I actually really love the concept of the Borg in this episode; the idea of making a hivemind that isn't inherently oppressive and made up of ostrocized folks. Honestly, it only really loses me when they choose to removed Chakotay's agency at the end of the episode - feels like it was the writers not really understanding the concept they had here to instead go with their VILLIAN OF THE WEEK and BORG BAD typical structure. Honestly, this was the one idea from Star Trek Picard Season 2 that I really loved and wished they had continued with Borg Queen Jurati... but alas, Picard Season 3 seemed to have zero interest in that too in favor of more BORG BAD.
I took it to be an example that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I like the idea that this is an echo of how the Borg started out - a group of individuals who found a way to physically/psychically combine to help them overcome whatever challenges they were facing. And if they had more people in the link, they could do more good...
Hell, even the lack of a longer conflict pitting the heroes against a cube being run solely by dead borg was a giant missed opportunity. I always felt like that was an interesting and disturbing situation that should have been revisited in some form later -- it could've made for one hell of a Halloween episode.
It's not a bad way to have the Borg in a story without diminishing the threat of the main collective. ...In theory. The execution left something to be desired. But I think the idea was solid.
It's an interesting concept, but yeah, if it doesn't end up as a good story for an hour of television, who cares? That was my problem with the Borg Queen Jurati bit in Picard season 2, as well. The idea could potentially go somewhere interesting, but it wound up playing as "Oh, the Borg are going to be cooperative instead of authoritarian now. Isn't that nice?"
I'd personally amend it to the vast majority of Voyager rather than all. The show had some stellar one shot episodes like "Death Wish", "Living Witness" and "Pathfinder". (However those particular episodes have storylines where guest characters are the focus of the drama rather than the main characters, so there's that...) Also, stick with the seasons 1-2 (The Michael Piller years) rather than seasons 3-7 (the post-Piller years which are mainly...ugh.)
It's a sad fact that the five minute intro of DS9's "Emissary" with the Battle of Wolf 359 (with their single appearance in the series) gives the Borg more dramatic weight than any of their ENDLESS appearances in seasons 4-7 on Voyager. (Ditto for That Maquis on DS9...or TNG's "Preemptive Strike".)
It's a known issue - if you keep showing the Big Bad getting beaten, they suffer villain decay; hell, in TNG the Galaxy class flagship avoids conflict with borg ships even when reinforcements are available, because they are so damn dangerous - by the end of Voyager, they are actively seeking out Borg to fight and rob, with no backup. It massively reduces the viewer's perceived danger level of the Borg. And whilst Voyager did have the advantage of Seven's insider knowledge of the Borg, it still shouldn't have been anything like enough to neuter the Borg to the point of being a minor inconvience.
@@dm121984 Which was another missed opportunity on the part of Voyager. Given their stranded nature and lack of any kind of backup, the Voyager crew should have been ordering new brown pants and fleeing every time they got a sniff of the borg. The episode which revealed the borg before this one, B'Elanna gets Vulcan horny, should have seen the crew going into deep strategy meetings to plan what to do and jumping every time there's a sniff of borg presence.
A "Nemesis" style rug-pull where it turns out the other 'factions' are just desperate to stop the cooperative from turning the hive mind on again would have been fun!
I actually love this episode, it does a good job of showing the borg are still people under the machinery, and shows that they can be broken free of the collective. I think that concept really interesting, and I really like Seven's character and arc that we get a little taster of here.
I agree with Jesse. It was, for me, fascinating to see a version of the Borg for whom the link doesn't result in viral-minded drones hellbent on consuming everyone...
It could have been interesting if Voyager had decided that the Borg had been nearly wiped out in First Contact, and instead of constant run-ins with cubes they instead found nearly abandoned planets, or small groups of Borg now cut off and troubled. It could have been an interesting plot development, instead they just used the Borg as generic villains and wasted them.
That was actually the plan when this was written. This group was going to have been freed when Picard killed the Queen in that film, but decided to make it vaguer to keep their options open. They only fully changed their mind to have the Borg still at full strength when they were writing “Scorpion”.
You know, Ensign Isn't Going To Make it reminds me of another missed opportunity; with Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, unnamed mooks are not actually replaceable. Dwindling resources as a whole is a theme they never actually got into, but specifically running out of crew is an angle that could have really shaken things up with the franchise's history of redshirts and such.
I think the episode could have been taken much further too on a personal level, it should have really been a two-parter to explore it all. What if Chakotay had a relative or a close friend who was assimilated at Wolf 359, so he has reason to harbour resentment toward the Borg. Here his view of the Borg could be completely challenged: Picard was liberated from the Collective at great risk that could have easily gone sideways, so it was always assumed mass de-assimilation would be impractical and impossible. But now Chakotay is confronted with evidence that it is actually possible. He now has to completely re-process the grief of losing his friend/relative, because before he was able to just write it off as "they were taken and they became one of them, an enemy, we had no choice", but now the presence of this community is proof that not only his loved ones can/could have been rescued, but that they all can. Would this change how they approach the Borg in the future? Should they look for ways to disable and disconnect the hive mind, rather than destroy individual Borg vessels with all hands? It would really get at the nature of what the Borg are. The Borg are (were) such a unique concept because your experience with one is the same as your experience with all of them. It's not prejudice, it's postjudice. They are _all_ the enemy, because they _all_ pursue the same goal with a single-minded unwavering clinical pursuit. But, at the same time, they are all victims, and in many ways, it's not their fault. They were all once people taken against their will and forced to do the Hive's bidding. That being said, they are also an extremely powerful and ruthless enemy, who will not stop until you are one of them. Until they're disconnected, they're an enemy. There's a certain tragedy in that, and that could have been used to force Chakotay to reckon with the loss of his friend/relative.
I think this story might well have benefited from more time. As was remarked up thread it would have been interesting to spend some time with Riley's enemies and find out what their pov was.
kind of like Sisko having a grudge towards Locutus...sorry Captain Picard. So glad they DIDN'T do that. Makes more sense to make/keep Chakotay as Marquis whose grudge was the Cardassians. (or Kardashians for that matter). But I thought Picard was not a full drone, but more like a spokesperson on behalf of the borg - "lessens the impact" of the "you will be assimilated" rigmarole.
As much as fans and especially fan reviewers complain about how VOY (and then PIC) ruined the Borg by turning them from a fearsome nigh-unstoppable adversary to essentially a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain, Netflix's analytics show that the top 10 most rewatched episodes include Scorpion, Dark Frontier, and Endgame (in addition to Q Who and The Best of Both Worlds). Star Trek has a reputation for being heady, for telling highbrow stories that are about something. And sometimes it does have stories that are about something. But ultimately that's not why most people are tuning in. First Contact turned the Borg into essentially space zombies, shambling about and oblivious unless provoked, but able to turn you into them with a "bite". The Borg fill the same role as the Stormtroopers in Star Wars and the Daleks in Doctor Who: a nameless army of drones that the heroes can slaughter without raising any moral issues about the whole slaughtering thing. There's another parallel in that Stormtroopers and the Daleks both went from an enemy to be feared to basically a joke. Footsoldiers of a powerful empire unable to hit the broad side of a barn or climb stairs. Yes, the Borg became a recurring ineffectual villain of the week, but the ineffectual villain of the week is something that gets enough eyeballs to build the entire super sentai genre around. It's not Voyager that turned the Borg into the villain of the week. That started in First Contact, and it was inevitable. The Borg never would have worked in Star Trek in their original form, not in the long run. Star Trek isn't a dystopian work where there's a truly unstoppable threat where the best the protagonists can do is to eke out small victories here and there and hope to just stay alive. It's not a setting like 40k where all they can do is to delay the inevitable just a little longer. In Star Trek, every enemy must be stopped. The Borg were way too popular to stop showing up so ineffectual villain of the week it is since the Klingons already took the frenemy role.
This one experience with any measure of collective bargaining set in place his attitude after this. It's also why the only other time he uses his borg implant is to remove someone from the Collective.
SFDebris also pointed out that the episode does such a bad job of portraying the alleged threat and malice of the other factions, and showed us so few actual characters in the commune, that it’s just as likely this was actually a small band of extremists trying to force everyone back into their link and the other factions were just a coalition fighting to keep their freedom and trying to stop them. Which is a possibility its kinda wild to just have our supposed heroes shrug about as they walk away. For as Bland as Voyager often was, it’s remarkable how often the writers, entirely on accident, also end up making the crew edge towards the side of the bad guys either by unfortunate implications in the scripts or by direct overt character actions on screen that the writers just didn’t think through.
There was apparently alot of executive meddling too to be fair to the writers - apparently the execs didn't want anyone really questionning the Captain's decisions. Which from a high level actually makes a degree of sense from an exec's pov - first female captain on screen, gotta make sure the show doesn't potray her as being incompetent. However, the obvious happens and when the captain makes a decision, the episode has to portray it as the only reasonable PoV. Hence when the Captain decides to literally murder someone to restore 2 other people, the crew are all onboard with it and not one offers resistance apart from the holographic doctor. Hell, they even seemed annoyed with Tuvix for not willingly going into the transporter. If "Quality of Life" was a voyager story, Janeway would have banned Worf from suicide and no-one would have been allowed to express a different point of view from whatever Janeway said was the way she saw it. Add to that, Brannon Braga was dead-set against the show having long-running arcs despite the premise of Voyager very much needing them for the show to actually make use of that premise. Complete waste of potential.
I think that second point is more of a natural outcome of the liberalism inherent in 90s Trek tbh. But yeah, it’s an interesting contradiction to examine in all 3 of those shows.
How did the former drones get from the cube to the planet presumably with some equipment, but then have no way to get back up to the cube themselves? I suppose there could be valid explanation, but it still strikes me as a little suspect.
To be fair Voyager irrecoverably crashes a shuttle presumably meant for rough conditions every couple episodes. A couple thousand newly disconnected Borg, all booking it for their lives, crashing and badly damaging their escape transports and/or just recycling them for permanent housing isn't crazy. If anything the weirder thing is the implication that the Borg /have/ escape pods, they generally all go down with the ship.
If this and Scorpion was only major appearance of the Borg I would be fine with it. But well thanks to Seven joining the cast that was never going to happen.
They did change their surname. It used to be two families, Moxmortuus and Warewamoushinda who both had an unfortunate history so when the last surviving members married, they decided to abandon their unlucky family history and create a new family name.
I like that Voyager learned how to deal with the Borg. Steve often says Voyager made them less threating as if that's a bad thing. I think it's great that Starfleet eventually figures out that they can defend themselves against an enemy that previously terrified them. It gives meaning and an unexpected upside to Voyager's predicament of being lost in the Delta quadrant.
I think the problem isn't that the Borg become less threatening as an overall antagonist, but the method in which it happens. Voyager never gives the impression that it's due to the competence of the crew or a miraculous stroke of good fortune that the heroes overcome the Borg, instead the poor writing ends up framing it as the Borg themselves have become less scary because they're just not as dangerous as they used to be for basically no reason. And it doesn't help that they utilise the Borg Queen much in the way of a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain. Cobra Commander was a more credible threat.
Don't know why I've never thought about Chakotay getting it on with a person who he is telepathically sharing all his physical sensations with (and vice versa). The implications of that experience are definitely the most interesting idea in this episode, and could never have been explored on television.
I suppose they could have turned this into a two-parter and answered all of the questions you've articulated, but it seems they didn't want to fill in too many of the blanks. If we learned too much about the Borg's back story then they'd seem less mysterious and that might have cut off future opportunities to use them to further the plots of other episodes. Personally, I'd like to see such a two-parter, mostly because there's so much inconsistency and understandable questions about them throughout VOY and TNG.
I like in the fight scene on the cube they add the little detail of Harry tapping his combadge with the end of his phaser as both his hands are busy. Doesnt improve anything in the episode, just a nice touch.
You so hard on Voyager and it always makes me laugh. Janeway is my fave captain and I watched the show pretty mindlessly (I saved my brain engagement for DS9). I love the show dearly but you’re pretty much right about everything you say about it ❤
This episode was the point of no return for turning the Borg from "Terrifying all-consuming incomprehensible cyber-amoeba" to "Basically Scientologists, but with radios in their heads".
The borg here, the collective as a voluntary humanist sharing of experiences & communing/being understood deeply... Like one could imagine something like a rumspringa, young ones not allowed to borg until having gained experience... Oh... oh... the Trill that dont get a symbiont would be SUCH targets for the Borg
I think it would have been a far more interesting story if they'd ditched the planet stuff entirely and just had the whole story set on the borg cube! Think about it: a dozen separate factions all vying for resources in the cube and doing their best to avoid activating the dead drones. It could have been a claustrophobic, tense story of a war of attrition, but... we got this wet paper bag of an episode instead.
If the Borg get their funk with mass collective hive orgies, couldn't Voyager just beam over the wedding episode from Outlander and warp away while they're helpless?
How did they know that Riley's community would be the one "in charge" of the cooperative and not one of the other factions being the controlling force of this new collective?
So, if the feel the physical sensations the other feels and they have sex…. And he had to know that going in so they just quietly added a lot of depth to Chakotay…which they completely ignored. It could explain why he hooks up with Seven out of nowhere at the end of the series. Maybe he was trying to experience that again?
Voyager always had a huge pacing problem. A lot occurs over the episodes but very little actually happens until about the last fifteen minutes of the show. And then you have the three minute summation. This episode is a great example of that pacing problem.
It would've been more interesting if voyager turned on the cube looking for information or get some tech and the collective didn't want to fully relink
Sexy, bald, ex-borg should be more people's type, but xenophobia is rampant despite the Federation's so called "tolerance". I, for one (of 3), think love should always be remodulating it's calibrations.
the Voyager writers loved this concept so much they rehash it later on, when 7of9 does it to more ex-borg. I feel this shows underlining issue is how they spend the full 7 year run trapped in the delta quadrant. To me, it feels like a concept that has been starched paper thin. every week we cross-paths with yet another humanoid alien, with a ever so slightly different nose bump. surely they sould encounter different people, with the same nose bump! 🤷♀️ If it was up to me, I would have brought them back home earlier. when you think about it, they had loads of attempts at doing it, but simply abandon the idea, because it failed the first time: > If warp 10 turns you into slugs, maybe warp 9.9 works just fine? > Didn't no one from engineering, downloaded some technobabble for how the quantum slipstream drive works? > Why, throughout their 7 year run, was the Federation just sitting on its ass! Voyage dose manage to establish contact with the federation - so why isn't the federation, I don't know - using its wealth of knowledge, research, materials and capabilities, from multiple worlds, to try to get to them at the same time? do they also hate Harry Kim, just as much as Janeway dose.....! they have the ability to get back sooner, they also established a very good reason for going back - allow me to set the scene! end season 3 on them getting home, yay we've made it 🎉🎉 they arrive to a heros welcome and fade to black, the audience is now left with a what's happens now kind of semi-cliffhanger. season 4 opens with a the opportunity for some character development, no doubt the vast majority of the crew would be dealing with some form of PTSD! But, as things start to settle down, the plot twist, that has been slowly creeping into the story ark happens! a spell of Klingon ships has been attacked recently, and crew members have been abducted! the investigation leads to the answer, that the phage aliens have been able to follow Voyage back and have started harvesting Klingons. Voyager is ordered back to the Delta quadrant to sort it out!
Steve’s top tier episode summary style + a Voyager episode = a great 20ish minutes of entertainment. Throw in suddenly unhinged Steve making an appearance…. 🤌🏼 chef’s kiss
The Borg were introduced in Voyager because it was likely planned as soon as someone said the words 'Delta Quadrant'. We knew since TNG that's where the Borg were located, we knew that Voyager was most likely always planning to build up to it, so I doubt it's just because they wanted to re-use First Contact props and costumes. Obviously the Borg were the most popular additions to Star Trek since the Klingons, it was inevitable they would appear in Voyager. I absolutely agree with the argument that they were overused and their impact diminished over time to the point we got sick of them by the seventh season, but still their inclusion was most definitely inevitable.
It is a shame that far too many episodes of Voyager start with a kernel of a good idea but fail in the execution. Still, I am glad that the series had a successful run on TV. That success led to Playmates making a really cool model of Voyager with Pivoting Nacelles! I have enjoyed many adventures in the Delta Quadrant of my imagination.
I don’t like Voyager much as a whole, but this is one of my favorite episodes. I like the new idea of ex-Borg creating a new community that could not have existed before they were assimilated. I think the episode flows well and sets up the Borg well as a future threat. It’s a shame the show then completely dropped the ball on that threat, but it started out well here.
How about Chakotay feeling violated by the collective and laying the ground work for Scorpian. Or having Riley come back as a Borg Queen. That would been interesting.
Another idea to explore could have been sincerity. He kept saying she was sincere, but a sincere belief can be harmful to others. This is an arc that could have lasted two or three episodes.
I can't agree that the planet doesn't feel like anarchy or that the collective doesn't feel like it's under constant attack. After all, in just the short time we observe Riley's group, they do come under attack *twice* and someone dies. Did they need to get attacked three or four times to prove the point?
The first attack is precipitated by the arrival of Chakotay and Ensign Kaplan, and the one person who dies is Kaplan, not even someone from the settlement. The second attack comes right at the end of the episode, and we essentially see nothing of it. So, yes, if the episode wants to portray these people are under constant attack and needing to establish a new collective to save their community from being overrun by raiders, those raiders need to be established as an actual on-screen threat, not a hypothetical one we mostly hear about secondhand.
@@SteveShives Fair enough. And certainly, from a story point of view, having an attack somewhere in the middle could certainly help to add some energy to the somewhat flaccid middle section of the episode. While the number of attacks may sort of be enough, I totally agree that the episode can feel a bit meandering and listless. You were spot on about the episode constantly just glancing over things that should be much more important/impactful/explored in greater depth.
Regarding the apparent lack of threat from the "rebels", I think you've just described the paranoia and need to control everything that goes with a group you Americans call... what is it....? Republicans?
Ya know what Voyager reminds me of, strangely enough? Dragon Ball GT. Seriously. Another show that was a follow up to a beloved classic, that proposed interesting ideas but never really did anything with those ideas.
They could have done something a little bit interesting by not killing Ensign Notlongforthisworld, but instead have her linked into the new collective for healing and be the one to go and fire up the cube for the benefit of her new co-operative. With that insubordination bringing a potentially harsh punishment, she chooses to leave Voyager and join the co-operative instead. No regular cast lost, story makes a little more sense.
I do wonder how many crew members got killed off post-caretaker. Since they were on the other side of the galaxy, it’s not like they could get more easily.
Yeah it's weird that Voyager doesn't put much weight on crewman deaths other than when the main cast comes close. Like with the Enterprise it's kinda understandable, it's a big ship, but they have episodes like Lower Decks that focus on the background characters. Voyager's a much smaller ship and it's stated pretty early on that the crew is about 150ish iirc, and after the pilot the only new crew members we really get are Naomi (who is literally born on Voyager) and Seven. Thing is with a crew that small everyone should know everyone, and tbh it's the one thing that truly frustrates me about Voyager. Out of every Trek til like, maybe the Lower Decks series Voyager has BY FAR the best pretense to humanize the non-main character crew and directly challenge the concept of redshirts. Granted I understand that 150 is a big cast when you have to pay them all and keep tabs in the writer's room but c'mon, we could've had more unnamed ensigns being shown to SURVIVE and an episode or two every season where we pivot away from Our Heroes and focus on the background crew and their hijinks, especially since with such a tiny crew every casualty should be a Huge Freaking Deal.
Could a better episode? Yes. However, it is an exploration on how some ideologies starting at a small scale with good intentions, soon derails and inevitably leads to totalitarianism. And just for that, is a worth episode, which could be developed much further.
Ah, the ambiguities of an Aggressive Hegemonizing Swarm Object that gets inadvertently converted into an Evangelical Hegemonizing Swarm Object. Will the cooperative need a Culture Mind to come along and give them a stern talking to in the near future?
so everyone's wishing that Kes would evolve into her higher being of existence, and thrown them 10,000 light years clear of borg space? That doesn't happen until S4 E2, "Unity is only S3 E17.... and when disconnecting Borg from the Collective is bad enough.....their solution is....Unimatrix Zero. Actually that concept would have been kind of OK had it been expanded upon, and not simply a 2 ep arc before the Queen gets her grubby paws on it.
I always wanted a more earnest exploration of the XBs. I thought Picard was going there but nah, that was dropped pretty quickly. Narratively comparing the XBs to people who have left a cult or a highly insular religious sect & now have problems adjusting to the outside world and/ or missing the sense of community they once had would have been interesting. It also would have been interesting to see them form their own societies with all the challenges that would entail. Or maybe align with the cybernetic artifical lifeforms in some way...nah. Just kill off Hugh & move on...
This episode is disappointing for all the reasons described. But be that as it may, it really would be *SO HOT* to b@ng with a partner you have that kind of experiential-tactile-mental connection with. Gets my glasses all fogged up just thinking about the steamy possibilities. ;-)😊
I love your stuff, Steve, but I think you were wayyy too hard on this one! You say the events are uninteresting but I was very interested. It’s a great concept and I thought it was executed quite well.
My fav Voyager episode. Maybe my favorite Borg episode even though Voy is my least favorite series and one which ironically comes from the same minds (Berman, Braga) that *RUINED* the Borg. They had the potential to be so much more interesting and I actually really liked that Picard S2 tried to pick that up, regardless of it's other faults.
I actually really love the concept of the Borg in this episode; the idea of making a hivemind that isn't inherently oppressive and made up of ostrocized folks. Honestly, it only really loses me when they choose to removed Chakotay's agency at the end of the episode - feels like it was the writers not really understanding the concept they had here to instead go with their VILLIAN OF THE WEEK and BORG BAD typical structure. Honestly, this was the one idea from Star Trek Picard Season 2 that I really loved and wished they had continued with Borg Queen Jurati... but alas, Picard Season 3 seemed to have zero interest in that too in favor of more BORG BAD.
I took it to be an example that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I like the idea that this is an echo of how the Borg started out - a group of individuals who found a way to physically/psychically combine to help them overcome whatever challenges they were facing. And if they had more people in the link, they could do more good...
Hell, even the lack of a longer conflict pitting the heroes against a cube being run solely by dead borg was a giant missed opportunity. I always felt like that was an interesting and disturbing situation that should have been revisited in some form later -- it could've made for one hell of a Halloween episode.
It's not a bad way to have the Borg in a story without diminishing the threat of the main collective. ...In theory. The execution left something to be desired. But I think the idea was solid.
It's an interesting concept, but yeah, if it doesn't end up as a good story for an hour of television, who cares? That was my problem with the Borg Queen Jurati bit in Picard season 2, as well. The idea could potentially go somewhere interesting, but it wound up playing as "Oh, the Borg are going to be cooperative instead of authoritarian now. Isn't that nice?"
Yeeeeee! I got some Jessie in my Shives! You two should make a crossover episode!
See this is why the Seven/Chakotay romance rang so hollow at the end of the series. He never saw her remove her wig.
Ensign Deadsoon -- that kind of character naming needs to be a recurring thing. Next up Lt. Ima Goner and security officer Kildenackshun.
Distantly related to Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film
I thought you were going a bit far to make a joke but it ended up solid. Good on ya. 👍
❤
Now it would be hilarious if that was the character's name in the episode!
Commandr Re'ED sh'IRT.
"This one starts with a very promising concept but-" I think you just summed up all of Voyager right there.
God, you're not wrong. A lot of potential that goes untapped.
Voyager could have been a much better show if it had just been a slightly better show
hey, ya know what? Voy may be curly fries covered in ranch dressing compared to the Risotto that is DS9, but I still love it
I'd personally amend it to the vast majority of Voyager rather than all. The show had some stellar one shot episodes like "Death Wish", "Living Witness" and "Pathfinder". (However those particular episodes have storylines where guest characters are the focus of the drama rather than the main characters, so there's that...) Also, stick with the seasons 1-2 (The Michael Piller years) rather than seasons 3-7 (the post-Piller years which are mainly...ugh.)
@@wellingtonsmith4998 Exactly. Voyager was comfort food.
It's a sad fact that the five minute intro of DS9's "Emissary" with the Battle of Wolf 359 (with their single appearance in the series) gives the Borg more dramatic weight than any of their ENDLESS appearances in seasons 4-7 on Voyager. (Ditto for That Maquis on DS9...or TNG's "Preemptive Strike".)
It's a known issue - if you keep showing the Big Bad getting beaten, they suffer villain decay; hell, in TNG the Galaxy class flagship avoids conflict with borg ships even when reinforcements are available, because they are so damn dangerous - by the end of Voyager, they are actively seeking out Borg to fight and rob, with no backup. It massively reduces the viewer's perceived danger level of the Borg. And whilst Voyager did have the advantage of Seven's insider knowledge of the Borg, it still shouldn't have been anything like enough to neuter the Borg to the point of being a minor inconvience.
@@dm121984 Which was another missed opportunity on the part of Voyager. Given their stranded nature and lack of any kind of backup, the Voyager crew should have been ordering new brown pants and fleeing every time they got a sniff of the borg. The episode which revealed the borg before this one, B'Elanna gets Vulcan horny, should have seen the crew going into deep strategy meetings to plan what to do and jumping every time there's a sniff of borg presence.
The Borg cube was tilted? In space?
In space, no one can hear you......tilt.
Can’t expect it to stay upright when it’s damaged!
They weren’t paying attention to the “this side up” arrow.
It’d be funny if whenever the Borg needed to generate a random number they rolled a few cubes.
Tilted in space: me every time I've played Xwing vs TIE Fighter
A "Nemesis" style rug-pull where it turns out the other 'factions' are just desperate to stop the cooperative from turning the hive mind on again would have been fun!
I actually love this episode, it does a good job of showing the borg are still people under the machinery, and shows that they can be broken free of the collective. I think that concept really interesting, and I really like Seven's character and arc that we get a little taster of here.
Absolutely! Well said.
I agree.
I agree with Jesse. It was, for me, fascinating to see a version of the Borg for whom the link doesn't result in viral-minded drones hellbent on consuming everyone...
RIP Ensign Deadsoon
It could have been interesting if Voyager had decided that the Borg had been nearly wiped out in First Contact, and instead of constant run-ins with cubes they instead found nearly abandoned planets, or small groups of Borg now cut off and troubled. It could have been an interesting plot development, instead they just used the Borg as generic villains and wasted them.
That was actually the plan when this was written. This group was going to have been freed when Picard killed the Queen in that film, but decided to make it vaguer to keep their options open. They only fully changed their mind to have the Borg still at full strength when they were writing “Scorpion”.
You know, Ensign Isn't Going To Make it reminds me of another missed opportunity; with Voyager being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, unnamed mooks are not actually replaceable. Dwindling resources as a whole is a theme they never actually got into, but specifically running out of crew is an angle that could have really shaken things up with the franchise's history of redshirts and such.
I think the episode could have been taken much further too on a personal level, it should have really been a two-parter to explore it all. What if Chakotay had a relative or a close friend who was assimilated at Wolf 359, so he has reason to harbour resentment toward the Borg. Here his view of the Borg could be completely challenged: Picard was liberated from the Collective at great risk that could have easily gone sideways, so it was always assumed mass de-assimilation would be impractical and impossible. But now Chakotay is confronted with evidence that it is actually possible.
He now has to completely re-process the grief of losing his friend/relative, because before he was able to just write it off as "they were taken and they became one of them, an enemy, we had no choice", but now the presence of this community is proof that not only his loved ones can/could have been rescued, but that they all can. Would this change how they approach the Borg in the future? Should they look for ways to disable and disconnect the hive mind, rather than destroy individual Borg vessels with all hands?
It would really get at the nature of what the Borg are. The Borg are (were) such a unique concept because your experience with one is the same as your experience with all of them. It's not prejudice, it's postjudice. They are _all_ the enemy, because they _all_ pursue the same goal with a single-minded unwavering clinical pursuit. But, at the same time, they are all victims, and in many ways, it's not their fault. They were all once people taken against their will and forced to do the Hive's bidding. That being said, they are also an extremely powerful and ruthless enemy, who will not stop until you are one of them. Until they're disconnected, they're an enemy. There's a certain tragedy in that, and that could have been used to force Chakotay to reckon with the loss of his friend/relative.
I think this story might well have benefited from more time.
As was remarked up thread it would have been interesting to spend some time with Riley's enemies and find out what their pov was.
kind of like Sisko having a grudge towards Locutus...sorry Captain Picard. So glad they DIDN'T do that. Makes more sense to make/keep Chakotay as Marquis whose grudge was the Cardassians. (or Kardashians for that matter). But I thought Picard was not a full drone, but more like a spokesperson on behalf of the borg - "lessens the impact" of the "you will be assimilated" rigmarole.
As much as fans and especially fan reviewers complain about how VOY (and then PIC) ruined the Borg by turning them from a fearsome nigh-unstoppable adversary to essentially a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain, Netflix's analytics show that the top 10 most rewatched episodes include Scorpion, Dark Frontier, and Endgame (in addition to Q Who and The Best of Both Worlds).
Star Trek has a reputation for being heady, for telling highbrow stories that are about something. And sometimes it does have stories that are about something. But ultimately that's not why most people are tuning in. First Contact turned the Borg into essentially space zombies, shambling about and oblivious unless provoked, but able to turn you into them with a "bite". The Borg fill the same role as the Stormtroopers in Star Wars and the Daleks in Doctor Who: a nameless army of drones that the heroes can slaughter without raising any moral issues about the whole slaughtering thing. There's another parallel in that Stormtroopers and the Daleks both went from an enemy to be feared to basically a joke. Footsoldiers of a powerful empire unable to hit the broad side of a barn or climb stairs. Yes, the Borg became a recurring ineffectual villain of the week, but the ineffectual villain of the week is something that gets enough eyeballs to build the entire super sentai genre around.
It's not Voyager that turned the Borg into the villain of the week. That started in First Contact, and it was inevitable. The Borg never would have worked in Star Trek in their original form, not in the long run. Star Trek isn't a dystopian work where there's a truly unstoppable threat where the best the protagonists can do is to eke out small victories here and there and hope to just stay alive. It's not a setting like 40k where all they can do is to delay the inevitable just a little longer. In Star Trek, every enemy must be stopped. The Borg were way too popular to stop showing up so ineffectual villain of the week it is since the Klingons already took the frenemy role.
You'd think the Borg were too much like a union for him to want to have anything to do with them.
This one experience with any measure of collective bargaining set in place his attitude after this. It's also why the only other time he uses his borg implant is to remove someone from the Collective.
Oof, nasty brun. Deserved, but still nasty.
😂 Buuuuurn!
He's going to need to see Robert Picardo for that burn.
SFDebris also pointed out that the episode does such a bad job of portraying the alleged threat and malice of the other factions, and showed us so few actual characters in the commune, that it’s just as likely this was actually a small band of extremists trying to force everyone back into their link and the other factions were just a coalition fighting to keep their freedom and trying to stop them. Which is a possibility its kinda wild to just have our supposed heroes shrug about as they walk away.
For as Bland as Voyager often was, it’s remarkable how often the writers, entirely on accident, also end up making the crew edge towards the side of the bad guys either by unfortunate implications in the scripts or by direct overt character actions on screen that the writers just didn’t think through.
There was apparently alot of executive meddling too to be fair to the writers - apparently the execs didn't want anyone really questionning the Captain's decisions. Which from a high level actually makes a degree of sense from an exec's pov - first female captain on screen, gotta make sure the show doesn't potray her as being incompetent. However, the obvious happens and when the captain makes a decision, the episode has to portray it as the only reasonable PoV. Hence when the Captain decides to literally murder someone to restore 2 other people, the crew are all onboard with it and not one offers resistance apart from the holographic doctor. Hell, they even seemed annoyed with Tuvix for not willingly going into the transporter. If "Quality of Life" was a voyager story, Janeway would have banned Worf from suicide and no-one would have been allowed to express a different point of view from whatever Janeway said was the way she saw it.
Add to that, Brannon Braga was dead-set against the show having long-running arcs despite the premise of Voyager very much needing them for the show to actually make use of that premise. Complete waste of potential.
I think that second point is more of a natural outcome of the liberalism inherent in 90s Trek tbh. But yeah, it’s an interesting contradiction to examine in all 3 of those shows.
Interesting comments. But I still enjoy this episode to be one of the few Voyager episodes I have seen multiple times and would still watch again.
It really looks like a good way to use The Borg.
How did the former drones get from the cube to the planet presumably with some equipment, but then have no way to get back up to the cube themselves? I suppose there could be valid explanation, but it still strikes me as a little suspect.
They're just lazy.
To be fair Voyager irrecoverably crashes a shuttle presumably meant for rough conditions every couple episodes. A couple thousand newly disconnected Borg, all booking it for their lives, crashing and badly damaging their escape transports and/or just recycling them for permanent housing isn't crazy. If anything the weirder thing is the implication that the Borg /have/ escape pods, they generally all go down with the ship.
@@SteveShives Like the _Voyager_ writers!
Probably by using a Borg sphere as a lifeboat, like the queen did in First Contact.
Voyager would have been saved if they had figured out a way to get mother Troy on the cast. She would have loved Nelix.
Steve, you crack me up. lol. I actually liked Voyager, but I can’t deny your recaps are often better than the original episodes.
If this and Scorpion was only major appearance of the Borg I would be fine with it. But well thanks to Seven joining the cast that was never going to happen.
RIP Ensign Deadsoon. You think they would have changed the family surname at some point.
A clear case of Nominative Determinism!
I like to imagine the Deadsoon line is a prestigious if not perils one
Ensign Deadsoon, the second greatest person in the history of the United Federation of Planets
They did change their surname. It used to be two families, Moxmortuus and Warewamoushinda who both had an unfortunate history so when the last surviving members married, they decided to abandon their unlucky family history and create a new family name.
I think the Deadsoons are among the many descendant clans of that noble family from San Francisco, the Hesdeadjims.
I like that Voyager learned how to deal with the Borg. Steve often says Voyager made them less threating as if that's a bad thing. I think it's great that Starfleet eventually figures out that they can defend themselves against an enemy that previously terrified them. It gives meaning and an unexpected upside to Voyager's predicament of being lost in the Delta quadrant.
I think the problem isn't that the Borg become less threatening as an overall antagonist, but the method in which it happens. Voyager never gives the impression that it's due to the competence of the crew or a miraculous stroke of good fortune that the heroes overcome the Borg, instead the poor writing ends up framing it as the Borg themselves have become less scary because they're just not as dangerous as they used to be for basically no reason. And it doesn't help that they utilise the Borg Queen much in the way of a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain. Cobra Commander was a more credible threat.
Ensign Deadsoon was filling in for Lieutenant Dontgetattached…
Don't know why I've never thought about Chakotay getting it on with a person who he is telepathically sharing all his physical sensations with (and vice versa). The implications of that experience are definitely the most interesting idea in this episode, and could never have been explored on television.
I'm proud of you for resisting the urge to say "board the borg cube" in a Swedish Chef voice.
I suppose they could have turned this into a two-parter and answered all of the questions you've articulated, but it seems they didn't want to fill in too many of the blanks. If we learned too much about the Borg's back story then they'd seem less mysterious and that might have cut off future opportunities to use them to further the plots of other episodes. Personally, I'd like to see such a two-parter, mostly because there's so much inconsistency and understandable questions about them throughout VOY and TNG.
I like in the fight scene on the cube they add the little detail of Harry tapping his combadge with the end of his phaser as both his hands are busy. Doesnt improve anything in the episode, just a nice touch.
You so hard on Voyager and it always makes me laugh. Janeway is my fave captain and I watched the show pretty mindlessly (I saved my brain engagement for DS9). I love the show dearly but you’re pretty much right about everything you say about it ❤
This episode was the point of no return for turning the Borg from "Terrifying all-consuming incomprehensible cyber-amoeba" to "Basically Scientologists, but with radios in their heads".
Suddenly unhinged Steve is my favorite Steve.
I can't believe that it's taken me this long to realise that a Voyager/Melrose Place mash up was what I needed to bring me fulfilment. Kudos sir.
I love this sarcastic S.O.B . Much love, steve. Keep up with the great work
"Charlie Murphy!"
POW!
"Unity!"
Ketracel White is a helluva drug.
The borg here, the collective as a voluntary humanist sharing of experiences & communing/being understood deeply...
Like one could imagine something like a rumspringa, young ones not allowed to borg until having gained experience...
Oh... oh... the Trill that dont get a symbiont would be SUCH targets for the Borg
8:55 that is one hell of a serotonin and dopamine Loop. If "He feel her and she feels him," then he feels her half of the "conversation"
Felt like I was missing a lot of the jokes on this one, having absolutely no idea what Melrow's Place is...
Off topic: scifi writers get nebulae wrong. A typical nebula is so thin and spread out you would never get lost in it like a fog bank.
Chakotay has a thing for people who are in a hive mind.
I think it would have been a far more interesting story if they'd ditched the planet stuff entirely and just had the whole story set on the borg cube! Think about it: a dozen separate factions all vying for resources in the cube and doing their best to avoid activating the dead drones. It could have been a claustrophobic, tense story of a war of attrition, but... we got this wet paper bag of an episode instead.
Janeway's like: "I guess not. Get lost, you two"
Me:
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If the Borg get their funk with mass collective hive orgies, couldn't Voyager just beam over the wedding episode from Outlander and warp away while they're helpless?
loved this episode, steve... i was constantly laughing and entertained by your excellent quips and jibes -- i love how much you hate voyager!! =)
How did they know that Riley's community would be the one "in charge" of the cooperative and not one of the other factions being the controlling force of this new collective?
Hm, Janeway's thinking here is flawed. You can't find what damaged the borg cube to use it to fight the borg, because it's only going to work once.
So, if the feel the physical sensations the other feels and they have sex…. And he had to know that going in so they just quietly added a lot of depth to Chakotay…which they completely ignored. It could explain why he hooks up with Seven out of nowhere at the end of the series. Maybe he was trying to experience that again?
Oooohhh, that's where the Rick and Morty episode came from. Sho nuff
I had to pause it after "Ensign Deadsoon" from laughing so hard. So true.
Voyager always had a huge pacing problem. A lot occurs over the episodes but very little actually happens until about the last fifteen minutes of the show. And then you have the three minute summation. This episode is a great example of that pacing problem.
So how dare people say that Chakotay and Sevens relationship in season 7 came out of nowhere? Voyager writing redeemed!
It would've been more interesting if voyager turned on the cube looking for information or get some tech and the collective didn't want to fully relink
I really hated Voyager but this one episode is up there with my fav TNG DS9 episodes. It added critical context to the Borg.
Sexy, bald, ex-borg should be more people's type, but xenophobia is rampant despite the Federation's so called "tolerance". I, for one (of 3), think love should always be remodulating it's calibrations.
But people generally seem to find Picard mostly appealing in the Federation?
@@jasonkeith2832 Was he even Borged long enough to count? And on that same note, I always thought that Seven was striking without hair.
Next time maybe work in that Robert Beltran was in the movie Eating Raul.
And for the one after that, I'll try to shoehorn in a reference to his Murder, She Wrote episodes. Or better yet, Lone Wolf McQuade!
He was also in Lois & Clark.
@@SteveShives And don't forget Night of the Comet ^.^
Absolutely cannot wait for 'Drone'
I'm a huge fan of Voyager, generally speaking.
I haven't watched this episode since the 90s. Nuff said.
Boy… Steve has strong feelings about all things melrose place lmao 😂
the Voyager writers loved this concept so much they rehash it later on, when 7of9 does it to more ex-borg.
I feel this shows underlining issue is how they spend the full 7 year run trapped in the delta quadrant. To me, it feels like a concept that has been starched paper thin. every week we cross-paths with yet another humanoid alien, with a ever so slightly different nose bump. surely they sould encounter different people, with the same nose bump! 🤷♀️
If it was up to me, I would have brought them back home earlier. when you think about it, they had loads of attempts at doing it, but simply abandon the idea, because it failed the first time:
> If warp 10 turns you into slugs, maybe warp 9.9 works just fine?
> Didn't no one from engineering, downloaded some technobabble for how the quantum slipstream drive works?
> Why, throughout their 7 year run, was the Federation just sitting on its ass! Voyage dose manage to establish contact with the federation - so why isn't the federation, I don't know - using its wealth of knowledge, research, materials and capabilities, from multiple worlds, to try to get to them at the same time? do they also hate Harry Kim, just as much as Janeway dose.....!
they have the ability to get back sooner, they also established a very good reason for going back - allow me to set the scene!
end season 3 on them getting home, yay we've made it 🎉🎉 they arrive to a heros welcome and fade to black, the audience is now left with a what's happens now kind of semi-cliffhanger.
season 4 opens with a the opportunity for some character development, no doubt the vast majority of the crew would be dealing with some form of PTSD! But, as things start to settle down, the plot twist, that has been slowly creeping into the story ark happens!
a spell of Klingon ships has been attacked recently, and crew members have been abducted! the investigation leads to the answer, that the phage aliens have been able to follow Voyage back and have started harvesting Klingons. Voyager is ordered back to the Delta quadrant to sort it out!
"I'll fix your radio after the lovin" comedy pure comedy
Steve’s top tier episode summary style + a Voyager episode = a great 20ish minutes of entertainment. Throw in suddenly unhinged Steve making an appearance…. 🤌🏼 chef’s kiss
This episode was well served by the gap of several years since Descent.
The Borg were introduced in Voyager because it was likely planned as soon as someone said the words 'Delta Quadrant'. We knew since TNG that's where the Borg were located, we knew that Voyager was most likely always planning to build up to it, so I doubt it's just because they wanted to re-use First Contact props and costumes. Obviously the Borg were the most popular additions to Star Trek since the Klingons, it was inevitable they would appear in Voyager.
I absolutely agree with the argument that they were overused and their impact diminished over time to the point we got sick of them by the seventh season, but still their inclusion was most definitely inevitable.
It is a shame that far too many episodes of Voyager start with a kernel of a good idea but fail in the execution. Still, I am glad that the series had a successful run on TV. That success led to Playmates making a really cool model of Voyager with Pivoting Nacelles! I have enjoyed many adventures in the Delta Quadrant of my imagination.
Better than Melrose Place, it's like Sense8!
RIP Ensign Dedsun, if only we'd seen it coming
I don’t like Voyager much as a whole, but this is one of my favorite episodes. I like the new idea of ex-Borg creating a new community that could not have existed before they were assimilated. I think the episode flows well and sets up the Borg well as a future threat. It’s a shame the show then completely dropped the ball on that threat, but it started out well here.
I remember that Melrose Place reveal. It was so creepy at the time but seems kind of lame now.
How about Chakotay feeling violated by the collective and laying the ground work for Scorpian. Or having Riley come back as a Borg Queen. That would been interesting.
Ah, remember when the Borg were still threatening? I miss those days.
Just as a reminder, none of them would be in this situation if Janeway hadn't made a horrible decision for the entire crew in the pilot ;)
Hey I love thr melrose place reference!
Another idea to explore could have been sincerity. He kept saying she was sincere, but a sincere belief can be harmful to others. This is an arc that could have lasted two or three episodes.
I can't agree that the planet doesn't feel like anarchy or that the collective doesn't feel like it's under constant attack. After all, in just the short time we observe Riley's group, they do come under attack *twice* and someone dies. Did they need to get attacked three or four times to prove the point?
The first attack is precipitated by the arrival of Chakotay and Ensign Kaplan, and the one person who dies is Kaplan, not even someone from the settlement. The second attack comes right at the end of the episode, and we essentially see nothing of it. So, yes, if the episode wants to portray these people are under constant attack and needing to establish a new collective to save their community from being overrun by raiders, those raiders need to be established as an actual on-screen threat, not a hypothetical one we mostly hear about secondhand.
@@SteveShives Fair enough. And certainly, from a story point of view, having an attack somewhere in the middle could certainly help to add some energy to the somewhat flaccid middle section of the episode. While the number of attacks may sort of be enough, I totally agree that the episode can feel a bit meandering and listless. You were spot on about the episode constantly just glancing over things that should be much more important/impactful/explored in greater depth.
Regarding the apparent lack of threat from the "rebels", I think you've just described the paranoia and need to control everything that goes with a group you Americans call... what is it....? Republicans?
This should have been a several episode story. I still think that is one of the best Voy episode.
00:43 OMS Steve I actually though the cast member was named Deh Sung. 😅😅😅
I know I’ve seen this episode several times but I have no memory of it at all.
Ya know what Voyager reminds me of, strangely enough? Dragon Ball GT. Seriously. Another show that was a follow up to a beloved classic, that proposed interesting ideas but never really did anything with those ideas.
2:55
Funny... there's no up or down in space.
Ugh. The only thing worse than a Voyager Borg episode is a Chipotle Voyager Borg episode.
Its better than Melrose Place 😂😂
I managed to hold it together for poor ensign didn't make it (RIP) but "booboo on his bwain" slayed me...
They could have done something a little bit interesting by not killing Ensign Notlongforthisworld, but instead have her linked into the new collective for healing and be the one to go and fire up the cube for the benefit of her new co-operative. With that insubordination bringing a potentially harsh punishment, she chooses to leave Voyager and join the co-operative instead. No regular cast lost, story makes a little more sense.
I do wonder how many crew members got killed off post-caretaker. Since they were on the other side of the galaxy, it’s not like they could get more easily.
Yeah it's weird that Voyager doesn't put much weight on crewman deaths other than when the main cast comes close. Like with the Enterprise it's kinda understandable, it's a big ship, but they have episodes like Lower Decks that focus on the background characters. Voyager's a much smaller ship and it's stated pretty early on that the crew is about 150ish iirc, and after the pilot the only new crew members we really get are Naomi (who is literally born on Voyager) and Seven. Thing is with a crew that small everyone should know everyone, and tbh it's the one thing that truly frustrates me about Voyager. Out of every Trek til like, maybe the Lower Decks series Voyager has BY FAR the best pretense to humanize the non-main character crew and directly challenge the concept of redshirts. Granted I understand that 150 is a big cast when you have to pay them all and keep tabs in the writer's room but c'mon, we could've had more unnamed ensigns being shown to SURVIVE and an episode or two every season where we pivot away from Our Heroes and focus on the background crew and their hijinks, especially since with such a tiny crew every casualty should be a Huge Freaking Deal.
Could a better episode? Yes. However, it is an exploration on how some ideologies starting at a small scale with good intentions, soon derails and inevitably leads to totalitarianism. And just for that, is a worth episode, which could be developed much further.
with so may VOY borg episodes you are going to be returning to your favorite Star Trek series again and again and again
Ensign not going to make it simply the Best
Ah, the ambiguities of an Aggressive Hegemonizing Swarm Object that gets inadvertently converted into an Evangelical Hegemonizing Swarm Object. Will the cooperative need a Culture Mind to come along and give them a stern talking to in the near future?
This episode caused Beltran's rejection of unions.
so everyone's wishing that Kes would evolve into her higher being of existence, and thrown them 10,000 light years clear of borg space? That doesn't happen until S4 E2, "Unity is only S3 E17.... and when disconnecting Borg from the Collective is bad enough.....their solution is....Unimatrix Zero. Actually that concept would have been kind of OK had it been expanded upon, and not simply a 2 ep arc before the Queen gets her grubby paws on it.
I always wanted a more earnest exploration of the XBs. I thought Picard was going there but nah, that was dropped pretty quickly. Narratively comparing the XBs to people who have left a cult or a highly insular religious sect & now have problems adjusting to the outside world and/ or missing the sense of community they once had would have been interesting. It also would have been interesting to see them form their own societies with all the challenges that would entail. Or maybe align with the cybernetic artifical lifeforms in some way...nah. Just kill off Hugh & move on...
This episode is disappointing for all the reasons described. But be that as it may, it really would be *SO HOT* to b@ng with a partner you have that kind of experiential-tactile-mental connection with. Gets my glasses all fogged up just thinking about the steamy possibilities.
;-)😊
what is it with Chakotay and blondes
I love your stuff, Steve, but I think you were wayyy too hard on this one! You say the events are uninteresting but I was very interested. It’s a great concept and I thought it was executed quite well.
Ensign Dead-Soon...That would be a hyphenated last name, right?
My fav Voyager episode. Maybe my favorite Borg episode even though Voy is my least favorite series and one which ironically comes from the same minds (Berman, Braga) that *RUINED* the Borg. They had the potential to be so much more interesting and I actually really liked that Picard S2 tried to pick that up, regardless of it's other faults.
In space there is no straight up and down. Maybe Voyager was tilted.
"Ensign DeadSoon" sent me. 🤣
Ensign Dead Soon
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I wonder if this was originally going to be another group they would meet up with but just never did