Picard Season 3 – The Problem with the Borg

By Owen Quinn author of the Time Warriors and Zombie Blues

copyright paramount pictures

There is no denying how great Picard season 3 was. It delivered the send off for the Next Generation crew better than we could imagine. There wasn’t a heart that didn’t leap for joy when the Enterprise D came back from the ashes to save the Earth or the resurrection of Data. The Worf and Riker humour was spot on and the terrifying tension of not knowing who was a Changeling. By the way, if ever a story needed Odo, this was it and the sad passing of René Auberjonois was felt every time a reference to the Dominion War and Worf’s time on DS9 came up.

But I digress. It seemed the writers and producers had learned their lessons from the terrible first two seasons but had the sense to bring back Seven of Nine as a regular character. Bringing Q, the Borg Queen and Guinan back should have been epic but sadly was limp as brewer’s droop. However one small issue soiled the almost perfect season three and that was the reveal of the big villain; the Borg Queen. It felt like the Daleks appearing yet again in Doctor Who but this time there’s an issue. Picard season two completely ignored Time’s Arrow when Guinan first met Picard along with Mark Twain against time travelling aliens. In turn, Picard season three completely ignored the events of season two in regards to the Borg, leaving a hole in logic as big as a black hole.

The first thing that came to mind when the Borg were revealed to be the big bad was….wait a minute, where the hell’s Agnes? The Collective’s where? So Wolf 359 still happened? Stop, I told my brain, let’s look at this logically.

In season two we meet the Borg who is about to be executed by the Mirror Universe-like version of the Federation that Q had thrown our heroes into. She was the last great enemy; alone with no drones to her name. Escaping to the past to prevent this future from happening, Agnes becomes infected by and merges with the Borg Queen to lead them down a path of salvation rather than assimilation. By the end of the season, Agnes Queen and her hive became provisional members of the Federation and were stationed at a mysterious anomaly that posed a threat to the Federation. The problem is that this version of the Borg did not jump through time but travelled through the years until they reached the correct point in time and summoned Picard. So did that mean that Picard never became Locutus of Borg? Did Wolf 359 never happen? Did all of Janeway’s battles against the Borg in the Alpha never happen? Did Agnes really succeed in changing the nature of the Borg? If so, how is Seven still a survivor of Borg assimilation?

The answer creates more questions than answers which are ignored simply because the rest of the season was so good. It seems that there was in fact two sets of Borg following the events of season two. Agnes and her hive exist separately to the Borg we know and fear. History has remained unchanged. Everything we saw happen still happened. It seems that when future Janeway from the final Voyager episode Endgame, infected the Collective and the transwarp network was completely destroyed, the Borg did not recover. The Borg Queen was all that was left of the entire Borg Collective, wounded, alone and crippled, waiting and planning like a spider at the centre of an isolated web on the ether. But as an aside, it is always a pleasure to bring back Alice Krige as her majesty. An absolute gem of a lady to meet and a welcome addition to any show.

Of course, this in itself conjures up several questions. Where was Agnes when the Borg kidnapped Picard and tried to assimilate Earth? Where was she when Voyager was alone in the Delta Quadrant? The point can be made that the timelines had to be protected given the horrible future witnessed in season two? Like Guinan in Time’s Arrow, Agnes knew the future and had to stay back from events in order for her own future to evolve correctly. Her Borg had to be there to become members of the Federation and stop the deadly anomaly. What happened to all the other Borg cubes that had broken free from the Collective, as seen in Descent and Unimatrix Zero. They have been forgotten yet would make cracking episodes to explore this aspect of the Trek universe even though it has been done through the characters of Seven and Picard and to an extent Hugh. However how does this PTSD apply to a species like a Vulcan or Klingon who believe it is a great dishonour? Could they adapt that to making it a new moment of glory in the life of a Klingon? There as a Borg civil war for Christ’s sake so were those rebels hunted down and killed or reassimilated or are they still out there? It’s all well and good using the Borg but for such a powerful enemy, each subsequent return could be a dilution of what made them so attractive in the first place. Picard season three teeters on implausibility with the Borg reveal and the exploration of the truth behind Picard’s brain anomaly which has been passed to his son Jack. However on the flip side, it does explain Picard hearing the Borg and knowing where to fire on the Borg sphere in First Contact. Additionally, where is the Agnes hive when the Earth was about to be destroyed? Their intervention would go a long way to becoming members of the Federation. I know thy needed the cast to be the heroes but not to mention Agnes is strange and reflects the swiss cheese writing of the first two seasons.

While this seems to be the end of the Borg as we know them, the possibility still remains to bring the Borg in with all these unanswered questions from previous episodes. But everyone is still rightly so basking in the Next Generation’s swansong to even really think about this. But who knows? The Enterprise F has a Borg captain and as we know, any ship named Enterprise really does go where no-one has gone before.