I, Borg

DVD, TNG S5 (I, Borg)

iBorg? Is that the next Apple product to shake up the market? No, it's the long-awaited follow-up to the epic two-parter 'The Best of Both Worlds' long thought of as the best story of the series. For me it was 'I, Bored' as I always had reservations about this episode. In 'Star Trek' the optimism and positive morality that exudes from the stories and characters always means that a race is never judged by a few representatives. Given enough episodes a race will always feature someone or a group of people that are good, even if the race is generally the enemy, be they Romulan, Klingon, or many others that have set themselves up against the Federation. With one exception: the Borg.

Their very name sends shudders through those that have encountered them… and survived. They were the ultimate enemy, devastating the fleet, killing thousands, and even worse, assimilating many more into their collective. They had no morals, they were unstoppable, they were the destroyers of civilisations. They were the Borg. Until we came to this episode and the same parameters were applied to this race as all the others. By showing a single, confused individual that shows that with the Borg consciousness removed, they were real people, trapped inside the hive mind and essentially innocent of the heinous crimes of the collective. From then on they could no longer be wholeheartedly annihilated without concern because the foot-soldiers of the greater mind of the collective were just as much captives acting against their will as they were enemies.

They made the Borg cute, and for such a formidable foe I felt it was wrong to treat them in the same way as all the other races. They should have been the one exception to the rule, and my mind was set against any attempt to change them. Of course, the long history that followed 'TNG' explored the Borg in increasing depth so that we even got to the stage where those who had been assimilated could be rescued and rehabilitated as if they had escaped a mind-altering cult, the best analogy I can think of. Third of Five paved the way for Seven of Nine and understanding the Borg became as much a joy as the gradual development of the other major races. What had become a super-villain, grew into something more. They could still be as tough as Targ snouts, but there was more to them than was at first realised.

The history I'm relating does have a bearing on this episode, because, like Geordi, then Guinan and finally, Picard, I realised that this is a better episode than I gave it credit for and the first in a long line of stories that would push the envelope regarding the Borg. I empathised with Hugh through Jonathan Del Arco's defenceless and vulnerable performance as a boy who has woken into a new world in which everything he knew is wrong and questioned for the first time. At first, Picard, still haunted by his experiences as a Borg refuses to see them for anything more than they appeared to be: destructive machines intent on killing or absorbing the human race. If he had spent time with his conscience testing whether the plan to infect the Borg and hopefully cause them to self-destruct as a race was right, he would have seen much earlier that it didn't sit well with his Starfleet ideals, but he has a wall up right away, knowing personally that if his conscience is the only thing between dealing with the greatest threat to his people, or destruction, he will sacrifice that. It's not as obvious that he believes this as much as Sisko does in 'In The Pale Moonlight,' or Janeway in 'Equinox,' but the hardness in his eyes speaks it eloquently.

Guinan is the factor that changes his mind, or at least, begins to chip at his wall. She has just as much reason to hate and fear the Borg as the Captain, since her entire race was hounded into becoming refugees and her homeworld lost to them. It's somehow comforting to see that even Guinan, a character that is always so sure of herself, has centuries of wisdom behind those big eyes, the one who is always in the know, is flawed and susceptible to bigotry and race hate. Yet she overcomes her preconceptions and everything she knows, to speak to Hugh and learn that he is no longer what he was. Whoopi Goldberg gets possibly her most featured role on the series to that point. She has several scenes of giving advice, or taking it, where she usually only has one or two. I admit I totally forgot she actually has a fencing scene with Picard, but whatever she's doing she continues to have such presence it's a joy she agreed to be such a big part of the series.

As much as the episode is about the realisation that the right to inflict genocide on even evil races is wrong, it is also about being better than your enemy and fighting fairly even at the cost of victory. Hugh indirectly teaches the crew all these things, and learns the basics in being an individual. Most importantly he chooses to sacrifice himself to rejoin the collective to save Geordi and the others from assimilation. When you think about it, a selfless Borg isn't an anomaly as they are all technically selfless through not having the choice of will. The special thing about Hugh is that he makes a choice to lose all that he has gained because by gaining it he has learned that to let his friends be at risk would be to as if he had never understood individuality at all. The ramifications of that decision would be far-reaching. It might have given the story a more interesting angle if Hugh had been someone Picard knew or recognised, someone that had been assimilated under his leadership as Locutus, but that might have confused the matter, making us even more sympathetic towards Hugh without the benefit of the journey, and that would have been a disservice to the writer's intentions of our coming round to accept him even though he was so alien. A Wolf 359 survivor would have been a shortcut, and in any case it was a subject that would be mined sufficiently in future stories.

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