Voyager Flashback: Collective

When a television show adds a new, cute kid to the cast of characters late in the series run, that's called a "Cousin Oliver." When a show adds four new kids to a show that already has a cute kid (Naomi Wildman)? That's Star Trek: Voyager's "Collective."

Voyager encounters a nearly inoperable Borg cube, where almost all the drones aboard have been killed by a mysterious virus. But even though the handful remaining are only children, they pose a threat to Voyager when they capture an Away Team... and the group's leader shows irrational, emotional behavior.

The "Cousin Oliver" is generally regarded as a negative, desperate trope for a TV show -- so I'm being a bit flippant to invoke it here. When the rescued Borg children are brought aboard Voyager at the end of this episode, it's not really done to be cute; it's actually opening up a lot of story avenues. Of course, it's basically juicing Seven of Nine's gradual takeover of the series, since the story avenues are pretty much all for her -- can she now learn to be a parent and mentor in much the way she was parented and mentored by Captain Janeway. (Kate Mulgrew had to be thrilled. This move sort of makes her character into a "grandmother.")

But besides the long term, this story about "child Borg drones" actually makes for an interesting one-off episode. It actually allows for a Borg episode that doesn't utterly de-fang them just so the Voyager crew can emerge victorious. If the Borg are erratic and vulnerable here, it makes sense in the context of this story. And of course, it makes for a good Seven of Nine episode in the moment, giving her quite a conflict to resolve. On the one hand, she's already bonding with the children (and Icheb more than the rest -- a trend that would continue in future episodes). On the other hand, she's rejecting the lot of them, telling Janeway that she thinks not all drones can be saved as she was.

Yet while the episode does a good job of setting things up for the future, it does a rather poor job of acknowledging the past. Seven of Nine shows absolutely no apprehension about going back aboard a Borg cube. When dealing with the young "First" drone, who is single-mindedly trying to relink to the Borg collective, she doesn't share her own similar experience when she was severed from the Collective (nor her regrets over her actions).

Then there's a lot of strangeness throughout the episode -- the sorts of things that would usually form my "other observations" section of a Star Trek flashback review, but there are a lot of them this time:

• Poker is always so bad in TV and movies. Here, besides the illegal "string betting" typical of fiction ("I see your 20... and raise you 50!"), it appears the hand played at the start of this episode is going counterclockwise!

• Remember when photon torpedoes were supposed to be a limited resource? Now, even the Delta Flyer has some.

• Maybe this was an issue with my subjective interpretation, but I always thought that the "Borg voice" we'd hear in communications was the sound of thousands of Borg speaking in unison. But in this episode, even though there's only five Borg kids, their calls to Voyager have that familiar "Borg voice." So, I guess the Borg just run an audio processor over their speech to be spooky.

• It's a weird choice to show that these Borg kids are "half finished" drones by removing large chunks of their armor. They end up with single sleeves and pant legs that look comical. And one of them is showing so much hip that it's practically side butt, which... these are kids, people!

• We learn that the Borg deliberately abandoned this cube after it became infected. Seems weird that they wouldn't self-destruct it, though. They know the value of their own technology, as we've seen drones show up to reclaim parts from fallen drones. Even if they think this cube is infected and thus risky to them, they should know better than to possibly let it fall into someone else's hands.

• Kim using playing cards to mark his path through the Borg cube is a clever idea... except that he places them in random order rather than in a pattern that would make it possible to remember the route (by number, by suit?).

• Also, when the drone we'll learn is Mezoti catches Kim doing this... how did she get there? In the immediately prior scene, she was gathered with all the other Borg in the chamber where we spend most of the episode. Was she like, "oh hey, I gotta go do a thing. BRB."

• There's actually a fifth Borg drone brought to Voyager: the baby who nearly dies before the Doctor intervenes. But we never hear about the Borg baby again.

• When they're planning to release a pathogen aboard the cube at the end of the episode, to overcome the Borg kids, why does no one consider that said pathogen could well be fatal to Seven of Nine also?

• The flip side of finding an amazing child actor is finding these twin boys who play Rebi and Azan. I mean, I don't know that they're bad actors, but I think they get one line each in this whole episode -- which is pretty typical for the rest of their time on the series. They apparently could not be trusted with more.
  

Add it all up, and "Collective" is a tough one to grade. It's an interesting story, but full of flaws. It sets up for future episodes without fully engaging with past episodes. It adds a new wrinkle to the series, but one that's positioned only to give more storylines to the character who already gets the most. Still... it's by no means a "bad" episode, so I think I'll call it a B.