101 – Infinite Regress

Grade: D+

Summary

Seven of Nine has had some bad dreams. She is even sleepwalking. It turns out she’s experiencing multiple personalities. Later we find out that this is caused by some machine that links Borg together. So Janeway wants to destroy it but they’re intercepted by the aliens who added a virus to the machine in an effort to kill off a bunch of Borg.

Commentary

Yeah, this is a bad episode. The only thing keeping this from being a complete failure of an episode is that Jeri Ryan actually does a very good job in the role. She plays a young child, a Ferengi, a Vulcan, a Klingon, etc. With every different iteration, she does the exaggerated movements of the species. Her best role here was of the young girl who befriends Naomi Wildman.

The aliens in this episode really look ridiculous. It is something you’d expect to see out of a 1980s Dr. Who episode. There are lights on their uniforms and they’re some of the stupidest-looking aliens I’ve seen. It’s extremely distracting and takes a lot away from the story.

I thought it was stupid that there’s a machine that links the Borg together. In the episode when Chakotay finds a group of former Borg drones, they don’t have such a device, and yet they’re still able to hear each other’s thoughts. In fact, they even connect to Chakotay’s mind. So this is literally just a piece of technology that they invented for the purpose of giving Jeri Ryan something to do.

Skip this episode and you will miss nothing of consequence.

Of Note

This virus idea was used again at least two more times in this series. The Borg are supposed to adapt to such things – you’d think they would have figured this out so that the next couple of times Janeway tried the virus approach, it wouldn’t have worked at all.

Apparently, there are 47 sub-orders of the Prime Directive. I don’t know about you, but I’m guessing that with that much detail, it’s pretty much impossible to not violate it almost no matter what you do.