Ah, the Borg — the perfect antagonists for the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And
introduced by Q — the perfect antagonist for the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This is a review of the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Q Who?” If you
have not seen this episode, and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned:
spoilers beyond this point!
Yes, the first Borg episode is also the third Q episode! I’m going to do a batch of these
reviewing Q episodes a bit later — I believe I have those scheduled to start late this
summer — but for now, we get a two-for-one! One story with two iconic villains! It’s like
a Batman movie! Except, this is about a crew of twenty-fourth century space explorers encountering
a godlike being who flings them across the galaxy to face a group of unstoppable cybernetic aliens.
So, it’s like a more plausible Batman movie!
I’ll go ahead and tell you up front that I think “Q Who?” is one of the best episodes Star Trek:
The Next Generation ever produced. The fact that it’s neither the best Borg episode or Q
episode speaks to how great both the Borg and Q are — up to a point — but I will talk about
those better episodes when I review them. For now, let’s talk about what happens in “Q Who?”
Newly assigned crew member Ensign Sonia Gomez spills some hot chocolate on Captain Picard — why
do the replicators in engineering even make food? This seems like a ridiculously easy
problem to fix! Picard obviously isn’t happy, but he handles the situation with restraint
and says “Hey, no worries, Ensign Gomez, I’ll just go change into a clean uniform,
then wait an episode and quietly transfer you off the ship, never to be seen again
until your reappearance as a member berry in an animated series thirty years from now.”
Picard heads to his quarters to change, but when he steps off the elevator he suddenly
finds himself in a shuttlecraft — piloted by Q! And they are far, far away from the Enterprise,
because in his last appearance Q agreed never to trouble the Enterprise again,
so he’s meeting with Picard here instead of on the ship, thus technically satisfying the
terms of their arrangement. It’s Q’s version of “I’m not touching you!”
Back on the Enterprise, Guinan’s spidey sense is tingling. She calls
Riker on the bridge to ask if anything is wrong, and Riker’s like “Everything’s fine,
weirdo, how ‘bout you stick to pouring drinks and let me run the ship for awhile?” But then,
they realize Captain Picard and a shuttlecraft are missing, and begin a search. On the shuttle,
Picard finally gets tired of waiting Q out and goes “Okay, fine, what do you want?!” Q transports
them back to the Enterprise, where he runs into Guinan — they do not like each other — and then
makes Picard an offer: Q has been ostracized by the other members of the Q Continuum,
but his misfortune is Picard’s good luck, because Q wants to become a member of the Enterprise crew!
Picard’s like, “Nah.” Q’s like, “Are you sure? You’re about to enter areas of space
your people have never been before. You might need someone like me to help you out!” Picard’s like,
“Nope, we’re good.” And Q’s like, “We’ll just see about that!” And he snaps his fingers and sends
the Enterprise spinning through the galaxy at incredible speed, stopping at a point so far from
where they started that Data estimates it will take them two years just to make it back to the
nearest starbase. Q says “Have fun!” and vanishes. Picard turns to Guinan and says “Your people have
been in this part of space before. What should we do?” And Guinan says, “Uhhh, leave. Now.”
So, Picard takes the earnest advice of his oldest friend and most trusted advisor,
completely ignores it, and decides to stick around and check things out for
a while. Within a few minutes, they’ve run into the Borg, whose ships are big cubes,
and who have the really annoying habit of dropping in uninvited and using your computer without even
asking! Hey! I pay for that internet access, buddy! You want free wi-fi, go to McDonalds!
The Borg drone accesses the computer in engineering, totally ignores Picard
when Picard tries the standard Star Trek “we mean you no harm” thing. Worf kills
the drone with a high power phaser blast, but another drone beams in and takes over,
and this one has upgraded to generate a shield to block Worf’s phaser. He finishes whatever he’s
doing and beams back to the cube as the dead Borg vanishes. Not long after, the Borg cube
attacks the Enterprise. After a brief but tense battle, the Enterprise is able to damage the cube
enough to break off its attack, but not before eighteen Enterprise crew members are killed.
Picard calls a meeting of his officers, along with Guinan, and Guinan says that a
hundred years ago the Borg destroyed the home of her people, and that there’s no negotiating
with them. Q pops in to reinforce what Guinan says: the Borg are users,
they only want to consume things they judge as being useful to them, they aren’t interested in
diplomacy or political conquest, and they won’t stop until they get what they want.
So, Picard absorbs the dire warnings of both his most trusted advisor and the omnipotent being,
completely ignores them, and turns to Riker and says “Why don’t you beam over to that
Borg cube and see what’s what?” Riker, Data and Worf beam over, discover that the vast
ship is heavily populated with Borg drones, but most of them seem to be plugged into the wall,
and they take no notice of the away team whatsoever. They wander around a bit,
find some babies being kept in drawers — that works, by the way,
you can barely hear them — and then Data realizes that the Borg are all plugged in
because they’re using their combined efforts to repair the ship. Now Picard’s like, “Okay,
time to go!” They beam the away team back, and the Enterprise high tails it outta there.
The Borg cube comes back to life and gives chase. The Enterprise fires phasers but it’s no good,
they can’t slow the cube down. The Borg attack with weapons that weaken the Enterprise’s shields.
Eventually the shields drop. The Borg are closing. The only option Picard has left is to launch
photon torpedoes at close range, but without shields the explosion would destroy the Enterprise
as well as the Borg cube. At this point, Q is like, “Well, anyway, I’m outta here.” But Picard
says, “Hey, before you go, could you maybe save all our lives? Pretty please? I admit we’re in
over our heads and need your help, if that’s what you need to hear.” And Q’s like, “It is!” And he
snaps his fingers, and the Enterprise zooms back to where it started, not a Borg cube in sight.
Picard turns to Q and says “I get it. We were too cocky, we weren’t prepared for what just
happened. You could have taught us this lesson without eighteen of us getting killed though,
probably.” Q calls that “a bloody nose” and tells Picard if he can’t take it he should just
pack up and go home, because the universe is a dangerous place, in case he forgot.
In a final scene in Ten Forward, Picard is thoughtful about what’s just happened.
He tells Guinan, “You know, we were a little full of ourselves. Maybe Q did a favor for us.
Those of us who survived, I mean — oh, Jesus, do I have to write condolence
letters to eighteen families? I didn’t even know those people!” Guinan reminds Picard that,
regardless of Q’s intentions, as a result of this encounter, the Borg are now aware of their
existence. And that means only one thing: they will be coming. Probably next season.
“Q Who?” is one of those episodes that I have watched a bunch of times,
and I appreciate it more and more every time I see it. Things move pretty slow until about
halfway through the second act — Picard winds up on the shuttlecraft with Q and they kinda just
hang out there for a couple of scenes, while the rest of the gang on the Enterprise mill
around trying to figure out what’s going on — but ultimately I think that serves the episode well,
because the arc of this story is near constant escalation from tedium to maximum tension.
Once they encounter that Borg cube, the angle of that arc becomes a lot steeper.
Everything about the Borg feels calculated to make us uncomfortable. Even though,
like most Star Trek aliens, they are represented on screen by actors wearing funny costumes and
having shit glued to their faces, the Borg are presented in a way that makes them feel different,
more truly alien than anything we’ve seen in Star Trek up to this point. Their ship isn’t
designed to look fearsome or intimidating. It’s just a cube, it’s simple — and that simplicity is
intimidating, because of how out of place it feels. That’s not what spaceships look like.
It goes beyond appearances — the Borg themselves don’t do any of the things we
expect a hostile species to do. When the first drone beams aboard the Enterprise,
he just starts scanning the computer. He ignores Picard and the others. He only acts aggressively
in retaliation. And when Worf kills him, another drone beams in to take his place. In one scene,
the basics of what make the Borg different — and scary — are established: they aren’t interested
in talking to you, they don’t have to talk to you, and if you do manage to kill one of them,
they’ll just send someone else, and that one won’t be as easy to kill because he will have adapted to
defend against the attack that killed the last one. Uncommunicative, impersonal, adaptable.
Something else, too: methodical. The first attack on the Enterprise feels almost like a
scientific experiment. The Enterprise is held in place by a tractor beam,
a section of the ship is sliced out and extracted like a core sample from a glacier. They’re cold,
analytical, patient — and when they’ve decided what they want, they’re almost unstoppable.
The arc of the episode isn’t just about ratcheting up the tension — it’s also about defying
expectations, sometimes in very subtle ways. One of the most intimidating things about the Borg is
that they can’t be negotiated with — there’s no talking to them. When Picard asks Guinan “How do
we reason with them and let them know we’re not a threat,” she answers, “You don’t — or at least,
I’ve never known anyone who did.” That line right there — “I’ve never known anyone who
did” — sets up a potential direction this episode could go, and a very Star Trek
direction at that. The enemy that can’t be negotiated with. Perhaps Captain Picard,
our hero, our eloquent diplomat, will be the one who finds a way, will somehow be able to talk his
way to peace with this silent and immovable enemy. The episode doesn’t go that way at all, but the
possibility is acknowledged, the expectation is there, so that it can then be subverted.
Another, broader expectation is subverted, too — not only does Captain Picard fail to reason
with the Borg — he fails to defeat the Borg. The Enterprise doesn’t win its fight against the cube,
it merely escapes. And it only manages that with help from Q. The climactic moment of
the episode isn’t when the hero decides to commit to a risky battle strategy,
or make a difficult sacrifice, but when the hero acknowledges that he was wrong,
that the other villain of the story was right, and asks that villain to bail him out.
It’s an extraordinary moment — a moment of defeat for Picard, an admission that
he has met his match — but also a moment of strength, and a different sort of strength than
we often see from heroes of action/adventure stories. Picard must admit that he was wrong,
and humble himself, in order to save himself and his crew. And he does, and manages to impress Q
in the process. Q tells him, “Another man would have rather died than ask for help.”
It’s all played just right, too — Picard admits he was wrong,
admits they can’t defeat or escape the Borg without Q’s help,
but Patrick Stewart plays it so you can see how fucking annoyed Picard is to have to say it.
But the thing is, Q is right — Picard does come across as over-confident in that scene in Ten
Forward where Q warns him about what’s to come. And when he realizes that, and asks Q for help,
and then later tells Guinan, “Maybe what we needed was a kick in our complacency,” it feels earned,
it means something. Picard’s outlook has changed as a result of his experience.
As you would hope from the title, “Q Who?” is also a great Q episode.
It’s probably best remembered for being the first appearance of the Borg, but John de
Lancie does some of his finest work here, too. Q is colder here than we typically see him,
almost cruel. He’s still the trickster god — his meticulous commitment to honoring the letter but
not the spirit of his agreement to never trouble Picard’s ship again is funny and very on-brand,
and I like how the game of musical chairs he plays, swapping places with Data and Riker
during his final conversation with Picard, adds a subtle note of absurdity to an otherwise deadly
serious scene — but he’s far more serious here than usual. Q is rarely more threatening than
in the scene in the observation lounge where he appears, in shadow, with his feet up on the table,
and calmly explains to Picard and company that the Borg are uninterested in political
conquest or conventional forms of power, and only want to consume the Enterprise.
“Q Who?” is gripping, and suspenseful — it’s not as if we ever believe the Enterprise will actually
be destroyed by the Borg, but the episode does such a skillful job of closing off all possible
avenues of escape that we do find ourselves wondering “Shit, how are they gonna get outta
this one?” It’s also full of smaller touches that give it a well crafted feel. I love the way the
rhythm of Q bouncing a ball against a wall of the shuttlecraft is used as a transition from
the shuttle to Ten Forward — we cut from a shot of Picard on the shuttle where we hear the sound
of the ball bouncing, to a shot of Q catching the ball on Ten Forward. Using both the sound of the
ball and the act of Q throwing and catching it to bridge one location to the other is ingenious.
I also like the little detail of how the chair in the observation lounge wobbles
when Q vanishes from it — it doesn’t really make sense, but it’s a nice touch anyway.
Ultimately, what makes this episode so effective is how well it puts over how powerless Picard and
the crew of the Enterprise are. They find themselves at the mercy of Q, the Borg,
and more broadly speaking, the universe itself. It’s an unfamiliar position for the heroes of
a Star Trek show to find themselves in, as unfamiliar and unsettling as the Borg
themselves. In the space of a single hour, the episode manages to make the world of
the series feel a lot more dangerous, and therefore a lot more interesting.
Eventually, the Borg would lose most of the qualities established here that made them so
unique, and so uniquely formidable as antagonists. They would go from a faceless, nearly invincible,
almost elemental threat, to just another bunch of evil Star Trek aliens. That’s too bad.
I’ll trace that deterioration as I review some of the Borg episodes that came after this one,
but for now, let’s just appreciate the accomplishment of “Q Who,” a fantastic
standalone episode that introduced the signature bad guys of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Those are my thoughts on “Q Who?” 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 is a big one,
one of the most important episodes of Star Trek ever produced, for a whole bunch of
reasons. We continue our series of reviews of Borg episodes with the Borg episode to
end all Borg episodes — not literally — the epic Star Trek: TNG two-parter, “The Best of
Both Worlds.” I’ll see you next week for that. Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!