While under a fairly routine survey mission the Enterprise intercepts a nearby distress signal and goes to investigate. On a habitable moon they discover a small, crashed, Borg vessel and among the wreckage a lone survivor, though critically injured.
Initially Picard, and everyone else, is insistent that the away team beams back up and they high-tail it out of there before a Borg rescue vessel comes but Dr. Crusher is insistent that they try and to save the injured Borg. Reluctantly, Picard agrees and has the Borg transported to a holding cell that is shielded to block the Borg's distress signals.
Once on board Picard wants to set into motion whatever they can to either learn more about the Borg or to hopefully destroy them. The injured Borg, 3 of 5, has some damaged chips that Geordi believes he can duplicate based on what they learned from Picard's experiences with the Borg. Along with the replaced chips they plan to input some malicious software in hopes it'll infect the entire collective and destroy the Borg once and for all.
Initially everyone, except Crusher, is on board with the plan but as Geordi spends more and more time with 3o5 he begins to see it as more of an individual, even deciding to give it a name: Hugh and ultimately begins having second thoughts about the plan. Guinan attempts to set Geordi straight but even she begins having second thoughts about the plan once she meets with Hugh.
Talking with Picard in his quarters Guinan manages to convince him to meet with Hugh. If he plans to use him as a weapon to destroy his entire race he should get a better grasp of what he is doing. Picard meets with Hugh and poses as Locutus, claiming he's working undercover on the ship in hopes to assimilate the Federation. Hugh's individuality has grown strong enough at this point he actually argues with Picard about the futility of assimilation and proclaims that "he" will not aid Locutus in assimilating the ship. Picard, taken aback about Hugh's (who until now has called himself "we") expression of individuality and decides to not go forward with their plan.
Instead, he hopes that the idea of individuality may be the greater malicious program than their original idea and they will return Hugh to the collective when the rescue ship arrives. So long as Hugh wants to go. Realizing what he is faced with, and that he's being given a choice in his fate, Hugh opts to rejoin the collective knowing that otherwise a conflict would likely happen endangering his new friends' lives. He's beamed back to the crash site where he's eventually recovered by the Borg rescue ship.
This is one of the earliest episodes I saw as I got into TNG, and Trek in general, back in the 1990s. At that time, having never seen the previous Borg-related episodes, I was quite confused on the relationship between the Borg and the Federation, thinking the Borg were simply just another odd race out there that had integrated cybernetics into their lives. Not knowing the greater thing they represented. I had also just assumed at some point Picard had been held captive and brain-washed by the Borg and hand since recovered. Which, I guess, is more or less what did happen.
But with this episode I got a greater idea of the types of stories Trek told and what it was doing and that it wasn't just some goofy show centered around aliens in silly make-up. The show had deeper meanings and stories it wanted to tell.
This episode is good, another strong one TNG's ranks. Great performances by Stewart, Burton, Goldberg and the young actor who plays Hugh.
Plenty of good scenes, the fencing scene between Picard and Guinan, as she confronts him on him bringing the Borg on the ship and the later scene with Guinan in Picard's quarters where she's swapped her position on the current mission. Lots of good scenes between Hugh and Geordi.
Stewart is particularly good in his faux-Locutus poise as he confronts Hugh and later in the Observation Lounge when he decides individuality is ultimate malicious program they could introduce to the Borg.
Problems in the episode:
None of the plans they come up with could realistically work.
Their first plan involves a 3-D picture of something that cannot be rendered in the real world. The idea is the Borg will analyze the picture and blow up their minds trying to conceptualize it. Erm.... Yeah. So they could show them a Klein Bottle? An M.C. Escher painting? A Penrose Staircase? A tesseract?
It doesn't exactly make a ton of sense that just because an image cannot be realistically constructed that it'd blow the Borg's minds.
It also seems to assume that the Borg don't have a means to isolate "problem areas" in their programming or collective and get rid of it. (Which, of course, they ultimately do with Hugh and the infected Borg.)
The individuality "malicious program" also is an odd one to assume will work. Isn't pretty much every member of the Borg once an individual? Didn't they all enter the collective with knowledge of individuality and wanting it? So why would Hugh's refound individuality present a problem?
Of course, the bigger question with this episode is with whether or not Picard was right in not using the true malicious program to try and end the Borg. Many would use the argument Picard first had, that they were at war and that they had to take every opportunity they could to end an enemy they could not reason with nor beat.
And, I don't agree. As causing what is essentially a genocide wouldn't make them that much better than the Borg and it DOES seem to ignore that the Borg are operated by some higher power (ignoring the Queen at this point since she doesn't technically exist at this point) and that, in the end, that all of the "soldiers" really are individuals who are victims in whatever power ultimately controls the Borg and makes the decisions.
Which, there'd have to be one rather than everyone making the decision themselves after coming to a consensus over a few nano-seconds because, again, all at one point individuals. Something has to be controlling all of them (what turns out to be the Queen when she's come up with) making all of the drones individuals.
So, accepting for a moment that Picard and co. really believed their plan would work, and that it would work, Picard made the right decision in not enacting it. As, in the end, it wouldn't have made them any better than the Borg themselves and it came at a very high price. The destruction of billions of "innocent" individuals not acting of their own free will.
Again, a good episode with a lot to digest and discuss on.
Next week: Geordi: The Intangible Man!
