A Brief Guide to Star Trek

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 statesat 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,