5x23 I, Borg

[8.4/10] When I think about the larger project of Star Trek, I think of it as one of empathy and understanding. Over the course of 50+ years and hundreds upon hundreds of installments, Trekkies have seen loads of different perspectives and types of stories. But if there’s something that unifies them, a broader worldview at play across eras of the franchise, it’s the notion that even cultures and beings far different from our own can be as worth of respect and self-determination and our care as ourselves.

“I, Borg” is, if not the pinnacle of that, than certainly one of Star Trek’s best examples. Up to this point in the franchise, the Borg have been nothing but an indiscriminate enemy, one without feelings or reason or hesitation. They exist as a single-minded collective, one whose mission is simple to consume or destroy, without emotion or reluctance. Based on what the audience knows about them through three episodes of introduction, there’s no reason to see them as anything other than a lifeless threat, a mechanical id with no more right to self-preservation than hurricane.

But “I, Borg” sends a teenager-sized monkey wrench into that conception of Starfleet’s most dangerous enemy. A random distress call sees our heroes encounter a crashed Borg ship, and with it, one barely living drone. Everyone’s inclination is to leave it be and get the hell out of there, except for Dr. Crusher. Spurred by her hippocratic oath, she convinces Picard to beam it aboard.

That’s the first mini-test of a show founded on a series of moral conundrums. If you see an enemy, one who could give away your position to its allies no less, do you stay to help it our your commitment to this errand of mercy, or do you let it suffer and die rather than put others at risk. This is the Federation (and network television) so, inevitably, at the end of the day sympathy bears out and the lone Borg drone is brought aboard the Enterprise to be treated.

The most interesting thing about that choice is the implication that it may not be a pure one. As always, Patrick Stewart plays the layers of Captain Picard: the part of him that is bound to respect all life, the part that is still scarred from his own experience with the Borg, and the part that sees a potential strategy unfolding. Given the knowledge from his own experience with the collective, Picard realizes that this drone could be a trojan horse, one who could carry a computer virus back to the Borg collective and neutralize this enemy once and for all. (Using a math bomb no less!)

All of the senior staff seems on board with this plan -- all except Dr. Crusher. She lodges the objection that this is the annihilation of a species. The larger theme of this episode is an epiphany that this would be wrong, that these drones, however interchangeable and soulless they may seem in the throes of the collective, are nonetheless sentient beings, who deserve more respect and decency and understanding that if they were mere walking, talking “arms and legs.”

Battlestar Galactica makes a similar argument against a similar tactic, and I’ll raise the same point here that I did there -- they’re freaking trying to destroy you! It would be one thing if Crusher and others had this hesitancy merely after the crew’s first, Q-assisted encounter with the Borg. But after “The Best of Both Worlds”, the men and women of the Enterprise all know the devastation that the Borg can cause, the path of destruction they cut through the Federation, and the likelihood that the Earth itself would have been consumed and humanity along with it were it not for a near-miraculous save from our heroes.

When you’re facing an existential threat, the ethical leeway changes. Knowing the individuality that this Borg is capable of makes it harder to sacrifice him as part of this plan. But knowing the harms the Borg cause later in the franchise make this seem like Picard and company allowing a single life to put billions of others at risk. As another great Starfleet officer once put, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Despite the resonance of that quote, such utilitarian calculations are not the stock and trade of Star Trek (at least when applied outside of self-sacrifice). Despite my objections, there’s something extraordinary about the transformation, the epiphanies, that take place over the course of “I, Borg.” Not only does the titular drone slowly but surely reassert his humanity, but the people with the best reason to doubt that rediscovery come to believe it wholesale. That realization, that acceptance that someone can change and that life and sentience can come from surprising places in myriad forms, is the heart of this franchise.

What follows is a transfer of ideas, a recognition that starts with Dr. Crusher and her duty to do no harm, that eventually changes the hearts and minds of all who follow. She persuades Geordi, who’s apt to see the drone as nothing but another mechanical problem to solve, as a lost little boy. Geordi persuades Guinan, who saw her people decimated by the Borg, to listen to this being they’ve dubbed “Hugh” and see that he is more than an avatar of destruction. And she, who so strongly advised the captain against even treating this drone, convinces Picard to look Hugh in the eye before condemning him and his people to death.

It is a series of souls moved in the presence of another. Amid these key members of the crew shifting their thoughts on what they once viewed only as a walking threat, the audience also gets to see that there’s more to the Borg that mindless assimilation. While it happens awfully fast compared to what Seven undergoes on Voyager, we see Hugh’s individuality and arguably even his soul, reemerge once he’s cut off from the collective.

We see him experience loneliness. We see him understand the notion of friendship. We see him comprehend the idea that others have wants and needs that may supersede those programmed into him. We see him willing to sacrifice his own wishes (budding though they may be) to save the people he’s come to care about.

And we see all of these things come to fruition in a single, powerful scene that puts him opposite the Captain. Picard again assumes the mantle of Locutus, as a tool to challenge the supposed change this drone has undergone. He challenges Hugh again and again: as to what his name is, as to what is relevant to a Borg, as to who must be assimilated and die. And it culminates in Hugh refusing to do the bidding of what he thinks is the Collective, using the pronoun “I” to express a desire separate and apart from that of the grand Borg mission, a desire born of empathy for the people who’ve helped him.

“I, Borg” gets a bit highfalutin about the results and implications of that. Picard’s speech about individuality potentially being the greatest Borg virus of all is a little corny. (Though we’ll eventually see that he wasn’t entirely off-base.) But the bigger reason this episode provides to spare Hugh, to treat his return to the Collective differently, is the realization that the others may be just like him, people who could be saved, souls trapped in iron and steel, that the Federation could try to free rather than destroy. The one here represents the many, the many who could, given the chance, be just like him.

That doesn't justify ignoring an existential threat, necessarily, but it does uphold the spirit of Star Trek. That spirit is one of greater appreciation and understanding writ large. It’s rooted in the idea that even the ones who seem lost and dangerous are owed a certain measure of understanding and moral protection, because the lives that exist beneath what we find so frightening and so different may ultimately be the same as what we recognize in ourselves. That is the soul of this franchise -- the idea that the souls of others take many forms, but are just as real, just as worthy, and just as pure as our own.