Everybody always says “going back to the well” like it’s a bad thing — “Oh, another Borg episode,
they’re going back to the well again!” But, in real life the well is where you get the water.
Going back to the well is a good thing, a necessary thing! So, why shouldn’t we
go back to the well?! . . . I think I just channeled a Voyager creative meeting . . .
This is a review of the two-part Star Trek:
Voyager episode “Unimatrix Zero.” If you have not seen this episode,
and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned: spoilers beyond this point!
You know, there’s a scene relatively early in part one of this episode where the
senior officers are having a meeting and talking about what they’re going to do,
and Tom Paris goes “Another round with the Borg?” And on my couch watching like,
“Buddy, I am right there with you.” But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves:
The episode opens on the Borg Queen dealing with a personnel issue — it
seems some drones have been afflicted with a mutation that . . . does something bad,
we don’t really know yet. The Queen questions such an afflicted drone about this, but the
drone says he knows nothing. So, the Queen turns to the other drones like “Off with his head!”
Actually what she says is “Bring me his cortical array!” And that’s the
line we go to the opening credits on — gotta love that scintillating dialogue,
always one of the hallmarks of Star Trek: Voyager.
Anyway, after the credits we find Seven of Nine wandering through a wooded area. She hears someone
call her human name — Annika — and then wakes up in her regeneration alcove. Apparently it was all
a dream. Seven goes to the Doctor like “But I don’t want to have dreams,” and the Doctor says
“Oh, you’ll get used to it.” Later on, she has another dream, and she talks to the guy who said
her name. His name is Axum, and he tells her this isn’t a dream — this is Unimatrix Zero!
And again we cut to commercial on a bit of flat technobabble,
because I guess it worked so well the first time!
It turns out, Unimatrix Zero is a kind of virtual reality environment that certain Borg drones can
enter while they’re in their regeneration cycle. Only drones with a particular genetic
mutation are able to access it. The visitors to Unimatrix Zero exist in the real world on Borg
cubes located throughout the galaxy, but they can come together and interact with each other in this
simulated space. So, it’s like Decentraland, only there are people in it, and those people
are Borg drones instead of crypto-bros, which I imagine makes it a far more pleasant experience.
Drones who enter Unimatrix Zero have no memory of it once their regeneration cycle ends,
but they do remember their lives in Unimatrix Zero when they are there. It turns out Seven of Nine
was a regular visitor for many years until she was disconnected from the collective by Voyager
a few years ago. But now, Axum has tracked her down and brought her back to Unimatrix Zero
because the Borg Queen has found out about their little VR clubhouse and is trying to shut it down.
Axum and the others have a solution: a nanovirus that can prevent the Queen
from detecting the genetic mutation that allows drones to access Unimatrix Zero. But,
since they all turn back into drones when they wake up from regeneration,
they need someone from outside the Collective to introduce the virus. That’s where Seven comes in.
Seven tells Janeway about Axum’s plan, and says they should treat it like any
other distress call and do what they can to help. But Janeway wants some more info first,
so she has Tuvok do a three-way mind-meld with her and Seven so Janeway can visit Unimatrix Zero,
too. She meets with Axum and says “Your nanovirus plan is good, and we can help you continue
to hide here, but have you considered greatly increasing the risk to all your lives instead?”
Janeway’s suggestion is to find a way for the drones of Unimatrix Zero to retain
their individuality once they wake up, so that they can form a resistance movement and start
to undermine the Collective from within. Axum’s like, “That’s ambitious, but I’m not really sure—”
“Great, it’s a deal!”
The Doctor takes Axum’s nanovirus and modifies it so that drones with the mutation will retain
their individuality once they wake up from regeneration. They locate a nearby Borg cube
and hatch a scheme to get aboard and introduce the virus so that it will spread throughout the entire
Collective. The Borg Queen learns of Janeway’s involvement and, suspecting she’s up to something,
makes a threatening phone call to Voyager, telling Janeway to mind her own business. Janeway’s like,
“That’s not really my thing,” and they proceed with the plan, which is this:
Voyager attacks the nearby Borg cube while Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna move in close
aboard the Delta Flyer and beam aboard. That part works okay — the Delta Flyer is destroyed,
but don’t worry, they build another one off-screen a few episodes later, it’s no problem because
nothing matters — then, once they’re aboard the cube, Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna are
assimilated. And it turns out that was part of the plan, so that part works okay, too!
By the way, have the Borg upped their assimilation game or what?! We see Janeway,
Tuvok and B’Elanna take those little tubes to the neck, there’s one brief cutaway to
Voyager as Chakotay orders a retreat, then we’re back aboard the cube and Janeway,
Tuvok and B’Elanna are fully Borgified! At first I thought there was a time jump or something,
but no, in part two dialogue between Chakotay and Paris establishes that the away team is only on
the cube for a few hours! Those nanoprobes must have been busting their teensy little asses, huh?
As part two begins, Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna are still on the Borg cube — because it’s only
been a couple of minutes — fully assimilated as drones, but able to retain their individuality
thanks to an anti-Borg vaccine the Doctor gave them all before they left. But uh oh,
Tuvok’s vaccine is wearing off, and he keeps hearing the voice of the Collective
intruding into his thoughts. One of those times the Borg Queen briefly hears Tuvok,
and realizes what’s going on. She figures out which cube the away team is on and has
some drones capture them, but not before B’Elanna is able to deliver the nanovirus
by injecting it into the core of the cube using her little wrist tubes.
If they’re not actually part of the Collective, how does she know how to work the little wrist
tubes? And how did the nanovirus get into the wrist tubes for B’Elanna to send it into the
cube? Did the Doctor infect B’Elanna with the virus and then after she was assimilated she was
somehow able to locate the virus in her own body and shoot it through
her little wrist tubes on command? How is any of this supposed to work?
The drones put Janeway into a holographic whatchamacallit so she can talk to the Borg
Queen, who says “Hey, I just thought you’d like to know all the suffering
you’ve caused. By injecting the Collective with that virus that allows the Unimatrix
Zero drones to disconnect and remain individuals, you’ve left me no choice
but to just blow up all the Borg vessels that have disconnected drones on them.”
“Couldn’t you just use other drones to find the
disconnected ones and re-assimilate them, or kill them if necessary?”
“Nope! Wouldn’t work! Gotta blow up the whole ship!” And the Borg Queen starts blowing up her
own ships. Hilariously, she tries to use this as leverage against Janeway — “If you don’t convince
them to shut down Unimatrix Zero and rejoin the Collective, I’ll keep destroying my own ships.”
Janeway’s like “Have we met? At the end of this season I’m gonna help my
future-self erase twenty-five years of history because it didn’t turn out
quite how I wanted it to — I do not give a shit!”
Meanwhile in Unimatrix Zero, Borg drones have figured out a way to invade and capture the
disconnected drones, so there’s a kind of primitive frontier war going on. Also,
it turns out Axum and Seven were a thing for a while, and he remembers but she doesn’t,
so it’s just weird. And then Janeway contacts Chakotay, ostensibly to relay the Borg Queen’s
demand that the disconnected drones in Unimatrix Zero rejoin the Collective,
but Chakotay reads between the lines and realizes that Janeway is actually telling him to shut down
Unimatrix Zero, so the Queen will have no way of finding the disconnected drones,
who can now retain their individuality in the real world, too, thanks to the nanovirus.
Voyager and another Borg vessel commandeered by disconnected drones work to disrupt the
frequency which carries Unimatrix Zero. All the remaining drones there leave. Seven says good-bye
to Axum — the cube he is on is so far away, it’s unlikely they’ll ever see each other again.
Meanwhile, the Borg Queen realizes what’s going on and that she’s about to lose her only remaining
way to find the wayward drones. She turns to the hologram of Janeway like “What the hell,
man?” And Janeway says, “I don’t compromise with Borg . . . except for that time a few
years ago when I offered them an ultimate weapon in exchange for a right of way.”
Anyway, the Queen blows up the cube Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna are on,
but Voyager beams them back just in time. They get de-Borgified. Unimatrix Zero is gone,
but the drones that were part of it are still out there with their individuality intact,
so they can carry on their resistance, which will alter the Borg Collective so
dramatically that none of this is ever, ever mentioned again.
This is pretty much the bottom of the barrel for me, as far as the Borg are concerned.
The episode attempts to tell a bloated, overly complicated story that doesn’t
make sense on multiple levels, carries no dramatic weight, and means nothing.
The Borg have been completely bled dry of anything that made them menacing,
or interesting. There’s no mystery left to them at all. There’s nothing unique or intimidating
about them. The Borg are just standard issue bad guy aliens at this point. We see drones
operating computers, pushing buttons. We’ve got the Borg Queen issuing verbal orders,
watching things on monitors, making threatening calls to Janeway.
I maintain that the Borg Queen is a fine character, or at least would have been if
we’d only seen her in Star Trek: First Contact. Her presence there makes sense and works,
but like the Borg in general, the more the Queen shows up, the less impressive she is. Here,
she comes across as out of the loop, incompetent, and easily outsmarted. The venomous but strangely
seductive serpent-in-the-garden character seen in First Contact is nowhere to be seen here.
Worse yet, the Queen’s continued presence — at least as depicted in this episode — only serves
to further weaken the Borg as a whole. Instead of a collective consciousness composed of billions
of minds all working in concert, we have the Queen who can hear the voices of her drones,
but also needs to ask for things to be brought to her, can be distracted without much effort,
and is apparently completely unaware when assimilated drones don’t join the
Collective — as is the case with Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna, even though the Queen is watching
at the moment they are assimilated. She watches them get assimilated, then doesn’t notice that
they aren’t actually in the Collective until Tuvok’s anti-Borg shot starts to wear off?
Speaking of the away team’s assimilation — they gloss over something that should be a
really big deal for the sake of giving the cliffhanger a shocking image to go out on,
then stumble right before the finish line. Getting assimilated is part of Janeway’s plan,
but we aren’t told that. We’re supposed to think the away team is in big trouble at the
end of part one when all three of them have been Borgified. But, Chakotay gives it away
in the next to last scene, when he says “So far so good” before ordering Paris to withdraw from
the fight with the cube. Why have him say that? Why not have him say something like “Let’s get
out of here” in a tense, serious tone that would make sense in hindsight once we know the deal,
but doesn’t give it away right before the end? Now that we know everything we’ve seen up to
this point has gone according to plan, we don’t feel a sense of peril for Janeway, Tuvok and
B’Elanna when we see them as drones, because we know they are right where they want to be.
Yes, they’re in danger, they’re surrounded by Borg, but they’re still in control of
themselves and carrying out their plan. And yes, the explanation for this we get in part
two — that they aren’t actually drones because the Doctor gave them a shot off-screen that
blocks them from hooking up to the Collective — completely removes the threat of being
assimilated — instead of a nightmare that some would rather die to avoid, it’s just something
else you can be inoculated against, no big deal. But even if that’s the direction you’re going,
why let the cat out of the bag before the “To Be Continued”?! Why not leave us in suspense,
thinking that they’ve been assimilated and that all is lost? Isn’t that a better cliffhanger?
Seven’s story isn’t much better, which is too bad since it’s supposedly the heart of the
thing. The idea of giving her a past life that she’s forgotten about is intriguing. Unimatrix
Zero is a place she apparently enjoyed being, she formed strong relationships with other
people there, and when she was removed from the Collective by the Voyager crew she lost
that and forgot about all those people. You’d think discovering that might cause some mixed
feelings. But the episode isn’t interested in that. The idea of Seven having a serious
relationship with someone in the past who she’s completely forgotten also has potential,
but Axum just turns out to be Seven’s version of Vedek Bareil. He’s not that interesting in
his own right, and there’s no chemistry between him and Seven. I’m supposed to
be sad when they have to say good-bye for the last time, but I don’t really care.
Also: Janeway really doesn’t come across well in this episode at all. She responds to the
call for help from the drones of Unimatrix Zero, declines to do what they’ve asked her to do — take
an action that would prevent their virtual sanctuary from being discovered — and takes
it upon herself to do something else that will put those drones in even more danger — and which,
if the Borg Queen had any idea what she was doing, would result in the almost instant death of all of
the disconnected drones — on the off-chance that they might be able to form a resistance to the
Collective from within. But . . . did Axum or any of the others ever say that’s what they wanted?
We see them going along with it, but that’s after Janeway has decided that’s what she’s going to do.
I’m not saying the story shouldn’t have pivoted from Axum’s original idea to the “let’s free the
Unimatrix Zero drones from the Collective” plan, just that the way it’s written makes
Janeway look like a terrible person who sees an opportunity to enlist others in a revolution
she herself won’t have to fight in, and then does it before they have a chance to object.
There are one or two good points scattered throughout this two-parter. I like the opening
tracking shot of the Borg Queen’s vessel — it’s reminiscent of similar shots we’ve seen
in the past without being an exact copy, and it does a good job giving us a sense of the
scale of the ship. There’s a scene early in part one where Tom Paris learns he’s being
promoted to lieutenant when he finds a box at his duty station containing his new rank pip,
and from across the bridge forever-ensign Harry says “I didn’t notice a little box on
my chair!” That made me chuckle. Harry, that poor bastard.
But overall, there’s not much of value here. This episode is exhibit A for how Voyager
wrecked the Borg by diluting or eliminating some of their most unique and formidable qualities,
and also through sheer overuse. The irresistible evil can only be successfully resisted so many
times before that “resistance is futile” line starts to ring hollow. If you compare the Borg
here to their first appearance in TNG’s “Q Who,” the change is immediately apparent and startling.
What was once alien, unknowable, and seemingly unbeatable is now just another bunch of goons with
shit glued to their faces. The Borg in Voyager are little more than Kazon in different costumes.
There’s no creative purpose for them to keep showing up. The Borg appear in Voyager
as frequently as they do because they were a known quantity, they were the most recognizable
villains of the TNG-era — probably the most recognizable villains of the entire franchise,
with the possible exception of the Klingons. So, the creators of Voyager kept bringing them
back. They had no new ideas, no fresh angles to explore — or if they did, they failed to actually
explore them. The Borg became staples of Voyager because the show’s writers and producers lacked
the creativity, or perhaps the creative freedom, to come up with anything else, anything better.
So, what choice did they have but to keep going back to the well?
The thing about going back to the well, though? There’s not much use in it once
that well has run dry. What good is it to keep bringing back the Borg when they’ve lost all
the qualities that made them compelling to begin with? After a certain point,
you’re just pulling up buckets of dirt and calling it water.
Look, this isn’t an all-time worst episode or anything. It’s not offensive or embarrassing.
It’s just a long way to go, for very little — a cliff-hanger with no tension,
a one-parter stretched into a two-parter through posturing and plot contrivances. This tedious,
busy, clunky, preposterous, emotionally flat episode shows us the Borg at their creative nadir,
and Voyager running on fumes.
Those are my thoughts on “Unimatrix Zero.” What do you think of this episode? Please share your
thoughts with me in the comments. If you’d like to support this channel — and I sure wish you would,
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Please join me next week for another retro review. Next time, we wrap up this batch of reviews with
a look at the one and only appearance of the Borg in Star Trek: Enterprise: “Regeneration”!
I’ll see you next week for that. Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!