VOY: Collective

         An episode about irritable teenage Borg? Yeah, no thanks. The drone in charge of the children on the cube is a really Kylo Renn type who likes it make unreasonable demands and throw temper tantrums. I got kinda bored so I missed why they thought it was reasonable to demand the deflector dish from Voyager, but that was clearly never going to happen. The reduction of the Borg into almost comic villain in Voyager is one of the things that I think fans are right to criticize them for and this episode is a big part of that.
         We open with the crew of the Flyer, Chakotay, Paris, Kim and Neelix, playing poker until they are interrupted by a Borg cube. They flee and the cube is clearly not working well, but as they make their escape it grabs them with a tractor beam and they are brought aboard. But something seems strange, they wake up very much not assimilated and Kim is missing. Back on Voyager they are tracking the missing Flyer and detect the cube. They track it down and are attacked, but very ineffectively they discover that there are only a handful of drones and the away team has yet to be assimilated. They are contacted by the cube and after he usual threats the Borg offer the away team in exchange for Voyager deflector. Janeway stalls and asks to send some one over, of course she sends Seven.
         She discovers that the only drones on the ship are kids. All the adults were killed and they were released from their pods early to try and run the ship. I am going to summarize a bit extra here since the middle is pretty dull. Harry is on board and tries to plant charges or something. The leader of the Borg is irritating and keeps saying he won't negotiate and then negotiating. Janeway has a virus to kill Borg designed and put in place, but never uses it so that is a red herring. In the end they just overload the Borg shields and beam everybody off the end.

         Review: This episode was pretty irritating and never really went anywhere. Stuff was set up and never paid off in any way. Also, weak Borg make a weak episode.

2 out of 10