Chakotay, on a shuttle trip with a red-shirt, responds to a Federation distress signal emanating from a nearby planet. He finds two warring factions of former Borg there, and is injured, but a cooperative led by a human (Riley Frazier - female, despite the name) rescues him. The only way to save him from death is temporarily linking him to a small collective, which repairs his neural damage and also gives him a look into the minds of the other people there. He and Frazier bond (sex) after the experience, and she tells him that their best hope to restore peace to the planet is to use their nearby, damaged and inoperative ship to restore the link between the people there.
Voyager arrives, after inspecting the ship for themselves, and Janeway is skeptical of this plan, especially after seeing first hand how easily the drones on the ship could be reactivated. After consulting with Chakotay, who is optimistic but also cautious, she still decides to deny the cooperative aid in this plan. After Chakotay makes his final farewells, the cooperative is attacked, and they, in desperation, reactivate the link with him and use him to power-up the Borg ship. The whole ship comes to life, but the cooperative, having gotten what they wanted, activate the self-destruct, saving Voyager.
One of the most compelling (and ultimately, sinister) things about the Borg is that they aren't outright evil. They aren't a Villain, in the capital "V" sense of the word. They're a snowball effect, of what probably started out as perfectly good intentions, but have ballooned out of control. And, at the same time, they are perfectly in control, they aren't off-the-rails, there's just no one at the helm anymore. The existence of a Borg Queen somewhat diminishes the no-one-at-the-helm part, but First Contact's use of the Borg Queen was sufficiently vague as to allow me to still see her as just a manifestation of the hive. Kind of a universal Locutus, for situations where they aren't hell-bent on assimilating one particular faction. Even the existence of the Borg Queen/Locutus role, a misguided attempt to put a happy-face on a civilization's impending doom, reinforces the Borg as the ultimate good intention gone awry bad guy.
This episode captures that aspect of the Borg square in the face, from a brand new angle. The cooperative (I keep wanting to write collaborative for some reason), they're good people. Chakotay sees it. He's inside their heads. All they want to do is save their own lives and stop ethnic warfare while they're at it. It's just a small price to pay to co-opt Chakotay against his will, briefly. They'll give him back and save his ship too. No harm done, right? Right? Chakotay says: "I wonder how long their ideals will last in the face of that kind of power." Fantastic stuff, almost an origin story for the Borg without actually going back in time. It is consistent with what we know about the Borg without being tied down by history.
Robert Duncan McNeil (Paris) directed this episode, and stated that he was trying to portray Frazier as the devil, seductive in her evil. That is completely not what I got from the episode, which is great: once upon a time, a friend and I watched an almost completely wordless, feature-length movie by the name Koyaanisqatsi. It is just a series of beautiful natural landscape scenes gradually progressing into scenes set in modern city-scapes, teeming with time-lapsed patterns of human life. My friend and I both took from the film the message that you can find natural beauty even in places where it has been supplanted by skyscrapers - but the goal, based on the few lines of text at the end, was to show that humans are living a life out of balance (the meaning of the word Koyaanisqatsi) in their grotesque, unnatural cities. I find that divergence to be the most powerful and compelling part of the movie. I didn't see it as a failure on the part of the creators that they did not convince me that they were right, I saw it as a triumph that they made something so complex that different people could watch it and come to different conclusions. I think that you guys can probably see how all that might relate to the difference of opinion between me and McNeil about the message of the episode.
What else... there's the sex I suppose. After noting that there'd been no cut-away sex, this is the second episode in a row to have it. Also odd that it involves Chakotay, whom the writers haven't seemed to have given up on shipping with Janeway yet; that could be seen as commentary on casual sex, but it would be a whole lot braver if they'd had Janeway be the one to get some. Just a little nit to pick in an otherwise fantastic show.
Watchability: 5/5
Bottom Line: Head and shoulders above the rest of this season, even well above the fours. I recall later Borg installments bothering me, so when this one was so great, it was a very pleasant surprise.
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