S6 E16: Collective

Paris, Neelix, Chakotay, and Kim are on a Delta Flyer Survey MissionTM when a Borg cube sneaks up on them and captures them. Voyager arrives late to the party, and sends Seven over to negotiate with the hive there, but it turns out that the hive is only composed of five premature drones. The ship had been infected with a pathogen that only affects cybernetic beings (perhaps the handiwork of the guys from Infinite Regress?), and now these "Borg kids" are the only ones left. While the Voyager crew attempts to mount a rescue effort, Seven meets with more success by appealing to the newfound individuality in these new drones. One of them, the leader, is aggressive and arrogant, but he is conveniently killed at the end. The four remaining kids join the Voyager crew.

At the rate that the Borg are experiencing malfunctions, it is becoming hard to consider them a threat anymore. I know that they have to water them down or they'd be too much of a threat for a lone Federation starship, but frankly I'd rather that the writers just use them more sparingly. Or, you know, get Voyager a cloaking device. That would be cool. There's no ill-advised treaty with the Romulans out here, and we've seen plenty of aliens with equivalent technologies lately. That'd be one way at least to keep the Borg around without neutering them completely.

So, while other characters have some activities to engage in, this is primarily another episode about Seven's quest for individuality and Janeway's quest to say "I told you so" to anything with a pulse (but mostly to Seven). There's the generic set up with Seven saying it wouldn't be possible to introduce individuality to the kids, and then Janeway smugly implying that Seven's too stupid to realize that she also happens to be a Borg drone who gained independence. And then Seven learning an important lesson about giving the kids a chance. The whole thing is so ham-fisted that I was bored throughout, watching the time on the DVD player.

The idea of Borg maturation chambers from Q Who is revisited here, but it feels out of place. In Q Who, when the Borg were more interested in assimilating technology than they were in assimilating people, baby Borg made sense as a means of reproduction. Why go through all the trouble of mass assimilation when you can catch a few important individuals and just compose the rest of your population with genetic engineering? The children here aren't test-tube babies though, they all seem to have been assimilated as children, and that doesn't really fit with the Borg philosophy of abandoning the weak or defective. In this very episode, the hive just abandons the children, ignoring their distress calls, but why assimilate them in the first place? When the Borg are focused on efficiency and perfection, this behavior doesn't make much sense.

Watchability: 2/5

Bottom Line: It's not really a bad or offensive episode, but it is completely predictable and unengaging.

Addendum: Chris reminded me that I did not mention the Borg baby that Seven rescues from the cube when its incubator malfunctions. He and Memory Alpha have informed me that we never see it again, so its only purpose is to be a prop for the Doctor to hold when he asks Janeway not to use the biological agent that they've harvested. It's kind of a cheap move, but it's hard to say that it is much different than Hugh's plot purpose in I, Borg. Again, a Federation crew has a weapon that can be used against the Borg; I guess the real distinction here is the paradox puzzle that Data and Geordi designed was intended to kill all Borg everywhere, whereas this one is of significantly smaller scale. I'd be interested to see if the weapon comes back, and if the debate about its use returns - Memory Alpha gave me no spoilers, so I'll just have to wait and see.

As for the baby, I'm okay with it not coming back. I'm comfortable assuming that they just kept it safe until they could find others of its species to hand it over to.