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At Least It Looked Good Dark Frontier Review by Steve Perry Airdate: February 17, 1999 Written by:Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky Directed by: Cliff Bole (Part One) and Terry Windell (Part Two) Short Take: A series of Borg gimmicks that don't win this fan over Brief Summary: An attempt to steal Borg technology leads to Seven's capture Review:I'm going to surprise a lot of people with this review. Last year, I split up "The Killing Game" into two reviews, mainly out of habit of reviewing only one hour, but also because both hours were substantially different plots, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, that made seperate reviews necessary in my opinion.
Where do I begin? It felt so... contrived. A Borg sphere, part of a mighty fleet, is somehow disable by an ion storm. Please, the Delta Flyer handles ion storms better. That combined with Janeway's boldness now directed toward the Borg, and we have a clumsy setup. Basically, it felt horribly complicated, a spur of the moment decision made by the spur of the moment by the writers.
The whole two hours felt drained of life. Seven's equence aboard the ship, for example, didn't scare me. Those screens sounded artificial. The people walking down the halls hardly moved - they didn't act like they were about to be assimilated. It felt like a bad Halloweeen horror house at the old armory. Likewise, the plan to save Seven was by-the-number. Use this technobabble. Now use this one. Didn't work? Then use this one. There was no tension and no reason to doubt a victory. Voyager's crew had miraculous powers against the Borg, making for boring TV. (I particularly liked how the Borg couldn't find the Delta Flyer... hello, try looking out one of your windows for it!!!)
We also had a final destruction of the sphere that was amazingly easy... I'm still not sure how they did it. Combine that with the now semiannual 10 year jump, and it's very ho-hum.
The crew felt drained in a similar way. No one had a catchy line. This was Seven's show, I suppose. "Scorpion" crackled with character conflicts. Here, no such luck. The closest we game was Seven's concern for the crew, even in getting assimilated. Alas, it turns out she was under the influence of the Borg Queen at the time.
The Borg Queen. Wasted. She said a few riddles, but was there mainly for the diehard drooler fans. I can't say she represented much of anything. Instead of saying, "Look, we are helping these people," she said "We are giving them perfection." It's writing like that which will keep the non-fans on the WB.
More interesting ideas were hardly dealt with. Seven's intentional placement, for example, was dropped into a conversation. The Borg deciding that a special form of nanoprobe needs to be used on Earth is another example. As I write this, I realize that even these notions weren't terribly interesting. Why would the Borg go to such great lengths to get Voyager? It sounds more like propaganda to convince Seven to join the Borg than any real idea. And the plan to assimilate Earth is pretty much ripped off of Babylon 5's Crusade (now deceased), which itself was ripped off from Starship Yamato.
It all boils down to one big Borg cliche: the Borg are fascinated with humans because we're individual and special. Apparently none of the other 10,000 assimilated species are like this. That's arrogant and contrived, and it's not interesting. It also goes to another cliche: Seven is special, because she's half human or something. I don't mind seeign her struggles with that on screen, but the Borg Queen caring about it is silly, epsecially after we saw this before in First Contact.
Dragging the entire Event down was the series of terribly painful vignettes involving Seven's childhood. It had two big science fiction no-nos: a cute kid and Aryan superhuman heroes.
On one level, it was fascinating. It was actual field research, complete with al the moral questions involved and nifty nicknames for the specimens like what they did with the Mars Pathfinder. It was the most serious this episode got.
But the rest was a joke. A spate of technobabble, dad reassurring a whining kid again and again, a cheesy bits like the kid zooming around with a model Borg cube (Why make a model of a cube?). I appreciate how the writers wanted to convey how foolish the parents were being. I just didn't want to see it done this way. Folks, if I wanted to really skewer it, I'd point out that no kid has memories that vivid of what happened at age five. It's not that I want to be mean - it was simply that bad.
I will however skewer the episode for its awful continuity. I'm not a continuity nerd. I only care about consistency. For example, the Borg Queen returning doesn't bother me - that can be justified. The problem with Dark Frontier is that it went completely against concepts that many of these writers had be acquainted with for years. The Hansens knew about the borg ten years before the Enterprise did? WHY???? Why not hae them hit a wormhole accidentally, taking them to Borg space? That way, they could resarch the Borg without Starfleet's knowledge and without questions about why they dragged their kid along. This doesn't solve questions like how two people out in the middle of nowhere faired better against the Borg than the Enterprise did, but it's a start.
The fact they'd so casually toss these facts aside suggests they either don't care or aren't familiar enough with their own work to justify their continuied presence. Harsh, yes, but after seeing Dark Frontier I was wondering if the light were on at the Hart Building but nobody was home.
Add that into the continued neutering of the Borg, and you've got two hours that undermine the Borg, not make them more exciting. How is Voyager suppose to keep using the Borg if this is what they are going to do with it?
Some short takes:
- I guess Nikki Tyler had to do some more porns. The woman who played Mrs. Hansen in Raven wasn't back this time, no doubt because Brannon couldn't get her away from the porno lot at Paramount in time.
- Did anyone else hate that clumsy name, Operation Fort Knox, complete with 20th century relevance speech?
- I found the use of Seven's father as an assimilated drone to be cheap schlock.
- I found the use of a practically naked man for a diagram of humans to be just bizarre.
Rating: C+
Next week: SEX
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