, a detail she omits when reminding him), but Riker says he’s counting on that.
When the Enterprise intercepts the Borg, Riker is on the battle bridge and hails the Borg, asking to discuss terms. Locutus deems discussion to be irrelevant, as there are no terms, and rightly views this as an attempt by Riker to delay the inevitable. Locutus announces that they will continue to Earth, and if Riker attempts to intervene, the Borg will destroy them. “Then take your best shot, Locutus,” Riker says, “because we are about to intervene.”
Shelby, in command of the saucer, separates the ship. Both halves of the ship fire on the Borg, but the Borg only go after the drive section. The saucer fires an antimatter spread, which covers Data and Worf launching a shuttlecraft. Once the shuttle is close enough, the two of them are able to beam onto the cube and nab Picard. They beam back to the shuttle and fly back toward the Enterprise. Once they’re clear of the cube, O’Brien beams them back, right before the Borg blow up the shuttle.
The Borg cube then buggers back toward Earth. The Enterprise reunites and Crusher examines Locutus. The Borg implants themselves could easily be removed, but there’s the question of his link to the collective. Data detects a massive network of subspace signals that allows the Borg to all be linked to each other. In the past, Borg have removed components from their dead comrades, after which they disintegrated. Data theorizes that that cut them off from the collective. Crusher fears that cutting Picard off may kill him as well, so instead Data tries to hook into the collective via Locutus.
They bring Locutus to Data’s lab, Data attempting to form a neural link with Locutus. He manages to gain access to the Borg subspace signals, which he discovers are sorted by sub-commands. Data tries to plant a root command into the collective, but power and defense subsystems are protected.
Picard manages to seep his consciousness through Locutus and says the word “Sleep” to Data—who interprets this to be a command he can plant. The regeneration commands don’t have the same level of security on them, and Data can easily plant that command via Locutus.
The Borg break off their attack—not half a second before Riker is about to order Wes to ram the Enterprise into the cube at warp speed—and have gone into a regeneration cycle. A few minutes later, they blow up. Picard is himself again, “with a bit of a headache.” He remembers everything, including the brilliantly unorthodox strategy by “a former first officer of mine.”
Shelby is assigned to head up the task force that will put the fleet back together. She tells Riker that he must have his choice of assignments, and Riker demurs, saying that his career is his business.
Riker and Shelby leave Picard alone in his ready room. Once alone, Picard looks haunted….
Can’t We Just Reverse the Polarity?: Data uses multimodal reflection sorting to map out the intra-Borg subspace communications.
If I Only Had a Brain : Data pretty much saves the day here—he and Worf are the ones who rescue Picard, and it’s Data’s ability to access the Borg communications that ends the threat by putting them to sleep.
Riker also tells Data that he seriously considered the android for the position of first officer (a position he’s had twice before, in “A Matter of Honor” and “Peak Performance“).
Thank You, Counselor Obvious: Data uses Troi to sense how Picard is doing when Data tries to link up to the Borg via Locutus, and it’s Troi who verifies when Picard manages to poke his own consciousness past that of the Borg.
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Riker also considered Worf for first officer, and he and Data engage in a nifty retrieval of Locutus from the Borg ship.
The Boy!?: When Riker orders the Enterprise to ram the Borg ship, Wes looks positively ill. And who can blame him, really? I mean, he was just told that his job description had changed from that of Starfleet conn officer to kamikaze pilot….
Syntheholics Anonymous: Guinan gives Riker a come-to-Jesus speech, telling him that he has to let Picard go. It would’ve been easier if Picard had died, but instead the Borg took him and perverted him. When Riker says that Picard wrote the book on the ship, Guinan points out, rightly, that if the Borg know what he knows, it’s time to throw the book away.
I Believe I Said That: “At what point should I shut it down if there’s a problem?”
“I do not know. I have never done this before.”
O’Brien asking a reasonable question, and Data giving a brutally honest answer.
Welcome Aboard: Elizabeth Dennehy and George Murdock reprise their roles of Shelby and Hanson, respectively, from Part 1. Todd Merrill gets a few lines as Gleason, the battle-bridge ops officer; he’ll get a few more lines in “Future Imperfect.”
Trivial Matters: Despite picking up immediately after Part 1, the episode was very obviously filmed months later—Elizabeth Dennehy, Gates McFadden, and Jonathan Frakes all have slightly different hair, the lighting on the bridge is a bit different, and now nobody is wearing the “unitard” from the first two seasons (thank goodness).
And despite being the conclusion, the next episode, “Family,” really will serve as Part 3—but we’ll talk about that on Tuesday….
Michael Piller didn’t figure out how to end Part 2 until shortly before filming started. He wrote Part 1 without any idea of how to end it—but then, he wasn’t even sure he’d be back for the fourth season, and if he didn’t re-up his contract, it would’ve been someone else’s problem in any event.
LeVar Burton had to undergo emergency surgery during the filming of this episode, so his part was reduced. His dialogue was all filmed later on, done in closeups or single shots. The only shots of him with others around are in the observation lounge, and a body double was employed there. His role in the climax was given to O’Brien.
While only the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359 was seen in this episode due to budgetary constraints, parts of the battle were shown at the beginning of Deep Space Nine‘s pilot episode, “Emissary.”
Riker will not be seen to be offered another command again until Star Trek Nemesis, which ends with him going off to captain the Titan, though he will briefly command the U.S.S. Excalibur in “Redemption Part II” as part of Picard’s armada. In Peter David’s Double Helix novel Double or Nothing, a crossover between TNG and David’s novel series New Frontier (which features the Shelby character), Riker is put in temporary command of the Excalibur, with Shelby once again as his first officer.
The effects of being transformed into Locutus will continue to have ramifications, both onscreen (“Family,” “I, Borg,” DS9‘s “Emissary,”Star Trek: First Contact) and in the tie-in fiction (Resistance by J.M. Dillard and the Destiny trilogy by David Mack).
Although Dwight Schultz does not appear in the episode, Shelby does make reference to Barclay.
This is the third and final time the Enterprise will separate the saucer on the series, after having done so previously in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Arsenal of Freedom.” It will separate for the last time ever in Star Trek Generations.
The Borg will appear again on TNG in “I, Borg” and “Descent.” The movie Star Trek: First Contact is more of a direct sequel to this two-parter, more or less ignoring those subsequent two appearances. In addition to their flashback appearance in DS9‘s premiere, the Borg recur throughout Voyager—which goes so far as to have a de-assimilated Borg become part of the opening-credits cast—starting in the episodes “Blood Fever” and “Unity,” continuing all the way through to the series finale “Endgame.” The Borg also appear in Enterprise‘s “Regeneration.”
In the seventh-season episode “Parallels,” Worf will visit several alternate timelines in which Picard was not rescued by the Enterprise in this episode (in one, the Borg has completely overrun the Federation). Two other alternate timelines that branched off from this episode were shown in David R. George III’s short novel The Embrace of Cold Architects in Myriad Universes: Shattered Light and “The Worst of Both Worlds!” storyline that ran in issues 47-50 of DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book by Michael Jan Friedman, Peter Krause, and Pablo Marcos.
Make it So: “Sleep, Data.” Let’s be fair: Part 1 was an incredibly tough act to follow. It would take one of the greatest episodes of TV ever to follow up to that.
This, well, is not one of the greatest episodes of TV ever. It’s good, but it kinda falls apart at the end.
In the abstract, the idea that the Borg are beaten by ingenuity makes a certain amount of sense. For one thing, it was made clear back when they first appeared in “Q Who” that a direct approach was never going to cut it. For another, it’s completely true to Star Trek that brains would win out over brawn.
But in practice, we wind up ending a tense two hours of action, one that’s been anticipated for three months—hell, since the middle of the second season, truly—in Data’s lab. Aroo?
Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the climax actually made sense. Data planting a root command into the Borg Collective to go into a regenerative cycle is fine—that’s actually very clever, in part because it’s so simple. But we’ve seen the Borg go into a regenerative cycle before, in “Q Who,” after the Enterprise trashed their cube. They regenerated, rebuilt, reconstructed, were better, faster, stronger, and proceeded to kick the crap out of the ship until Picard begged Q to send them home, please. So why the heck did Data putting them into that cycle now cause them to self-destruct like a Bond villain’s headquarters?
Riker’s strategies aren’t nearly as bizarre and unorthodox as the script insists they are, and after Guinan tells him to set Picard aside and take over, he moves heaven and Earth to get Picard back.
And in the end, the status quo is unconvincingly restored. While we don’t find this out until the next episode, Riker’s still on board, even accepting a reduction in rank back to commander, and everyone’s back where we expect them to be. Shelby doesn’t even join the crew, which might’ve been entertaining (especially with Wil Wheaton on his way out the door—but we’ll talk about that when we get to “Final Mission”).
The episode is by no means bad. The immediate cliffhanger resolution is brilliant, the sequence that culminates with Data and Worf liberating Locutus from the cube is a superb action scene, and the evolution of Riker and Shelby’s relationship is well played. But as a followup to one of the best episodes in the franchise’s history, it just doesn’t entirely hold up.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at the Farpoint convention this weekend in Timonium, Maryland (just north of Baltimore), along with fellow Trek scribes Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Marc Okrand, Aaron Rosenberg, and Howard Weinstein. Come by and say hi! And go to his web site and order every single one of his books. Or just go from there to read his blog, check him out on Facebook and/or Twitter, or listen to his many podcasts.
Re: the regeneration mode triggerring a self-destruct. I always interpreted that as an unintended benefit of tricking them into sleep. Putting them to sleep bought time, but going into regeneration mode with nothing to regenerate caused a power surge — the cube was sending energy out to fix systems that were already at 100%.
I do love this episode, but agree that it isn’t among the all time greats for TNG. I don’t necessarily love the idea of basing the final rating on the previous episode. To me this is more of a 7 or 8, but I understand your arguements. I like how it fits into the overall Borg arc up through First Contact more than I like it as a stand alone episode. You can’t watch Part 1 without watching this though, so I think it did its job.
My guess with the self-destruction is that the Borg (maybe the Queen) found out that they were being sabatoged through Locutus. The Queen then probably declared the whole ship a liability (since they were all taking the same orders), and ordered it’s destruction (of course, we didn’t know about the Queen back then). Similar to a dead Borg vaporizing into nothingness. The question then is, why did the Borg just not send another ship to invade Earth? Probably because it was hard enough on the writers to try and finish up this storyline. I would also like to know how the Enterprise caught up with the Borg ship so quickly (considering they missed out on Wolf 359, the Borg probably had too much of a head start on them).
I found this a mostly satisfying conclusion (I consider “Family” an epilouge, moreso then Part 3 of this story). I liked some of the tie-ins with part 1, particularly the Melbourne being destroyed (Riker would have been dead had he accepted promtion), and Shelby balking at Riker’s plan to seperate the ship (since that had been her idea in the first place).
Yes, there are some things here that don’t make sense, but it’s more then outweighed by what’s good in this episode, IMO.
I think a rating of ‘6’ is accurate for this episode; while it has its merits, its strengths don’t compare to that of the first part (coupled with the fear and tension which is resolved in the first few minutes of this episode). Still, glad they were able to get Picard back; there’s an interesting arc in the TNG DC comics where the crew encounters a mirror version of themselves, but in this galaxy Picard is still Locutus.
I know characters and species change as more is added to them, but I dislike how assimilation suddenly became a weapon individual borg could use on unassimilated species after ‘First Contact.’ I’m intrigued by the baby borg from ‘Q-Who?’ and Picard’s assimilation in this two-parter…after all, are borg merely a species suffering from a technological virus, or do they willingly add pieces of machinery to their bodies to enhance and unify them? Just personal opinion. Nice review, krad!
6 is about right. There are two glaring issues rasied by this ep.
First, that a single Borg ship is so powerful that a fleet of 40 Federation starships is decimated without any damage to the Borg. If they’re THAT powerful, the Federation would have no chance. All the Borg need to do is send two or three ships, never mind a fleet. Done.
Second, the deus ex machina ending. A society so incredibly powerful, that has assimilated so many cultures wouldn’t protect all of their systems? And that if one was hacked, it would cause the ship to blow up? No way. This solution was a hack designed to get around the first issue above. They created an almost all-powerful enemy. The problem then becomes how to defeat that enemy and, as usual, the answer isn’t really convincing.
They could have made the Borg an existential threat while not making them so incrediblly powerful but once they did there never was a good reason why the Borg didn’t just sweep in with a dozen cubes and ravage Earth and the other Federation worlds. That’s really all on this second part.
An addition for Trivial Matters, In Star Trek Online, you can fly to Wolf 359 and visit a memorial to those lost in the battle. (It’s really one of the only cool “Trek” things in the game).
Eh, I’d handicap it enough for a 7, simply because the episode managed to pull itself together in spite of the massive amounts of off-camera drama. But otherwise, I agree. The denoument was the typically quiet ending that you get after loud season finales, but at least its tidiness was due to a likely scenario.
I love this episode, but I have issues with it as well. The Borg just don’t make sense to me…
First, I never understood why the Borg had an almost reluctance to not destroy the Enterprise. They seem to just pass it up. Could have done it in the nebula or after the rescue sequence, but they just sort of let it go. They blow up 40 other ships, but not the Enterprise? Mr. Worf- Fire… splat… so sorry we’ll blow you up now. Or board and assimilate you, or just ram you with our rediculously large ship, or anything. It’s logical, it’s cold, it’s what the uber bad Borg would do. The Enterprise doesn’t escape, the Borg let it go. It’s like they want to taunt Riker and the Enterprise over the powerlessness. That’s something that a Buffy the Vampire Slayer big bad would do, not the most cold, calculating enemy ever. The Enterprise should barely be able to escape, not just be left behind.
I also have an issue with just how ineffective Starfleet is… as I understand it, shields work by being energized layer of gravitons around the object to be protected. Energy discharges could dissipate the integrity of the shields however, so when a phaser or photon torpedo hits it, it should have some effect. The Borg might have really, really powerful shields, but the weapons should have some effect against them. Instead the weapons just bounce off, as if they are rocks. But to say that weapons are completely useless doesn’t make sense. The first time the Enterprise shoots them they Borg cube has a nice chunk taken out of it, but then they “adapt” and are now impervious. I could understand if somehow they were able to make the phaser ineffective, since using destructive interference they should be able to weaken it, but a photon torpedo is a matter/anti-matter explosion. It should do something…. Star Trek may be science fiction, but as Scotty says “You canna change the laws of physics.” Science says that the photon should do something to the shields. The Borg could jam them, prematurely detonate them, deflect them without causing explosion… but to say they jusst *poof* adapt to them is a cop out.
Last, I agree with you that the tactics in the battle scenes aren’t exactly unorthodox, but I’m sure that was a function of special effects budgets. The tactics seem to be “move the ship left, then move the ship right.” I wonder what tactics might have been displayed if they could have properly been shown on screen.
I’d like to register a dissent here; I think 6 is too low. While I agree that there are many issues of plausibility that weaken the episode, the core idea of using the Borg’s strength — their collectivity — against them, is wonderful. Simple, believable, and clever, while subverting the expectation of a big battle. Moreover, while Data was the main agent in the resolution, the sequence of inspirations from Guinan to Riker to Data to Picard to Data, with help from Troi, involved much of the team in an essential way. I liked that a lot.
There are also some very nice moments throughout the episode. The draining color. The Wolf 359 aftermath. The palpable despair of everyone involved in the early going. Admiral Hansen’s stirring (if somewhat goofy) defense of Picard. The rescue scene. Picard’s haunted gaze after his release. Mostly plot driven, I admit, but good stuff.
That said, the plausibility problems mentioned by earlier commenters (e.g, @8 Mike Kelm on the Borg’s failure to destroy the Enterprise) are pretty glaring. I would have liked to have seen the Borg use more obvious technological sophistication rather than just magic adaptivity to deal with the challenges. For instance, it would have been nice if they deflected or diffused the deflector-beam weapon rather than just be unaffected by it. And the Federation’s defenses were pretty pathetic, really, even if you grant that the Borg could beat 40 ships. Those three little ships by Saturn??? Why not *try* to use a nuclear/antimatter warhead or overloading warp core in some way? I would have liked to see them try something, anything, marginally more clever and ruthless, even if the Borg did stop them.
As for the end, I think they could have explained it in some way as a defensive reaction of the collective when their systems were compromised. It would have been better that way. The very end (once they were asleep) was not good, though, I agree.
Nonetheless, I’d go 7 or 8 here.
Think the rating is a little low because of the above comments but one other scene I didn’t like was the wooden reading of the ships at Wolf 359. Also, one more trivial matter: In “The Drumhead” Admiral Setee uses the Locutus incident against Picard in his trial.
Yeah. If they had put the Borg to sleep and then showed some attack on the cube I would be happier. But massive buildup is always tough to resolve well in fiction (see Neon Genesis: Evangelion), and making the Borg too powerful gives the same problem as writing Superman- how to you slow them down, let alone stop them?
Taken as a whole, Parts 1 and 2 are still rockin’.
And how do you drain color from someone?
I thought Hansen’s comment made plenty of sense, and actually showed a knowledge of the Borg and Picard– he wasn’t helping them, which implies doing something willfully, they were forcibly extracting knowledge. To frame it another way, Picard didn’t tell them resistance was futile, Locutus, an arbitrarily named unit of the Borg, told them that. Picard was, for lack of a better word, violated, which the next episode reiterates.
I’m still liking the re-watch though, and so far liking it more than the others I’m following.
Even though it’s weird that the cube just sort of up and explodes once it goes into regeneration mode, it actually makes sense to me (in terms of consistency) that they wouldn’t think to defend against Picard’s tactic. As Seven was fond of saying the Borg adapt, and as we’ve seen them, they almost never anticipate. They change much like a population of organisms changes by natural selection–if a variation is counter to survival, then it dies out. The Borg don’t (doesn’t?) care that one cube is destroyed. They’ve got plenty more. And they might have sent more to Earth in the first place, but they’re efficient. Why imagine that more than one is necessary against these pitiful organics? They’re rather spectacularly unimaginative.
I thought the cube self-destructed because its network had been infiltrated– Data had basically hacked into the Borg, and showed he was able to affect some changes, and they couldn’t have that.
As for why the Enterprise wasn’t destroyed when they grabbed Locutus, or before, I figured it was the same as one of his lines, about proceeding without further diversion to sector 001– they didn’t want to waste any time and let the Federation prepare better.
sps49 @11
“And how do you drain color from someone?”
I was wondering exactly just that. One possibility would be to replace the red blood cells with something more efficient at carrying oxygen which is not red. That at least would remove the reddish color of the skin.
In this episode the doctor proposes using nanites to fight the Borg (but that would take too long to setup).
I wonder if that was the idea that led to the nanoprobes that the Borg use to assimilate adult beings as seen in Voyager and in First Contact.
I loved this episode(s) as a kid growing up in the early 90s. The music throughout (something I don’t normally even notice) was superb, especially the music playing during Picard’s line, “We have engaged the Borg.”
As for the comments about the Borg only sending 1 ship…first of all…it’s a TV show. Right?
Second, now that we have many different Borg encounters, you could postulate that maybe the Borg did not possess transwarp as yet or maybe the transwarp network did not extend as far. You could even just chalk it up to Borg overconfidence.
I read like it’s my job, but have, in the past, purposely ignored the tie-in fiction. However, once I heard there was an ongoing continuation post-Nemesis across all the franchises, I decided to give it a try. The writing is mostly competent, though there are some dreadful entries (Resistance) that follow-up authors do their best to ignore or play-down. I bring this up because a major Borg invasion which wipes out many many planets and 40% of starfleet occurs in David Mack’s Destiny trilogy. It’s fantastic. Thousands of cubes take out Deneva, Khitomer, and almost wipe Qo’noS out. It’s a great series that ties in most of the franchises. Later books deal with the aftermath of many Federation worlds reduced to what would seem to them “stone-age” technology and food shortages. Highly recommended.
>A society so incredibly powerful, that has assimilated so many cultures wouldn’t protect all of their systems?
I think this was an acceptable deus ex machina because Data is not federation technology. He’s a one-of-a-kind creation of an eccentric genius. In the world Star Trek, strong AI like data is still generally out of reach. I can buy the Borg had never seen anything like him and certainly Picard would not have been an expert on the tech.
It’s also a nice contrast that the product of extreme indivduality ends up being the weakness of the groupthink Borg.
I was hoping we’d see a non-evil Borg collective at some point, “assimimlate if you want, it’s really cool and you can leave anytime” and have them be the main check on the Borg technologically. The only thing that can beat a strong AI is another strong AI.
If nothing else, the first sight of the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359 will always live on in my memory.
I agree the cube blowing up for no good reason was weak, but I like it that the climax of the story revolved around characters, around Picard finding the strength of will to overcome Locutus, rather than around action and spectacle. Often the best climax for a big action story is one that’s intimate and personal, because while that may be smaller in scale than the action set pieces that preceded it, it’s emotionally bigger. And I think the climax of BOBW2 worked very well.
As for why the Borg only sent a single cube after the Federation every once in a while, it makes perfect sense if you remember that the Federation constitutes a very, very tiny portion of the galaxy, and one that’s very, very far from Borg territory. Watching the show gives us the sense that everything in the universe revolves around the Federation, but in reality, the Borg probably considered it a very low priority. It had species and technology worth assimilating, but nothing they desperately needed to have right away, and it was too far away to pose any significant threat that required wiping it out. The Borg were probably spending most of their resources assimilating or warring with the thousands of advanced civilizations that immediately abutted their territory, so they only had so much to spare for this remote little union of planets way off in the Orion Arm. If they didn’t manage to assimilate it now, it would still be there to assimilate later, once they got around to it.
That’s the idea behind the novels’ Destiny trilogy — that once Voyager destroyed the Borg’s transwarp hub, the Federation’s status was upgraded from “worth getting around to if we can spare the time” to “immediate threat that has to be crushed as soon as possible.” Hence the massive, all-out invasion rather than just the occasional single-cube scouting expeditions they’d sent in the past.
@19 – the problem for me with your supposition that the Borg didn’t consider the Federation important, etc is that it requires the viewer to start making things up. “Oh, maybe they didn’t have transwarp/we were a low priority/etc.” That’s sloppy storytelling. Why should we have to suppose all of the things that you do, basically making excuses? Come on, we’re a low priority but they can’t send 5 ships? Or 2? If we’re so low a priority… why send a ship at all? The choices aren’t between all-out invasion or send a single ship.
As for the ‘it’s just a TV show’ comment above… Um, yes. Thanks. I know that. You can use that to counter any argument if you want, but at the end of the day TV shows are stories and it’s valid to critique it on that basis. Otherwise reviews and criticism are just “I liked it!” or “I didn’t like it!”.
PS: All of the “perhaps they didn’t have transwarp” stuff doesn’t hold up. TNG and Voyager are set in the same century. Voyager was launched in 2371. This battle was in 2367 -see the Memory Alpha wiki. So, no, we have to assume that the Borg that we see in each series are basically the same Borg with the same capabilities.
“the problem for me with your supposition that the Borg didn’t consider the Federation important, etc is that it requires the viewer to start making things up.”
No, it’s simply making a deduction from the evidence we do have. We know for a fact that Borg territory makes up an immense portion of the Delta Quadrant, given that Voyager traversed over 40,000 light years, nearly the entire radius of the galaxy, between “Scorpion” and “Endgame.” And we know from “Encounter at Farpoint” that Deneb, a star estimated to be between 1340 and 1840 ly from Earth, was at the outermost fringes of explored space as of 2364, which puts an upper bound on the size of the Federation. Therefore, based solely on canonical evidence, we can draw the indisputable conclusion that Borg territory is far larger than Federation territory. We also know from simple subtraction that the nearer portions of Borg territory (at least the parts of it in the DQ) are roughly 30,000 ly from the Federation, which is consistent with what real astronomy tells us about the size of the galaxy and the position of Earth within it. There is also considerable canonical evidence from “Q Who” onward that Federation space and Borg space are very far apart.
We also know, from decades of experience, that the galaxy in the Trek universe is abundantly populated with starfaring civilizations. Since Voyager typically encountered well over a dozen distinct ones per year, we know this holds true for the DQ. Now, given that Borg territory is at least 40,000 ly across in just one dimension, the surface area of its borders must be immense. Therefore, the logical deduction is that Borg territory abuts upon thousands of other starfaring civilizations. Logic also dictates that at least some of these must be equal to or greater than the Federation in technological advancement. Add to this the undeniable fact that the Borg’s policy in dealing with technologically advanced civilizations is to invade and attempt to assimilate them, and we are compelled to conclude that the Borg must be in an ongoing state of war with many advanced civilizations that are immediately adjacent to Collective space. Inevitably, fighting on so many fronts at once would require a vast expenditure of resources. And it stands to reason that immediate neighbors in direct conflict with the Borg would be seen as a more immediate threat or target, and thus a higher priority to devote resources to, than a federation that’s on the opposite side of the galaxy and poses no immediate threat.
So the only logical conclusion is that the Borg had many higher priorities than invading the Federation (at least, prior to “Endgame”). That’s not made up or arbitrary, it’s a deduction we can derive entirely from known facts.
“Come on, we’re a low priority but they can’t send 5 ships? Or 2?”
That’s thinking like a human. Borg think collectively. A Borg cube isn’t just a ship, it’s equivalent to an entire fleet, and a big one at that (as evidenced by the fact that one cube could destroy 39 starships with hardly any trouble). But since they’re Borg, they put it all in one unified, homogeneous package rather than a bunch of smaller, separate ones.
Just a quick note, as I’m at Farpoint — I struggled with the warp factor rating, but ultimately what led to me giving it a 6 was how I felt while watching it. Where, with Part 1, I kept having to pause the DVD so my notes could catch up, that wasn’t an issue with Part 2. I was not gripped by Part 2. Indeed, I spent the rewatch of Part 2 being in what Dave Lister would call a state of un-grippedness.
And the ending didn’t work. Christopher, I agree with you in the abstract, as I said in the rewatch, that ingenuity over brute force was absolutely the right way to go. But they blew it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Much as I love these three episodes, I have to agree that the pay-off doesn’t quite measure up to the build-up.
But they kept me watching. Before this, I’d been a casual viewer. After this, I was a fan.
And hey, Family is next! The Next Gen episode that dared to explore the consequences of the story. How very un-Trek-like. But it worked beautifully.
I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only person watching to think that the idea of the Enterprise‘s deflector weapon failing, the Borg seeing the ship was defenceless, and not finishing the ship off was pretty thin. It’s all the more difficult a plot hole to negotiate because it could have been ameliorated by a few well-chosen lines in the following scene – a brief conversation in the obs lounge, in which disbelief was expressed that the ship was left alone, and someone (Data, maybe?) theorises that the Borg no longer see the Enterprise as a threat.
As for the other plot hole – the destruction of the Borg cube – I never had so much of a problem with it. If Data has essentially hacked the Borg’s systems, it follows that the regenerative cycle has probably not been initiated in the usual way. I always rationalised that he managed it in such a ham-fisted way that the feedback loop was a by-product.
6 out of 10? Meh. Not as good as Part 1, or ‘Family’, come to that, but definitely worth a point of two more.
As Guinan would say, I think that’s a bit harsh. We knew the Borg could regenerate their ship and we knew that it was at full strength. Data being able to plant a command to regenerate was not a deus ex machina, nor do I think it was a farfetched conclusion that the ship would blow up as a result of “regeneration overload.” As Crusher said, their collective consciousness was their achilles heel. Data proved that adequately, I think. Incidentally, it was also a great set-up to the Borg Queen being “interested” in Data in First Contact.
And yes, the whole assimilation tubules/nanoprobes thing got retconn’ed from First Contact on, but it was a pretty damned cool idea. Q said “the Borg is the ultimate user,” but really they’re the ultimate zombie. And this is coming from a SciFi fan who hates zombies.
Sorry Christopher, but you’re still making up a large part of ‘what the Borg must be doing’ and to me the point of a story is to draw me in and convince me by showing me. If I have to make up a whole backstory for a new alien threat just so that I can excuse why they didn’t send more than one cube, that’s not good story-telling. There are two other things wrong with your analysis:
One, you can’t really use anything not known at the time of the episode to excuse its flaws. Sorry, Voyager and later eps didn’t exist so it’s unreasonable to use such post hoc evidence to explain things in this story. None of us could have known any of what you assert at the time of the episode’s airing.
Two, you claim I’m ‘thinking like a human.’ Well, I hate to break it to you but both of us are humans. Your attempt to think like a Borg is a human attempting to think like a fictional alien. Hell, if I do that I look at a civilization that admires collective action and shuns individuality and I see even MORE reason to not send one, single, individual ship. No matter how powerful, it’s single point of failure.
Finally, let’s say that your post hoc analysis is correct and the Borg are under pressure around their own territory. Then you need to explain why they send even one ship. If one ship is all they could spare because of military pressure, why send even one since the Federation wasn’t a threat? If they can spare one ship to go all that way, why not two? The argument seems to be that they could spare one, but no more. In that situation it seems silly to send even the one… just postpone dealing with that pesky, minor, far away Federation until you have more resources.
I never really understood why the Borg only sent a single ship in First Contact. They’d already lost once to the Federation so for such an adaptable race, it never made sense to come with one ship a second time. But this first time never bothered me. We don’t know what Borg vessel was attacking the settlements in the Neutral Zone but if it were something other than a Borg cube that sent a message home that said that the Federation was ripe for invasion and couldn’t possibly beat the Borg, then a single cube made sense. And really, if not for Data, then its pretty unlikely the Alpha Quadrant could have stood up at all.
I also didn’t mind the conclusion. We’ll never know if Data’s hack job or something else caused the self destruct. Maybe it was a security measure that activated if the system knew it was hacked. A Borg ship taken over by outside forces would be something the Borg would probably want to avoid.
Also, to #3: Perhaps the Enterprise caught up because the Borg had spent time regenerating after the battle. We saw the Borg ship whole and the fleet was decimated so the assumption is there was no damage done. We’ve seen the Borg ship (and probably it was this ship I’d imagine) regenerate damage before. It was a huge fleet and its not inconcievable that they did some damage to it, requiring it to regenerate before continuing on.
Whether you are a TNG Borg, an all-ST Borg (encompassing later knowledge) or a TV writer, sending one Borg cube to attack the central planet of the Federation is stupid.
Given the Borg’s stated goal, their response to a species/society with inferior technology should be to ignore it, unless it occupies strategic location or resources. The Borg were already sampling Federation technology at the end of season 1, and they presumably decided there was no point to a full scale invasion. With the Enterprise showing up in Borg space, the Federation suddenly becomes a target, because they seem to have transport capability far more advanced that the Borg (it took the Borg a year to cover distance the Enterprise covered in seconds. The Borg don’t know about Q.)
So the Borg now view the Federation as either a threat, or an opportunity for new technology, or both. Under the circumstances, they could do one of two things. (a) capture the Enterprise and interrogate her crew and her technology, or (b) invade the Federation. If you invade, you start on the edges and nibble inward. Even the Borg need to keep their supply lines open — to think that they don’t need food, water, or at least antimatter to generate power to produce these other things, is just lazy writing. Driving straight to the central plaent of the Federation is incredibly risky. If 39 ships couldn’t blow up one cube, how about 390? You think the Federation would sit on theor hands while the Borg assimilated Earth? Maybe a desparate alliance between the Romulans, Klingons and Federation. Bring enough ships and take the cube down. (Maybe with the Romulans and Klingons fighting over the remnants of a beaten Federation — good starting point for a book series.)
But taking one ship to Earth is just stupid. Even if the Borg assimilated all the people there, and they all got in Federation starships and tried to spread the contagion, those ships would be old technology and normally vulnerable. It’s not as though capturing Earth would automatically turn the entire Federation into Borg.
What would conquering Earth do that conquering some other planet — closer to Borg space and less well defended — would not achieve?
The Borg should have either sent one ship to assimilate the Enterprise, and then start assimilating outlying worlds, or it should have mounted a full invasion starting at the borderlands and moving inwards.
@28. Strongdreams:
By “interrogate her crew and technology” I believe you meant to say “assimilate.”
Interrogation is irrelevant.
@29, no, I meant interrogate.
The Borg are not going to assimilate technology that does not enhance their own. Assuming they behaved rationally, and not by writer fiat, once they discovered that the Enterprise lacked an advanced propulsion system, and was technologically inferior to them in every way, they would assimilate the crew and just destroy or abandon the Enterprise.
In fact, there is only one thing on board the Enterprise that a Borg collective would want, and that is Data, not a human intermediary.
A rational Borg collective would send one cube to Federation space, assimilate Data (and not in a sexy “you complete me” way), then hide in a nebula somewhere while ocassionally picking off colonists and crews of passing ships, building their population and constructing additional cubes. Meanwhile, other cubes would be doing the same thing on the edges of all the territories bordering theirs.
To me the high point of this episode has always been the talk, and lesson in leadership, Guinan gives Riker. I will admit that I think 99% of the time Whoopi Goldberg’s performace as Guinan makes me shake my head and love the character, but this talk, is to me, one of the character highlights of the series. It is quiet but filled with power and emotion. A very well written, superbly performed moment in Trek.
I rather like the idea of the Borg contemptuosly failing to destroy the Enterprise. It adds to their aura of invincibility. Why bother to swat an annoying fly? On the other hand, Starfleet’s defense strategy seems odd. Knowing that the Borg had Picard, why didn’t Hansen let the Klingon and (maybe) Romulan ships take the lead, since tapping Picard’s knowledge might be less useful there? Also, the idea of ramming at warp speed never occured to any of the other 40 ships? Finally, shoudn’t Earth have massive planetary defenses, and what exactly are those never seen again things the Borg blow up at the “mars defense perimeter?”
Like some other commenters, I think you are alittle low here. 7 or 8 seems about right.
I agree that saying that Hansen is a moron is a misreading of what he’s saying. What he’s saying is that Picard is a POW who has had information forcibly extracted from him; ‘assistance’ implies helping the Borg of his own violition, which is not the case. Hansen then agrees with Crusher that they have to write Picard off and proceed on the assumption he cannot be recovered, which is harsh but probably sensible in this situation.
As for why the Borg never send more ships, I always liked to think that it was simply because they didn’t have any ships close by. If we assume the ship in BoBW is the same one from Q Who, it may be an outlying scout (and maybe the ship that tore up the Neutral Zone offscreen in S1 was a small scout like Hugh’s ship in I, Borg, not a full-on big cube that can take on all of Starfleet). After all, Q ‘only’ sent the Enterprise 7,000 light-years, whilst the bulk of Borg space – as seen in VOYAGER – is 40,000+ light-years away.
So in this scenario, Q sent the Enterprise into the path of a single, long-range patrol cube operating far beyond their borders in Q Who. The Borg got the coordinates of Earth (downloaded during their foray into Engineering) and after the Enterprise somehow escaped them they decided that Earth was an important target. The cube immediately changed course for the Federation, reaching it 18 months later (faster than the Enterprise could have managed – which would have been more than 2 years – but not ridiculously so). It then got blown up. No other Borg ships are close enough to reinforce it (at least until a transwarp conduit can be built into Federation space), so it remains an outlier event.
Of course, Peter David’s excellent ‘Vendetta’ novel does have the Borg coming in force, sending five (IIRC) cubes into Federation space. Fortunately, the Federation has the super-sized version of the Doomsday Machine from TOS to help take them out. That novel also has the fabulous moment when a Borg cube (weakened by a failed subspace weapon, to be sure) gets blown to pieces by the USS Repulse using the deflector beam weapon, and the Enterprise crew high-five each other that, “It would have worked!”
An excellent novel. Later Peter David Borg books, like the one where a super-sized Borg vessle eats Pluto, not so much.
like the one where a super-sized Borg vessle eats Pluto
There were Borg on Lexx?
Keith, talking about your memories of your first watching, I would have been 9 (screening in NZ would have been about a year behind the USA) and I remember the whole family watching and being totally entranced and then when picard tells data to sleep and crusher says ‘he’s exhausted’ my mother screamed ‘he’s telling you to make the borg sleep you dozy bitch!’
thats my only memory from our family weekly watching of star trek and i’ll always remember it for the intensity this double episode had on all of us.
Actually, the Borg ship exploding made perfect sense to me. Granted that this is never stated in the episode, but it seemed clear to me that as a hive mind their ship would be built with the assumption that said hive mind would be ever available to regulate its systems and only some portion of the drones aboard would be offline regenerating at any given time. With ALL the drones forced into regeneration mode at once, there was nothing/no one to regulate the cube’s systems and … blooey.
Remember, it’s “Resistance is futile,” not “Resistance is unlikely to be effective.” Having backup systems for something the Borg (to that point) saw as invincible would be considered inefficient.
I haven’t re-watched this episode since (probably) a re-run or two in the years immediately following the original broadcast, but I certainly do remember the anticipation – in fact, the excitement I felt in the run-up to the Season Four opener.
I remember that anticipation even better than I do the sense of disappointment I felt after the fact.
It wasn’t the anti-climactic (and, as has been pointed out, the anti-logical) way the Borg were defeated – I knew the Borg weren’t going to assimilate the earth – but with the victory of standard-issue episodic television over drama that might bring genuine change to its characters.
See, much as I loved watching Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard, by this point I was coming to appreciate Riker and I thought the woman playing Shelby was utterly convincing – possibly the first time Trek managed to create a kick-ass woman one could believe in.
I thought then, and suspect I would still think now, if I re-watched, that the show would have had a much better long-term future if they’d had the nerve to do the logical thing: beat the Borg (of course, somehow) but have Picard go down with them.
A program that had seen the next episode start with Riker in Command, mourning the loss(es) and having to rebuild, would have been a program might have become a genuine drama, instead of just another space opera that would go and on (and on) until ratings or sagging bodies decreed it was time to end.
The first time the crew encountered the Borg, they needed Q to save them. This time, they saved themselves. To me, that seems to express Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic view of humanity rather well.
rickg@5, I see the Borg as opportunistic hunters. They *could* defeat the Federation by sending two or three ships, but why bother? They have many easier targets closer to home. In fact, one interpretation derived from Werthead@33’s idea, and ignoring everything we learn after this episode, would have the Borg as *single-ship* collectives, like ant colonies, assimilating other species and fighting each other as viciously as ant colonies do. Under this interpretation there’s no way the ship in _Q, Who_ would have told any of their rival ships a thing about this rich target — no, they spent a year and a half getting to the Federation to pluck it for themselves and build a huge batch of offspring ships, and when they got blown up instead, no other Borg knew about it. This would also explain the paranoid internal security on the Borg’s internal data access channels (which may well extend to self-destruction if penetration was detected: you may die but your offspring cubes will survive) — who would be trying to access them that you would need to defend against? Who else but another Borg!
If they had remained modelled on how social insects *actually* behave rather than gaining a ridiculous all-controlling time-travelling dictator Queen, all that would have been plausible. (As for assimilation, well, a good few species of ant in particular are slavers, stealing ants from other colonies and converting them into workers for their own. Sounds a lot like Borg assimilation, doesn’t it?)
Not commenting on the episode itself, but in agreement with #31, one of the joys of rewatching these episodes has been the performance of Whoopie Goldberg as Guinan. I’m so used to seeing her performing the kind of broad slapstick comedy of so many of her movies, that it is sometimes hard to remember what a truly fine actress she is. In both the scene with Riker in this episode and the scene in Ten Forward in the first part, she is utterly compelling.
I just revently watched this chapter on shows re-run in this part of the globe (Finland).
I saw these two episodes when I was 10 or 9 (I think) and these two episodes scared the hell out of me as a kid, not becauzse they are scary per se but the eximent (and suspencion) especially in the first part was too much for me back then which I take as an indication of a great episode.
As for the why the cube exploded, imho that’s because it’s a fail safe mechanism to prevent enemy from taking over the cube in case of a catastrophic system failure (which it essentially was) or they have a power plant that requires constant supervision and when everyone goes to sleep *poof* no one to take over in case of emergency, though any modern powerplant has fail safes for that but maybe the borg just weren’t interested in observing safety protocols.
“…after Guinan tells him to set Picard aside and take over, he moves heaven and Earth to get Picard back.”
Riker’s plan wasn’t to get Picard–it was to get Locutus, his reasoning being that they might gain vital knowledge of the Borg through Locutus in the same way the Borg gained Picard’s knowledge of Starfleet defenses after his assimilation. It’s only after getting Locutus into sickbay that Crusher offers even a glimmer of hope that they might be able to get Picard back.
I think I was most fascinated by the moment where Data’s attempts to hack into the Borg consciousness via Locutus triggers a physical reaction by Locutus and Data ends up ripping off his (its?) right appendage. Ironically, both characters at this point are essentially machines, yet they both appear to be somewhat stunned by each other’s actions. (I found it unintentionally funny when Locutus raises his right arm and looks at where his evil pincer looking thing used to be attached, almost wistfully, lol).
May I point out one small thing here that I’ve noticed. Picard being taken by the Borg has always been interpreted that the Borg learned Starfleet’s defense strategies and technological capabilities from him. I disagree. If you look in each of the battles thus far with the Borg, there was no need for that. Only Q’s timely intervention saved the Enterprise from destruction in “Q Who?” During both battles with the Borg in this episode, the Enterprise‘s conventional weapons, despite being an impressive display, entirely failed. LaForge even mentioned after the first volley “Their subspace field is intact. New phaser frequencies had no impact.” The only brief reprieve the Enterprise received was when Shelby ordered Data to randomly fluctuate phaser frequencies. That didn’t even last long. Since the fleet at Wolf 359 didn’t try to use the deflector dish weapon but attacked in battle lines firing conventional Starfleet weapons, with or without Picard/Locutus the Borg would have won anyway, since Starfleet’s phasers and photon torpedoes had been shown to be ineffectual in every previous encounter. Sorry to spoil anyone’s fun but if you look carefully at both “Q Who?” and “The Best of Both Worlds,” I’m pretty sure you’ll see I’m right.
SethC: I’m not sure that part mattered so much. Mostly what Locutus gave them was knowledge of the deflector modification.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The idea that they hadn’t yet laid the transwarp conduit never occurred to me, and to me is enough to explain why there was only one ship was sent. I also like the overload idea.
I would have went with a 7 or 8 for this episode. But maybe that’s because I never had the letdown. I had to wait at most one day to see the conclusion–and probably just saw it right away. My first exposure to TNG was with two episodes a day. I believe it was on TechTV.
trlkly: Yeah, the summer of 1990 was not fun…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@43: This “battle of the machines” was a highlight of the episode for me and significantly tweaks the science-fiction premise; the Borg are straightforward alien (read: frightening) invaders and their cyborg, collectivist, zero-individuality society is an expression of that. Data is also in a sense alien, but he’s a valued friend and powerful ally to humanity because of the nature of his relationship to it. It moves away from “different, alien = frightening” to a more nuanced view where the attitude and actions of the Borg and Data make one an enemy and one a friend.
A lot of the comment thread relies on later stories which use the Borg but I’m curious as to what, if anything, the writers were thinking about certain issues regarding the Borg at the time this episode was produced. The Borg’s transformation of people into new Borg is famous but not suggested here as a normal practice; they abducted Picard to serve in a special role as “speaker”. Their demand that the Federation “service us” doesn’t imply that all humans will be transformed into Borg, although Locutus’ “You will become one with the Borg” could be interpreted that way.
The three Borg episodes up to this point even allows the possibility that this Borg ship was the same one from “Q Who?” and represents the Borg in their entirety which solves the problem of why only one cube is used.
There’s a few things about watching these two episodes recently that I think really lets them down. First of all, we all know that Picard returns. This is my first time through TNG in order (previously I’d only caught the odd episode here and there when I was about 10-15 or so) yet I still knew that. With that one thing gone, it’s robbed of all tension in a way that other episodes don’t suffer regardless of viewer knowledge outside of that episode. Well, there’s the ticking clock element of Earth being destroyed but you could guess that wasn’t going to happen regardless of what else you knew.
Another thing is that you’ll tend to watch them as one part (indeed, I viewed them in a format that was the two episodes edited into a single movie-like experience) so treating them separately as KRAD has done here seems more difficult. It also seems kind of illogical since it’s really one larger story. Does that mean one could average out the whole thing to an 8/10? The first part has an easy job of just being lots of build up and hype with no need to actually resolve anything or offer any payoff. The second part has a hard job since the first part has the honour of building it all up while all its left with itself is to try to satisfyingly wrap it up. It’s far easier to imply all this interesting stuff than it is to actually take it somewhere (see “Lost”) and I feel like these two reviews are a reflection of that.
Some other complaints. First, the pacing does seem quite slow. This is a recurring complaint of mine about TNG yet I do think it’s got better as it’s gone on… just not so much here. Maybe it’s the damage done by the tension totally evaporating when watched nowadays but it did feel like it was crawling along at some points. On another note, Earth (or indeed Sol, or the Terra System or whatever) seemed laughably badly defended. There’s a relatively small amount of ships that make their stand at Wolf 359 – it seems very odd that they only had that many within range, especially given that they knew about the Borg and that another major enemy can become invisible and undetectable for the most part. This is a thing that comes up again in the Generations movie as well (see the Plinkett review for more details on that). Then the Borg arrive at the Mars barrier or whatever they call it and what appears to be 3 Ford Transit vans drift towards it only to pop like corn in a microwave.
I can see why this episode(s) is seen as a classic but I think it has a few flaws even before you add in the totally-not-its-fault flaws due to watching it now with contemporary knowledge of the series as a whole (even basic stuff like “Picard is in season 4 onwards”).
I think ALL the Borg on the ship SIMULTANEOUSLY going into regeneration mode tripped a “bug” switch, which the overall collective would have seen as a reason to “amputate” that ship. They only sent one ship because the Borg are very efficient, and, if not for the vulnerability in their system they didn’t know about, it would have been sufficient. For the record, I feel that the idea of a Borg Queen ruins everything that makes the Borg really interesting and different.
A pity Elizabeth Dennehy was never brought back after this. I liked the Shelby character quite a lot. You’d think DS9 could’ve used a tactical officer at some point, huh? Or a holographic Borg specialist on Voyager? Come on, guys.
@51/MarvinBerry: I like Shelby too, but I have the impression that the writers intended for us to dislike her, at least in the previous episode. We’re supposed to side with Riker, who thinks his career choices are as important as the impending end of civilisation.
The glaring one for me is how the Enterprise caught up with the Borg after they were disabled. Also, why did they have to figure out which way the Borg had gone? Weren’t the Borg still headed to Earth?
I guess it’s not covered on screen, but it’s possible the cube did suffer significant damage at Wolf 359 and had decided to take a lengthier route to Earth since its reasonable for them to assume more Starfleet ships would intercept them.
Why didn’t they just destroy the Enterprise? It’s hard to believe the saucer would have been given 5 seconds.
I just assumed either Picard was influencing them in some way, or that they believed t there was something special about it. It’s reasonable that this incursion was as much a probe as a full on invasion. They had unexplained questions…
Like, what exactly happened during their first encounter when they were about to destroy the Enterprise and it vanished? From their point of view, the Enterprise suddenly appeared to use some vastly powerful technology that they hadn’t detected. That could also be the real reason for treating Picard differently.
Also, people saying part one was way better. Maybe, but it has long boring sections too, like Riker’s whole career thing.
As many have noted, our humble re-watcher badly misunderstood what Admiral Hanson was saying so calling the character a moron is kind of ironic.
I’m rewatching TNG now actually, just watched Best of Both Worlds… and it hit me at the end. Picard wasn’t’ cured, he just magically reverted to human when the borg cube blew up. He should’ve stayed borg, or at least the show should’ve had some time with Crusher and Data finding a way to deactivate the borg nanites. That should’ve been part of the next episode. We know from Voyager that not only does the Collective’s signal reach all 4 quadrants (the whole galaxy), and not only can they get ships anywhere very fast with the rare transwarp hubs, but we know borg STAY borg even if their ship blows up. They don’t’ suddenly revert…
@55/Azhrei: You make a valid point, but this was only the 3rd Borg episode aired in Star Trek history. All the technobabble of the Borg from Voyager hadn’t been thought up yet.
Maybe Picard didn’t get all the bells and whistles because he was a rush job?
Picard/Locutus wasn’t a regular Borg drone.
@56/Thierafhal: Even mass assimilations weren’t a thing yet. The Borg, as originally introduced, were only interested in technology. Locutus was the first assimilated drone we met.
I personally think it was a good ret-con for the Borg to want to assimilate both technology AND biological distinctiveness since the Borg are the ultimate melding of the two elements and so why not improve on both if they can? For instance, if they’re assimilating beings that are telepaths like Betazoids and Vulcans, that definitely will improve the Borg biologically and make them even more unstoppable (assuming the Borg can successfully use telepathy as a strategic advantage, but that’s just one example of what I’m getting at).
@60/GarretH: It also makes them scarier.
@61/JanaJansen: Oh, for sure! The Borg are basically cybernetic zombies which is the stuff of nightmares. Like Picard said in ST: First Contact, “Don’t let them touch you!”
I’m beginning to suspect this episode was overrated. It was entertaining in a way. But there were some writing decisions that left me scratching my head, like:
*Why did the Borg only snatched Picard? Why didn’t they just assimilated the entire crew or as many as they could?
*The Borg must have acquired some information about the Federation during its first encounter with the Enterprise-D back in Season 2.
*After snatching Picard, the Borg cube left the Enterprise-D behind. Why?
*Why go straight to Earth? Why didn’t the Borg assimilated many Federation worlds and colonies before and after its encounter with the Enterprise-D?
If this episode is regarded as the best example of the Borg’s encounter with the Federation . . . then I can only wonder about their opinions.
@63
Because in the Borg’s singular, obsessive mind, Picard was their choice to be a bridge between them and humanity. They only needed one. Everything else was irrelevant.
As for Earth, it’s the home of humans and the Borg appear to have a preoccupation with humans. So it seems logical to go directly to the “hive” of humanity.
I know this is going to seem like cranky nitpicking, and it’ll probably get me flamed (or at least photon torpedoed), but I’m sill bugged by how humanoid the Borg look — like frat-boys in “Robot” drag. Nothing scary about their appearance at all. Was there a reason they weren’t portrayed as entirely non-humanoid?
jazzmanchgo: Because the Borg were played by human actors and there are limits as to what you can do on a TV show budget, even a high (for TV) budget show like TNG.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@66- I’d add the in-universe reason that the Borg are largely made up of assimilated species- and the default form of intelligent life in the Star Trek galaxy seems to be humanoid, with maybe some bumpy bits. (This is, in turn, for the out of universe reason that they’re traditionally portrayed by human actors, and the in-universe reason that something something Precursors).
@65/jazzmanchgo:
This is probably too simplistic an answer, but how un-humanoid are we talking about here. Perhaps in today’s era of television it would be easy and inexpensive to come up with something radically different than a humanoid, but back then, not so much. In fact, I recall reading that in an earlier concept for the Borg, an insectoid race was considered, but then quickly ruled out as impractical. That’s actually where the “hive mind” concept originated from, and then remained throughout the creative process.
There’s a thing that puzzles me in this episode: in sickbay, when Locutus identifies Data, why does he call him obsolete? Isn’t he the ultimate tech to covet?
@69
Maybe because Data has no organic components and sees himself as a work in progress? And I could see the Borg seeing him as a tinker toy built by a lowly, flawed human.
@69/nadgamgee: I remember when I first saw this episode I was wondering the same thing. I think it was probably because the Borg wanted to be the ultimate synthesis of biology and technology and Data was technology.
@70/71: Makes sense.
@63/Lee Jones: “Why did the Borg only snatched Picard? Why didn’t they just assimilated the entire crew or as many as they could?”
Because at this point in their portrayal, the Borg hadn’t yet been redefined as interested in assimilating individuals. Their goal was to assimilate entire species. The Borg Collective was a single unified consciousness, and individual drones were just cells in its body. So it saw other civilizations the same way. It didn’t want to assimilate this human and that human and this other group of a thousand humans; it wanted to assimilate humanity as a single collective mass. And small groups of individual humans were irrelevant to that as long as the whole was absorbed. Which is why they went for Earth, the heart of the Federation and the homeworld of humanity.
What people often forget about First Contact, largely because of how Voyager retconned things, is that the Borg aboard the Enterprise acted the way they did because they were in an unusual situation. Their cube and their scout sphere had been destroyed, and only the Queen and a handful of drones had beamed to the E-E. For a vast collective mind, that’s barely enough drones to stay functional. So they had to assimilate the crew to replenish their numbers and get back to some semblance of normal collective function. It’s something they did because they were weakened, rather than just their everyday mode of behavior.
@68/Thierafhal: “Perhaps in today’s era of television it would be easy and inexpensive to come up with something radically different than a humanoid, but back then, not so much.“
Oh, ’60s TV had plenty of nonhumanoid aliens. Look at all the monsters in TOS and The Outer Limits. TNG’s greater budget and technology should’ve let it do even more impressive nonhumanoids — but it was Roddenberry’s preference during TNG to have the show’s aliens retain some recognizable human aspect, and Berman and Westmore tried to stay true to that preference after he died.
I mean, look at The Jim Henson Company’s sitcom Dinosaurs, which aired from 1991-4, during the latter part of TNG’s run. Using the same animatronic technology they’d pioneered on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, the sitcom was almost entirely populated by anthropomorphic dinosaur characters in full-body suits with radio-puppeteered faces, as well as some full puppet characters, sometimes quite large ones of a variety of different body shapes.
So the technology to do elaborate nonhumanoid aliens absolutely did exist while TNG was on. They definitely could have done it — they just didn’t choose to.
@69/nadgamgee: “There’s a thing that puzzles me in this episode: in sickbay, when Locutus identifies Data, why does he call him obsolete? Isn’t he the ultimate tech to covet?”
Why would he be “the ultimate?” Just because he’s the most advanced AI the Federation has achieved doesn’t mean there aren’t more advanced AIs elsewhere in the galaxy. Heck, look at all the alien androids and computers Kirk encountered a century earlier — the Federation was clearly well behind the galactic curve on AI development.
The Borg were supposed to be a far more ancient and vast society than the Federation, after all, with cybernetic technology enormously beyond anything a tinkerer like Noonien Soong could dream up. Unfortunately, the clunky costume/tech design rather undermined that impression.
@73/CLB:
Hahaha, in all the years I’ve been a Star Trek fan, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone comment on the underwhelming look of the Borg in their original television costuming. It’s something that’s always bugged me ever so slightly. The costume reimagining in First Contact was overdue and much more believable.
In my head canon, the Borg are so enamored with technology that they wear it as an affectation. Most of that junk has no function but — hey, look how neat this can opener on the end of my arm is!
@75/JFWheeler: That’s an interesting theory. It would have been hilarious if Picard pulled that Borg’s wire out in Descent, part II, and the Borg laughed at him for thinking it actually had a function!
Although, I guess Picard would know about that having been assimilated. Still, it’s an amusing idea.
@76
Haha, yep. “Dude, this wire doesn’t go to anything. Just something I found in an old Buick.”
@63,64,73: There is also the Voyager retcon that Picard wasn’t the only human the Borg assimilated during its assault during “The Best of the Both Worlds.” Several future Voyager episodes will establish (to my annoyance) that somehow a bunch of Starfleet officers, civilians, and even members of other Alpha Quadrant species like the Romulans were assimilated at the Battle of Wolf 359 and brought back to the Delta Quadrant. So in theory, the Borg had other spokesmen to act as a bridge between themselves and humanity should Locutus/Picard be lost during the Borg/Federation conflict.
@78/GarretH: The Borg’s line was, “Your archaic cultures are authority-driven. To facilitate our introduction into your societies, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.” That is, out of all the available options, the Collective decided that Picard was the optimum choice to represent them to an authority-driven culture. Perhaps none of the other officers they assimilated at Wolf 359 were captains, and thus they weren’t deemed to be as suitable for the role.
Besides, Borg are quick to adapt. When a tactic doesn’t work, they don’t repeat it, they replace it with a new tactic.
@78
A pointless retcon, too. Voyager could’ve easily said those people had been assimilated on distant ships or colonies, but no, they had to go for the name recognition of Wolf 359. Hey, remember that?! Go home, Voyager. You’re drunk.
@78 That always bothered me. The thing where 7 of 9 was assimilated 20 years ago with her parents was kind of a necessary retcon to make it possible for Voyager to encounter a human drone in the Delta Quadrant. But then Voyager tells us that the cube in BOBW apparently stopped at Wolf 359 to assimilate the crews of the ships they destroyed, and then somehow got those drones sent to the DQ even though that cube and all the Borg on it were destroyed. That’s nonsense. Or am I thinking in such 3-dimensional terms?
In any case, that’s not the fault of BOBW, which may be my favorite (2 part) episode of TNG. Part 1 is, as the review described, pretty much perfect and one of the best hours of science fiction tv ever made, with one of the best cliffhangers of all time. Part 2, to me, is a very worthy follow-up. Some things about it can be picked apart, and maybe it’s not as huge and exciting a payoff for the build up as it could have been. But I still think everything works. The character work, one of the stand-out features of part 1, is still excellent. Riker struggling with taking Picard’s place, asking his chair in the ready room, “What would you do?” followed by that talk with Guinan is just great stuff. I love that Riker keeps trying to run things the way Picard did, until he succeeds by doing what Riker would do instead; and yet what Riker does is to do the human thing, to get his captain and friend back from the Borg and that’s the key to their victory.
The tension isn’t as palpable as in part 1, because part 1 was all build up and part 2 is an extended sequence of payoffs followed by short builds and then another payoff. But it still feels big, it feels like doom has arrived and no one was ready, and the sense of fearful scrambling to figure out something, anything, is also effective.
So I think whatever its flaws in comparison to part 1, they don’t matter because so much of it is so good and so cool that I’m 100% willing to be taken on the ride. And following the first half, I’m already willing to follow what they lay out for me.
@81/erictheread: We saw in First Contact and later on VGR that Borg cubes have smaller auxiliary sphere ships onboard. It’s easy to presume that after Wolf 359, the cube sent a selection of assimilated Starfleet personnel back to Delta in such a sphere ship as the cube proceeded to Earth.
@82-83: I definitely think the word, “nonesense”, by erictheread is a little too strong for the reasons CLB brings attention to. However, I still think it’s kind of debatable that the Borg would have bothered sending a relatively insignificant amount of fresh drones back to the DQ in a ‘lifeboat’. Although, if that is indeed how the Queen survived for Picard to remember her, I guess why not bring a bunch of new drones back to DQ… Especially if Kevin Riley potentially sanctioned it =P
@83- I think we see at some point that there are multiple “Queen,” bodies that the consciousness possesses. (Reraising questions as to what a collective needs with a queen in the first place, and yes, I know it’s because bees and ants have them, but I’m pretty sure the Borg Queen doesn’t spend all her time laying eggs).
@83/Thierafhal: “However, I still think it’s kind of debatable that the Borg would have bothered sending a relatively insignificant amount of fresh drones back to the DQ in a ‘lifeboat’.”
I see it more as a sample return probe. It might be routine procedure in any assimilation of a far-flung civilization to send a sample of its populace and technology back to the DQ for more detailed analysis, or perhaps as a safeguard against the failure of the main mission. After all, it’s a huge galaxy, and there are many civilizations older and more advanced than the Federation, so the Borg must occasionally fail the first time out.
“Although, if that is indeed how the Queen survived for Picard to remember her”
No need. The Queen is just the body through which the single mind of the entire Collective expresses itself, or sort of a focusing/coordinating node for the whole. Even “she” is just one component in the larger hive, as replaceable as any other component. When one Queen body is destroyed, another takes its place, as happened once or twice on Voyager. The post-finale Voyager novels by Christie Golden established a software package called the Royal Protocol that was installed in a drone to create a new Queen, while the novel Resistance by J.M. Dillard focused on how a regular drone was converted physically into a Queen (and I did my best to reconcile the two in Greater than the Sum).
@85/CLB:
Good point, although it’s still entirely possible the Queen didn’t feel it necessary to stick around the AQ after the Borg had bagged Captain Picard as their liaison. I realize her “3D terms” line suggest something more radical than simply hopping into a Sphere and going back. However, she also could have simply been taunting Picard with that line considering how simple a matter her survival can easily be.
“When Riker orders the Enterprise to ram the Borg ship, Wes looks positively ill. And who can blame him, really? I mean, he was just told that his job description had changed from that of Starfleet conn officer to kamikaze pilot.”
I thought Wheaton played that perfectly. He looked like he was sick to his stomach at the idea (like, he always knew that death and danger were a possibility, but now having to intentionally cause his own death and that of everyone else on the ship too…) while quickly overcoming it enough to decide to obey the order and understanding the cold logic of it.
That was very standup of Michael Piller not to leave the other writers in the lurch like that. Data’s part in this is a bit undervalued, I think. Admiral Hanson was probably trying to protect the memory of his friend. It’s a good thing they got Picard back when they did – it looks like they were getting ready to remove his right eye. I’m rather amused at everyone trying to explain away the destruction of the Borg cube – it reminds me of that line from Ned Flanders, “It sounds like you’re strainin’ to do some explainin’!”
4: “Borg babies” just made me realise something – when the ship exploded, how many pre-natal Borg died in their maturation chambers? 8: It’s curious that the Borg, so bent on assimilating the Enterprise in Q Who, deem it as something far less important to them this time. 25: Why was the Borg Queen so keen to assimilate Data after Locutus deemed him unworthy of it?
31: I like episodes where Guinan comes to them rather than the crew seeking out her advice in episodes like this, Yesterday’s Enterprise or Ensign Ro. 32: It all depends on how suicidal the crews of those ships were – even Sisko didn’t do that (although he would have died if he hadn’t been physically removed from the battle). And those things seen near the Mars Defence Perimeter made up the Mars Defence Perimeter.
33: Borg space is 70,000 light-years distant from the Federation. 51: I think Worf fills the role of a tactical officer on DS9 and Seven of Nine is Voyager’s resident expert on the Borg. 65: I think Species 8472 were they’re first attempt at a non-humanoid race but some ST fans laughed that CGI right off the screen.
84: Some say Seven of Nine was being groomed to be a Queen until she was liberated by Voyager. 86: I think Alice Krige replaced Susanna Thompson in Endgame because Thompson was unavailable to reprise the role. 87: Don’t forget that one of those people he would be sending to her death was his own mother.
Locutus warns Riker that if they attempt to intervene the Enterprise will be destroyed. This sounded a false note to me, as the Borg never do anything unnecessarily, and it was entirely unnecessary for them to sound the warning. The Starships at Wolf 459 were standing in the way so they were destroyed. The Enterprise is running behind them like a puppy, completely ineffectual. Destroy it or don’t, but why bother to warn them? Especially, if as the premise provides, the Borg now the wealth of Picard’s knowledge and Picard would know Riker would never turn tail.
Also, curious about something:, at about 21 minutes, Riker gives the order (to a crewman who looks just like a young Ryan Reynolds): “Reset Subspace Communications, Riker code Scrambler one.” And the crewman repeats it. But when you watch it it’s entirely clear that the word “one” was dubbed from something else the actors actually said. Almost looked like they might have been saying Riker “go” or something. Anyway it’s a small matter but I was just curious if anyone knows what the deal was there.
1. You know it occurs to me that Ben Sisko should really have been furious with his commander. The whole point of separating the saucer section on the Enterprise was to get rid of civilians during combat. They had a few hours to get into place and there is NO reason that there should have been any civilians at the Battle of Wolf 359. Yet, instead, they just went into battle with all the kids and families there.
2. My assumption is the Queen is not actually a personal body but a program that can possess other bodies at will. There’s no more Queen than it is the name of the central governing intelligence of the Borg. It’s just a tool for communicating with lesser organisms. Presumably, you CAN’T kill the Queen of the Borg because if you destroyed its body then it would simply move to another.
3. I assume the Enterprise is unimportant because the Borg are now going after Earth itself. I still believe technology is the primary motive of the Borg rather than people. As such, there’s no point in trying to assimilate the Enterprise when all of the information and tech of it will be available on Earth.
@90,
That’s…actually a good point.
They knew from J-25 and the 1701-D’s engagements in the preceding days how dangerous the Borg ships were. The time Picard and company bought for the armada definitely could’ve been used get civilians like Jake and Jennifer out of the combat zone.
I suppose you could argue that with his Captain having died in the chair, Sisko transferred any of that due anger towards the embodiment of his wife’s death (i.e. Picard).
C.T.: That is a really good point — it makes no sense that Jennifer and Jake would be on the Saratoga when it was going into battle against the Borg…..
Also the fact that we saw the Queen again after First Contact indicates that the Queen isn’t a specific individual but a program. For that matter, the events of Picard‘s “Broken Pieces” supports this notion as well….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“…the Borg absorbed all of the captain’s knowledge—and therefore knew of the modified deflector weapon and adjusted their defenses accordingly.” In my view, the writers deliberately excluded Picard from the discussion of the deflector weapon in Part I. It’s not that Picard knew about the specific plan being developed, and more that his knowledge of the ship, and the crew, enabled the Borg to intuit the potential tactic and thus be prepared. I realize it is likely Picard was briefed offscreen about the deflector weapon. But I thought that his pointed absence from any such discussion on screen meant he was not briefed. To me, this makes the first scene of Part II more terrifying. It suggests that the Borg did not only absorb known strategies. With Locutus, the Borg could extrapolate and anticipate tactics. I thought this enhanced the danger that the Borg posed.
Did take all most all of the Federation many lives and dozens of Star Ships bu the Borg Cube Ship did explode and they have Hugh and his band of Free Thinkers
I forced myself to wait a day between Parts 1 and 2 even though here at Casa Arben we’re trying to plow through at least TNG before the upcoming final season of Picard. My hope is that we can add DS9 in release chronology but for sure after TNG’s finale we’ll have to jump ahead to the films. Then it’s back to DS9 and on from there at a more relaxed pace.
@89. fullyfunctional — While I’m a year late on replying, I had the same question. The answer is “Riker Zero” according to Memory Alpha.
Even Borgified, I have to say, Picard as seen in Data’s lab makes for a fine, manly specimen of manhood.
In Voyager we know that many starfleet members were assimilated in Wolf 359 and survived the cube´s destruction. Even Klingons (so a few of their ships did manage to get there). That also means that there was another Borg ship around (probably a sphere lurking in the vicinity).
@96/David: See comment #82. We know that Borg cubes have auxiliary sphere ships onboard, so this cube probably did too.