A Brief Guide to Star Trek (33 page)

Voyager
did get some things almost right, though. Its third year on air coincided with
Star Trek
’s thirtieth anniversary, allowing both that show and
Deep Space Nine
to celebrate with
special episodes.
Deep Space Nine
produced the innovative ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’, an imaginative sequel to the original
Star Trek
fan favourite ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’. Incorporating much footage from that 1960s episode featuring the original
Star Trek
cast, the episode cleverly worked several of the
Deep Space Nine
characters into the background of the ori ginal adventure as they pursued an independent adventure of their own. Television technology had progressed far enough that through a combination of video effects, clever shooting and the use of doubles and specially built sets, the integration of the
Deep Space Nine
crew with that of the original
Enterprise
is almost seamless.

One major member of the original cast was missing from ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’, so could not be featured in
Deep Space Nine
’s ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’. George Takei was off shooting a role in the movie
The Green Berets
alongside John Wayne when the episode went before the cameras at Desilu Studios in the 1960s. Little could Takei have known the kind of afterlife that particular episode would enjoy with fans and casual viewers alike. As part of
Voyager
’s contribution to
Star Trek
’s thirtieth anniversary, it was decided to make up for this by building an entire episode around the further adventures of Takei’s Sulu, thus also answering a growing clamour among some
Star Trek
fans to see Sulu with his own command.

The resulting third season episode was cheekily entitled ‘Flashback’, and took the shape of a flashback story experienced by Vulcan Tuvok of his time serving aboard the USS
Excelsior
alongside Captain Sulu. The episode also tied in closely with the events of the last original cast movie
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
. Rather than use another time travel plot to have the
Voyager
characters involved with original series characters as
Deep Space Nine
was doing, the writers drew upon an already existing idea for a story that would explore problems with Tuvok’s failing memory. Brannon Braga recalled the team wanted to ‘to do a time travel story without doing time travel, by doing a [mind-] meld. Tuvok’s old enough that we can go way
back, to Sulu’s ship and events that happened in
Star Trek VI
. That was what we combined.’

Having lobbied for a return to the series in some form, and helped foment the fan calls for the same, Takei was only too happy to play Sulu once more. ‘I thought it was a very imaginative idea to bring a connection between Sulu and Tuvok. It turns out that he was on the bridge of the
Excelsior
when the Praxis incident [in
Star Trek VI
] happened, and so there we had a story, making Captain Sulu, Tuvok and Janeway all organic parts of the same episode.’

After all the high hopes that
Voyager
would be a return to the exploration of the unknown, the writers and producers had quickly fallen back on the use of races, characters and situations developed in previous incarnations of
Star Trek
. Chief among them was the Borg, lifted from
The Next Generation
and taken to the next level of development in multiple
Voyager
episodes.

By the middle of season three, the decision had been taken to bring the Borg into
Voyager
. The aim was to create an event episode for the February 1997 ‘sweeps’ period, when ratings would determine the value of ad slots for the series, and capitalise on the anticipated success of
First Contact
in cinemas. Staff writer Kenneth Biller began working on an episode – eventually entitled ‘Unity’ – in May 1996, with the aim of bringing the Borg back to
Star Trek
. He also felt it was an opportunity to expand upon what had been done with the Borg in
The Next Generation
and the then-upcoming movie
First Contact
. ‘When you think about the Borg’, he told
The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine
, ‘they’re interesting and cool, but they’re just relentless and keep coming at you. How do you get under their skin? That was the question I had to ask.’

Realising that the Borg were a hive-mind community, Biller wondered if a group of Borg could be freed from the collective together, and if so, what would become of them once their individuality returned? He also saw resonances with fairly recent contemporary events on the world stage, namely the disintegration of the Soviet Union into smaller individual sovereign states
at the end of the 1980s. By the mid-1990s there was an odd nostalgia for the old, unified Communist super-state among those who’d gained independence, so Biller wondered if the same would apply to a group of ex-Borg: would they miss the collective experience of being a Borg, despite gaining their individual freedom?

The result was his script for ‘Unity’ that saw Chakotay trapped on a planet after answering a distress call. Tended to by a benevolent community, he discovers they are de-assimilated Borg drones, survivors of the Battle of Wolf 359 (as featured in
The Next Generation
’s ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ and the
Deep Space Nine
pilot ‘Emissary’). An electro-kinetic storm had broken their link with the Borg hive-mind, leaving them to cooperate and survive on their own. Helping to heal Chakotay (who is separated from his own ‘collective’ on
Voyager
) with a neural link, he experiences their memories. In an attempt to re-establish their collective nature, the survivors reactivate the crashed Borg ship and awaken its still-Borg inhabitants. With the help of
Voyager
, the ship is destroyed but the planet’s ex-Borg survivors are able to retain their newly restored collective nature without being part of the wider Borg collective.

‘Unity’ raised a series of thoughtful issues, and paved the way for the Borg to become a major part of
Voyager
through to the end of the series, nicely set up by the discovery of a Borg corpse by the
Voyager
crew in the immediately preceding episode, ‘Blood Fever’. A line in ‘Unity’ speculates whether this group of Borg were defeated by an even more powerful enemy, which would lead to the reveal of Species 8472, an inter-dimensional ‘fluidic’ race, in the third season finale, ‘Scorpion’. This episode grew out of a discarded idea from ‘Unity’, with Brannon Braga keen on the concept of a ‘Borg graveyard’ with the Borg eventually re-animating and posing an ongoing threat to
Voyager
, while building on both ‘Unity’ and the movie
First Contact
(as well as providing an economical opportunity to reuse costumes and set pieces from the movie).

In ‘Scorpion’ parts I and II, episodes that spanned the end of
Voyager
’s third year on air and the start of the fourth, the crew of
Voyager
travel through ‘Borg space’ in their continuing attempt to return to Earth. Encountering fifteen Borg cubes, only the intervention of an unknown alien race saves the ship. Realising the cubes were fleeing this deadly new race,
Voyager
explores the wreckage of the Borg battleships in order to learn more about such a formidable opponent. Discovering the Borg refer to the aliens as Species 8472, Captain Janeway is forced into an uncomfortable alliance with the Borg to save
Voyager
. This proved to be one of the series’ most popular end of season cliffhangers with fans. The second episode introduced the Borg fully designated as Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01 (Jeri Ryan), the envoy between the humans and the Borg. Based on the human ship, Seven helps the crew confront Species 8472 by introducing Borg technology to the vessel. Afterwards, Seven attempts to assimilate
Voyager
, but is defeated thanks to forward planning by Janeway: having escaped the Borg, the ship now has a disconnected Borg drone as a member of the crew.

Future episodes would give Seven of Nine a poignant back-story (assimilated at the age of six, she’d grown up Borg), and explored her Spock or Data-like attempts to blend in with the human crew in sometimes serious, sometimes humorous ways. With the majority of her cybernetic implants removed, Seven still retained the appearance and manner of a Borg, a most unsettling development for those on
Voyager
’s crew who had to work alongside her (an issue not widely explored by the series). However, she would prove to be an undoubted asset in the crew’s future battles with both the Borg and Species 8472 and in their eventual return home to Earth. Jeri Ryan also proved to be an asset to the show: producers emphasised her sexiness by putting her in a series of skin-tight uniforms. Ryan undoubtedly brought a degree of sex appeal to
Star Trek
that had largely been missing since the short skirts of
The Original Series
. Of course, some critics and fans saw this as nothing more than a blatant attempt to boost the ratings of a flagging show . . .

Voyager
drew further on the success of
First Contact
by reintroducing the character of the Borg Queen. The Borg continued to be a nuisance for the crew of
Voyager
through a variety of episodes, appearing as hallucinations or holograms in a handful (‘The Raven’, ‘Living Witness’, ‘One’) before making proper appearances in fourth season finale ‘Hope and Fear’, fifth season episodes ‘Drone’ (exploring the life cycle of a Borg drone) and ‘Infinite Regress’ (exploring multiple personality disorder through Seven of Nine). A two-part tale, ‘Dark Frontier’, in the middle of season five saw actress Susanna Thompson take over from
First Contact
’s Alice Krige as the Borg Queen. While filling in the back-story for Seven, the episodes revolve around a daring heist by the
Voyager
crew to steal Borg technology that might allow them to speed up their return to Earth. Captured by the Borg, the Queen attempts to convince Seven that she was deliberately infiltrated into
Voyager
’s crew by the Borg, and now they intend to study her in order to devise a successful way of assimilating humanity. Janeway is able to rescue Seven, but only after the former drone suggests a way of disrupting the Queen’s control. A very popular feature-length tale, ‘Dark Frontier’ helped give the final seasons of
Voyager
a new dramatic energy as the Borg Queen became something of a regular nemesis for the
Voyager
crew, creating an almost maternal struggle between her and Janeway for control of their wayward child, Seven.

More Borg-centric episodes followed, each exploring different aspects of the collective. ‘Survival Instinct’ saw Seven of Nine encounter a trio of Borg connected with her past, while ‘Collective’ explored the lives of a group of isolated Borg children. The two-part ‘Unimatrix Zero’, from the end of the show’s sixth season and the beginning of the final year, returned the Borg Queen to centre stage, and introduced a utopian, rebel faction of Borg who share a realm of the unconscious called ‘unimatrix zero’. Janeway and the Queen once more clash over Seven of Nine, leading to the seeds of civil war being sown in the previously united Borg collective.

All of this eventually culminated in the final double episode of
Voyager
, ‘Endgame’, broadcast in 2001. That the series finale
should feature the Borg and their Queen can have come as little surprise to fans, given the prevalence of Borg stories throughout the second half of
Voyager
’s existence. Whereas
The Next Generation
, which spawned the Borg, featured only six Borg episodes,
Deep Space Nine
just one and the subsequent
Enterprise
also only one,
Voyager
clocked up a whopping twenty-two Borg-centric instalments. For a series that had declared its intention to set out to explore new frontiers and introduce new ideas into
Star Trek
,
Voyager
had come to rely pretty heavily on some very old concepts and characters for its storytelling.

For the finale, Alice Krige returned from
First Contact
to take over the role of the Borg Queen from Susanna Thompson. Although she didn’t want to watch Thompson’s take on the role, Krige did read the scripts of previous Borg Queen episodes in order to get up to speed on story developments. ‘I read all of the
Voyager
episodes that the Borg Queen was in’, she told startrek. com, ‘but I didn’t watch them. I didn’t want something in my head, in my imagination. I needed my performance to happen in the moment, and I didn’t even watch
First Contact
again.’

‘Endgame’ had an unusual structure, beginning in a future in which
Voyager
has already successfully made its way home to Earth. It’s now 2404 – the tenth anniversary of the ship’s return from its twenty-three-year journey back to the Alpha Quadrant. The older Admiral Janeway uses adapted Klingon technology to travel back in time to a period when
Voyager
was still lost in space, hoping to help her younger self use stolen Borg technology to speed up
Voyager
’s return home. She’s trying to change the past because in her original return, Seven of Nine, Chakotay and twenty-two other crewmembers were killed while Tuvok suffered an irreversible neurological condition. The younger Captain Janeway prefers to use the technology from the future her older self has provided to destroy a major Borg transwarp hub (a kind of Borg transit station that will allow them to spread across the galaxy). In an attempt to achieve both aims – destroy the Borg and get the ship back home – Admiral Janeway allows herself to be assimilated by the Borg Queen, only to infect the
Borg with a neurolytic pathogen she has been carrying in her bloodstream (an echo of the climax of the Founders story arc on
Deep Space Nine
). At the same time, Captain Janeway uses the Borg’s transwarp corridor to blast the ship back to Earth, destroying the last Borg sphere in the process.