“Q Who” (2×16)
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The first season gave us the Ferengi, who fell well short of being this show’s Klingons. Fortunately, this episode succeeded in providing arguably the most iconic Trek villains since Khan.
Jean-Luc Picard is the captain of the USS Enterprise, the flagship of the United Federation of Planets, a prosperous and technologically advanced regional power in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Compared to the pioneering days of Archer and even Kirk, when the final frontier felt wild and dangerous, Starfleet has fallen into a certain complacency.
Q shatters that complacency here, by putting the Enterprise directly in the path of the Borg Collective, a species of interstellar locusts that consumes everything in its path. It’s an encounter that will drastically change the path of Picard’s life. It also advances his relationship with Q. While the antagonism persists, Picard begins to perceive a benevolent purpose underlying Q’s seemly inexplicable and cruel actions.
The problem with the Borg in later appearances is that the heroes always have to ultimately prevail. When an enemy is shown as being as all-powerful and unstoppable as the Borg, each escape and each victory serves to undermine their menace. But that’s not a problem here. Q taps his ruby slippers together three times and sends the Enterprise back from whence it came. Otherwise, the Enterprise would have been unquestionably been assimilated.
We learn a lot about the kind of man Picard is at the climax of this episode. Q is shoving some very bitter medicine down his throat, and he swallows it. He unhesitatingly throws himself upon Q’s mercy when it becomes clear that they are not going to be able to stop the Borg without his help. Picard is not without ego. But he doesn’t put his ego ahead of the safety and welfare of those under his command.
Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:
This episode introduces the antipathy between Guinan and Q. Their two extremely long-lived species share an acrimonious history that is never fully explained.
It also reveals the El-Aurians’ tragic backstory: They’re not just a race of listeners, they’re a diaspora of refugees. As a race of people that are superhuman in a few key ways, this reveal humanizes them and imbues them with a certain vulnerability. That also adds weight to Q’s warning: If the Borg could devastate the seemingly mighty El-Aurians and send the survivors scattering, what chance does Earth have?
The episode also introduces Sonya Gomez. She’s a new ensign who gets the kind of screen time that would seem to be laying the groundwork for a recurring arc. However, the character only appears in one subsequent episode. It isn’t until “Lower Decks” that we find out what happened to her.
Revisiting this episode made me angry all over again that “Enterprise” retconned the first contact between humanity and the Borg in “Regeneration”. As originally presented here, Q’s intervention drastically reshaped the destinies of two of the galaxy’s major powers. The Federation got advance warning about the looming threat of the Borg. As devastating as the Battles of Wolf 359 and Sector 001 were, things would have gone even worse for the Federation without this time to prepare. But it also moved up the timeline of those conflicts. The Borg’s exposure to the Enterprise-D put a target on the Federation. They learned enough to identify it an enticing target for assimilation. After all, a multi-species pacifistic alliance offers up plenty of biological and technological distinctiveness for the taking.
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