Mike's Voyager Episode Review Page: Dark Frontier

Seven: Voyager is my collective now.

Seven Goes Home to Mommy.

The opening sequence is really the best part of this whole show- and that's no small statement! Finally we see an attack from the Borg point of view! Also, it's a Seven movie, so again we're rewarded! And in fact the whole crew seems to be playing their parts to the hilt:
Janeway- with her rescue. She does quite well as a bit player.
Chakotay- He thinks that Seven's gone, and with good riddance! Torres- Ditto.
Naomi Wildman- She knows that something's wrong even before Seven leaves. And then she tries to devise her own plan for rescuing Janeway.

Also, having missed the Scorpion and Raven episodes, I was thrilled to see a bit of Seven history, and how she dealt with it. This season has been one in which we've gotten to watch Seven's character develop and experiment with various sides of her personality. And I definately include the nightmare scene with that. It was excellently done, totally unexpected and Seven's reaction was just you'd expect, given the situation. Also unexpected was the Borg Queen's assertion that she planted Seven on Voyager- very interesting. However, it also wasn't really fleshed out.

I really enjoyed the episode/movie as a bit of an adventure/action flick, but there were definate shortcomings. And unfortunately one of these shortcomings was the premise of the movie: Seven rejoining the collective. This whole being threatened by the Borg Queen thing was just too ridiculous. How could Seven possibly fall for such stupidity? It's a simple thing to alert Janeway to the double-cross in the plan, with little or no consequences. Yet Seven chooses not to- ridiculous!

Also, there's this whole thing with the Raven tapes. Now I haven't seen that episode, so perhaps that would enlighten me, but you'd have to be a knob to have 3 years worth of data on the Borg and not look at it! And then what they find it is... well- hogwash! But I'll let that go into the science section.

Also, did you notice how every time Janeway stopped moving, it was in some kind of pose? I mean what was up with that? Watch her during the briefing, or when she's carrying the phaser rifle- it looks so artificial! It also seemed very awkward when Chakotay noticed Janeway fidgeting with her combadge (god, who didn't!?) and acted like he knew what that meant. Well I sure didn't as I've never seen her do it before. Couldn't they use something that we've seen before? Look at the tapes guys!

Smartly, the writers avoided a lot of possible pitfalls by using realistic science, so we're left to think about the technology that they did use. The one that jumps out at me is the Stealth Bio Device. How do you conceal organic matter? It's made of carbon and water and other elements that are quite abundant in nature. So maybe with this great device the Borg can't hear your heart beating, or your blood pumping, or detect the electro-chemical processes of your brain, but for the love of God, does it make them BLIND too!? I mean, shouldn't they notice this odd, person-looking part in their ship? They even walk around them! What are the Borg thinking? "Hey, nice piece of timber in the hall! Guess I'll just go around it."

The same question applies to the suddenly-stealth Delta Flyer. Sure, it could be 'scanner invisible', but they're flying through several Borg ships. It should be a simple thing to have several of their collective eyes look out the window, and once one Borg has seen you, they all have!

I suppose that there should also be some issue with the trans-warp coil. I mean, why can't they produce/replicate more once they have one? The replicated an entire ship (the Delta Flyer), but they can't reproduce just 1 extra trans-warp coil? Not even with the help of a former Borg?!!

Now as I said before, this is all very foriegn technology, so there may be some explanation for some of these. But goddamnit, if I step around you, you've been detected!