The arrival of the Borg in Voyager was anticipated almost from Caretaker.
Read Part 1 here...
The Delta Quadrant was their home so the trip back to Earth would have to encounter them at some point.
For three years we waited, knowing that at some point the crew would encounter the Federation's greatest foe. What would it be like to actually get to the core of the Collective? Experience the essence of the Hive?
Once we'd pushed past the Kazon and the Vidiians it took until season three's Blood Fever to even get the suggestion of what could be heading their way. The final reveal of the Borg corpse hidden amongst the vegitation is truly chilling. I encourage fans to watch the episode back and pick up on all the references to the state of the planet on which they find the body as it screams "Borg Attack" in every line but I only really caught these on a second viewing. Why I didn't notice originally is probably down to the mediocre nature of the rest of the episode with that massive payoff almost tagged on.
Unity finally brought Voyager into the realms of the Borg with the splintered community but there was still a sense that the show was holding back. Somewhat akin to Descent, this was a group of Borg separated from the Collective with the twist here that they were, for the most part, benevolent and had begun to rebuild their lives to some extent. However one faction from their cube had chosen more hostile activities and the eventual reactivating of the collective consciousness looks to be the only way of creating a unified, benign society.
It sets up some really interesting points. We have our first derelict cube and the notion that even the Borg can, unusual as it might be, get it wrong. Chakotay experiences the power of the Collective, leading him to do their bidding and actively reconnect their mini-Collective. We have a first inkling of the draw that the connection has even if it is limited amongst former Borg. Unity exposes a chink in their armour and the possibility that something could actually cause problems for the Borg would grow stronger and into the third season cliffhanger, Scorpion.
One of my favourite Voyager episodes, leaves the group from Unity behind and gives us an enemy who can defeat them and it seems, fairly easily. Cubes are in bits within seconds and the danger that the Borg present is culled in the series' shortest ever pre-titles sequence.
Scorpion does question the Borg's supremacy in the galaxy and dislodges them from that unstoppable "top spot" if you will. Species 8472, while more powerful are individuals and their arrival, I feel, does lessen the impact of the Borg considerably even if it is there for dramatic purposes and to send a shiver down the spine of the Collective. They can be defeated. That said, Scorpion does give us our first look at the Collective en masse with fleets of ships rather than the single cube we've encountered in First Contact or during The Next Generation. Species 8472 are the very antithesis of the Borg even to the stage that their ships are organic and there's got to be some form of analogy to nature defeating technology in there somewhere. For the first time in Star Trek history, the Borg are here in numbers but still manage to get their wings clipped through their own arrogance.
The unnatural alliance between the Borg and Voyager suits both parties for a time yet there is still something that doesn't sit right. We know the Borg only hold the alliance together because they need the pathogen contained in the Doctor's holomatrix to stop 8472 infecting them but for a race which has all the answers and can adapt, they are unable to change their plans at this stage to combat Voyager's tactics.
Scorpion at least continues the visual look of the Borg from First Contact and provides gravity to the realisation that we are now entering Borg space and it's going to be the most challenging part of the journey home. Fifteen Borg cubes is jaw-dropping but would they really have missed the chance to add the Voyager crew to the Collective and increase the number of drones available? I understand that Species 8472's incursion in the "North West Passage" was their priority but wouldn't you think that they'd have added to their fleet?
It's a satisfying cliffhanger nonetheless with Voyager gripped in a Borg tractor beam - yes, saved by the Borg - to flee from a Species 8472 attack but the subsequent conclusion would alter franchise history.
The unveiling of Seven of Nine in the concluding part - and first episode of season four - would be a gamble for the show overall but it was a familiar move if you look back to The Best of Both Worlds.
Both stories relied on a second part where a human (now Borg) acted as a voice for the Collective. Seven and Locutus clearly fit the bill with both regaining their humanity - or being on the path to it by the end of the episode. Seven's addition to the crew unquestionably changes the dynamic of the show and adds the "observer" element that is a constant throughout the franchise and sorely missing in Voyager until this point.
Seven meant there was a constant Borg presence on the show right through to Endgame and in a way that softened the impact of the Borg episodes. Yes the ship was travelling through Borg space but their return did not become the big event that it once was. Ok, The Next Generation had used a Klingon as part of the crew from day one so surely this was a natural progression from there. Season four was, oddly for a show that had declared itself to be entering Borg space, devoid of specific Borg episodes with only Te Raven revealing more of Seven's origin story and Hope and Fear exploring the aftermath of the Borg through a story of vengeance.
Season four plays it safe with a lot of episodes focusing on utilising the Seven character yet the race from which she escaped is conspicuous by its absence. Even the first half of season five is Borg-free with the feature-length Dark Frontier marking their return to the screen in force.
It's a great backstory for Seven building on The Raven and an unusual episode in which we focus as much on the flashbacks to the Hansens' research as we do on the present and the crew versus the Borg Queen. However crow-barring in the Borg pre-Q Who raises its fair share of issues that are never addressed (see also Regeneration). According to that episode of The Next Generation Q had to introduce Picard to the Borg and there's not a single hint that humans have encountered them before. I know that is possible but Dark Frontier, for all its good points does mangle that issue somewhat within its narrative and then there's the whole piece around their look versus the original The Next Generation episode.
What it does manage to do is restore some of the Borg's darkness and malevolence that was missing from their semi-neutering in Scorpion. We have them back to their assimilating best but are foiled by the Voyager crew once again and by this point they've almost become the Daleks of the Star Trek world. Seemingly indestructible and unstoppable but then are destroyed and stopped in every encounter. If you were the Borg Queen you'd be holding a board meeting to discuss your future plans. Amazingly Janeway makes it look a lot easier than Picard ever did. Indeed he needed a fleet of the most advanced ships in the fleet to take one Cube down in First Contact. Does this make Janeway the greatest Starleet captain ever? Singlehandedly defeating the Borg's plans on multiple occasions? Lazy writing? Audience expectation? All of the above and more?
Season five does play both sides of the Borg coin if you will with Drone. Voyager's answer to I, Borg and The Abandoned, it provides the chance to humanise the Collective through the creation of One but actually has the Borg doing what they do best - relentlessly pursuing the ship to acquire the 29th Century tech merged into the drone.
One provides the human element here, showing that the Collective might "evolve" but as his own Hive mind, he understands the danger he poses to Voyager because of his unique nature and what it could mean to the Borg should he be fully assimilated. Where Drone does succeed is that this is not a contemporary of the Collective; an active part if you will - as we had with Hugh and the junior Jem'Hadar in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It doesn't work to undermine the current status quo and still manages to offer something new in the lore of the Borg.
One thing that Voyager does differently to how we have viewed encounters with the Collective in The Next Generation and even the Deep Space Nine pilot is that there were always consequences to meeting them. Voyager sidesteps this every time. Seven might have a slight crisis of consciousness and waiver towards rejoining the Collective but she always remains loyal to Janeway. The incident with One is never mentioned again as a second example. How the hell Seven isn't mentally traumatized by seeing her father as a drone I don't understand and this could have been a point to have continued over several future episodes, even bringing him back - but alas no, it's dropped by the end credits. Dark Frontier has Voyager poking the Collective with a big stick and the Borg, to a degree, rolling over and taking it.
Survival Instinct from season six would be the first distinct Borg single length episode since Unity with Seven reuniting with former members of her unit. Adding a further layer to the Seven character it illustrates how easily the Collective can either a) fall apart when something goes wrong or b) shed issues with lightning quick reactions. Maybe it actually does as much for them as I,Borg did during The Next Generation reinforcing the notion that the heart of the Borg is driven, focused and single-minded in its vision but the drone army are, as we would expect, unwilling slaves to the machine. However, Seven is resilient in her desire here to return to the Collective potentially demonstrating that the longer you are a part of it, the more it becomes familiar, addictive and, bizarrely, a family.
Maintaining our focus on the Collective and not on the personal journey of Seven, the Borg did get a rest for a while before resurfacing in another season event, this time the conclusion of year six; Unimatrix Zero.
To date I still firmly believe that this does the worst disservice to the Collective over any other Borg-primed instalment of Star Trek and I even class it below Descent, Part II. The concept of a place where Borg can be individuals again does not resonate well with me. A Borg resistance? Borg who have their own personalities back? I can't see how the deadliest foe in the galaxy would allow this to happen in the first place nor be able to shut it down almost instantaneously. But again we have the return of the Borg Queen and the Collective rolled out for a 90 minute story and another concept that is never spoken of again..EVER, This is Voyager's Force of Nature where a good idea in the writers' room doesn't translate to the screen. The Borg lose their mysticism and their internal strength by pushing the Collective towards an almost unbelievable civil war.
It does mean once more we can see the Borg drones as unwilling victims in the bigger scheme of things however did it need to happen? Did we need to see it and the biggest tragedy is the fake assimilation of Janeway, Tuvok and Torres which ends with no adverse effects for any of them and is forgotten about by the following episode.
It's not believable and the speed at which they are humanised again without a whiff of trauma is incredible. They might not have been fully augmented and included into the Collective but they must have experienced something that would have left a mental if not physical scar?
Fortunately the Borg are benched for the final season of Voyager meaning that their reappearance in the series finale, Endgame is welcome and they finally gain some teeth again. It's a battle to the last to see if the Borg will be eliminated or survive for another day. It's the ultimate fight with the greatest prize possible - the chance for Voyager to return home after seven years. For one final Voyager time the Borg are genuinely threatening, back to their best but yet completely outplayed by humanity with some neat future tech and the brilliance of the Janeways.
Returning Alice Krige to the role of the Borg Queen as Susanna Thompson was unavailable was a stroke of luck and helped tie the much-vaunted finale back into the larger canon (not that it needed to much but this felt like more of a connection to Picard and co).
The Borg just became too normal, expected and always there for a ratings turn as opposed to being the enemy that offered the very real possibility of defeat. If you look at the back end of Voyager, the major events of the show were all Borg related but the positive was that for once we did see a former Borg drone having to come to terms with and reconnect with her humanity after a lengthy time as part of the Collective. Seven of Nine was an inspired character in Voyager, giving that ability to see humanity from the outside inwards that Data and Odo had managed in previous incarnations of the franchise but somehow had been lacking from the marooned starship.
However, I might challenge that Seven was also a major damaging force in the nature of the Borg. They became stoppable, routine and an armada of Cubes or a trip to a transwarp hub didn't feel as special an event as Picard dispatching a subspace communication that they had engaged the Borg. The mythos was watered down, the threat minimal and even if we were told it was major you knew that there was nothing going to come of it. However, let's tackle Seven in our next piece.
They would be back in the prequel/sequel Regeneration in Enterprise as discussed in Part I but we would have to wait another 15 years to find out what occurred after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant...
To Be Concluded...
Find us on Tumblr
It sets up some really interesting points. We have our first derelict cube and the notion that even the Borg can, unusual as it might be, get it wrong. Chakotay experiences the power of the Collective, leading him to do their bidding and actively reconnect their mini-Collective. We have a first inkling of the draw that the connection has even if it is limited amongst former Borg. Unity exposes a chink in their armour and the possibility that something could actually cause problems for the Borg would grow stronger and into the third season cliffhanger, Scorpion.One of my favourite Voyager episodes, leaves the group from Unity behind and gives us an enemy who can defeat them and it seems, fairly easily. Cubes are in bits within seconds and the danger that the Borg present is culled in the series' shortest ever pre-titles sequence.
Scorpion does question the Borg's supremacy in the galaxy and dislodges them from that unstoppable "top spot" if you will. Species 8472, while more powerful are individuals and their arrival, I feel, does lessen the impact of the Borg considerably even if it is there for dramatic purposes and to send a shiver down the spine of the Collective. They can be defeated. That said, Scorpion does give us our first look at the Collective en masse with fleets of ships rather than the single cube we've encountered in First Contact or during The Next Generation. Species 8472 are the very antithesis of the Borg even to the stage that their ships are organic and there's got to be some form of analogy to nature defeating technology in there somewhere. For the first time in Star Trek history, the Borg are here in numbers but still manage to get their wings clipped through their own arrogance.The unnatural alliance between the Borg and Voyager suits both parties for a time yet there is still something that doesn't sit right. We know the Borg only hold the alliance together because they need the pathogen contained in the Doctor's holomatrix to stop 8472 infecting them but for a race which has all the answers and can adapt, they are unable to change their plans at this stage to combat Voyager's tactics.
It's a satisfying cliffhanger nonetheless with Voyager gripped in a Borg tractor beam - yes, saved by the Borg - to flee from a Species 8472 attack but the subsequent conclusion would alter franchise history.
The unveiling of Seven of Nine in the concluding part - and first episode of season four - would be a gamble for the show overall but it was a familiar move if you look back to The Best of Both Worlds.
Both stories relied on a second part where a human (now Borg) acted as a voice for the Collective. Seven and Locutus clearly fit the bill with both regaining their humanity - or being on the path to it by the end of the episode. Seven's addition to the crew unquestionably changes the dynamic of the show and adds the "observer" element that is a constant throughout the franchise and sorely missing in Voyager until this point.Seven meant there was a constant Borg presence on the show right through to Endgame and in a way that softened the impact of the Borg episodes. Yes the ship was travelling through Borg space but their return did not become the big event that it once was. Ok, The Next Generation had used a Klingon as part of the crew from day one so surely this was a natural progression from there. Season four was, oddly for a show that had declared itself to be entering Borg space, devoid of specific Borg episodes with only Te Raven revealing more of Seven's origin story and Hope and Fear exploring the aftermath of the Borg through a story of vengeance.
Season four plays it safe with a lot of episodes focusing on utilising the Seven character yet the race from which she escaped is conspicuous by its absence. Even the first half of season five is Borg-free with the feature-length Dark Frontier marking their return to the screen in force.
It's a great backstory for Seven building on The Raven and an unusual episode in which we focus as much on the flashbacks to the Hansens' research as we do on the present and the crew versus the Borg Queen. However crow-barring in the Borg pre-Q Who raises its fair share of issues that are never addressed (see also Regeneration). According to that episode of The Next Generation Q had to introduce Picard to the Borg and there's not a single hint that humans have encountered them before. I know that is possible but Dark Frontier, for all its good points does mangle that issue somewhat within its narrative and then there's the whole piece around their look versus the original The Next Generation episode.What it does manage to do is restore some of the Borg's darkness and malevolence that was missing from their semi-neutering in Scorpion. We have them back to their assimilating best but are foiled by the Voyager crew once again and by this point they've almost become the Daleks of the Star Trek world. Seemingly indestructible and unstoppable but then are destroyed and stopped in every encounter. If you were the Borg Queen you'd be holding a board meeting to discuss your future plans. Amazingly Janeway makes it look a lot easier than Picard ever did. Indeed he needed a fleet of the most advanced ships in the fleet to take one Cube down in First Contact. Does this make Janeway the greatest Starleet captain ever? Singlehandedly defeating the Borg's plans on multiple occasions? Lazy writing? Audience expectation? All of the above and more?
Season five does play both sides of the Borg coin if you will with Drone. Voyager's answer to I, Borg and The Abandoned, it provides the chance to humanise the Collective through the creation of One but actually has the Borg doing what they do best - relentlessly pursuing the ship to acquire the 29th Century tech merged into the drone.
One provides the human element here, showing that the Collective might "evolve" but as his own Hive mind, he understands the danger he poses to Voyager because of his unique nature and what it could mean to the Borg should he be fully assimilated. Where Drone does succeed is that this is not a contemporary of the Collective; an active part if you will - as we had with Hugh and the junior Jem'Hadar in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It doesn't work to undermine the current status quo and still manages to offer something new in the lore of the Borg.
Survival Instinct from season six would be the first distinct Borg single length episode since Unity with Seven reuniting with former members of her unit. Adding a further layer to the Seven character it illustrates how easily the Collective can either a) fall apart when something goes wrong or b) shed issues with lightning quick reactions. Maybe it actually does as much for them as I,Borg did during The Next Generation reinforcing the notion that the heart of the Borg is driven, focused and single-minded in its vision but the drone army are, as we would expect, unwilling slaves to the machine. However, Seven is resilient in her desire here to return to the Collective potentially demonstrating that the longer you are a part of it, the more it becomes familiar, addictive and, bizarrely, a family.Maintaining our focus on the Collective and not on the personal journey of Seven, the Borg did get a rest for a while before resurfacing in another season event, this time the conclusion of year six; Unimatrix Zero.
To date I still firmly believe that this does the worst disservice to the Collective over any other Borg-primed instalment of Star Trek and I even class it below Descent, Part II. The concept of a place where Borg can be individuals again does not resonate well with me. A Borg resistance? Borg who have their own personalities back? I can't see how the deadliest foe in the galaxy would allow this to happen in the first place nor be able to shut it down almost instantaneously. But again we have the return of the Borg Queen and the Collective rolled out for a 90 minute story and another concept that is never spoken of again..EVER, This is Voyager's Force of Nature where a good idea in the writers' room doesn't translate to the screen. The Borg lose their mysticism and their internal strength by pushing the Collective towards an almost unbelievable civil war.It does mean once more we can see the Borg drones as unwilling victims in the bigger scheme of things however did it need to happen? Did we need to see it and the biggest tragedy is the fake assimilation of Janeway, Tuvok and Torres which ends with no adverse effects for any of them and is forgotten about by the following episode.
It's not believable and the speed at which they are humanised again without a whiff of trauma is incredible. They might not have been fully augmented and included into the Collective but they must have experienced something that would have left a mental if not physical scar?Fortunately the Borg are benched for the final season of Voyager meaning that their reappearance in the series finale, Endgame is welcome and they finally gain some teeth again. It's a battle to the last to see if the Borg will be eliminated or survive for another day. It's the ultimate fight with the greatest prize possible - the chance for Voyager to return home after seven years. For one final Voyager time the Borg are genuinely threatening, back to their best but yet completely outplayed by humanity with some neat future tech and the brilliance of the Janeways.
Returning Alice Krige to the role of the Borg Queen as Susanna Thompson was unavailable was a stroke of luck and helped tie the much-vaunted finale back into the larger canon (not that it needed to much but this felt like more of a connection to Picard and co).
The Borg just became too normal, expected and always there for a ratings turn as opposed to being the enemy that offered the very real possibility of defeat. If you look at the back end of Voyager, the major events of the show were all Borg related but the positive was that for once we did see a former Borg drone having to come to terms with and reconnect with her humanity after a lengthy time as part of the Collective. Seven of Nine was an inspired character in Voyager, giving that ability to see humanity from the outside inwards that Data and Odo had managed in previous incarnations of the franchise but somehow had been lacking from the marooned starship.However, I might challenge that Seven was also a major damaging force in the nature of the Borg. They became stoppable, routine and an armada of Cubes or a trip to a transwarp hub didn't feel as special an event as Picard dispatching a subspace communication that they had engaged the Borg. The mythos was watered down, the threat minimal and even if we were told it was major you knew that there was nothing going to come of it. However, let's tackle Seven in our next piece.
They would be back in the prequel/sequel Regeneration in Enterprise as discussed in Part I but we would have to wait another 15 years to find out what occurred after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant...
To Be Concluded...
Enjoyed this article? Why not like and share to spread the word!
Like our page on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Find us on Tumblr
No comments:
Post a Comment