“Scorpion, Part II”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Season 4, Episode 1
Production episode 169
Original air date: September 3, 1997
Stardate: 51003.7
Captain’s log. We get the highlights of Part 1, then pick up with a Borg Cube running very fast away from the Species 8472 ship that blew up a planet, Voyager in a tractor beam. Chakotay tries to get Torres to beam Janeway off the cube, but Janeway herself contacts them and says to belay that order, as she has formed an alliance with the Borg.
The deal is, they’ll work together on taking the EMH’s nanoprobes—which are successfully used to cure Kim—and weaponizing them. Janeway and Tuvok will do their work in a lab on the cube initially, and the Borg will guarantee Voyager safe passage through Borg space. Janeway will turn over the nanoprobes once they’re through Borg territory.
Chakotay isn’t thrilled, but goes along with it. He also requests that they remove the tractor beam, which they do.
The Borg’s notion of “working together” with Janeway and Tuvok is to put a temporary neural implant into them that will allow direct communication, linking the pair of them to the Collective. Janeway refuses, and insists that the Borg instead have a drone be a speaker to them for the Collective. If they don’t accede, she’ll destroy the nanopobes and the EMH (who has the only copy of the research).
A drone, Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, is assigned to speak for the Borg to Janeway and Tuvok.
Kes once again receives strong telepathic impressions of 8472. She realizes that they’re watching Voyager and the cube.
Tuvok suggests putting the nanoprobes in some of Voyager’s photon torpedoes. Seven counters with a larger weapon that has a five-million-isoton yield. Janeway isn’t comfortable with the collateral damage that would result from such an explosion, plus it would take too long to create enough nanoprobes for such a weapon. The torpedoes can be prepared with much more dispatch. Seven comments that, as individuals, they think too small, but the value of such a smaller-scale weapon as a demonstration and deterrent, plus the speed, leads to the Borg agreeing.
Just as Kim reports back to duty after being cured of 8472’s disease, a singularity opens and a bioship attacks Voyager, having learned of the nanoprobe weapon from Kes’ thoughts. Voyager gets its ass kicked, and the bioship also attacks the cube, but then the cube does a kamikaze run, destroying itself and the bioship. Just before impact, half a dozen drones, including Seven, beamed over with Janeway and Tuvok to a cargo bay.
Tuvok and Janeway were both injured in the attack, but Tuvok assures Chakotay that Janeway approved the Borg beaming over. The drones convert the cargo bay to a Borg laboratory while Tuvok and Janeway are taken to sickbay.
Tuvok is treated pretty quickly, but Janeway is in very bad shape. Before the EMH is forced to induce a coma before treatment, Janeway puts Chakotay in charge and orders him to make the alliance work and get everyone home.
Seven, however, refuses to keep to the original arrangement, and instructs Chakotay to reverse course to the nearest Borg Cube. Chakotay, however, is unwilling to go back the way he came—the deal was to give them the nanoprobes when they were safely out of Borg space. Seven insists; Chakotay says he’ll think about it; Seven says to think fast. Seven also criticizes the individual need to constantly question decisions and to not make up their minds.
Chakotay’s compromise is to leave the drones on an uninhabited planet with the nanoprobes, and Voyager will continue on their way out of Borg space as fast as possible. Seven threatens him with assimilation. Chakotay tells her to pound sand and says that any move made to try that will result in the cargo bay being opened to space.
The Borg are not so easily cowed, however. They access a Jefferies Tube and Seven moves to take control of the deflector dish. Kim tries and fails to lock them out, and Chakotay orders Tuvok to opened the cargo bay doors. Most of the Borg are blown out into space, but Seven is able to hang on thanks to being in the Jefferies Tube. Seven’s modifications to the deflector open a singularity similar to those used by 8472, which sucks Voyager in.
They find themselves in fluidic space: 8472’s home. The other shoe drops: the Borg have been there before. Seven admits that the Borg invaded fluidic space, only to find that they couldn’t assimilate 8472—worse, their doing so gave 8472 a gateway to our dimension, which is what led to this war. Which, by the way, the Borg are losing, badly.
Seven also says that 8472 knows they’re here and will arrive in three hours.
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Fugitive Telemetry
Janeway has recovered, and is livid that Chakotay ended the alliance with the Borg. Chakotay insisted that he had no choice, as he couldn’t turn around and negate their progress to rendezvous with another cube. They go round and round, and Chakotay ruefully admits that this is exactly what Seven dinged them for. Janeway admits that the first mistake they made was not to support each other.
Janeway then goes to the bridge and summons Seven. Janeway tells her that Chakotay has been put in the brig for insubordination and she’s in charge, and they’re going to war.
Two hours later, Seven has made modifications to the shields, and thirteen regular torpedoes and one class-10 high-yield torpedo are armed with the EMH’s nanoprobes. Kes is still in telepathic contact with 8472, and says that they view Voyager as having contaminated their space and are about to attack.
Once they attack, Tuvok fires the regular torpedoes. They destroy all the bioships targeting them. Janeway then orders Seven to gimmick the deflector to open another singularity so they can go home.
They’re greeted by a fleet of bioships. Tuvok fires the class-10 torpedo, which wipes the entire fleet out. Seven reconnects with the Collective upon their reentry to the galaxy, and she reports that all of 8472’s bioships are in retreat after this massacre.
Janeway declares the alliance a success and offers to drop Seven off somewhere while they continue home. Seven declares the alliance at an end and says that Voyager will now be assimilated.
Janeway then contacts Chakotay—who’s in the cargo bay with the EMH and Torres rather than the brig—and says, “Scorpion.”
The EMH activates the same neural link that the Borg tried to attach to Janeway and Tuvok back on the cube. He is able to link with Seven—among other things, learning that she was a human girl named Annika who was assimilated at a very young age—and distract her long enough for Torres to sever her connection to the Collective.
Voyager heads out of Borg space at maximum warp. Seven is unconscious in sickbay, her skin already started to regain some color. Janeway intends to keep her on board—after all, they severed her link to the only home she’s known since she was a little girl, the least they can do is take her in. Chakotay is worried that she’ll try to get back to the Collective.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Janeway, Tuvok, and the EMH succeed in weaponizing the latter’s modified nanoprobes to be used against 8472.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway manages to broker an alliance with the Borg against all odds, though it is fraught, especially when Chakotay trashes it after she goes into a coma. But Janeway also has a backup plan for when the Borg go back on their word…
Half and half. Torres is able to use the Borg tech in the cargo bay to cause a feedback loop that severs Seven’s connection to the Collective.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. The EMH is able to manipulate the nanoprobes to cure Kim and also be made into weapons to be used against 8472. Not sure how this got past his ethical program, given that he couldn’t separate Tuvix due to the whole “do no harm” thing, so creating a weapon of mass destruction would, you’d think, be an issue…
Forever an ensign. After spending most of Part 1 hand-wringing over Kim’s being poisoned by 8472, he’s completely cured off camera. Allegedly, there was some talk of Garrett Wang, rather than Jennifer Lien, being removed from the cast, and having him killed by 8472 was a handy way to accomplish that.
Resistance is futile. Seven is assigned to be the Borg spokesperson for Janeway and Tuvok to work with, winds up being the only one to survive both the cube’s kamikaze attack and Chakotay spacing the cargo bay, and then is kidnapped from the Collective in the end.
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. When it’s all over, Janeway goes back to Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop to record her log entry with a quill pen.
Do it.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“We are Borg.”
“I take that as a yes.”
–Janeway asking an honest question, Seven being sassy, and Tuvok being sassy right back.
Welcome aboard. In the Chakotay-induced flashback Seven has to her pre-assimilation childhood, Erica Bryan plays young Annika.
Trivial matters: Jeri Ryan is added to the opening credits as Seven of Nine, while Jennifer Lien is relegated to an “also starring” billing before the guest stars, which is how she’ll also be billed in her two other appearances on the show (“The Gift” next time and “Fury” in season six).
Janeway references the Borg using Picard as “Locutus” in TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds” and “Emissary” to speak for them as a precedent for the Borg assigning a drone to speak for the Borg to her and Tuvok.
Chakotay mentions that he’s been part of a Collective before, referring to the events of “Unity,” which likely made it easier for the EMH to hook him up to Seven at the episode’s climax.
The 1991 TNG novel Vendetta by Peter David had this disclaimer: “The plot and background details of Vendetta are solely the author’s interpretation of the universe of Star Trek, and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.” This was done because Richard Arnold, who was in charge of approving all tie-in merchandise, wanted a female Borg who was removed from the Collective changed. According to Arnold, there were no female Borg, and when David refused to change it, Arnold insisted on the disclaimer. The later introduction of Seven of Nine (not to mention the establishment of several female ex-Borg back in “Unity”) made that note particularly imbecilic.
Both 8472 and the weaponized nanoprobes will next be seen in “Prey.”
The events of this episode will be revisited in “Shattered.”
Strangely, the version of this episode that’s currently on Netflix streaming doesn’t include the “previously on” segment with the highlights of Part 1. (The version on CBS All Access does include it…)
Set a course for home. “I speak for the Borg.” It took me a while after watching this episode to realize the issue I had with the overall storyline: Janeway kidnaps Seven against her will, removing her from the only home she’s ever known without her consent.
I’m not saying she shouldn’t have done it. I’m not even saying it’s the wrong thing to do in the circumstance, especially given that Seven was trying to assimilate the ship and its crew. But given how often Janeway has insisted on maintaining Starfleet principles while they’re stuck in the Delta Quadrant, this kidnapping deserves at least a comment.
However, it’s endemic of the episode’s primary flaw, which isn’t enough to make it a bad episode—quite the opposite, it’s actually quite excellent, he says, burying the lede—but still stands out: Everything that happens in this episode feels like it’s all there, not because it flows naturally from the story, but because everything must lead to the conclusion that was established as inevitable by virtue of Jeri Ryan’s spot in the opening credits. Janeway insists on a single voice to speak to her and Tuvok, so we get Seven, who is miraculously the only one who survives Chakotay proving he wasn’t bluffing when he threatened to space the Borg. (Full points for that, by the way. Threats only work if you’re willing to follow through.) And then, once they’re most of the way through Borg space (apparently), they’re able to cut her off from the Collective.
Still, despite the fact that you can see the strings a bit too much, this is a slam-bang season opener, and what I particularly like about it is that it sets up a true dichotomy between Janeway and Chakotay. One of the problems with “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II” is that, even though the script insisted that Riker needed to be as un-Picard-like as possible and to set Picard aside, he then acted pretty much like Picard would have and also moved heaven and earth to get Picard back.
Here, though, the divide between captain and first officer is legit, and it’s one that carries over nicely from Part 1. But what I especially like is that Janeway’s fervent statement that they still need to work together even when they disagree is well taken, because in the end they both were right. Allying with the Borg was the only way they were going to (a) be able to create the weapon to use against 8472 and (b) get across Borg space unassimilated. But in the end, the microsecond the alliance was over, the Borg moved to assimilate the ship, just as Chakotay feared. It’s their nature.
And so captain and first officer worked together to save the ship. It’s a beautiful thing.
Now we’ve got a new crew member, who very much doesn’t want to be there. Well, okay, there’s nobody on the ship who wants to be there (except Neelix and Kes, anyhow), but the other 140-odd folks are, at least at this point, accustomed to it. Gonna be a fun ride…
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest novel is To Hell and Regroup, a collaboration with David Sherman. The third book in David’s “18th Race” trilogy of military science fiction novels, this concludes the alien-invasion tale begun in Issue in Doubt and continued in In All Directions. The book is on sale now in trade paperback and eBook form from eSpec Books.
Like a lot of people may end up commenting, I absolutely love the addition of Seven of Nine to the show, but it’s because I love her as a character, not because her character “was added to the show for sex appeal.” She develops as a character to be clever, suspicious, confused, resourceful, stubborn, haughty, kind, composed, helpful, Borg, Human, you name it… I’ve always enjoyed Seasons 4-7 more than 1-3 because of what Seven of Nine brought to the show.
For the record, I’m not saying I’m glad she replaced Kes. I wish they could have afforded to keep Kes while adding Seven. I’m simply saying I liked the show a lot more once Seven joined the team.
Oh, and yes, despite the fact that I hate the continued conflict between Janeway and Chakotay, this is a great conclusion as well as a great season opener.
Re: Seven being “kidnapped” by Janeway —
The way I see it, Janeway liberated Seven. Yes, Seven was adamant about staying with the Collective, but she was suffering from SEVERE Stockholm Syndrome. So not freeing her from the Collective would be like not rescuing someone who’s been living with their kidnapper for most of their life. As far as I’m concerned, what Janeway did was not only ethical, but morally obligatory.
Robb: like I said, ultimately it’s the right thing, but still what they did to her was a vicious assault on her person. It’s not quite black and white, on my opinion, and it deserved more discussion and Jess fait accompli because Jeri Ryan was in the opening credits now….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“And then, once they’re most of the way through Borg space (apparently), they’re able to cut her off from the Collective.“
I believe they are still in Borg space next episode up until Kes jumps them 10 years on their way at the end.
“got past his ethical program”
He’s a sapient being, he can modify his own ethics if necessary. Well, that’s my assumption. My ethics have certainly changed over the years. Mainly in that I accept that there are times when two or more ethical beliefs, sometimes strongly held, will collide, in a way I wouldn’t accept when I was a teenager.
It’s not a kidnapping when you rescue someone from a cult. Charlie Manson had a healthier family than these tech-head weirdos.
My issue with the introduction of Seven is that she’s specifically a human former Borg drone, who was assimilated before the Enterprise D even encountered the Borg but is randomly available to be a Locutus for the crew of Voyager. Bang goes my willing suspension of disbelief. This is made worse in later episodes when we not only encounter her family’s ship 60,000 light years away from Earth but also learn that her father was studying the Borg. Distances and timelines just make no sense, and I think the powers that be could have trusted the audience enough to give them a character that was learning to be an individual without necessarily learning to be a human individual.
I know she has a whole thing about regaining her humanity, but it could have been just as interesting for her to try and reclaim her individuality without having anyone from her own species to try and force her to fit that species’ expectations, with that species itself potentially even made extinct by the Borg; we could have seen her interact with non-human crewmembers and try and construct her own identity, and Janeway would have been more likely to let her do that. The little bit we got of her with Tuvok as a mentor in Year of Hell was great; we could have had more moments like that, not just humans and the Doctor (who is very much in a human mould, and based on a human).
wiredog: Yes, but you weren’t programmed. It’s an interesting question, truly…
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“My issue with the introduction of Seven is that she’s specifically a human former Borg drone, who was assimilated before the Enterprise D even encountered the Borg but is randomly available to be a Locutus for the crew of Voyager.”
What really gets me about this exchange is that Janeway is able to tell, even under the Borg gore, that Seven used to be human
JANEWAY: You’re human, aren’t you?
SEVEN: This body was assimilated eighteen years ago. It ceased to be human at that time.
How the hell did Janeway come to that conclusion? A lot of species look like humans, so even if you can tell under the Borg Gore she looks human, she could just as easily be Betazed. Or any of the several species Voyager has come across that basically look like humans, such as the aliens from Before & After or Favorite Son. But, seemingly without any real evidence, Janeway can just tell. Starfleet science officers never cease to amaze me.
“According to Arnold, there were no female Borg, and when David refused to change it, Arnold insisted on the disclaimer. The later introduction of Seven of Nine (not to mention the establishment of several female ex-Borg back in “Unity”) made that note particularly imbecilic.”
Wow, I’ve read that book but had no idea that was the origin story of the note. That’s… an astonishing assertion, I’d love to hear the reasoning behind it it. At this point, we know the Borg expand in part by assimilating, so… what, the assimilation process just randomly doesn’t work on women? The Borg just stuck a note on their cube that says “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” and choose not to assimilate women because of cooties? Usually when there’s something I disagree with, I can at least trace back the logic to see how someone got there, but this time I got nothing.
@7/Muswell: I agree with your sentiments as well. Seven of Nine didn’t need to be human to still get the point across about someone reclaiming their individuality. There were just far too many coincidences regarding her character starting with how she just happened to be located near Janeway and Tuvok on a Borg ship of thousands of drones when Janeway asks for a Borg spokesperson. This will get even worse when in a later episode the Borg queen will tell Seven that it was always her intention that Seven be placed on Voyager which further strains credulity.
So something that always bothered me was Seven’s designation. Shouldn’t she be “Seventh of Nine” just as Hugh from “I, Borg” on TNG was “Third of Five?” Consistency, people!
Anyway, this was actually a rare second part episode that was even better than the first part. It was slam-bang action and drama and great characterization as far as Janeway and Chakotay and Seven are concerned. In general, I think the “Seven of Nine Era” of Voyager is superior to its first three seasons.
I never would have guessed that Borg was an acronym for “Buzz off, revolting girls!” I detect Calvin’s fingerprints about this.
I’m tempted to view Seven’s severing, based on what we know about the Borg at this point, as closer to traumatically resurrecting a dead person than rescuing or abducting a living person, but that will become more complicated when we learn that the identity of individual Borg continue exist and manifest in Unimatrix Zero.
@10 I seem to recall the logic went something like this:
1. All the drones we saw on TNG were male, or at least sexless.
2. Therefore, there are no female drones.
It’s a logical fallacy, but from stories told over the years, Arnold excelled at those.
Of course, we also had the Borg Queen by then too. So we already had had a female Borg by then. This just gave us one that had also been liberated, similar to Reannon in Vendetta.
Without a doubt, what Janeway did was take Seven against her will from the only home she’s truly known. But I don’t think that’s really a flaw of the episode. It was pretty apparent that it was an assault and a violation. If it wasn’t apparent to Braga and Menosky, it was very much so for Winrich Kolbe and Jeri Ryan, because they play the scene as such, specifically her reaction the moment when the disconnection occurs. It is not a pleasant scene to watch.
Plus, I feel the show is well aware of the fact that Janeway is responsible for the ongoing process of Seven being literally assimilated by the ship and crew. It’s not unlike what the Borg already did to her. If anything, it’s intentional, since Seven will throw this fact right back at her later on, and it’s very much one of the main points of her conflict with Janeway that will drive her character (and the show) over the next four seasons.
As for Scorpion, Part II, it’s one hell of a season opener. Top-notch stakes, outstanding VFX and set pieces, it used the ensemble well, it kept the Janeway/Chakotay conflict front-and-center, even with Janeway in a coma. And it introduced us to the most promising Star Trek main character since Kira Nerys on Emissary. Seven is on full drone mode, but even at this point, you can see glimpses of her personality. Superb work by Ryan right from the start.
And by emphasizing that the Borg were the ones who first invaded fluidic space, it gives the show a chance to redeem Species 8472 down the line. Plus, it’s hard not to feel for their fleet being decimated.
At the risk of oversimplification ,
What could be better than
Assimilation? But de-assimilation !
Bravo!!
After Seven leaves the Collective, do the others renumber? Does Nine of Nine become Eight of Eight?
I don’t understand the issues with rescuing Seven. It’s like getting mad at authorities for rescuing kidnap victims found chained in a basement 20 years later (which happens in real life). Just because that’s the life they’ve known they should have been left there?
I agree you could see the strings being pulled to set up the new status quo, but that’s a necessary mechanic in a situation like this. You could say much the same about any pilot episode.
I don’t agree that Janeway kidnapped Seven, because at this point, Seven is not a person with a will of her own. She’s a human body and brain being puppeteered by the Borg Collective, her own personality suppressed until she’s severed from it at the end. Janeway liberated a slave. It was the Borg who kidnapped Annika Hansen; after that, her ability to speak for herself was suppressed, and whatever she said was the Collective’s will, not Annika’s. The last expression of individual choice that Annika Hansen ever made prior to this was (as we will see in “The Raven”) yelling “No! No!” when a Borg drone reached for her — a clear expression of unwillingness to be in the Collective. Which means that Janeway had Annika’s prior consent to liberate her from the Borg, even if she didn’t know it (though it was a reasonable surmise that a slave would consent to be liberated from enslavement).
Really, I’m shocked that you’d equate a rescue from mind-controlled slavery with kidnapping. The two are direct opposites from the standpoint of consent. A slave cannot meaningfully consent to remain in slavery, because they don’t have the option to refuse and thus any expression of consent is made under duress.
@7/Muswell: “My issue with the introduction of Seven is that she’s specifically a human former Borg drone, who was assimilated before the Enterprise D even encountered the Borg but is randomly available to be a Locutus for the crew of Voyager. Bang goes my willing suspension of disbelief.”
We’ll find out in “Dark Frontier” that she was essentially planted by the Borg Queen, who expected Janeway to liberate her and wanted to use her as a double agent within Voyager. A bit iffy on a number of levels, but it helps justify assigning a human drone.
Then again, I always found Seven to be implausibly autonomous for a Borg drone, even a “Locutus-type” one. And I wondered why she was in a special sealed alcove deep inside a cube. My pet theory is that she was a potential replacement Queen in case the current one was destroyed.
@9/Rick: I suspect (and may have mentioned in one or two novels) that species that look entirely human can be told apart by scent. I think, also, that in the “real” underlying universe (where they’re actual aliens rather than actors pretending to be), there would be subtle differences in kinesics, i.e. the nuances of body movement and facial expression, and perhaps in vocal timbre.
@10/Rick: Remember, in TNG, it was presumed that Borg drones were incubated from embryos, not assimilated. Assimilation was portrayed as an exception, not the norm. In First Contact, the Borg assimilated the crew because they were a small complement of drones that needed to replenish their numbers. It wasn’t until Voyager, well after Arnold was gone, that assimilation was portrayed as the Borg’s primary way of making drones.
Still, Arnold was wrong. There was at least one female drone in “Q Who,” played by Mary Donatelli.
Great episodes- but Janeway is at peak annoying me here. Every call she has made throughout this whole thing has been wrong (at least IMHO). Going through Borg space was imbecilic. She had no reason to get involved in someone else’s war but decided to, anyway. She decided to help *the Borg* against a species she knew next to nothing about (and who turned out to be fairly reasonable), she made an alliance with the Borg that anyone could tell wouldn’t work but that still seemingly caught them off guard when it turned out that they are lying liars who lie, got angry with her first officer for making the only smart choice in this whole two-parter by spacing the Borg (and I agree, great moment for Chakotay, where we finally see some of that Maquis coming through), and then once in a completely different Space, decided to fight the native inhabitants. And then kidnap a Borg drone. Brilliant work all around, Janeway.
And I agree that she *did* kidnap her. I know the Borg exist along a very unique spectrum of being both victim and victimizer- but I fail to see how this is Janeway’s call. The way she presents Seven with her options always implied to me that she only considered Seven to be “deprogrammed” when Seven decided she wanted to stay with them. Which, as others have pointed out, is hardly much different from being assimilated in the first place. “I will keep you here until you agree to stay of your own free will” isn’t actually a choice. It didn’t really sit right with me the way that they just made the call that they were going to remove as much of her robotics as they possibly could- including changing her appearance in purely aesthetic ways, seemingly without bothering to consult her. It always struck me as both a rigid adherence to Star Trek’s “no transhumanism unless it is 100% medically necessary or meant to show the person is a criminal” rule, but also just a violation of Seven’s bodily autonomy. And to make it worse, I’m not entirally sure the writers understood that. I think Jeri Ryan did- because her acting is full of an anguish that shows that Seven really feels she is losing *who she is* is a way she has no control over- but the episode seems to skim right over that to “Hey, we have Borg Barbie now, pretty cool, right?”
Anika Hansen was forcibly kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, abused, had her self-identity subsumed, and basically groomed and enslaved by an evil abuser and forced to do the same things to others, essentially continuing the cycle of abuse and enlarging this evil cult. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a liberation of her and not a “kidnapping.” You wouldn’t use that later term for someone who had been chained up for multiple years in a basement being raped and abused when freeing them from their captor.
Honestly, the only reason I even considered this a kidnapping was the way Ryan played it and the way Winrich Kolbe shot it: as Seven in agonizing pain. That caught me off guard when I watched it this past weekend and gave me pause when I was writing about it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The problem with calling Seven’s rescue and reprogramming by the Voyager crew an “assimilation” is that it places the Federation and the Borg on morally equal terms, when obviously they’re not. It works on an ironic level, yes, but let’s get real here. The Borg is not a legitimate culture nor a home for anyone. It’s a totalitarian cult hellbent on forcing sentient beings into slavery in the name of “perfection.” If they weren’t spacefaring, they would be handing out pamphlets at the airport.
The fact that disconnecting Seven of Nine from the collective results in an individual who has Annika’s memories and will eventually come to identify itself as Annika…
Well, clearly given the onscreen evidence it is how the Borg work, but I’m not entirely sure it’s how I’d expect them to. I’d think that once young Annika’s experiences and memories had been harvested and cataloged within the greater collective, the ‘local’ copies would be overwritten, or actively excised as parts of her neural tissue were replaced, surgically or by nanoprobe conversion, with Borg hardware. It seems odd that, given the Borg’s mantra on assimilation, they’d store everything that made Annika Annika in Seven of Nine.
So unplugged, Seven of Nine would now be an individual, but one closer to Hugh, who had to construct their identity entirely anew,
@23/Benjamin: I’m not sure the memories in an organic brain really could be “erased” as if from a hard drive. They’re physical changes in the neurons, networks of strengthened connections. You might be able to suppress access to those memories, but they’d still be physically etched into the tissue on some level. Although you have a point that they might actually replace some of that tissue with cybernetics, so it might not all be there.
As for Hugh vs. Seven, I’ve always found the difference between them ironic. Hugh was the TNG version of the Borg, presumed to have been a drone from birth with no prior identity except as part of the Collective, yet he embraced individuality quite readily, with minimal resistance, in the course of one episode. Seven, by contrast, was an assimilated drone with a prior human identity, yet she fiercely resisted embracing her individuality and humanity for the greater part of a season.
And really, it’s because of their prior identities that they acted that way. Hugh’s entire life had been defined by conforming to those around him, so when he was taken aboard a ship full of individualists, he readily absorbed the ideas they fed him and mimicked their behavior. But Annika had prior experience with having an individual identity that she resisted surrendering to a group that captured her, so she did the same the second time around. It was Hugh’s prior inhumanity that made him adopt humanity so easily, and it was Seven’s prior humanity that made her resist humanity so fiercely.
@24, Christopher- I suppose it’s partially a question of whether the Borg assimilation took place in surgical or nanotechnology. We, and probably the Federation, are a long way from any sort of selective removal of (as opposed to suppression of) memory on a neurological level (although I’d have to rewatch Sons of Mogh to see how exactly Bashir describes what he does to Kurn). On the other hand, if you’re a nanoswarm doing a full remodel of someone’s brain on a molecular scale you might have more options.
@18 – I find the Queen’s plan an unconvincing retcon.
The Borg knew Voyager were around somewhere, because they found and destroyed their probe, but couldn’t know exactly which Borg vessel/outpost they would first encounter.
We saw 15 Borg cubes not far from where Seven was based their arses handed to them on a plate not long before they enountered Seven’s cube.
The vessel the Queen’s chosen human “mole” is on just happens to be near where Voyager makes contact with the Borg, and just happens not to get destroyed by Species 8472? It’s not as if she could have kept a human drone ready and waiting on every Cube in the Collective just in case; there just haven’t been that many humans assimilated, and most that were assimilated (Wolf 359) are either randomly in Riley’s collective or at the very least wouldn’t have been Borg long enough to resist humanification the way Seven did at the outset. She’s the Borg Queen, not Batman.
Seven’s childhood assimilation simply makes no sense and, even if you handwave that, her presence just where Voyager happens to be is too much of a coincidence in a universe without a sentient TARDIS taking people to just the right place at just the right time. And if the Doctor’s TARDIS did exist in the ST universe, I’m pretty confident she wouldn’t have been on the Borg’s side (what with the Borg being really a really quite blatant mix of Daleks and Cybermen).
@21: Well yeah, but think of it as someone who’s been groomed and brainwashed to the point that they want to stay with their abuser as happens in many cults and domestic situations where one partner clearly beaten by the other whether physically or psychologically or both, protests and actually demands to stay with their abuser. So it actually reads as authentic that Ryan and/or Kolbe is choosing to play it as Stockholm Syndrome.
Regarding the EMH’s medical ethics protocols, I can see how these could be worked around. Pretty much all pharmaceuticals have the potential to be harmful / deadly if given in excess. Presumably the EMH’s ethical coding allows for that, he can have enough morphine (for example) in stock to treat numerous crew, despite the fact that, if someone wished to use it as a weapon, they could steal it and administer it all to one person in a fatal overdose. Likewise, the re-engineered nanoprobes are a treatment against the 8472 infection in Kim, so I can see the EMH’s code allowing him to produce it in bulk. If this stock of nanoprobes is then used by someone else as a weapon, that’s not the EMH’s responsibility.
So nobody has brought up “Suddenly Human” from TNG, which offers the most direct parallel (and contrast) to Seven’s storyline here. In that episode, Picard admitted that he committed a “crime” by trying to take Jono away from “the only home he has ever known.” Even though aspects of the Talarian culture clearly did not jibe with the Federation’s secular humanism, Picard acknowledged Jono had the right of self-determination, even as a teenager.
What we see in “Scorpion” is Janeway following the older-style Kirk model of Federation cultural imperialism and biological determinism. By default, human culture is superior to Borg culture in Janway’s eyes, and nobody who is biologically human could rationally decide otherwise.
Now, if we want to get into a legal discussion of Janeway’s actions, here’s how the present-day U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice defines kidnapping:
So if we assume that Starfleet has a similar regulation, I think the critical question is whether Janeway acted “wrongfully,” as all of the other elements of kidnapping are clearly satisfied.
@27 Well, right, but the problem with trying to get people away from those situations in real life is that you can’t just kidnap them and force them to stay away from their cult/ abuser/ brainwasher against their will, because despite everything, they are sentient human adults who are allowed to make choices for themselves, even if they are the wrong ones. I’m sure every person who ever had a loved one join a cult would love to just be able to kidnap them and keep them locked in a cell, a million miles away from their cult until they saw the error of their ways. But they can’t unless they find a way to get that person declared mentally incompetent. And attempts to force someone to “de program” rarely work, which is why I have such an issue with it here, where it is barely discussed. People who are able to de-brainwash do so because they *want* to do so- not because someone throws them in a cell and forcibly strips away part of what- from their perspective- makes them what they are.
Seven is basically being traumatized for a second time, but because we know the Borg are evil we are just supposed to accept that it is a good thing. And she isn’t just being cut off from the collective- she is having her physical body altered against her will. I find that hugely problematic- but as with so many things in Trek, it is reduced to “the good guys are doing it, so therefore it is good” without considering anything else. What the Borg did to her is wrong, but I’m not entirely sure that what the crew is doing is right, and there is basically no discussion of that. Perhaps because it is coming in an episode where Janeway has already proven that what she thinks is right is often the worst possible thing to do- but I feel like Seven deserves more than “we stripped her down, de-connected her from the Borg, and she is ours now.”
@29
Except Talarian culture was an actual culture with a family structure and shared love and honor between its members; it was not a collective of slaves.
It’s not imperialist to liberate someone from forced servitude.
@29: I don’t think you can compare the Talarians with the Borg. Jono with the Talarians has free will and the independence to do what he wants. He is still essentially himself and has an identity. Not the case with the Borg where a drone is essentially locked into a hive mind being told what to do by others or one overriding voice, a fate worse than death.
@29, 30 – Seven was KIDNAPPED AND ENSLAVED as a child. She was not born into Borg “culture” (they don’t have one) nor did she willingly agree to become Borg. She literally HAD HER AGENCY taken away and turned into a mindless slave. What the heck are we debating here?
@30: American legal rules about declaring someone mentally incompetent to make decisions for their own welfare don’t apply here: the Federation is in a perpetual state of war with the Borg with no codified rules of conduct. Janeway is essentially reclaiming a Federation citizen from an enemy combatant.
I suppose every Federation citizen from the time they are mentally competent should prepare some type of legal document that states “In the event I am captured and assimilated by the Borg, it is alright to liberate me and restore me to my pre-collective state.” There, no more moral ambiguity.
34. garreth – the Federation is in a perpetual state of war with the Borg with no codified rules of conduct.
Except Janeway just allied with them, making a mutually agreeable treaty.
@30
Seven’s second painful transformation isn’t the fault of Janeway, though. She’s simply undoing the work of the Borg. Because what happened to her is still the fault of the Borg.
To use the example of someone kept as a slave in a basement again, I’m sure that sudden liberation is also painful in its way. But it’s not the fault of the police, social workers, doctors, and therapists who help that person recover. It’s the abuser.
@35/kkozoriz: A treaty which as we as all saw, the Borg rather promptly voided, not unexpectedly, after getting what they wanted. Time to free Annika!
@29/smoliva: “So nobody has brought up “Suddenly Human” from TNG, which offers the most direct parallel (and contrast) to Seven’s storyline here.”
I don’t agree that it’s a parallel. It is a mistake to treat the Borg as a culture and its drones as individuals following a belief system. The Borg Collective is a single individual with a single mind. Essentially the entire thing is one person. The drones that make it up are its cells. When they’re in the hive mind, they have no thoughts of their own, any more than your individual neurons do. The only entity thinking and deciding is the Collective.
Yes, after Seven was liberated, she thought of herself as a Borg, but she had not had a self while she was with them (except in Unimatrix Zero, but we won’t find that out for three more years — and that self was an entirely separate personality). She was thinking independently for the first time in two decades and trying to construct a sense of self, and she drew on what she knew, which was the knowledge and thinking of the Collective. But that was after the fact. While she was a drone, she was not a “she.” She was just a cog in the machine. It’s not even remotely analogous to Jono, since he retained his individual mind and personality the whole time, and learned to think of himself as a Talarian. He was adopted and cared for by a loving parent. He was not plugged into a mainframe as an extra RAM chip.
Just by the way, the fact that we’re having this argument in the comments vindicates my original statement in the rewatch article, which is that this isn’t a cut-and-dried situation and was worthy of discussion among the characters in the episode instead of being a fait accompli in the story.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I don’t get why it’s even a debate. As others have pointed out, the Borg are not a culture and there is no love there. Annika/Seven and all of the other drones are enslaved. They should be freed or mercy killed (Picard did as such for a crewman in Star Trek: First Contact).
@7: They do address the distance thing in the story. Seven’s parents’ ship travelled a long way out of Federation space before encountering the Borg ship, then hid behind it and were able to followed it into a transwarp conduit leading all the way back to Borg space. It’s still a stretch, but not as bad as it first appears, or later on (when a transwarp conduit leads all the way into the Solar system to Earth’s very doorstep and the Borg have never used it before because reasons).
@39- I’m flattered that you think that just because this comment section argues about something means it’s a worthwhile point of contention.
41. Werthead – Meaning that humanity were the first to trespass into Borg space and not the other way around. Since the Hnasens didn’t have permission to be there and didn’t do so openly but rather by staying hidden as best they could, doesn’t that mean that the Borg did have the right to treat them as trespassers? The Hansens set out specifically to find Borg space. Well, they found it.
Now, this is not to excuse in any way, shape or form, the Borg assimilating cultures that are just minding their own business. However, if you go looking for a nest of snakes, do you really have the right to complain when one of them bites you?
@43 We also found out that the Hansens used to kidnap Borg drones so they could study them and then return them, in addition to sneaking onto their ships.
@42 I fail to understand why this *wouldn’t* be worthy of discussion. One of the whole points of SF is that it gives us the ability to think about humanity specifically by thinking about what might exist outside of it. The Borg are about as outside of normal human norms as you can get, which is part of what makes them so interesting and worthy of discussion.
@43
So… what, if the Hansens hadn’t gone off and “trespassed” the Borg wouldn’t have found interest in humans? They wouldn’t have tried to conquer Earth?
Sooner or later they were going to encounter humans and they were going to try to conquer them. It’s what they do. They’re not carrying out an elaborate neighborhood watch program because a couple of mooks broke into one of their cubes.
Several things have been posited as catalysts for the Borg’s interest in humanity. In real-world chronological order — and reverse in-story chronological order — they include Q dropping the Enterprise-D in Borg territory; the Hansens’ investigations of the Borg; and the time-traveling Borg from First Contact being revived in ENT: “Regeneration” and sending a signal that would take a couple of centuries to reach the Delta Quadrant. Presumably it was the cumulative effect of all of those that made the Collective finally decide to move us up on their list of species to investigate. (Given what a huge swath of the galaxy they occupy, there must be thousands of adjacent civilizations they’re fighting or absorbing at any given time, so a distant power like the UFP couldn’t be very high on their list of priorities.)
My problem with the way the Borg were used in the 24th century Trekverse was that assimilation was a massive retcon.
Picard/Locutus was the first human we saw assimilated. In Scorpion we find out Annika/Seven was assimilated 18 years ago.
In Generations, Guinan and the other El Aurians were fleeing from the Borg. But in Q Who, Guinan never said that the Borg assimilated organic life, only technology. (Not that they didn’t, she just never said so.) Q said that the Borg were only interested in technology and had identified the Enterprise as something they could use. The Borg cube in Q Who never even tried to assimilate people when they could have done so easily and quickly. The implication was they had never even seen a human before and Q forced their meeting to happen long before it should have.
But after the Borg assimilated Annika they should have known about humans.
This retcon was made even worse by the use of the Borg in First Contact and Enterprise.
(I had spent some time typing this comment while Chris was posting his.)
@47/richf: Yes, it was a retcon, but it was a necessary retcon. The idea of the Borg as a completely impersonal force of nature with no interest in people was effective for a single story, but stories need to be about people, so in order to get more use out of the Borg, they had to find ways to make it more personal, such as having them take an interest in individuals or focusing on drones discovering/reclaiming their individuality.
Basically they started with cosmic horror — the Borg are scary because they’re too vast to notice you as they trample you underfoot — but ended up modulating into zombie-movie horror — the Borg are scary because they’re coming to get you.
@48 I didn’t mind the Borg changing priorities from technology to adding biological distinctiveness to theirs. And I agree it was a necessary change for them to make them a personal danger, not just a technological one.
My problem was story writers going back in time and stating that they had already been doing this to humans long before they allegedly met humans for the first time.
@44- Ah, don’t mind me. Just a spot of the ol’ self deprecation. In terms of the actual discussion, it’s worth noting that what Janeway knows about ex-Borg (assuming that if she wasn’t already familiar, she’d have read up on the Enterprise’s reports once it was clear they were in Borg space).
Picard recovered from a rather shorter stint as an assimilee and continued a prominent career in Starfleet.
Hugh never manifested an underlying identity (he may have been home grown, or assimilated at too young an age to retain any real memories, or just more thoroughly reprocessed than Seven) but developed an individual personality and may by this point have been on his way to gaining Federation citizenship. Hugh did at one point choose reassimilation, but under extreme circumstances, and to protect others.
Hugh’s cube mates did not adjust well to being separated from the collective, allowing them to be coopted by Lore, but Hugh’s faction ultimately won in a power struggle- I don’t think we ever particularly learn in the show what became of them, although presumably they make up a hefty chunk of the ex-borg we hear about and occasionally see in Picard.
The ex-borg from Unity displayed no desire to rejoin the greater collective, but intentionally created a mini-collective.
All in all, a bit of a mixed bag, but there’s two points I want to take away from this. First, Janeway has some reason to believe that rehabilitation of a severed Borg is possible, (although it’s not clear whether she has good reason to believe that that rehabilitated Borg will be in any true sense Annika). Second, Hugh’s story suggests that rejoining the Collective may be impossible for a freed Borg- IE, even if some hypothetical future Seven were to decide of her own free will to seek re-assimilation, Janeway may already have irreversibly made that decision for her.
45. Marty – Q was the one that started the current Borg contact with the UFP. The Hansens were just a couple of folks sticking their noses in where they didn’t belong and putting themselves and their child in danger.
48. ChristopherLBennett – And the more personal the powers that be made the Borg, the less interesting they became. They were set up as this big, unstoppable force and they just became more and more inept each time they appeared. De-assimilation became something that happened often and was fairly easy to do. The Borg Queen turned them from a faceless foe that couldn’t be negotiated with into someone that was looking for a date with Data.
You can still make the story about people. You can have stories where the force that your characters are struggling against is nature (fire, earthquake, pandemic, etc.), You can even include assimilation. After all, the Borg need replacement drones. But making it easy to reverse assimilation reduces the level of an annoyance. “Pop into sickbay and we’ll have you back to normal in a jiffy”.
It would have been more interesting to see how the Federation would deal with a foe who has no interest in negotiation? All the ambassadors you’ve got wouldn’t make a dent. Add to that the ability to adapt to your weapons as well as technology that you haven’t encountered yet and Starfleet would have had a rather steep learning curve. Instead we got an adversary not really all that different from what we’ve seen. There’s people we can talk to, Janeway even makes an agreement with them in this episode. In First Contact, Picard basically takes out a cube on his own, just needing the ships to follow his lead.
I agree with the others who said that taking Seven was a liberation and not a kidnapping, because she was (the equivalent of) brainwashed and the choice to stay with the Borg was not really a rational decision on her part.
I think they decided to make her human so that her strange behavior will be even more striking. In-story, my theory was that the Borg selected a human drone to communicate with the Voyager team on purpose, probably feeling it will be most efficient (this was before I saw the episode where the Borg queen said it was a part of a long-term plan).
I wasn’t around to watch “Best of Both Worlds”, but I was so glad to have seen this in first run.
I waited eagerly for three months for the conclusion to this two-parter and I was not disappointed. This felt like a soft reboot, much as DS9′s fourth-season opener was a soft reboot on that series (of course, when that show added a main character, they didn’t get rid of another. Sigh.). Compelling story with that same sense of foreboding from Part 1, and the visual effects were superb, (the battle in Fluidic Space was brief, but epic), more stand-out scoring from Jay Chattaway, and we even got a great new character. The producers were lucky Jeri Ryan is an great actress.
But once again, the good shit is the kerfuffle between Janeway and Chakotay; like you said, krad, you really could argue both sides and be right. The best part truly is that captain and first officer finally realizing they need to work together.
I only found out about Jeri Ryan joining the main cast, and Jennifer Lien departing, when I saw the changed opening credits sequence when this aired in September 1997. It’s interesting to see Kes and Seven of Nine together in shots in this episode; I have to wonder how Jennifer Lien was feeling as she filmed these two episodes.
The next era of Voyager is a go on this rewatch.
krad –
You said, “Janeway kidnaps Seven against her will, removing her from the only home she’s ever known without her consent,” and described that as the episode’s flaw. But it seems to have flowed logically from the story.
Janeway allied with the Borg, which led to a Borg group beaming aboard Voyager. They worked together until the Borg became a threat, at which point Voyager’s officers used force (spacing the Borg, cutting Seven off from the collective) to defeat the threat.
In fact, they seem to have used just enough force to defeat the Borg without undue violence (they didn’t kill them all, when they could have).
But that mercy left them, at the end, with a cut-off drone. What to do? They can’t return her – that would expose Voyager to further threats of assimilation, which they had only just escaped. They couldn’t maroon her – that would be immoral, tantamount to a death sentence. They couldn’t just kill her – again, immoral, she had not acted with malice or evil, only the Borg nature, which was now contained.
So, if they had to keep her, they can’t just lock her in brig. She’s a sentient being, starting to become an individual again.
Taking her in, and teaching her how to be human, was the only moral option open to them. Later, when they found the ‘Borg children,’ they did everything the could to return them to their planets of origin; they did the same for Seven, here. That Jeri Ryan turned out to be a good actress who created a memorable character, with a compelling development, was icing on the cake.
@49/richf: “My problem was story writers going back in time and stating that they had already been doing this to humans long before they allegedly met humans for the first time.”
They never actually said that, though. You choose to interpret “Q Who” as evidence that they were encountering humans for the first time, but that was never stated. And your reasoning doesn’t make sense. You said:
You’re forgetting that the Borg in “Q Who” did take a core sample right out of the ship’s hull, including 18 members of its crew. You’re mistaking their lack of interest for the few individuals that beamed aboard their cube for a lack of interest in the species, because you’re forgetting that the Borg think in terms of the aggregate, not the individual. If a scientist takes a tissue sample from a specimen, the scientist doesn’t care if a few stray skin or blood cells get overlooked.
Besides, your logic here is exactly backward. They’re not interested in a species because they haven’t met it before? No. It would be the other way around. Of course they’d be interested in finding out about a new species. Or one that they’d only had a single brief encounter with in the past, because you can’t learn everything from a single small sample.
@54/Michael: You make a good point. If we accept, for the moment, the flawed premise that Borg drones are citizens of an enemy nation, then Seven is not a kidnap victim, she’s a prisoner of war. Taking prisoners in battle is not considered kidnapping, but legitimate self-defense, and certainly more ethical than killing them (as long as they’re well-treated in captivity). And what would happen if you found out that your POW was a citizen of your own nation who’d been kidnapped and brainwashed to serve the enemy? I think that would invalidate the enemy state’s claim on her. Legally, I think, your obligation would be to protect her as one of your own people, and turning her back over to her abusers would violate that obligation.
Perhaps someone mentioned this in the last discussion thread, but it occurs to me that it’s interesting that the anti-8472 weapon, the modified nanoprobes, are created not by any of the human (or Vulcan, Talaxian, or Ocampa) crew, but by the EMH, a hologram who has grown far beyond his initial capabilities- and, having failed rather spectacularly to incorporate aspects of others’ personalities into his own- has done so in exactly the way that the Borg seem unable to.
@53: I’ve often wondered myself how it was for Lien to do scenes with Ryan while they were both there. I would imagine it would be awkward. I don’t think they shared any scenes in “The Gift.” But in “Fury” where Kes returns, Seven has literally one line of dialogue with Kes, her catchphrase, “state your intentions.”
I lament that they could/would not keep Jennifer Lien. I feel like Kes’ compassionate serenity would contrast and compliment Seven’s brusque acidic efficiency beautifully. Unlike Janeway her Mom, Torres the angry girl at school, and the EMH who vacillated between her adoptive uncle and the guy who was in love with his own work; Kes would’ve been a loving big sister who in my view due to her unrelenting niceness would’ve been the only person Seven would’ve been naturally nice to…except of course her delightful little sister Naomi Wildman.
One of the best two parter finales in the franchise and Janeway and Chakotay’s well coordinated counterattack to the Borg’s sudden but inevitable betrayal was a thing of beauty.
As to whether or not this was a kidnapping…no. It’s not a kidnapping. However it is easy to see how it is one from Seven’s perspective. Like any well functioning cult, the Collective has supplanted all of the facets and positions of family in Seven’s life. Her entire self identity is based around it. It grants her certainty and security. Removing her from it certainly would seem for her to be a kidnapping. It’s complete too, as Seven is fully aware of the details and circumstances of the events of her assimilation, she simply finds them all irrelevant. She became a true believer. The best part of Seven as a character going forward that as much as the Borg don’t have an actual culture, Seven’s growth into an individual actually inflects the appearance of culture onto the Collective. Seven is extremely distinct in how she approaches every aspect of her life. Uniquely spartan and regimented. There’s little wonder that she gets along best with Tuvok.
On the subject of Seven’s body being modified, that was NOT a purely aesthetic decision. Once she was separated from the collective most of the mechanisms that suppress her natural functions went offline and her normal physiology began to reassert itself. Thus they had to physically de-assimilate her to keep her body from going into conflict with itself. After that decision is made, choosing a visual style that was in line with what her original human appearance would have been was natural. I’m not sure it was necessary to keep her in the skin tight dermoplast suit for the entire three years she was there, but that was the call that was made.
@23/ CuttlefishBenjamin
“Well, clearly given the onscreen evidence it is how the Borg work, but I’m not entirely sure it’s how I’d expect them to. I’d think that once young Annika’s experiences and memories had been harvested and cataloged within the greater collective, the ‘local’ copies would be overwritten, or actively excised as parts of her neural tissue were replaced, surgically or by nanoprobe conversion, with Borg hardware. It seems odd that, given the Borg’s mantra on assimilation, they’d store everything that made Annika Annika in Seven of Nine.“
While I doubt that the Borg would care about personality, I’m not certain that they are interested in deleting information. The Collective is completely serious when they say they’ll add your distinctiveness, including psychological distinctiveness. Imagine if they assimilated Grand Admiral Thrawn. Deleting his mental profile would make the assimilation a waste of time.
@59/Mr. D – Just a little nit, Seven was on the show for four years, not three.
I was going to say at first that Kes would have been more like a little sister to Seven because the former actress is actually younger than the latter actress, but an Ocampan ages much faster than a human so in effect Kes would be like an older sister.
@60
Silly me not actually counting season 4.
Yeah, Kes for only being four going on five years old had much more experience as an individual and a person than Seven. She also has the experience of being picked up and whisked away from her environment to head off with Voyager, but from a completely different perspective.
@59- the purely aesthetic decision I was referring to was the doctor deciding to stimulate her hair growth, seemingly for no other reason than that she is a woman and women should have long hair, I guess. And even the EMH says that her suit was made to be a balance of function and aesthetics- because if you get Jeri Ryan on your show the producers think it would be a waste not to have her in a skin-tight suit. I have no problem with them removing the implants that are harming her medically, but that obviously isn’t all of them, since she retains some of them even through ST:PIC- and since the Voyager crew already started making aesthetic decisions for her, it makes me curious how many of the removals *were* medically necessary, and how many were taking a Borg drone’s toys away from her.
@59- Ah, but in my scenario, the Thrawn of it all isn’t deleted- it’s copied, probably several times over, onto whatever storage media the Borg use (one assumes they must have options that grant greater data density than the average humanoid gray matter, or the whole Borg project starts looking silly). It’s only the originals, stored in Thawn’s own… Chiss(?) brain that would be deleted, overwritten, or scrambled, because the last thing you as the Borg want is for a disconnected drone to become an independent and vengeful Thrawn.
(No art? NO ART?! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORG!)
@62 Given that she kept her ability to inject nanoprobes, I doubt too many components were removed for non-medical reasons. If they were going to declaw her, her inject tubes would have been the first thing to go.
So…, Janeway sure did sell her soul (aka the nano-probes) pretty cheaply eh?
Not asking for transwarp drive at all from the Borg or even to just be deposited near the Alpha Quadrant.
What exactly were Voyager getting from the Borg Alliance in the first part of the episode? She even mentions that she wants to speed up work by staying on the Cube as they have equipment Voyager lacks…..why? Why give away her advantage even more quickly?
A trade is: I give you something—–you give me something.
Seriously why the hell didnt Janeway demand Transwarp Drive from the Borg for the nanoprobes? This is just stupid.
@63/Benjamin: “because the last thing you as the Borg want is for a disconnected drone to become an independent and vengeful Thrawn.”
That assumes that the Borg acknowledge individuals like we do. They’re not supposed to, though FC and VGR blurred that with the Queen. They’re supposed to think in terms of the aggregate. The relevant entity to them is an entire species, an entire civilization, not one of the inconsequential specks that make it up. If one of those specks manages to inflict some damage on a certain number of their drones, even a whole cube, that’s just a flesh wound to the Collective, a minor inconvenience to be overcome by throwing more drones and cubes at it until it’s overwhelmed.
True, we know that one effective leader like Janeway or Picard or Thrawn or whoever can mobilize a larger force, even a whole civilization, to make a difference against the Borg, but that’s not supposed to be the way they think. Granted, you could say they were aware of the importance of an individual leader when they made Locutus. But what they considered significant when they made Locutus was not Picard’s own leadership abilities, since they suppressed his personality completely. They only cared about how the other members of his community responded to him. They used his face and voice to express their will through him, because they expected his community to respond to his authority as they were conditioned to do. So it was still essentially about the psychology of the aggregate rather than the special gifts of an individual. Any leader would’ve served their purpose as well. And if a given one broke free of control and retaliated in some petty way against a single cube, it’s still a trivial setback and they’ll just try another tactic.
After all, what we have consistently been shown about the Borg is that they never anticipate future threats. They don’t take precautions or institute safeguards. That’s why the first attack always works. They just wait until a drone or a cube is destroyed, observe what destroyed it, and institute a defense after the fact. The Collective is so vast that nothing can hurt it as a whole, and thus any finite part of it is expendable. They’ll just replace it by assimilating or incubating more drones — no big deal.
@66/ChristopherLBennett
Similarly it’s the same reason the Jem’Hadar casually use kamikaze tactics. The Founders are able to mass produce soldiers at low to no relevant cost. The Borg don’t view numbers as a factor ever. As far as personnel resources go they treat them like a multitrillionaire could treat money. Superpower=”I’m Rich”. A single dollar stolen is irrelevant, a hundred thousand is notable but never distressing.
@65/Eoin
That’s not bad honestly, but I’d be suspect on receiving a transwarp drive from the Borg. That means you’re taking a piece of their technology into their ship that they could booby trap however they like. Admittedly they ended up with a drone on board and still ended up with a lot of Borg gear on there, but going into the deal I wouldn’t have gone for that myself. Safe passage is a pretty straightforward request. But that raises a larger question. Why couldn’t Seven just build a Transwarp drive for them? Mind you I haven’t seen all of Voyager even all these years later. So I’m along for this ride.
@69/wildfyrewarning
Well the Doc’s personality is based on Dr. Zimmerman whose preferences are pretty well established, it’s not like it was Data doing it. And I would imagine he would find growing hair to be a gratifying task. Removing all of her implants was never an option, while others would begin impeding her natural biological functions others she will forever require to live. That’s a plot point for a later episode. But from your Doylist perspective, absolutely.
@63/CuttlefishBenjamin
Ahh, but therein lies the problem. Thrawn is not something you can compress down to data. Even a book written by the Grand Admiral himself wouldn’t give you the ability to think and behave like the one who made Grand Admiral a title of reverence. There is will, intuition, insight and singularly unique perspective; that once he becomes a part of the collective would be erased and lost. The Borg adapt purely through trial and error, they forsake the capacity to imagine, to make logical leaps. Those things are fanciful and not concrete to them. It may be a failing of the collective mind. That so many minds operating in unison can only come to whole mental consensus based on only the most absolute and concrete of evidence. And yeah, the dead culture would drive him absolutely insane. He might break a cube or two like that Zhat Vash Romulan lady.
@66 Christopher- True, but we’ve also seen Borg become disconnected enough, by battle or accident, that you’d think in aggregate it’d be worth it to design them with that in mind as a possibility- not for any one drone, but for the aggregate loss of resources they represent over the long run. Granted I’m not sure what the ideal situation for that would be for the Borg- a relatively passive drone that will wait to be reconnected, or something with more independence that will actively seek rejoining the Collective. Presumably “Unity,” where they wind up forming a new collective, is the worst case scenario.
@67
If not Transwarp Drive why didnt she at least ask for say a Borg Ship to open a transwarp conduit for voyager to travel through while they worked on the nanoprobes. This drove me nuts when i first saw the episode. Yes it would end the series but getting Voyager home is now the premise. It should have least been addressed as to why Voyager doesnt ask for more from the Borg then they do. “Please dont assimilate us and in the meantime we will save you from extinction (Up front!)” is pretty lousy negotiating.
@67/Mr. D: “Thrawn is not something you can compress down to data. Even a book written by the Grand Admiral himself wouldn’t give you the ability to think and behave like the one who made Grand Admiral a title of reverence.”
On the other hand, there’s a concept called whole brain emulation. In theory, a computer could simulate a sentient brain completely — not just the knowledge it contains, but its processes, the way it thinks. You just need enough computing power to run the simulation, and the Borg have that in spades.
Besides, Trek has repeatedly shown that it is possible in-universe to digitally copy the consciousness and personality of a living being into a computer, from Richard Daystrom/the M-5 to Ira Graves to Danara Pel to [Picard spoiler].
“And yeah, the dead culture would drive him absolutely insane. He might break a cube or two like that Zhat Vash Romulan lady.”
Her “insanity” didn’t shut down the cube. Surely countless assimilation victims have been driven insane by the process, or by the devastation the Borg inflicted on their loved ones beforehand. It was the alien AI program she was carrying in her brain that did it.
@68/Benjamin: “True, but we’ve also seen Borg become disconnected enough, by battle or accident, that you’d think in aggregate it’d be worth it to design them with that in mind as a possibility- not for any one drone, but for the aggregate loss of resources they represent over the long run.”
Except it happens so rarely that even the aggregate loss would be inconsequential to them. See what Mr. D said about trillionaires. With that much money, you don’t bother to protect yourself against losses, because even a major loss isn’t going to cripple you. If anything, casually wasting money because you can is a fundamental part of the rich-person mentality.
@67 Yea, but the EMH is also a medical Doctor- who should both understand why you should not perform elective procedures on people without their consent (even if it is as seemingly minor as making her hair grow) and shouldn’t even be able to do it in the first place, because it should violate his ethical programing.
@67/Eoin
The original plan actually was to hand over the nanoprobes AFTER they were clear from Borg Space, Seven Darth Vader’d the arrangement by hijacking the Navigational Deflector and taking them to Fluidic space. As for why she didn’t ask for more. I don’t know. She was playing the whole thing by ear, no one’s ever successfully negotiated with the Borg before. I would imagine she didn’t want to push her luck beyond what was absolutely needed. Because the whole thing goes to hell if the Borg decide, nahh, we’d rather just assimilate you.
@70/ChristpherLBennett
I don’t doubt their capability to preserve and simulate such a mind, I doubt their willingness. I’m not saying they couldn’t I’m saying they wouldn’t.The worst part about assimilation has always been that they strip away the essence of an individual. They eradicate the person. But the thing about thought and style is that they are very personal things. By eradicating the personality, they eradicate what makes Thrawn a great strategist. As a massive entity that is a single mind, the Borg….and I suppose it’s simplest to say the Borg Queen, is an entity of great GREAT Ego. They add biological and technological distinctiveness, but not psychological distinctiveness. They assimilated Picard to be a spokesperson for the Borg in an attempt to employ diplomacy as a means of conquering the Federation, but he was a Borg with Picard’s voice, but not his manner, his mind, his spirit. Like Leatherface putting a guy’s face on to hit on his girlfriend the point is completely missed. The Borg don’t accept, “uh, no thank you we’d really prefer to not be assimilated, but you can have access to all of our databases and technical manuals if you’d like.” because they have such a supremacy of ego, such an extreme personal arrogance that they really believe that their method is the only way and any other way could be destroyed. Ego the Living Collective. If they assimilated Thrawn they wouldn’t use his strategies, though they may come to recognize his strategies if someone else uses them against the collective.
But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe the Queen would offer Thrawn the same deal that she tried to make with Picard and seeing the power the Collective could give him he would agree to be her “Borg King” and offer his intact mind in exchange for sparing his homeworld.
As for the Queen, I have always taken her statement at face value, “You assume disparity where there is none, I am the Collective.” A singular avatar of the sum totality of the Borg Consciousness, from the many, one. I think calling her Queen was stylistic, or perhaps a callback to the original insectoid bluegill concept of the Borg. Honestly as great as First Contact is and as lovely as Alice Krige’s performance I feel the character of the Borg Queen should be closer to Unicron than Delilah. Lots of horror story to go there, her voice emanating from different drones for different thoughts. Now if Picard had never seen or heard of her from his time as Locutus it would’ve made a lot more sense. The Collective failed with Locutus, but if the Collective had decided to do it themselves and created a Queen with the ability to speak for the Borg in a seductive enticing manner then her being a person instead of a dark entity makes sense.
I was partially joking about Rhamda, just rolling off of Narissa’s crack.
Something else I forgot to say, Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One. I think that highlights Seven’s special-ness because as far as I’m aware everything that has Unimatrix Zero One in the designation is directly tied to the functioning of the Borg Queen. I don’t know what an Adjunct’s function is in the collective, but that could either mean Third Backup Queen or Third Personal Assistant Drone. But from the introduction direct connection to the Queen seems implied.
I’m a little befuddled by this idea of stunningly wealthy people who don’t worry about preserving their wealth and/or crushing every last bit of use out of each and every last one of their employees/drones/assets.
@73/Benjamin: “don’t worry about preserving their wealth”
Not the point. They do care about preserving it; it’s just that their wealth is on such a gigantic scale that a loss that seems massive to us is too small to register with them. They can’t care about what they don’t even notice.
Part of the point of being super-rich is to show off how wasteful you can be, how much money you can throw away on needless indulgences, like buying a new yacht when the old one gets wet, or getting plumbing fixtures made of solid gold. It’s an obscene waste of money, but they don’t care, because it’s not waste on a scale significant enough to threaten their wealth. It’s within their budget to throw that much away. After all, they can make more money by crushing the little people even more, as you say.
Times and places chamber pots of gold have been considered an economy because noble metals are easier to keep clean. A wife of one of the robber barons said her private train could get by with one fewer servant because the chamber pots were gold.
“I’ll delete myself at the first sign of trouble. Well…maybe not the first sign.”
In a sense, the conflict between the Borg and Species 8472 that Voyager has found itself in the middle of is almost secondary to the conflict between Janeway and Chakotay, which carries through from the previous episode. Chakotay is on very thin ice here. Whether you agree with Janeway’s decision or not, she’s left him with a direct order which he chooses to “re-interpret”. There’s a case that Seven’s changed the terms of the agreement and released him from his orders to honour it, but he’s been against the alliance from the start and is looking for any excuse to break it. The possibility of the Borg ship coming to them, which would probably take a lot less time, isn’t even considered by either side.
Ultimately, neither Janeway or Chakotay is completely right or wrong. This isn’t just about Janeway’s doggedly insisting on keeping on course for the Alpha Quadrant, although that’s certainly a consideration: From the threats they make here, if Species 8472 overwhelm the Borg, then the rest of the Delta Quadrant, and maybe even the whole galaxy, could quickly be in their sights next and defeating them becomes a matter of survival. But Chakotay is right that the Borg can’t be trusted: Unlike the scorpion of the fable, they’re smart enough to protect Voyager when they still need their help, but as soon as that help’s over they turn on them. Fortunately, Janeway and Chakotay are enough of a collective to have anticipated that and planned for it.
It is of course also the introduction of Seven of Nine, but there’s precious little of the character we’ll know going forward on display here. She has at once too little and too much personality: She’s merely a mouthpiece for the Collective and yet she doesn’t display the unemotional behaviour you’d normally associate with the Borg, possibly because she’s been detached from them. With Species 8472 being a rather nebulous adversary, Seven basically serves as the antagonist of the episode.
As a result of that, firstly I’m not going “It’s okay because yay, Seven of Nine” but secondly I think the issue of Janeway kidnapping Seven is an issue with the following episode, not this one, so I’ll discuss it when we get there. We’ve got no reason to sympathise with Seven in this episode except for a brief flash of a cute little girl running through a field and the fact she’s on the opening titles. Both Janeway and Chakotay give her the opportunity to peacefully leave Voyager and return to the Collective. Instead, she chooses to take hostile action against Voyager both times. Severing her from the Collective is an act of self-defence against a Borg trying to assimilate them. The moral ambiguity comes with what to do with her afterwards. As I say, next episode.
On a similar note, I think the parallel between this episode and “Tuvix” is distant at best. I’d say there’s a difference between carrying out unconsenting and harmful surgery on an innocent and helping design a weapon to be used against a hostile force threatening the Doctor’s 140+ patients. (There’s also a bit of an ethical tap dance where the Doctor isn’t directly constructing a weapon, he’s coming up with a means to cure Kim of an alien infection which just happens to have military applications as well.)
There’s not much room for characterisation for the other regulars, but the Doctor is on fine form with his few lines, Paris (having said what everyone else was thinking about the alliance in the previous episode’s briefing room scene) is brave enough to point out to Chakotay that the Borg are keeping their word, Torres gets to tease Kim, and Kes gets to show her panic acting for the last time as well as having a lovely moment of avoidance where she can’t even look at Tuvok when he asks how the visions are affecting her. Neelix gets one line of dialogue in the staff briefing.
From this season, all the cast except Janeway are merely listed by name rather than name and rank on the opening titles (a format previously used on the pilot): This does mean characters can be promoted or demoted mid-season without changing the credits, as we’ll see in just a few episodes. Jennifer Lien’s “Also Starring” billing for this episode and the next one basically puts her on a par with the regulars who aren’t Kate Mulgrew. I’ve heard it suggested that the reveal that the Borg first encountered 8472 when they invaded fluidic space contradicts the beginning of Part I (in which Borg ships are destroyed in normal space while threatening to assimilate), but it’s possible that teaser wasn’t actually their first encounter.
@76/cap-mjb: I don’t see any contradiction. The Federation has encountered multiple Borg ships that spouted the “You will be assimilated” spiel at them. It’s what they do in every encounter, not just their first encounter with a given species. It’s a preprogrammed message. It’s a robocall. So there’s no reason that has to be the actual first contact with 8472.
@77/CLB: If I recall correctly, the Borg didn’t do their typical spiel upon meeting the Enterprise for the first time in “Q Who?”
@78/GarretH: Which supports my point that it isn’t exclusive to first encounters.
@79/CLB: Okay, I thought your point was that the spiel can be given beyond the first encounter but it will still ALWAYS be used upon the first encounter which in the case of “Q, Who?” it was not.
@30/wildfyrewarning — thank you! I’m going to avoid going into grisly detail here, but I and my two siblings come from a household ran by an abusive mother. We were all under her thumb, and various decisions which – in the moment – I had thought were illogical, counterproductive to her stated aims, I have now come to understand they always served to increase the level of control she had over us. She was willing to act reasonable, act as if she could make compromises, but only up until it might threaten the leverage she had. If those two aspects were in conflict, her “sensibility” would go out of the window.
Which is to say, I couldn’t have been simply taken away from her, to fix things. It took years of work, by dedicated friends and partners, to even begin to get me to understand the life I was living was A) not normal, B) unethical and abusive.
For those first few years, I would immediately parrot one of her preprogrammed excuses/justifications for her behaviour whenever anybody challenged them to me. I couldn’t even consider moving out before then, because she “needed me”, and had on occasion causally threatened very bad things for my siblings were I to leave. (Which reminds me of the Borg Queen now, especially the way she acted in Unimatrix Zero. “I need you! You’re important! Anyway this rebel ship goes boom”) These wonderful and kind people had to slowly work at me for years, like an archaeologist carefully brushing dust away so as not to harm the artefact inside, before I even realised things were screwed up and I had to go.
It wasn’t until after I moved out that I had realised she didn’t really “need me” at all, she managed to do everything around the house she had me doing since as long as I can remember. My worries about her ending up trapped in inability to run her house were completely unjustified. (Somewhat like how disconnected Borg drones are shown to believe the Collective desperately needs them back, such as with the Borg Teens later on.)
It wasn’t until then that I had really begun to consider the deeper currents and threads of control running through what I had, until then, merely considered as a (long) string of otherwise disconnected incidents.
Until that point, even after I had decided I had to leave her clutches for my own health, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I had to begin to grow, away from her influence, to come out of my shell for the first time without fear of reprisal, before any of it had even begun to sink in.
If anyone had tried to take me away before then, I would’ve been the first to scream that my autonomy was being overridden – just as Seven does in the subsequent episode. I would’ve screamed that they were my family, and they all relied on me, and you can’t take me away from them. If anybody had tried to take me away and keep me away, until I had learned what I was really going through, it would absolutely have backfired. It would’ve driven me further into her web. It would’ve supercharged my loyalty to her.
Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of myself that I can see within Seven of Nine, especially as she goes on to develop. Even as she comes to reject the Borg Collective for what they did to her, many aspects of their attitude to life still permeate her priorities and methods. Even 8 years on from having moved out of that hellhole, I’ll still catch myself acting in a way that would appease my mother in anger, or finding myself acting in a way congruent with how she would have me do the chores, or the most innocuous detail in a conversation will bring me back to some hitherto buried traumatic memory.
Seven’s discussions throughout Voyager and now Picard, about how she’s not really sure she can ever fully “be human” again, how there’s always aspects of Borg that comes through now and then – they always hit home hard. The revelation in Picard, that she couldn’t just settle down on Earth or in Starfleet, that she was too haunted by her experiences and felt compelled to help others in bad situations… it was simultaneously difficult but it rang so true, too. I’ve never been able to stop thinking about my own upbringing, the ways it affects me still, and I’ve never been able to sit idly by and ignore when other people were going through similar ordeals.
The healing is never completely finished, and it feels likely that there are parts of me that can never be healed back to how they were. It’s doubtful if those parts still exist at all, waiting to be uncovered, but rather seem to have been violently destroyed in childhood. (Again, the parallels…)
On the one hand, it’s sad that the Federation can’t offer enough psychological help for Annika, that she still felt the need to run off and join the Rangers, but on the other… it felt like, finally, Trek was acknowledging the true roadbumps that lie on such a journey. We’ve had glimpses, such as in The Raven, or episodes that were about Seven wanting to leave Voyager, or with Picard with his brother in their vineyard. But when the episode’s focus wasn’t in that direction, such things didn’t come up, even though they permeate survivors’ entire lives. And I felt, throughout the entire Picard run, that the writers finally understood that, and properly integrated it into the storytelling. Picard and Seven’s trauma are both front and centre, and they influence every last decision these characters make, at least in season 1.
Yet yours is basically the only comment that explicitly points out that Seven is going through yet another trauma, here. Of course it’s morally correct to save her, in abstract, but my issue (and seemingly yours as well) is the way in which the show actually decided to portray it.
They could’ve kept her in the brig and talked with her, just like Hugh – just like my being slowly convinced my family was abusive. But instead, Janeway takes the most drastic option, with involuntary surgeries, giving her basically no time to adjust, and a whole heck of a lot of shouting. The subsequent episode is always really tough for me to watch.
Surely the Federation has far better knowledge about how to deprogramme someone than we do, and we already know that you have to start slow, just as my friends did in my history. It’s a miracle that Seven ends up as well-adjusted as she does after the slipshod method used to break her free of her conditioning. (Though, one could say her never fully de-identifying with the Borg is a natural side effect of the sledgehammer approach that Janeway took). Even with no counsellors on board, there should be enough in their ship’s database (basically future Wikipedia), and the Doctor’s rudimentary psychological knowledge should have helped, too.
The most frustrating part about all this, is that navigating this difficult process, with various raw nerves to hit, various relapses, getting triggered and regressing from seemingly random nonsense… it’s all such a great well to draw from for drama, character interaction, and character growth. Yet the show basically delegates it to one episode, the next one, with a few minor incidents like The Raven triggering her later.
Her subsequent development is almost all about learning various social mores that the Borg failed to give her. Now, that’s an important part of recovery, and some of my biggest revelations about my mother came as a result of such basic-seeming social corrections. But the show very rarely, if ever, uses those faux-pas situations as a springboard for the deeper struggles. It just feels like yet more Spock/Data-style writing tics most of the time, honestly.
Obviously, we do see Seven develop over the subsequent seasons, but most of the hard-hitting stuff is left to be simply implied, to have happened off-screen. What is actually shown is just her becoming more comfortable with humans in general. Later episodes that hinge on her history, like that great one where she manifests personalities from all of the drones on a ship, stem from technobabble reasons, again much like when Data gets hacked. There’s no discussion of how these events influence her trauma, of how they might set back her own perception of her road to recovery, or any of that. At least, to my recollection.
I suppose that’s all rather in-keeping with the lack of drama from the Maquis, too. Voyager has such numerous wells to draw on, for growth and conflict, and basically infinite ways to combine them with each other to drive new stories. But we basically only get Neelix being annoying to Tuvok, and space wedgies of the week? That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it still rings true for me. There’s episodes where the conflict is drawn on a little, like the very first episode after the Pilot with Chakotay’s tension with Janeway, or indeed their more direct conflict here in Scorpion. But there was more than enough material to create all 7 seasons from! And Seven’s personal, complicated trauma, was just another casualty I suppose.
I’m very glad that she’s going to continue to be in Picard, because as already mentioned, I do see myself in her. Not just in the abuse survivor sense, as talked about in this comment, but also as an autistic woman (such as with her straightforward and direct complaints/assessments, or rapport with Tuvok), and as a trans woman (her having to deal with a physiological transition period, and having various medical complications thenceforth, and needing surgeries therein – although I personally haven’t needed surgeries, my hormones have had to be adjusted multiple times following blood tests).
Whoof, this got long! I had told myself I’d keep it below 6k characters….. :) thanks for reading, if you have. And I suppose I ought to check to see if I’ve had any replies on other threads here, come to think of it…. I have been commenting for a few months now.
@77/CLB: Yes. Same here.
@72/Mr D — at first I was going to add this to my other comment but it got too unwieldy just by itself, lol.
I like your theory, about Unimatrix 01. It kinda dovetails with CLB’s suggestion that she was groomed to be a replacement Queen unit.
As we’ve seen in Picard, it seems each Cube (if not each ship) has a Queencell which the Queen can pop-out of in a new body any time she wishes. It would make sense for there to be more than one potential Queen mouthpiece to be kept on ships, in case one of them gets blown out into space or something. And we’ve seen the Queen has a certain level of vanity about her, she always picks relatively young women to inhabit, the Queen drones don’t have a bunch of stuff coming out of their eyes and ears.
It also makes sense to make use of those resources when they’re not being actively inhabited. Either as the Queen’s direct servants, moreso than every drone already is, if we’re assuming adjunct means something similar to adjutant. Or, at least, as drones that focus more on wider problem-solving, who are already more easily attuned to the role of mouthpiece.
TNG made it sound as if every single drone were interchangeable, capable of performing (or being part of the parallel-processing) any task. But Voyager made it apparent that there were specialisations within the drones. Such as when Seven says Vulcans make excellent mathematical computation drones due to certain parts of their brain being larger than most humanoids. This is obviously akin to how our CPUs have separate execution units internally, handling multiplication in a separate part of the core than addition, a separate part for matrix calculations, a separate part for vector maths, and so on.
So it would only follow that drones which had been groomed to be potential Queen bodies, might possess various characteristics in their brainmeats which other drones lacked. Which could go some way to handwaving Seven’s apparent extreme level of personality, as far as drones go. For the Queen’s personality to inhabit them, obviously their brain has to be capable of carrying more personality already. This could also go some way to handwaving why Hugh was fairly placid and absorbing of his new situation, while Seven resisted more strongly.
This is also somewhat supported by the later episode where it’s revealed she was cut-off before but coordinated the group staying together and rejoining. Everyone else in the group was completely willing to go along with memories of their lives resurfacing, while Seven actively resisted it, just as the Queen would resist her host body attempting to override her will.
It’s quite fascinating to imagine what sort of things the Queen might want from her more-direct servants, besides what we were shown in Unimatrix Zero where she just sort of blandly orders the drones around akin to a starship captain. Even Intendant Kira was able to order her servants around with fewer words, with a glance here, a gesture there. Assuming the Queen is usually hedonistic in the manner she showed with Data, there’s a whole lot of possibilities where an entire class of servants can be willed into doing anything.
And I don’t think it’s all that unreasonable to assume the Queen is, in fact, generally hedonistic. She is the Collective, after all, and they constantly have an unending hunger to consume and subsume others. It’s not unreasonable to map that compulsive hunger, which drives them to throw Cube after Cube at a planet or ship on the collective level, into a more basic hedonism and vanity on the personal level. She is the avatar of the entire Collective, and they desire to be perfect.
The Collective on the whole views that perfection in aggregate, putting implants whenever and wherever they’re needed into drones with no regard for symmetry or whether it reduces other functions that drone can perform (such as the unwieldy things they stick on drones’ arms). So long as the pool of all the drones has that balance, they don’t care about perfection being embodied in any individual drone.
But since the Queen is the embodiment of the entire Collective, she has to represent their values perfectly. And that’s why she has an unspoiled visage – she has ships and drones to be her sensors, she doesn’t need to wear them personally. She has all of the same drives, priorities, and desires as the wider collective – but being concentrated into her gestalt individuality would naturally alter the way they’re expressed. One woman can’t eat an entire planet the way the Collective can, but she can get horny with Data or Seven of Nine. She can be seductive, to upsell the Borg in a way the individualityless drones cannot. She can experience the unique thrill of crawling in someone’s brain and eating them out from the inside, to subjugate them not by force (for which she has an entire army at her beck and call) but by insidious psychology. We see this not only with Data and Seven, but with the way she talks to the child inside Unimatrix Zero, too – “assimilation makes us all friends”.
Breaking down someone psychologically, to get them to join somewhat-willingly instead of simply overriding their brain with nanoprobes – consistently it seems to be high on her list of priorities. It must give her some extra power that a regular assimilation cannot – or at least, gives her a thrill that regular assimilation cannot. And when you’re a creature defined by desire, a desire fuelled by trillions upon trillions of converted souls, you never stop being hungry for such conquests.
It’s not enough to simply overrun the galaxy like a swarm, although of course she desires that too. She must conquer and consume in absolutely every way she can, because filling out the dimensional possibilities therein is too alluring. Why else would they constantly assimilate others’ technology, when theirs is already clearly superior enough to overrun all of their victims? Why else do they feel the need to never stop? Certainly, if they ever overran the entire Milky Way, if they ever crushed absolutely every final trace of resistance, they would simply begin eating Andromeda.
Because simply fulfilling their urge through one possibility, one lone mechanism, is not a complete and total conquest of the possibilityspace. They must assimilate all technologies to ensure they’ve covered every base. They must assimilate drones as well as growing new ones, because to do otherwise would be to lean too hard on just one method.
When your entire driving desire is a complete and total occupation of all living beings, all ideas, all possibilities, all of space, even all alternate dimensions (as seen with their incursion into Fluidic Space)…. of course you want to do that in every single way possible, every single way available to you. To do otherwise would be a failure to colonise all ideas. To do otherwise would be admitting they lacked perfection – that there were certain things they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in service of their conquest.
Since their ultimate goal is primary above all else, of course the Queen exists. She is a mechanism by which the Borg can talk down certain enemies who are not responding positively to force. She is a mechanism for chipping away at their morale while simultaneously offering them glimmers of light – which, if followed, lead to assimilation just like a moth to a flame. It’s a completely logical way to put a fire blanket on various centres of resistance – and as much as they love their catchphrase, they are certainly aware that resistance does sometimes succeed. They would be incompetent if they didn’t have a multitude of methods at their disposal to reduce resistance as much as possible. By virtue of being in such a gestalt individual state, the Queen understands psychology in a way the wider collective sometimes struggles to grasp. This is, of course, extremely useful in a multitude of cases.
But such a being isn’t just another tool in the toolbox, she isn’t merely instrumental to the Collective’s goals. She is the Collective, and naturally, she takes pleasure in absorbing new individuals. Again, we see this in Unimatrix Zero. She evidently enjoys, even savours, the experience of assimilating others. She can feel their resistance slipping away, as she steps into their skin like a new pair of stockings – only perfectly unspoiled that very first time. She craves that sensation, just like people who perpetually start new relationships to experience the bright intense new-relationship burn before things slow down, becoming stable and sustainable. To her, assimilation is like a first date.
So is it any wonder that she’ll occasionally take a personal interest in some of her victims, to “play with her food”, so to speak. She knows she can just inject them with nanoprobes at any time, but it’s more pleasurable for her if she can seduce them into the Collective. Even if she can’t achieve a new conquest, she can indulge in some of the physical pleasures of her embodiment, or at least torment her captives and enjoy watching them squirm before she finally gets it over with – probably when a new victim shows up.
Going back to your suggestion that the adjuncts are personal servants, one can imagine her sending them all over the place when something isn’t considered important enough for her personal touch, or simply fulfilling her deep-seated hunger with them in other ways when the Collective is running smoothly.. It’s understandable to keep them in a special pod when they’re not needed, to protect them (her vanity, her mouthpieces) and to keep them segregated from the rest of the ship. Close by to the Queencell for when she needs them, but still able to access the rest of the ship when needed too. Also ensuring they don’t dock in a regular alcove, where they’re all used as raw processing power, but in their special pod, where she can access them whenever she needs without impacting the functionality of the rest. (Just like modern node-based computing, removing one node doesn’t disrupt tasks, but it does slightly slow them down.)
It makes some sense to have “representatives” of the Queen on each and every ship, at least if we accept that such representatives exist at all. Even though she can appear on any ship at a whim, and can also reach into every drone’s mind, it’s organisationally useful to have such a tier as well. There are going to be times where you just need to send a specific general purpose drone to do a task, one which not every drone could handle by itself (since we’ve seen they specialise to some extent). It’s not something she wants to give her full attention, it’s just an annoying little thing, but one which requires one drone to handle it instead of an entire ship. There’s got to be millions such scenarios happening at any one time across the Collective, even if they don’t all look like a Starfleet Captain showing up with an unusual proposition.
Oh boy, this one got long too :D hopefully someone finds it somewhat interesting, at least. My two cents on the psychology of the Borg, and therefore, of the Queen.
In terms of this rewatch, given how many comments this episode already has in four days, I think it’s safe to say that adding Seven and the Borg to Voyager was ultimately the right call. It seems destined to generate more engagement than most episodes from prior seasons.
“Janeway kidnaps Seven against her will, removing her from the only home she’s ever known without her consent.”
I’m sorry, KRAD, there’s no delicate way of putting it: this statement is one of the dumbest things you’ve ever written, and that includes your Tiberium Wars novel. Seriously, have we become so spineless, so adverse to standing up for what’s right that the idea of liberating someone who’s been enslaved her whole life by an alien hive mind is yet another thing to be declared “problematic”? And how in the world could Seven consent to being freed in the first place, when she has no free will whatsoever as part of the Collective? Janeway taking Seven out of the Collective might not be what she wanted, but at the very least, now she has the self-determination required to make such a judgment in the first place. At the risk of coming across as an ethnocentric imperialist monster, I think that freeing slaves is a good thing, as is stymieing the efforts of one of the Federation’s greatest enemies.
“Just by the way, the fact that we’re having this argument in the comments vindicates my original statement in the rewatch article, which is that this isn’t a cut-and-dried situation and was worthy of discussion among the characters in the episode instead of being a fait accompli in the story.”
That’s… a take, certainly.
81. kaitlyn – Starfleet didn’t offer any counselling to Picard after his assimilation either. A few days shore leave, a fight with his brother, roll around in the mud and a glass of wine and then it’s back to work. Sure, you could bring up Troi but there’s no wat Picard should have been in the center seat for months. As we saw in First Contact, the collective was still in contact with Picard. Who knows what they overheard in his thoughts in all those years?
Devin Smith: wow, you actually read Tiberium Wars? Based on my royalty statements, that puts you in extremely rare company…….
—-Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is pretty sure he’s written much dumber things than either of the ones you cited
I always noted the similarities of Seven’s story to Peter David’s (excellent) Novel Vendetta so I find the information about them insisting on the disclaimer Intresting, I bet Peter David had something of a wry smile on his face when he saw this story play out, not to mention wondering whether to call his lawyer. Jeri Ryan is immediately impressive and we are going to come very shortly no doubt to seeing how the show nearly managers to screw that up in chasing the ratings.
chadefallstar: For what possible reason would Peter be calling his lawyer?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@90 a female Borge who gets disconnected from the collective.?.hmmm… even the teaser of part one bears some remarkable similarities to the start of the Novel…
@91/chadefallstar: Using a vaguely similar idea is not plagiarism. There are only so many ideas in the world, and different works unintentionally use similar ideas all the time, especially when they’re in the same genre or series. One of the most common experiences for people pitching to a television show is to be told “We’re already doing an idea like that.” It happens constantly. It happened to me when I wrote a TNG spec script (a similar idea aired 10 days after I mailed it in), and at least once every time I pitched to DS9 and VGR back in the day. Either they were already doing a similar idea, or they did a similar one later on, but I never thought it was theft because I knew I was probably not the first or only person to suggest such an idea.
Once “The Best of Both Worlds” introduced the idea of the Borg assimilating people, it was inevitable that later writers would do other stories about people being assimilated, and assuming lack of bias, there was a 50% chance that any such character would be female. So it’s not plagiarism, just parallel evolution — like the vast majority of cases where two stories are superficially similar.
@92 fair points but Peter David must have found it somewhat ironic that they made him add that disclaimer to Vendetta and then come up with two very similar ideas and put them both in the same two Parter.
@93/chadefallstar: I’m sure Peter had some choice thoughts about it, but that’s an entirely different subject from whether something is legally actionable.
Besides, writing Star Trek tie-ins is work-for-hire. We know going in that everything we write for them under contract is the studio’s property, not ours. If CBS (or Paramount at the time) wants to use characters and ideas from our Trek fiction in actual Trek episodes and movies, they have every legal right to do so, and we agreed to that when we signed up for it. After all, we’re basing our creations on their universe to begin with. It’s like being a subcontractor for someone else’s company. The work you do is on their behalf, so they own the results.
I sent in a comment for Scorpion, Pt II and so far… nothing. I’m guessing it was rejected if this second one appears. If so, I’ll have to do better next time.
@95 – There’s no pending comment on this post from you, so it’s possible something else went awry. Please feel free to repost your comment!
96: Thankyou but I’d need to write it out again first because the initial one wasn’t saved and it was a bit lengthy. And if it fails to go through a second time…
Am I the only one who thinks Janeway’s speech to Chakotay before going under was acted kind of badly? Normally Kate Mulgrew is excellent, right up there with Trek’s best actors. But in this scene, it just seemed that she was trying too hard to sound critically injured imo.
@98/Her voice did stand out to me in that dialogue but I interpreted it as being physically distressed yet emotionally determined when it came to the mission. I didn’t think it was bad acting.