Star Trek 606: Unimatrix Zero, Part II

606. Unimatrix Zero, Part II

FORMULA: Dark Frontier + The Maquis + Strange Bedfellows + Meridian

WHY WE LIKE IT: The Queen's visit to the woods.

WHY WE DON'T: Cop outs and broken promises.

REVIEW: So let's talk assimilation. In the final season's opener, Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna have been assimilated, but they're resisting the effects thanks to the Doctor's neural inhibitor (though Tuvok, of all people, eventually succumbs). Conveniently for them, they haven't been fitted with the usual robot arms and ocular implants, and by the end of the episode, they're back to normal. Janeway says they've taken out MOST of the implants, which means we have three new deassimilated Borg on the ship (never alluded to again, I don't think). What gets me is: They don't sport any of the scars or exterior implants Seven and the (not fully assimilated) Borg kids do. Sure, Picard fully recovered from being Locutus, but he was special. These guys were turned into drones. Any chance their brains were left intact? I guess what I'm saying is that it seems like one great big cop out and that Voyager's crew is way too unbeatable here, surviving assimilation intact.

They do manage to create a resistance movement among the Borg by releasing a virus that allows the Unimatrix Zero drones to retain their individuality after regeneration. The Queen's reaction is really kind of stupid. She tries to force Janeway to surrender the antidote by blowing up every Borg ship with a mutant drone aboard. "Help me or I'll destroy the entire Collective!" Even if it's sad to think a lot of these dying drones had recovered their individuality, it's not like that's much of a threat to the Borg's greatest enemy. I do like the Queen's visit to Unimatrix Zero, and her seduction of the innocent there. Assimilation (or ) has its seductive side, it's true. But overall, a bad performance for Queenie.

Ultimately, the only way to keep the resistance movement alive is to destroy Unimatrix Zero, putting an end to Seven's wishy-washy romance with the resistance's vanilla leader, Axum. I won't miss him or scenes like their final one, where he suicidally waits for Annika to show up as the world falls apart. Heavy-handed to say the least. They'll never meet again because his ship is patrolling the Beta Quadrant, on the border of fluidic space. If that doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't to me either. But we're talking about a show that keeps showing us humans assimilated at Wolf 359 by a cube that was destroyed under our very eyes.

And what about the seduction of Harry Kim, as hinted at in the previous episode? Never happens. Harry hardly gets a scene at all. Instead we get some tedious "now Chakotay's in Janeway's shoes and it's his turn to ignore his second-in-command" action. So in the end, the only real cost to this whole endeavor is the Delta Flyer. Tomorrow: The Delta Flyer returns!

LESSON: Internet romances are doomed if someone blows up the internets.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Oh, it's watchable, I can't say it isn't. It's pretty irrelevant pablum though, setting the tone for "more of the same".

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