Welcome to Nerd Heaven.
I’m Adam David Collings, the author of Jewel of The Stars.
And I am a Nerd.
This is episode 7 of the podcast. Now just as I'm starting to record this, it's starting to thunder outside. I don't know if you'll hear it. We'll see what happens.
We’re still working our way through my list of 10 episodes and moves you should watch
before Star Trek Picard.
Today, we’re shifting from The Next Generation into Star Trek Voyager.
True, Picard never appeared on Voyager, but another important character that will be appearing
in the new show was a Voyager regular.
I’m talking, of course, about Seven of Nine.
So today, we look at my favourite Voyager story, Scorpion.
The IMDB description for this episode reads About to enter Borg space, Voyager finds a
threat so devastating that even the Borg cannot deal with it.
And this episode first aired on the 21 may 1997
Do it.
This episode probably has the best teaser of any show I’ve seen.
We open on two Borg cubs.
Their traditional greeting playing in that chilling voice.
“We are the Borg.”
Our first through is, oh crap.
It’s the Borg.
And this time there are two ships!
And then something fires and the two cubs explode.
WHAT?
The Borg are the most powerful, most fearsome force in the Star Trek universe.
And something just tore through them like they were paper.
That’s terrifying.
When you look at it, there are a LOT of similarities between this episode and Best of Both Worlds.
They’re structured similarly, with slowly raising stakes.
They balance the Borg stuff with some great character drama.
There’s that same sense of dread.
And it even takes place over the season 3 / season 4 transition.
I can’t believe this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to re-capture te magic.
The really surprising thing is, it kinda worked.
Scorpion is a great episode.
So John Rhys Davis gues stars in Star Trek!
He plays a holodeck recreation of Leonardo DaVinci.
When I first watched this, I didn’t pick up on the name, but later, I realised, Oh,
it was that guy who I was familiar with from Indianna Jones, who would go on to play Gimli
in Lord of The Rings.
This sequence is actually quite long.
At first, it may seem a pointless addition to the edisode, if a great one, but it sets
up the relationship between the characters, and feeds into an important scene later.
The idea that Voyager could be heading into Borg space is absolutely terrifying.
Just one of their ships almost destroyed the human race.
But to be going into the heart of their territory, their turf.
That’s almost beyond comprehension.
How will they survive this?
The southwest passage is an interesting possibility.
An area devoid of Borg presence.
Surely that sounds too good to be true.
Even if it wasn’t, having so many borg ships on either side would have to be a terrifying
prospect.
Of course, there is the question, would be borg have any interest in a single starfleet
vessel in the delta quadrant?
The borg often ignore that which they don’t consider a threat, and Voyager is no threat.
Is there any advantage to the borg in assimilating Voyager?
Maybe not.
At least, not at the moment.
Still, I wouldn’t want to risk it.
The doctor’s plan to learn how the assimilation process works and try to develop a medical
defense is a great idea.
This episode gives us our first mention of Borg nanoprobes, but they were implied in
First contact.
The nanoprobes start by taking over the function of the victim’s blood cells.
Making the host reliant on the borg technology.
I know I keep using this word, but I say it again.
Terrifying.
15 borg vessels approach voyager.
Just like Best of Both worlds, this story keeps upping the stakes.
But after a quick scan, they fly on by.
Seems the borg have something more important on their collective mind.
There’s a light-hearted scene in Janeway’s quarters as she talks with Chakotay, limiting
the inflections of Picard and another captain.
This installs a small amount of humour into an otherwise tense episode.
Humour can be used effectively in a dark episode like it is here.
This is an example of doing it effectively.
There’s a strong tendency very recently, which mostly comes from the Marvel movies,
to inject large amounts of humour to “keep things light”.
Most of the time, it’s not done well, at least, according to my tastes.
In this scene with Janeway and Chakotay, the tension is releived, just a tad, but the seriousnes
of their situation is still there.
Contract this with the “Dance off Bro” moment at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy,
which completely deflates every molecule of tension, and for me, killed the movie from
that point on.
Personal taste, obvious, but I much prefer how Voyager is doing it here.
This scene also has some awesome character stuff.
It establishes just how far Janeway and Chakotay’s relationship has come.
How much mutual support and trust exists between them.
It’s powerful stuff and I love it.
This moment is actually the absolute high point of their relationship.
So remember it.
When voyager finds the destroyed remnants of those 15 cubes, wow.
As Tom says, “who could do this to The Borg.”
If I weren’t already terrified before, I would be now.
Harry, of course, sees the optimistic angle in this.
The enemy of the Borg cold be an ally.
But what if they’re not?
They spot an alien ship attached to one of the cubes.
And decide to investigate.
Voyager really benefits from First Contact’s redesign of the Borg for the big screen.
That redesign carries over here and looks great.
The inside ofhte borg ship is creepier than we’ve ever seen it before.
The first time I saw this scene I had goosebumps.
Put yourself in Harry’s hoes.
The souds, the sparks, the drones that can barely function.
Species 8472 are one of the most interesting aliens Star Trek has ever done.
The first we see of them is their ship.
It’s a biological vessel.
The interior design is awesome.
You see what looks like a spinal cord.
A circulatory system.
A computer core laced with neural peptides.
The episode spends a few minutes just exploring the wonders of this ship.
The aliens themselves are awesome.
Their non-humanoid design could never be done with a person in a suit.
CGI creature effects were stil lvery much in their infancy at this point, but despite
the low resolution and primitive texturing, it looks great.
When it jumped out at Harry, I jumped 50 metres.
And do you notice the music in this episode?
It was especially good.
It tooks things to a new level that voyager rarely went.
The aliens are telepathic.
Their proximity is affecting Kes, enhancing her abilities.
And we learn about the alien’s motivation.
It’s summed up in the liine “the weak will perish.”
Kes says, “it’s not the borg we should be worried about, it’s them.”
I’m not sure which is more terrifying, the borg’s emotionless pursuit, or species 8472’s
cold malevanance.
Both are chilling.
Harry’s in a bad way.
The alien cells are consuming his body.
It makes good sense that the humans have an advantage in this situation.
What the borg can’t assimilate, they can’t understand.
But humans don’t assimilate, we investigate.
In this case, that gives us the advantage.
The alien cells have an incredible immune response.
But by coding the borg nanoprobes to disguise as alien cells, they can fight them.
This is great stuff.
And then the terrible truth.
The north west passage is free of borg because that’s where species 8472 are coming from.
They’ve come from another place where there is no other life.
And they intend to wipe out all life in our universe.
It’s like the nazis only much worse.
They are the only species that deserves to exist.
Everything else is inferior and must be destroyed.
I’ve heard it speculated, that maybe, there was other life where species 8472 came from,
but they killed it all.
How scary is that?
So Janeway goes back to the holodeck to seek counsel from DaVinci.
Maybe the character can spark something in her mind.
I quite enjoyed DaVinci’s suggestion to appeal to God, as a person of faith myself.
In Star Trek, prayer is not the usual suggestion when people cannot find a solution to their
problem.
Not being in God, janeway politely rejects Leonado’s offer to visit the monastry and
pray together, but it does strike a new idea in her mind.
A deal with the devil, or in other words, an a temporary alliance with the Borg.
It’s an awesome scene.
At face value, an alliance with the borg is ridiculous.
But as Janeway points out, this is a unique situation.
They’ve never been so vulnerable, and the Voyager crew have something they need.
Chakoty thinks the plan is too risky.
He shares an interesting story about a scoprion, explaining that a monster cannot change its
nature, not matter how much it may want, or even need to.
It’s actually quite effective.
The argument between Janeway and Chaokotay is brilliant.
They both make good points.
It digs deep into their characters.
This is where their relationship starts to go downhill.
Janeway feels she longer has his support, only his obedience.
She feels that she is alone.
If you had any doubts about the power of Species 8472, we see them fire a beam and destroy
an entire planet.
This is Shadow and Vorlon level firepower, if you’re familiar with babylon 5.
As with best of both worlds, I didn’t watch this episode on TV.
At this point, we were so far behind America, and getting further behind.
They’d kind of alternative between DS9 and Voyager, showing one in the first year, and
then showing the other show the next year.
I gave up on Channel 9 very quick and ended up buying every episode on VHS.
They’d put out a tape with 2 episodes every month.
12 tapes every year.
So I only had to wait one month to see part 2, wheras in America, they had to wait 3 months.
We had a little christmas tradition.
Every January, during the school holidays, we’d make our way down to Hobart, the capital
city of my state.
While there, we’d visit this sci-fi shop called Area 52 and buy the season premiers
of DS9 and Voyager.
That was an exciting summer.
Not only did we get part 2 of scorpion, and the introduction of Seven of Nine, we also
got the beginning of the dominion war.
This truly was the golden age of Star Trek.
The show was at its height.
So Janeway has convinced the borg to work together on a weapon that will work against
species 8472.
The borg will take Voyager to the other end of their space.
The doctor’s cure works, saving Harry’s life, and proving that they can fight the
aliens on the cellular level.
It makes sense that the borg would want to temporarily assimilat Janeway and Tuvok in
order to work more efficiently together.
Janeway comes up with an alternative suggestion.
Choice a representative to speak fo rthe borg, just as they did when they assimilated Picard.
Enter Seven of Nine.
Interesting.
The diagram of the borg drone looks very much like the ships from descent.
I don’t know if I ever noticed that before.
For whatever reason, they chose to to do the distortion effect on seven’s voice.
I’m not sure why.
The borg sacrifice one of their cubes to protect voyager from species 8472.
It makes sense from their pont of view.
It’s just a tactical decision.
Janeway’s life is in danger, and she needs surgury.
She makes her wishes very clear to chakotay.
The alliance must continue.
The alliance is very difficult to keep together.
The borg want to modify things.
I can understand their perspective.
Things are going badly.
The war will be lost by the time they get Voyager clear of borg space.
Therefore, they have to adjust the plan.
Chakotay refuses to budge and ends the alliance.
The last thing janeway would want.
I’m glad I’m not in chakotay’s place, because I don’t know what I’d do.
When the borg try to assimilate the ship, Chakotay has no choice but to blow them all
into space.
Seven of Nine is the only one left now, but she manages to pull them into fluidic space,the
realm of species 8472.
I wonder if fluidic space is somewhere physically in our universe, or if it’s in another dimension?
Again, some great world building.
So much more creativity is put into species 8472 than usual for star trek aliens.
And Chakotay guesses the disturbing truth.
The borg stared this war.
They entered fludic space in an attempt to assimilate them.
Their mistake may have destroyed our entire galaxy.
Janeway has recovered from her surgery, and she’s NOT happy.
Chakotay’s decision to end the alliance in opposition to her orders damages their
relationship.
Over the course of this episode, they manage to work out their differences, but the relationship
has been damaged.
Just as in real life, when a relationship has been damaged like this it takes a longer
time to heal.
Janeway and Chokatay’s relationship will improve over time, but it will never really
get back to where it was at the beginning of this episode.
They use a power surge to disable Seven on Nine when she tries to assimilate Voyager.
That surge disconnects her from the collective.
Like Hugh, she is now alone.
Will she begin to regain her individuality as he did?
One interesting thing we learn.
Seven of Nine was originally human.
Her name was Anika Hansen.
That may seem like a huge coorcidance, but it makes sense the Borg would choose a former
human as their representative.
So that was Scorpion.
It leaves us with a lot of uncertainty regarding what will happen with Seven of Nine.
We’ll pick that up with the very next episode next time, The Gift.
We know Seven on Nine will play a part in the new Star Trek Picard.
This was the episode that introduced her, but we really haven’t seen her yet.
We’ve seen the borg drone that became her.
Next time we’ll meet the actual character.
I’ll see you then,
Live long and propser.
Make it so.