The two-part Scorpion, aired as the final episode of Voyager’s third season and the opening episode of its fourth, features a new confrontation with the visually cybernetic, “technologically totalitarian” Borg. Continuing its long journey at maximum warp towards the Alpha Quadrant, Voyager arrives at the threshold of Borg space. It is a vast expanse of thousands of star systems, millions of planets, and trillions of “assimilated” inhabitants with technological implants. The unimaginable numbers of drones live in the hyper-concentrated urban sprawl of nearly infinite rows of alcoves and endless automatic activity. Captain Kathryn Janeway faces the dilemma of either finding a way to get the starship through the immense hostile territory of the Hive Mind or having to give up forever on the hope of getting home. The Borg Collective is engaged in, and currently losing, a devastating war against the inscrutable Species 8472. This “computer generated” non-humanoid life-form emanates from a hazy, fluidic parallel dimension space. Its members enter our universe at will through a technologically opened quantum singularity inciting gravimetric distortions. Species 8472 (rendered by animation from Foundation Imaging, Inc.) is a swift and rapacious creature with three legs and standing more than ten feet tall. It is one of the few beings ever encountered by the Borg which they are unable to assimilate. The sharp Borg tubules, extending from the drone’s fingertips into the victim’s flesh, sending cell-sized nanoprobes into the bloodstream, are rejected in the case of Species 8472 by the resisting sparks of an energy emission. The savage entity’s densely coded DNA underlies an extraordinarily robust immune system. The Borg nanoprobes are rebuffed and the administering drone is jolted backwards. Since the usual method of species subjugation is a non-starter, the Borg are at a loss to acquire any useful information about this awesome enemy. The unfathomable aliens are routing the pale techno-humanoids with their powerful bio-ships and crackling electrodynamic tendril weapons.
Strengthened by their biogenically engineered energy technology, the cadres of Species 8472 have as ultimate goal the complete annihilation of all life-forms in the Milky Way. They are planning a full-scale invasion of our galaxy. In the nearer term, they pose a serious threat to Voyager and its crew. Their advanced alternate universe technoscience can disable the functioning of the transporter and warp speed. The flowing turbulence generated by their third-order cybernetic technologies, as Lt. B’Elanna Torres explains, “prevents us from creating a stable warp field.” Beaming is disrupted by bio-electric interference. The insides of a fluidic alien bio-mass spaceship consist of giant organic membranes, pulsating neuropeptide “veins,” and strange energy glows. While investigating the interior of a seemingly deserted Species 8472 vessel on an away team mission, Ensign Harry Kim is attacked by one of the oversized clawed demons, and is infected by a malevolent tissue. Tendrils wrap tight around his upper body and neck and start to slowly eat him alive. But the Emergency Medical Hologram analyzes the cells invading Harry Kim’s system, packed with more than a hundred times the information found in human chromosomes, and devises a way to cure Harry and effectively combat Species 8472. The Holographic Doctor reprograms Borg nanoprobes to go unnoticed by the alien blood cells. Holodoc has gained much knowledge of the assimilator microscopic robots by studying a Borg corpse that Voyager’s crew recovered from the Sikari planet three months earlier (in the episode Blood Fever). The Doctor’s modified nanoprobes “emit the same electrochemical signatures as the alien cells.” They can do their assimilation work without being detected. This recoding is the basis of the weapon that will be used against Species 8472.
After an initial skirmish with an armada of Borg Cubes fleeing Species 8472 that includes Voyager getting scanned, Captain Janeway retires to her Ready Room to read up on the history of Federation faceoffs with this Delta Quadrant arch-nemesis. “I’ve been looking through the Personal Log entries of all the Starfleet Captains who encountered the Borg,” Janeway tells Commander Chakotay several hours later. “I’ve gone over every engagement, from the moment Q flung the Enterprise into the path of that first Cube to the massacre at Wolf 359.” In the words of Jean-Luc Picard: “In their Collective state, the Borg are utterly without mercy, driven by one will alone, the will to conquer. They are beyond redemption, beyond reason.”
Captain Janeway proposes to the Borg that they and Voyager form an alliance or make an “exchange” in order to combat Species 8472. In return for information about the modified Borg nanoprobes developed by Voyager’s Holodoc, the Borg will grant the starship safe passage through its space. Commander Chakotay opposes the risky partnership, telling Janeway the story of the Scorpion, which the Indian master heard as a child:
A Scorpion was walking along the bank of a river, wondering how to get to the other side. Suddenly he saw a fox. He asked the fox to take him on his back across the river. The fox said no. If I do that, you’ll sting me and I’ll drown. The Scorpion assured him, if I did that, we’d both drown. The fox finally agreed… But halfway across the river, the Scorpion stung him. As the poison filled his veins, the fox said why did you do that? Now you’ll drown too. I couldn’t help it, said the Scorpion. It’s my nature.
Even if the Borg allow Voyager entry to their space, Chakotay argues, it will take months to traverse their territory. Who knows if, once the threat of Species 8472 is disposed of, they will keep up their end of the agreement for so long a time. Janeway thoughtfully rejects Chakotay’s advice and proceeds with her plan. She negotiates with the Borg, and they agree to the deal of safe passage for information. The Collective assigns a drone, Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, to be the liaison to Starfleet personnel, after Janeway insists that communication between them be verbal rather than through a neuro-transceiver the Borg wish to implant in the side of her neck. “I speak for the Borg,” the “female drone” says. Aboard a Borg Cube, the Captain, Lt. Tuvok, and Seven of Nine work together to design a weapon, based on Holodoc’s bio-reengineered Borg nanoprobes, capable of defeating Species 8472. Tuvok has determined that the organic material constituting the alien creatures from fluidic space and their bio-ships has the same cell structure as the tissue that infected Ensign Kim.
While cooperating on the development of the large-scale photon torpedo bio-molecular weapon, Captain Janeway notices that Seven of Nine is a former human. In the episode Dark Frontier, the Borg Queen, played by Susanna Thompson, explains that selecting Seven of Nine as the “representative” was a strategic ploy to gain more knowledge about humanity in order to assimilate it. Just before the Borg Cube where they are working is destroyed in an attack by Species 8472, Janeway, Lt. Tuvok, Seven of Nine, and several other drones beam over to Voyager’s Cargo Bay Two. There the more than a dozen surviving Borg set up a mini-Collective outpost, complete with alcoves and regeneration technology. The injured Janeway is in a coma, and Chakotay, who remains skeptical about the “alliance,” takes command. The relationship between the acting Captain and the Borg spokesperson becomes increasingly tense and mistrustful. Chakotay informs Seven of Nine that the starship is going to drop off her and the other drones, with the modified nanoprobes, at the nearest uninhabited planet. Voyager will continue towards the Alpha Quadrant, taking its chances on getting through the rest of Borg-controlled space.
The Borg are in search of the greatest degree of proficiency with a teleological faith that assumes one-way growth and development as time progresses. Seven of Nine admits to Commander Chakotay and Lt. Tuvok that it was the Borg which started the inter-dimensional war. The malevolent Delta Quadrant aliens wanted to add Species 8472’s biogenically engineered technology to their own non-reversible excellence. “They are the apex of biological evolution,” Seven tells the Starfleet officers. “Their assimilation would have greatly added to our own perfection.”
With the Borg rapidly losing the war to Species 8472, Seven of Nine is given instructions by the Collective to seize control of Voyager and take it into the predatory alien’s parallel dimension. From the freight storage area, Seven enters a Jefferies tube and accesses deflector control. She realigns emitters to send out a resonant graviton beam creating a quantum singularity. The ship is sucked by gravimetric distortions through the rift in space into the Species 8472 realm. Chakotay orders Cargo Bay Two depressurized, and all the Borg drones go flying into space except Seven of Nine, who holds onto something nailed down. Captain Janeway recovers from her injuries and reassumes command. She orders completion of the construction of the combined Federation-Borg bio-molecular warheads to annihilate the fluidic space aliens. Four bio-ships engage Voyager. Janeway has Lt. Tuvok fire the enhanced torpedoes. In a suspenseful delayed reaction, the weapon obliterates the enemy vessels. The customized doomsday technology ravages Species 8472 and all it holds dear at the “inner space” microcellular level. A special class ten high-yield photon torpedo demolishes multiple attacking bio-ships in a spectacular shock wave cascade effect. Species 8472 gets the nanotech apocalypse message loud and clear, and all bio-ships retreat from the Borg region of the Delta Quadrant.
Seven of Nine opens another singularity with her deflector protocols, and the starship returns to normal space. But the Borg fail to live up to their end of the bargain. Seven announces that Voyager will now be assimilated. “This alliance is terminated. Your ship and its crew will adapt to service us.” Seven of Nine is the Scorpion. From a Borg alcove in Cargo Bay Two, Commander Chakotay uses a neuro-transceiver device to connect directly to the consciousness of the “female drone.” Lt. Torres instigates an electrical power surge that abruptly dissevers Seven of Nine from the Collective. Seven’s Borg technology upper-spinal column neural transceiver link to the Hive Mind “explodes in a spray of sparks.”
Seven of Nine is kidnapped. She becomes a member of Voyager’s crew. According to the official interpretation, she embarks on a journey of “becoming human.” To increase her survival chances, the Emergency Medical Hologram removes 82% of Seven of Nine’s cyborg hardware. In The Gift, the Holographic Doctor states that he left a few techno-organs intact because they were not immediately cost-effective to replace. Holodoc restores Seven of Nine to near-humanity in her genetics, physiology, immunology, and metabolism. The process of her behavioral adjustment to “real personhood” is slated to take much longer. In the episode Prey, the Doctor, who has steadily perfected his bedside manner towards “more humanoid” patients, mentors Seven of Nine in the fine art of saying “please” and “thank you.”
After the addition of the former Borg drone to the starship’s crew at the start of the fifth Star Trek series’ fourth season, Voyager’s weekly viewer ratings soared by more than 60%. (Joseph Hanania, “Signoff: Intergalactic Generation Gap, The New York Times, February 7, 1999) Substituting for Jennifer Lien’s supporting role as the Ocampa Kes, the character Seven of Nine was an instant success, and “saved the show” from disorientation and even oblivion. The Emergency Medical Hologram’s dermaplastic grafting procedures and follicle stimulation therapies produced a highly sexualized feminine bodily appearance that appealed especially to adolescent and young males, a major portion of Star Trek’s viewership. Seven’s arrival on the scene was accompanied by a massive publicity campaign in TV magazines and newspaper supplements. Played by former Miss America pageant finalist Jeri Ryan, outfitted in a skintight, lustrous catsuit and high heels that accentuate her breasts and buttocks, Seven of Nine radiates “available feminine sexuality,” yet is paradoxically unaware of her “epidermal” exposure and blatant desirability. Her erect phallic posture, techno-scientific competence, stringently business-like speaking style, and indifference towards male erotic overtures in her direction make her an ambivalent boundary-crosser with both masculine and feminine semiotic and manneristic attributes.
