Of all the nitpicks and plot foibles, only one really stands out.
When Seven sees her assimilated father and exclaims with sadness and apparent surprise of "Papa!", it's supposed to be a gut-plummeting moment for the audience. Except it's par for the course that Borg assimilate species and 20 minutes' worth of character buildup had been on display prior to this moment, which douse the fire of the moment a little too quickly. It would have been a bigger surprise for the Queen to state they were killed in a self-destruct act or saying only Annika was taken (the parents destroying the ship with their magic armbands preventing the Borg finding them active, which then would take care of the issue where the Borg were quick to realize what the audience had figured out an hour before, in that they would know of the gizmo and counter it due to not being able to figure out how it protected the human wearers of it.)
More on that, we could easily have had just the scenes where Janeway and co. discover the information used by the Hansens in the logs, and have debate brought down for the same reason that Janeway was not going to swallow the accusations from others that Seven had turned on the crew. It wouldn't be hard to guess that the technology used would not work, but the audience could still get one nice jaw-dropper of a moment.
Speaking of logs, as with a previous story from season four, Janeway's able to download from Starfleet Central's database very quickly all this backstory information. (Since they need special episodes to even get through to the Federation to say "Hi there, we're alive but not at the phone right now", there's no way their computer systems can be connected to the Federation's WAN, mesh, or whatever network they have in place. That aside, the EMH stating each drone has its own technobabble address -- which is akin to a MAC address unique to every network interface card, which is one of many little moments I adored, especially as they don't do the allusion outright...
Are there other ways that the reveal of Seven's parents could have worked without the prior exposition that preemptively gives it away?
(The story is still B+/A- in my book for the overall themes, some great set pieces, great acting, great music, and tight production that does convey a legitimately epic scale and awe over just how big the Collective is, but the little sticklers still get to me. The other biggie is how the Hansens were picking up thousands of life forms on the ship when "Q WHO" onward stated they could not discern individual drones. )
When Seven sees her assimilated father and exclaims with sadness and apparent surprise of "Papa!", it's supposed to be a gut-plummeting moment for the audience. Except it's par for the course that Borg assimilate species and 20 minutes' worth of character buildup had been on display prior to this moment, which douse the fire of the moment a little too quickly. It would have been a bigger surprise for the Queen to state they were killed in a self-destruct act or saying only Annika was taken (the parents destroying the ship with their magic armbands preventing the Borg finding them active, which then would take care of the issue where the Borg were quick to realize what the audience had figured out an hour before, in that they would know of the gizmo and counter it due to not being able to figure out how it protected the human wearers of it.)
More on that, we could easily have had just the scenes where Janeway and co. discover the information used by the Hansens in the logs, and have debate brought down for the same reason that Janeway was not going to swallow the accusations from others that Seven had turned on the crew. It wouldn't be hard to guess that the technology used would not work, but the audience could still get one nice jaw-dropper of a moment.
Speaking of logs, as with a previous story from season four, Janeway's able to download from Starfleet Central's database very quickly all this backstory information. (Since they need special episodes to even get through to the Federation to say "Hi there, we're alive but not at the phone right now", there's no way their computer systems can be connected to the Federation's WAN, mesh, or whatever network they have in place. That aside, the EMH stating each drone has its own technobabble address -- which is akin to a MAC address unique to every network interface card, which is one of many little moments I adored, especially as they don't do the allusion outright...
Are there other ways that the reveal of Seven's parents could have worked without the prior exposition that preemptively gives it away?
(The story is still B+/A- in my book for the overall themes, some great set pieces, great acting, great music, and tight production that does convey a legitimately epic scale and awe over just how big the Collective is, but the little sticklers still get to me. The other biggie is how the Hansens were picking up thousands of life forms on the ship when "Q WHO" onward stated they could not discern individual drones. )
I dunno...
