| A Borg scout vessel bears down on Voyager, but is destroyed when Kim beams a torpedo directly aboard their ship before they raise shields. The goal, however, was just to incapacitate it; Voyager quickly moves on to another Borg target, a damaged sphere, intent on seizing its transwarp drive. After running drills, Seven is contacted by the Borg queen, who informs her that she is aware of Voyager's plans and will spare them if Seven willingly rejoins the collective. Janeway is having second thoughts about bringing Seven along, but Seven, displaying her unfamiliarity with all recorded human fictional media since the beginning of time, decides that the best course of action is to keep the communication a secret while also adamantly insisting on going on the larceny spree. Well, the mission is a success, except that Seven breaks Janeway's poor little heart by abandoning the crew to rejoin the Borg. Certain that there is no way that Seven could possibly not adore her with every fiber of her being, Janeway begins searching for transmissions from the Borg, which she finds, and initiates a plan to rescue Seven with the Delta Flyer. She takes a couple other people with her, but there's really no reason to because she just does everything herself. The queen and Janeway engage in a pissing match over who is more deserving of Seven's devotion (despite like three scenes in which Seven persistently displays no desire to return to the Borg), and then they escape. They are followed, but Voyager collapses the transwarp conduit, destroying the pursuing ships. Voyager then shaves fifteen years off the trip home using the drive, and then the drive doesn't work anymore, I guess. |
Even though this was originally aired as a two hour episode, it really feels like a two parter, and not in a good way. The first half of the episode is waaaay too long, as if the writers were trying to drag it out to have the reveal of the Borg queen's existence at the halfway point as a cliffhanger spot for reruns. A large chunk of time is dedicated to rehearsing the heist, a trope common to heist films, except there is absolutely no energy in that scene. The viewer is supposed to think that it is the real attempt, but we've all seen a movie before (and Janeway already said that they were going to have to run some simulations), and I was just thinking "man, I wish this were the real thing, because then I wouldn't have to watch it all over again."
Now, in the DS9 episode (Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang) which follows the same trope, they go over the plan just so that we can see what was supposed to happen, in contrast to the actual attempt in which things (everything) go wrong and the characters must cope. But in Dark Frontier, we just see the same sequence all over again (though slightly, blessedly sped up), with the one small hiccup where Seven abandons the crew.
I've read and/or heard responses to the Borg queen's appearance in Voyager being a surprise, given that we saw her die in First Contact. However, that very same movie established that she was already killed once in Best of Both Worlds, Part II, so, for me at least, there was no surprise at all in her reveal - just disappointment. I'll say it plainly: I don't like the Borg queen. First Contact was a very fun movie, definitely the fastest-paced and most action-packed of the Trek movies, but the Borg queen, even taken as just a physical manifestation of the hive mind, diminishes their appeal for me.
The Borg of Q Who and Best of Both Worlds were a kind of the anti-enemy, faceless, nameless, patient, and strangely noble in their intentions. Assimilating Picard as the face of the invasion was sickening not just because it was our captain, but because the unfeeling collective was just using him in an attempt to make us feel better about our fate - but despite the good intentions, the move of course just terrified us even more. And knocking out the Borg's public relations representative was completely irrelevant - he was, after all, just the flesh of a face stretched across a body in the hive mind, a la the main Vidiian from Faces.
While I found the Seven/Janeway/Queen love triangle completely unmoving (as you probably could have guessed from the tone of my recap), I did enjoy the look into life on the Raven, the ship that Seven grew up on with her parents. Her parents get to play the naive Federation citizens, curious about the Borg, doing the Federation cultural observation thing, until their subjects turn on them. That's another of my favorite things about the Borg; the way they are very suited to subverting standard Federation procedure. Also, this back-story made possible the nice moment when Seven's drone-Dad shows up on the Borg ship, staring blankly ahead.
Watchability: 3/5
Bottom Line: I think that, due to the excitement of making an "event show," this particular concept ended up being stretched over what is simply too much time. If they'd managed to boil this episode down to the one-hour mark, I think this would've been a 4/5 (assuming the stuff they cut wasn't the Raven back-story.
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