Friday, May 9, 2008

3.17 unity

Chakotay’s shuttle crash-lands on a war-zone planet inhabited by warring peoples. He is injured and rescued by a young woman who wants the help of the Federation to maintain their group, which is trying to create a peaceful society amid the chaos. She helps Chakotay gets well but also isolates him from the others. In the meantime, Voyager has encountered a Borg cube – completely disabled – with Borg ‘corpses’ inside. One of them is taken back to sick bay, where the doctor’s inadvertent probe causes the Borg to sit up and start flicking those little mechanical appendages, which temporarily scares the life out of Torres and Kes (and the doctor). While Janeway orders an away team to take the opportunity to study Borg technology as much as possible, Chakotay gets curious and stumbles upon the community exposed – they are former Borg, unlinked from the collective. With Chakotay near death and Voyager still nowhere in sight, this collective offers to link with Chakotay – it is only temporary – and use their combined will to help heal him. Reluctantly, he agrees, and it works. It also has a temporary residual effect – when the Borg woman touches her cheek, Chakotay feels it on his cheek, and there is an intimate interlude. Voyager eventually finds Chakotay, and the Borg woman asks Janeway to allow them to try to stop the fighting by turning the link back on at the ship, allowing the peaceful collective to link with the warring factions, but Janeway considers it too dangerous and refuses, offering medical and food supplies instead. But as Chakotay and Torres shuttle away from the planet, Chakotay begins to hear the voices of the peaceful collective again. They are under attack and are about to be killed, and they force him to phaser Torres and turn on the Borg transmitter. It works, and the new collective sends a thank you message to the bridge of Voyager. In the final scene, Janeway and Chakotay discuss the odds that this new collective can remain positive, or be corrupted by their power, which they have already shown they are willing to use to their own ends.

There is a nice scene between Chakotay and Kaplan at the start of the show; Kaplan is obviously nervous that, as a junior officer, she doesn’t know where in space they are. Chakotay very gently puts her at ease with his teasing humor. What a supervisor! I want to work for this guy in space. (Of course, Kaplan dies in the next scene, but that’s irrelevant).

Nit: Okay, did I miss something? The Borg bodies (which are partially organic) were preserved in the ‘vacuum of space’. But wouldn’t they start to decompose immediately as soon as the away team beamed over, sans suits, into an atmosphere? And what about the one in sick bay?

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