[7.7/10] My biggest gripe with “Drone” is that there’s just not enough time for everything it wants to accomplish. The story -- of a Borg baby raised to adulthood, of Seven becoming a surrogate parent rather than a surrogate child, of teaching him the values of the Federation, of him internalizing those values to the point that he’d rather sacrifice himself than put the crew at risk -- is more than enough to fuel a two-parter, and frankly, would be plenty for a feature film.
In fairness, Voyager and its veteran team of writers (Bryan Fuller, Joe Menosky, and Brannon Braga) are pulling from a lot of past Star Trek episodes here -- from Hugh the liberated Borg; to Data’s daughter, Lal; to even Kamala, the bride in a politically-arranged marriage who took a shine to Jean-Luc -- and all those episodes managed to tell their stories within a single episode. It’s not crazy to try to spin this yarn in under an hour. But the scope gets too wide, and the developments become too rushed, to where what could be a moving tale of growth and tragedy doesn’t have the emotional impact it might if the narrative had more time to breathe.
There’s so much here that “Drone” just sort of breezes past because it pretty much has to if it’s going to get to the finish line in forty-five minutes. What are the moral implications of incipient life that could grow up to provoke annihilation? Is the Doctor okay giving up his mobile emitter in perpetuity because it’s necessary to keep the nervous system of a new being functioning? How does Ensign Mulcahey feel about having his DNA stolen and used to create what is, presumably, some clone or genetic offspring of him? How does the rest of the crew feel, not just about having another Borg on board (B’Elanna’s quip about the new Borg strategy being to just show up looking helpless is a great one), but about the potential for this drone powered by 29th Century technology to supercharge the Collective?
We don’t know! We don’t have time to know! Set aside the actual logistics of all of this, which Star Trek has always hand-waved away anyway. There are so many facets to the presence of a being like One, an accidental life form, yearning to know his people, trying to be taught a life other than what his programming dictates, who could effectively doom the galaxy. “Drone” barely has the time to explore a third of them, and what it does examine, it rushes through by necessity.
(As an aside, I’m not crazy about the wacky comedy routine of Torres’ blase attitude about fixing the EMH’s emitter. Aside from the gratuitous cheesecake aspect of it, the whole thing has a vibe of “Yeah yeah, I’ll get around to fixing your wheelchair sooner or later; stop whining you dope!”)
Instead, the writers choose to focus on three main ideas: Seven as a surrogate parent, Janeway valuing life over the risk of destruction, and One feeling the pull toward one collective or another.
The first is the most interesting to me, if only because raising One is an opportunity for Seven to see her own development from the other side. If Seven’s arrival comes with the subtext of a troubled teenager who was raised in an unhealthy environment, One comes with the subtext of a young adopted child who’s curious and wants to know who his biological parents are.
The upshot is that Seven seeing someone who was once like her, demanding instructions, unable to shake Borg programming, yearning to return to the Collective, gives her a new perspective on her own journey. There’s something amusing but sweet about Seven’s calm but firm tone with the giant toddler, her annoyance when he keeps defaulting to a drone-like approach to problems, and the sense of protectiveness and care she develops for him.
Nothing speeds along maturation like having to care for others (hello Amphibia fans!), and it’s nice watching Seven step into Janeway’s role, guiding along someone who’s been conditioned to be part of a mindless collective into thinking of themselves as an individual. After these experiences, she sees herself in a new way (literally and figuratively, given the mirror imagery), and as compressed as One’s character arc, this is a nice step along the way for Seven’s much longer arc toward humanity.
Janeway’s balance of whether to continue guiding One along, as both an individual on his own terms and a potential asset to the ship and its crew, is perfectly fine. There is the usual weighing of practical risk versus Starfleet principle, and even Janeway’s sense of boldness in seeing the positiveness and chance for innovation over the possibility of destruction.
But the truth is that The Next Generation basically already did this with Hugh, and Voyager already did it with Seven. One being a brand new board rather than a person liberated from the collective does put a somewhat different spin on things. And the fact One nigh-miraculously manages to extrapolate the mobile emitter into all kinds of even more advanced technology that the Borg could use to assimilate and dominate does raise the stakes. Despite that, this plays out largely in keeping with the franchise’s other bites at this particular apple.
Frankly, I wish “Drone” spent more time gaming out the practicalities here. I’m all for protecting the rights and chances to flourish of individuals, but holy hell, the prospect of the already fearsome Borg upping their arsenal with 29th century tech is something everyone takes pretty darn lightly under the circumstances. The fact that Janeway even lets One go over to the Borg sphere in the first place is pretty galling.
I can't help but recall Admiral Necheyev’s words to Picard, that the deaths caused by the Borg after he returned Hugh to the Collective are on his head. If one were to be consumed by his people, an uber-powered Borg that can assimilate the whole galaxy would be on Janeway’s. And while the episode seems to care about that possibility, no one ever seems to take it that seriously. (Though hey, if Hugh is any indication, maybe returning One to the Collective would poison them with individuality anyway, assuming we haven't all just tried to forget TNG’s “The Descent”.)
Then there’s One himself. He has a strong, if abbreviated story, one that, oddly enough, puts him in line with Kamala from TNG’s “The Perfect Mate”. There is a poetic irony to the fact that Seven spends much of the episode trying to instill the values she’s learned from Janeway and the crew into One, to care about the well-being of others and not just rote assimilation, only for him to turn around and use those values as motivation for his own self-sacrifice lest those he cares about come to harm.
There may be no more heartening moment for Seven than her pronouncement that “Voyager is my collective.” “Drone” teases us a bit, suggesting that when the Sphere arrives, even she still has a certain longing to return to the comforts of that web of consciousness, but instead, of course, she and One maintain their loyalty to the rest of our heroes.
What follows is, like many Voyager endings of late, a bit too convenient and quick. But I’m sure One upgrading the ship’s anti-borg tech will come in handy down the line. And however reckless Janeway signing onto this plan is, him beaming aboard the Borg sphere, commandeering it, and steering into the destructive spatial anomaly of the week is pretty darn cool.
His survival is a little miraculous, but it’s cause for a good epiphany and moment of martyrdom in the name of what he’s been taught by Seven and company. The sense of him denying his worth because he’s an accident is sad. But his realization that the Borg will pursue Voyager forever with him there, that they’ll never stop trying to assimilate this new “collective” with him as the prize, prompts him to end his own life to protect those of the many. It’s a righteous thing to do, and a tragic sign that One absorbed everything Seven tried to teach him, maybe even a little too well.
And Seven gets her moment with Data and Lal: the moment of pain and growth that comes with losing a child. “Drone” doesn’t quite hit the same heights, but seeing Seven get emotional, the changed echo of her declaration that One’s actions are hurting her, is worth the price of admission. Seven’s disposition toward children will become a recurring part of her character through the rest of the series, and you can see the seeds being planted here.
I just wish Voyager spent more time plowing the field. Budgets, time limits,and ambition are not always a friendly mix. Sometimes, boring plots get stretched beyond recognition to fill the tie available. Sometimes, multiple episodes worth of story get crammed into a single-episode container. The balance is hard to strike. But one of the most exciting and frustrating modes of Star Trek is the concept that could spur something of real greatness, if only it had time. I imagine that's how Seven and Janeway feel about One.
(SPOILERS FOR MUCH LATER IN THE SERIES: It’s interesting revisiting this episode as a precursor to not only Seven’s relationship with Naomi Wildman, but Icheb and the rest of the Borg babies she would adopt down the line. You can see the show working through ideas here that they would explore in more depth down the line, which suggests they saw the potential in letting this concept breathe too!)
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-02T05:18:51Z
[7.7/10] My biggest gripe with “Drone” is that there’s just not enough time for everything it wants to accomplish. The story -- of a Borg baby raised to adulthood, of Seven becoming a surrogate parent rather than a surrogate child, of teaching him the values of the Federation, of him internalizing those values to the point that he’d rather sacrifice himself than put the crew at risk -- is more than enough to fuel a two-parter, and frankly, would be plenty for a feature film.
In fairness, Voyager and its veteran team of writers (Bryan Fuller, Joe Menosky, and Brannon Braga) are pulling from a lot of past Star Trek episodes here -- from Hugh the liberated Borg; to Data’s daughter, Lal; to even Kamala, the bride in a politically-arranged marriage who took a shine to Jean-Luc -- and all those episodes managed to tell their stories within a single episode. It’s not crazy to try to spin this yarn in under an hour. But the scope gets too wide, and the developments become too rushed, to where what could be a moving tale of growth and tragedy doesn’t have the emotional impact it might if the narrative had more time to breathe.
There’s so much here that “Drone” just sort of breezes past because it pretty much has to if it’s going to get to the finish line in forty-five minutes. What are the moral implications of incipient life that could grow up to provoke annihilation? Is the Doctor okay giving up his mobile emitter in perpetuity because it’s necessary to keep the nervous system of a new being functioning? How does Ensign Mulcahey feel about having his DNA stolen and used to create what is, presumably, some clone or genetic offspring of him? How does the rest of the crew feel, not just about having another Borg on board (B’Elanna’s quip about the new Borg strategy being to just show up looking helpless is a great one), but about the potential for this drone powered by 29th Century technology to supercharge the Collective?
We don’t know! We don’t have time to know! Set aside the actual logistics of all of this, which Star Trek has always hand-waved away anyway. There are so many facets to the presence of a being like One, an accidental life form, yearning to know his people, trying to be taught a life other than what his programming dictates, who could effectively doom the galaxy. “Drone” barely has the time to explore a third of them, and what it does examine, it rushes through by necessity.
(As an aside, I’m not crazy about the wacky comedy routine of Torres’ blase attitude about fixing the EMH’s emitter. Aside from the gratuitous cheesecake aspect of it, the whole thing has a vibe of “Yeah yeah, I’ll get around to fixing your wheelchair sooner or later; stop whining you dope!”)
Instead, the writers choose to focus on three main ideas: Seven as a surrogate parent, Janeway valuing life over the risk of destruction, and One feeling the pull toward one collective or another.
The first is the most interesting to me, if only because raising One is an opportunity for Seven to see her own development from the other side. If Seven’s arrival comes with the subtext of a troubled teenager who was raised in an unhealthy environment, One comes with the subtext of a young adopted child who’s curious and wants to know who his biological parents are.
The upshot is that Seven seeing someone who was once like her, demanding instructions, unable to shake Borg programming, yearning to return to the Collective, gives her a new perspective on her own journey. There’s something amusing but sweet about Seven’s calm but firm tone with the giant toddler, her annoyance when he keeps defaulting to a drone-like approach to problems, and the sense of protectiveness and care she develops for him.
Nothing speeds along maturation like having to care for others (hello Amphibia fans!), and it’s nice watching Seven step into Janeway’s role, guiding along someone who’s been conditioned to be part of a mindless collective into thinking of themselves as an individual. After these experiences, she sees herself in a new way (literally and figuratively, given the mirror imagery), and as compressed as One’s character arc, this is a nice step along the way for Seven’s much longer arc toward humanity.
Janeway’s balance of whether to continue guiding One along, as both an individual on his own terms and a potential asset to the ship and its crew, is perfectly fine. There is the usual weighing of practical risk versus Starfleet principle, and even Janeway’s sense of boldness in seeing the positiveness and chance for innovation over the possibility of destruction.
But the truth is that The Next Generation basically already did this with Hugh, and Voyager already did it with Seven. One being a brand new board rather than a person liberated from the collective does put a somewhat different spin on things. And the fact One nigh-miraculously manages to extrapolate the mobile emitter into all kinds of even more advanced technology that the Borg could use to assimilate and dominate does raise the stakes. Despite that, this plays out largely in keeping with the franchise’s other bites at this particular apple.
Frankly, I wish “Drone” spent more time gaming out the practicalities here. I’m all for protecting the rights and chances to flourish of individuals, but holy hell, the prospect of the already fearsome Borg upping their arsenal with 29th century tech is something everyone takes pretty darn lightly under the circumstances. The fact that Janeway even lets One go over to the Borg sphere in the first place is pretty galling.
I can't help but recall Admiral Necheyev’s words to Picard, that the deaths caused by the Borg after he returned Hugh to the Collective are on his head. If one were to be consumed by his people, an uber-powered Borg that can assimilate the whole galaxy would be on Janeway’s. And while the episode seems to care about that possibility, no one ever seems to take it that seriously. (Though hey, if Hugh is any indication, maybe returning One to the Collective would poison them with individuality anyway, assuming we haven't all just tried to forget TNG’s “The Descent”.)
Then there’s One himself. He has a strong, if abbreviated story, one that, oddly enough, puts him in line with Kamala from TNG’s “The Perfect Mate”. There is a poetic irony to the fact that Seven spends much of the episode trying to instill the values she’s learned from Janeway and the crew into One, to care about the well-being of others and not just rote assimilation, only for him to turn around and use those values as motivation for his own self-sacrifice lest those he cares about come to harm.
There may be no more heartening moment for Seven than her pronouncement that “Voyager is my collective.” “Drone” teases us a bit, suggesting that when the Sphere arrives, even she still has a certain longing to return to the comforts of that web of consciousness, but instead, of course, she and One maintain their loyalty to the rest of our heroes.
What follows is, like many Voyager endings of late, a bit too convenient and quick. But I’m sure One upgrading the ship’s anti-borg tech will come in handy down the line. And however reckless Janeway signing onto this plan is, him beaming aboard the Borg sphere, commandeering it, and steering into the destructive spatial anomaly of the week is pretty darn cool.
His survival is a little miraculous, but it’s cause for a good epiphany and moment of martyrdom in the name of what he’s been taught by Seven and company. The sense of him denying his worth because he’s an accident is sad. But his realization that the Borg will pursue Voyager forever with him there, that they’ll never stop trying to assimilate this new “collective” with him as the prize, prompts him to end his own life to protect those of the many. It’s a righteous thing to do, and a tragic sign that One absorbed everything Seven tried to teach him, maybe even a little too well.
And Seven gets her moment with Data and Lal: the moment of pain and growth that comes with losing a child. “Drone” doesn’t quite hit the same heights, but seeing Seven get emotional, the changed echo of her declaration that One’s actions are hurting her, is worth the price of admission. Seven’s disposition toward children will become a recurring part of her character through the rest of the series, and you can see the seeds being planted here.
I just wish Voyager spent more time plowing the field. Budgets, time limits,and ambition are not always a friendly mix. Sometimes, boring plots get stretched beyond recognition to fill the tie available. Sometimes, multiple episodes worth of story get crammed into a single-episode container. The balance is hard to strike. But one of the most exciting and frustrating modes of Star Trek is the concept that could spur something of real greatness, if only it had time. I imagine that's how Seven and Janeway feel about One.
(SPOILERS FOR MUCH LATER IN THE SERIES: It’s interesting revisiting this episode as a precursor to not only Seven’s relationship with Naomi Wildman, but Icheb and the rest of the Borg babies she would adopt down the line. You can see the show working through ideas here that they would explore in more depth down the line, which suggests they saw the potential in letting this concept breathe too!)