| On the run from species 8472, Janeway asks Tuvok to join her on the Borg cube so that he can help her develop weapons. When the Borg attempt to induct them (temporarily) into the hive, because verbal communication is limited, Janeway wheels and deals her way out of it by asking for an appointed representative. Thus, Seven of Nine joins the show. 8472 catches up with the two ships and, because the Borg view themselves to be more expendable than Voyager, they sacrifice the cube to destroy the lone 8472 ship - but not before beaming over a boarding party to assimilate a cargo bay. Janeway is injured in this maneuver, and tells Chakotay to make this alliance work, whatever the cost, before slipping into a coma. Seven starts playing hardball with Chakotay, insisting that they turn back; Chakotay fights back by ordering the ship to the nearest habitable planet where they can drop the Borg off. Seven leads the Borg in an attempt to throw the Voyager through a singularity into 8472 space, and while all the Borg but here are vented into space by Chakotay, she succeeds. Now in the "fluidic space" that 8472 inhabits, Janeway wakes up and gets all self-righteous on Chakotay for not getting them all assimilated. Chakotay points out that every Borg ever (in Voyager) has been all deception all the time, and look, they even were the ones to originally open the doors to 8472's realm in the first place. Janeway says that they shouldn't fight, and that even though really he started it they should call a truce long enough to fix this mess they're in. With the willpower of a thousand suns, Chakotay manages not to roll his eyes, and agrees. The crew perfects the weapons and they blow up a bunch of ships, then return to Borg space and blow up another large batch before 8472 retreats. Seven attempts to wrest control of the ship again, but Janeway and Chakotay are ready for her and link Chakotay into the hive mind long enough to distract Seven from their (successful) attempt to sever her from the collective. |
Right when we first meet Seven, in her very first line, she uses the first person singular ("I") pronoun, something that the Borg are pretty infamous for not doing. Of course, two of the three (sounds like a Borg name) Borg who have done so in the past were the Queen and Locutus, the latter being exactly the kind of representative that Janeway had been asking for. However, the writers then make the choice to have her refer to herself in the third person for the rest of the episode ("this drone"). It's not necessarily a bad thing for her to use "I", but I think it would have been more powerful to save that for later on, only after she has been severed from the collective, especially if they're going to waffle on it and only use it once.
As you may have been able to tell from my recap's tone, I am still very displeased with the Janeway-Chakotay conflict. Seriously, up until now, Janeway has had a model Federation citizen for a first officer (as much as that conflicts with his back-story) - and I'm not even convinced that he was really in the wrong here. Since the Borg were betraying everyone and everything, weasel-wording their way through the agreement already, Chakotay's actions could easily be seen as attempting to drive a hard bargain, or simply trying to appear to the Borg as if he were as resolute as they were. And the resolution, an attempt from the writers to make Janeway look like the bigger person, makes me support Chakotay in this conflict even more.
I don't want to rehash my whole thing from Real Life about professionalism, but I will say this: while having the whole crew of TNG behave like idealized adults may not have been accurate, and may have given me unreasonable expectations for ordinary human interactions, it (and TOS and DS9) are alone (together) in a vast sea of television shows populated with people who do not possess significant emotional maturity. There is room on air for both points of view, but Trek is one of the few places I can go to watch people not be petty towards each other. I wish that Voyager could be one of those places, but that does not appear to be in the writers' plan.
While I'm also disappointed in general with the level of deceit that the Borg have developed in Voyager, I was very pleased with the cube's sacrifice. It was the perfect move for a species of expendable drones, working for the greater good. Seven of Nine's delivery was dripping with disdain, unlike TNG Borg (who deadpan everything) or the First Contact Queen (who seems to prefer to revel in her superiority), but the content is all pretty classicly Borg.
Watchability: 2/5
Bottom Line: This episode featured the Janeway/Chakotay conflict more centrally, and its score suffered accordingly. Season to taste with a mixed bag of Borg elements and voila!, you have Scorpion, Part II.
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