I, Borg

Let's neuter the remorseless unstoppable monstrosity that is the Borg so that we have some sympathy for them. Is this a terrible idea, or a stroke of genius...?

The Borg. Unstoppable. Remorseless. Undefeatable. Oddly interested in lionfish. Let’s adopt one like it was a lost puppy. Great plan, Dr Crusher! But why did the Captain sign off on this insane plan…? Why, it seems he has an even more insane - and utterly genocidal! - plan of his own, to annihilate the Borg with a topological anomaly that will act like a computer virus and crash the collective once and for all. But will he go through with it...?

Words

This episode divides fans, and for an obvious reason. As Michael Piller was later to put it:

There were some people who really felt that “I, Borg” betrayed the vision of the Borg because it humanized them more than they wanted to see. But I just think every time you can understand your enemy, those stories have a huge impact.

I confess, I’m one of those fans who is a disappointed at the neutering of the Borg in this episode. But that said, I do enjoy this episode, and I acknowledge that there really was no way to proceed with the Borg without taking a step like this one. It’d been nearly two seasons, and nobody on the writing team had any clue how to reasonably bring the Borg back. Ronald D. Moore supported the direction that his fellow writer René Echevarria took, calling it:

...a real good way to bring the Borg back, because they're very limiting in the way they are. They’re this huge collective with no voice to communicate to and you can’t relate to these guys. We keep saying they’re unstoppable and if we keep stopping them it undercuts how unstoppable they truly are.

The title crossbreeds Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, and this is another story concept that came out of the autumn writers' retreat. As the screenwriter himself recalled:

I had this flash of inspiration: What if you reversed the way you look at the Borg? What if this was an intimate story about one of them? What would just one Borg be like – by himself?

The director, Robert Lederman, was new to Trek, and Rick Berman was really pleased with his direction, as well as Echevarria’s script:

The minute I saw the story I fell in love with it. The dramatic relationships are so vivid. Guinan, who comes from a people who were destroyed by the Borg, Picard who was brutalized and violated by the Borg – both are put in the position of being prejudiced. Geordi and Dr. Crusher are in the position of being open-minded and eventually sympathetic to this young man and the end result is a wonderful series of relationships and wonderful scenes between Guinan and the Borg...

Jeri Taylor, who made an editing pass on the script before filming felt it would “become a classic”, and Michael Piller singled it out as his favourite in the entire season, calling it “everything I want Star Trek to be”. At its heart, he just felt it was a great concept:

I think it’s just a great premise which forces both Guinan and Picard to confront their own prejudices. And you would think these are two characters who have none, but when it comes to the Borg the old issue is ‘know your enemy.’ It’s a lot harder to hate them if you know them and it deals with the issue of what happens to these communal Borgs which cannot be treated as anything else but parts of the whole when one is separated and becomes an individual? I feel that if you take the unstoppable villain, the stereotype and you turn it inside out, that’s great dramatic storytelling.

One small gaffe: the captured Borg asks Dr Crusher and LaForge: “Do I have a name?”, despite not yet being able to use a first person pronoun. Oh well, if you like this episode it’s easy to overlook, and if you don’t this isn't going to be what sinks it!

Acting Roles

The entire cast gets plenty to do in this episode, but of course it's Jonathan Del Arco’s Third of Five-slash-Hugh that is the centre of the story. Jeri Taylor had likened the character in the production meetings to Edward Scissorhands, which influenced Lederman’s direction and the casting process. Thirty actors auditioned for the part, but Del Arco won the role in the end.

Del Arco had been a huge fan of classic Trek and had indeed auditioned for the role of Wesley Crusher with great enthusiasm. When they cast Wil Wheaton instead, he was so crushed that he bitterly refused to watch The Next Generation at all! Still, he fell in love with this story the moment he read the screenplay, calling it: “one of the best scripts I’d ever read.”

“Take it all the way to 11"!”

During filming, Lederman and Del Arco had a ‘Borg meter’ that reflected how far along his transformation Hugh was, with ‘one’ being all Third of Five, and ‘ten’ being all Hugh. Lederman remarked:

In every scene, we had a numerable for where he was on the scale. During rehearsal, if I said, ‘Jonathan, you’re at six – we need you to be at eight’, he immediately knew what I meant.

Del Arco had half a dozen roles before this one, starting at age twenty one, and landing this part at age twenty six. Since he looked young for his age, he was cast as teenagers quite often. He continued to land a great many guest roles, and in 2007 landed the recuring role of Dr Fernando Morales on The Closer, which he continued to play on spin off Major Crimes. They also got him back for Voyager, and in the more recent big budget fan fiction too. It’s quite the career!

But as great as Del Arco's performance is, the real chemistry in this episode is between Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard and Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan. They are magnificent here, especially in the confrontation between them in Picard’s quarters.

They even bring back the fencing for the first time since season two - having the two literally spar as well as figuratively is a nice touch!

Every scene between the two of them are well-written and perfectly delivered. It’s what makes this episode for me.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Cool stellar corona in the opening sequence!

There’s also a matte painting when they beam down, but it’s only a rental.

Not to mention a pretty awesome crashed Borg scout ship installed on Sound Stage 16!

Other than that, the big SFX contribution this week is the updated Borg make-up. Head of make-up Michael Westmore and costume designer Bob Blackman came up with the hologram design in Hugh’s eyepiece, a feature that would become quite common in later Borg designs.

Westmore’s son, Michael Westmore Jr, also created the LED lighting that’s visible when the eyepiece was removed.

This is the only Borg episode where nothing blows up, except perhaps the street cred of the Borg. By taking this path, however, the writers opened the door for further Borg episodes, giving them an arc that was beyond conception until this story. For all that I don’t like what they did here, I still respect that achievement.

Frankly, Star Trek had a long history of surprising turns regarding apparent monsters, with “Devil in the Dark” being a particularly noteworthy example - who would expect the audience to care for a murderous duvet...? Turning the Borg into sympathetic characters is very much in the spirit of Trek, even if it’s still a shame to lose the universe’s ultimate badass aliens.