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Warning: This review contains plentiful spoilers for Voyager's "Collective."
If you haven't seen the episode yet, you may want to resist this review ...
unless, of course, resistance is futile.


Nutshell: There's groundwork here for some potentially intriguing future
material, but the episode itself is lackluster.

Plot description: A group of adolescent Borg holds an away team hostage and
demands Janeway turn over her ship's navigational deflector so they can
contact the Borg and rejoin the collective.

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Star Trek: Voyager -- "Collective"

Airdate: 2/16/2000 (USA)
Teleplay by Michael Taylor
Story by Andrew Shepard Price & Mark Gaberman
Directed by Allison Liddi

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
Rating out of 4: **1/2

"Negotiation is irrelevant. You will be assimilated."
"Not today and not by you."
   -- The Borg and Janeway
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In "Collective," we're introduced to a small group of young Borg. They're
the sole survivors of a Borg cube that suffered a catastrophe, and now the
five of them are running this massive cube-shaped spaceship. Frankly,
they're not up to the job. When it comes to being Borg, these kids need
practice.

Enter the Delta Flyer, which is manned by the team of Chakotay, Paris, Kim,
and Neelix (after "Memorial" and now this installment, one wonders if this
is the new official crew of the Delta Flyer). We join them as--apparently
trying to be more like the TNG crew--they are engaged in a game of poker,
which is interrupted by the sudden appearance of said Borg cube, much to the
dismay of Ensign Paris, who had a full house. (The shot that reveals the
cube is nicely played for its mild shock value but logically dubious; one
wonders why the ability of the Borg to sneak up within visual range of a
ship isn't something we've seen before. What we have here is a scene for
spurring an argument about cinematic ends vs. means, but never mind.)

The Delta Flyer is captured in a tractor beam and the crew members are
thrown into a cell for use as ... hostages? Since when do the Borg take
hostages? We'll see in a moment, but first some chit-chat.

It's an episode like "Collective" that has me hoping, hoping, hoping that
the producers of Voyager are looking well beyond the end of the hour at
hand. If you take the hour for what we've got, let's just say it's not the
most compelling hour of all time.

For starters, I have to ask: Have the Borg as story devices been exhausted?
I remember the awe of first seeing them in TNG's "Q-Who" all those years
ago, and the terror of seeing them again in "The Best of Both Worlds." Over
the past few years of Voyager, that awe has been replaced with a sense of
nearly clockwork annual routine. The Borg were still interesting, but our
fear that they might assimilate us was hardly a factor anymore. Instead the
question was how the Borg would figure into a story about the nature of
human individuality, particularly once Seven of Nine came on board. In
spirit, she was our weekly Borg representative.

"Dark Frontier" last year was essentially the final word in Borg as
action/adventure devices--one of the best-produced (but not best-told) Trek
episodes of all time. Given that they were no longer the awesome terror of
the galaxy they once seemed to be, "Dark Frontier" was acceptable use of the
Borg, but by pulling out all the stops it also served as an implied
resignation that perhaps the Borg were ready for retirement. An idea can
only go so far before it becomes tired.

"Collective" appears to be an attempt to tell a "different" kind of Borg
tale: Since we can no longer plausibly battle the Borg, we'll instead
negotiate with adolescent drones--whose behavior resembles your average
adolescent human more than your average Borg. When Voyager comes looking for
their missing team, they find the Borg cube, but because there are only five
drones--severed from the hive mind--who haven't a clue how to run a Borg
ship, Voyager is able to swiftly stalemate the confrontation.

We learn that the five children--or "neo-natal drones," as the story
sometimes calls them--had emerged prematurely from their "maturation
chambers" after the shipwide catastrophe, a cybernetic-targeting pathogen
that infected the ship and killed all the drones. The maturation chambers
protected the children from being infected.

Now the juvenile drones demand that Voyager surrender its navigational
deflector. They hope to modify it so they can contact the Borg and be
reintegrated into the collective. If Janeway turns over the deflector, the
Borg will release their hostages.

One oddity with "Collective" is its somewhat inaccurate title. These five
Borg do not seem to comprise a collective. At first they do, but then they
don't. They seem more like individuals who answer to a willingly established
hierarchy. They don't act much like Borg. The leader of the five, the
"First" (Ryan Spahn), represents the story's primary source of conflict:
He's a drone who follows the Borg protocols and intends to rejoin the
collective. It would seem the other four drones are less mature, and thus
don't hold strong Borg-like opinions; they follow the First simply because
he's the First.

But it seems these "drones" are capable of free, independent thought, and
that provides a source of confusion at times, because it's hard to determine
how exactly the story envisions these Borg. They're "different," which is
supposed to be part of the point, I think. But they also talk among
themselves like any individuals might. There's often no sense that they're
connected, and something about it just doesn't sit right. In order to
continue using the Borg, it seems the writers have to make them
progressively less like Borg, and more human.

Naturally, the story involves heavy focus on Seven of Nine (be sure to join
the online petition for renaming this series "Star Trek: Seven of
Nine"--visit http://www.st-hypertext.com/misc/renamevoy.html) who beams over
to the Borg ship to confirm the well-being of the prisoners and negotiate
with the drones. The core of the story emerges when Seven discovers that the
Borg collective will *not* be dispatching a ship to retrieve this cube,
which has been deemed a total loss. To the Borg, five neo-natal drones are
not worth salvaging (which strikes me as perhaps the most believable Borg
sentiment in the episode).

The central dilemma is (of course) a human one: Janeway proposes that the
drones be "saved" if at all possible. Sure, there's some plotting along the
way, including (a) Doc reluctantly re-synthesizing the pathogen that killed
the Borg ship, for possible use as a weapon against the drones should
negotiations fail; and (b) Harry Kim regaining consciousness aboard the
docked Delta Flyer unbeknownst to the Borg, and his eventual venture through
the cube in an attempt to blow up a shield generator so Voyager can beam out
the prisoners. But if you want to know what the episode is *about*, it's the
dynamic between Seven and the drones as she tries to negotiate with a leader
who has one, and only one, goal--to rejoin the collective. Along the way,
she comes close to connecting with one of the other drones, the Second (Manu
Intiraymi), who seems to have traces of his pre-assimilated individual self
somewhere beneath the surface.

Alas, these dynamics aren't on par with the potential. I expected more. The
episode is too content to resign itself to standard negotiation-standoff
"tension" dialog and predictable chatter. Although representing an
inflexible attitude that seems to fit the Borg, the First is not a very
interesting character. And with all due respect to the actors portraying the
Borg, they just don't measure up. Here, one can very easily see Ryan's
mastery of her character and the perfect vocal control; she is able to
convey the masked emotion and Borg-like monotone without seeming forced, and
there are subtle nuances that blend right into her performance. The same
cannot be said for the other Borg players. They always seem to be "acting,"
and not convincingly (especially Spahn as the First).

What plays better are some sincere scenes between Janeway and Seven. The
idea of utilizing Seven's insights to bring these Borg to some sort of new
understanding of their situation is something that makes sense--after all,
Seven experienced the process of being de-Borgified first-hand. The show's
best-written scene reveals that the mental structure that the collective
gave Seven when it assimilated her is an ordered structure that has also
been a source of strength in regaining her individuality. It's a sense of
order the Borg children, who were not fully developed before emerging from
their maturation chambers, do not have. Seven worries that the transition
for them will be even more difficult than hers. Between Seven, this
installment, and "Survival Instinct," there ought to be some sort of therapy
program for ex-Borg.

The final act of "Collective" is a muddle that doesn't work. It's as if the
writers couldn't figure out an adequate way to resolve the story. The ending
here is one of those tech wrap-ups where we have Janeway and Torres aboard
Voyager throwing around meaningless technobabble dialog in a desperate
last-minute search for a way to rescue the hostages before Voyager is
severely damaged. Meanwhile, the final conflict on the Borg ship is poorly
staged. Moments of tension feel misplayed by the actors and director, and
the fact that the First is killed as a result of his inability to go against
his Borg directives is a story point that doesn't come across as
particularly important, though I get the feeling it was meant to be. Oh, and
we've got Harry Kim lying critically ill, injected with nanoprobes, for no
particularly necessary reason (beyond keeping him a peripheral aspect of the
plot, which itself seems unnecessary).

And after the crisis ends, my lingering question was: What happened to the
Borg cube? It apparently didn't self-destruct, so did Janeway just leave all
that technology floating in space? In "Dark Frontier" the crew shaved 15
years off the trip by using Borg technology. Shouldn't this cube be a major
cache of tech foodstuffs? But never mind.

That brings us to the story's coda, which simultaneously gives me great hope
and worry. Four of the five drones (as well as a Borg infant that is beamed
aboard the ship) are rescued and turned back into individuals. This screams
for future storylines. We have four youths whose source for identification
will be Seven of Nine. The pupil will now become the teacher. This could
make for challenging material, a source of growth in the series. Then again,
it could also make for redundancy if not handled carefully. After all, we've
been down this road with Seven for almost three seasons now.

Though it's too early to say, the final scene already has me voicing one
gripe: According to what the story told us earlier, these children are
supposed to be disturbed--more so than Seven (who in "The Gift" was violent
and unstable after being severed from the Borg). But they don't seem
disturbed at all to me. They seem to be handling it way too okay.

But bringing aboard more Borg--and younger people--reveals a potential for
the sort of community-building that this series should've focused on from
day one. The key word is *potential*. Will it be used? (Of course, the
worst-case scenario would be never hearing about these Borg again. That
would be unforgivable, and probably unlikely, but not unthinkable given
Voyager's track record. We haven't, for example, heard one single peep about
those Equinox crew members that joined Voyager at the beginning of the
season.)

Bottom line for "Collective": The general theme here that examines drones
hanging with uncertain self-identities was done in fifth season's "Drone"
(and to a lesser extent in this season's "Survival Instinct")--and I assure
you it was done with much greater insight. "Collective" is reasonable, but
it probably works best as stage setting. Now let's just hope the players
actually decide to show up.

--
Next week: Return to Fair Haven. Just what we all wanted.

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Copyright (c) 2000 by Jamahl Epsicokhan, all rights reserved. Unauthorized
reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.

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