“Q Who”
Written by Maurice Hurley
Directed by Rob Bowman
Season 2, Episode 16
Original air date: May 8, 1989
Star date: 42761.3
Mission summary
The Enterprise has a new arrival: manic pixie dream girl Ensign Sonya Gomez, who tries to charm us by being polite to replicators, babbling on incoherently, and spilling hot chocolate (so much cuter than coffee) on an unsuspecting Captain Picard. The captain heads to Officers’ Quarters (really? They have their own district away from the riff-raff?) but the turbolift dumps him instead onto a familiar-looking shuttlecraft out in the deepness of space… with Q.
Guinan has a hunch that something’s wrong, but no one believes her until Riker realizes the captain and shuttlecraft six are both missing. Picard, meanwhile, demands to be returned to his ship and upbraids Q for interfering when he promised he wouldn’t. Q then snaps them both back to the Enterprise and is surprised to find Guinan, an old and not-so-amiable acquaintance. It seems Q has alienated everyone, including the Q Continuum, and he has no place to go now. He offers to join the Enterprise‘s rag-tag crew! Picard acknowledges that it’s a “provocative” offer, but ultimately says he can’t possibly trust him.
Q: Oh. Well, you may not trust me, but you do need me. You’re not prepared for what awaits you.
PICARD: How can we be prepared for that which we do not know? But I do know that we are ready to encounter it.
Q: Really?
PICARD: Yes. Absolutely. That’s why we’re out here.
Q: Oh, the arrogance. They don’t have a clue as to what’s out here. […] You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what’s waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand.
RIKER: We’ll just have to do the best we can without you.
Q: What justifies that smugness?
PICARD: Not smugness, not arrogance. But we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required.
Q: We’ll just have to see how ready you are.
Q snaps his fingers again and the Enterprise is flung 7,000 lights years away. It will take nearly three years to get to the nearest starbase. But hey, isn’t Guinan from around here?
RIKER: What can you tell us?
GUINAN: Only that if I were you, I’d start back now.
Oh. Well, she’s just a mysterious, unfathomably old alien. What does she know?
They find a class M planet in the sector, which looks like all the machine parts have been ripped away, just as with the outposts mentioned in “The Neutral Zone.” Because its ears are burning, a giant cube flies through space to meet the Enterprise. Guinan warns them that this sector is home to the Borg, a relentless, cybernetic intelligence that wiped out her entire species. Cool! Picard goes in for a closer look.
Once the Cube is in range, a Borg beams over to Engineering and starts zapping the terminals, extracting information. Picard tries to reason with it but it ignores him. Worf is able to neutralize it, but a new one just pops up in its place, some kind of mechanical hydra. Worf gets this one, too, but the Borg already got what they wanted from the computer. They lock a tractor beam onto the Enterprise and cut out a little slice of the ship’s hull, taking 18 crewmembers with them. The Borg have a message: resistance is futile.
That’s not so great, actually, so Picard calls a meeting.
Q: The Borg is the ultimate user. They’re unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced. They’re not interested in political conquest, wealth or power as you know it. They’re simply interested in your ship, its technology. They’ve identified it as something they can consume.
So what do they do? They fire at the ship until the tractor beam is released, but the Cube is repairing itself and will be functional again in no time. Why waste the opportunity for research? Riker, Worf, and Data beam over to investigate this new, dangerous species, and find out that… they’re a relentless cybernetic intelligence. News, huh? It seems the cube is very generic, but each borg has his own little cubby hole that they can plug into.
Picard decides it’s time to get out of there, and once his full complement is back on board (well, aside from the unlucky eighteen) he tells Wesley to gun the engine full-throttle. The Cube pursues, and even at maximum warp the Enterprise isn’t going to get out of this one.
WORF: The Borg are still gaining.
Q: They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defenses. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You’re out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. […] You can’t outrun them. You can’t destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. […] Where’s your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you?
Jeeeeez, what an obnoxious winner. But he’s not done until he has Picard begging.
PICARD: If we all die, here, now, you will not be able to gloat. You wanted to frighten us. We’re frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!
Q obliges and snaps them back to where they were. Phew.
Mulling over what’s happened, Guinan and Picard discuss what this means for humanity and the Federation. Now the Borg know humanity exists, and they’ll be coming to finish what they started…
PICARD: Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason.
GUINAN: How so?
PICARD: Well, perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead.
Analysis
Maybe it’s just because it’s sandwiched between “Pen Pals” and “Samaritan Snare” that my memory was so rosy, but even after two seasons of waiting this didn’t quite meet my expectations.
Q is back, and he’s as malevolent as ever. This is worth celebrating! In his first two appearances he seems petulant and silly (the costumes don’t help), probably intended as a throwback reference to Trelane & Co., but I think here he really comes into his own as a dangerous being. They retconned this encounter in First Contact to make meeting the Borg early a way to “save” the Federation by helping them prepare, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Q’s setting up the pawns to fight a battle that would not have otherwise been fought, because he wants Picard to lead the charge. It’s perverse and disturbing and selfish and I love it. You know he wouldn’t do it if a betting man didn’t have his money on the Borg, so you also know the odds are stacked against our heroes. Picard’s a diplomat, so what happens when you pit him against a power that cannot be reasoned with? This is drama, the stuff that’s supposed to be on TV. About damn time.
But let’s face it, we’re all here for the Borg. By next season they’ll have come a long way from their roots (power supplies?). The Cube looks really silly when it first appears. I kind of blinked and thought “that’s it?” but maybe I’m spoiled by the mid-90s First Contact effects. All the Borg look the same, too. They aren’t recognizably different species and there’s absolutely no mention of assimilation, so presumably that evolved later. Without the troubling elements of loss of identity and self, the first appearance of the Borg is kind of… underwhelming. They don’t seem any different from the doomsday machine, and you get the distinct impression all this could be sorted out by planting some malware. There’s no bite, not like a proper villain. They’re obviously powerful but they aren’t scary just yet. This thread will get somewhere worth getting to (eventually) so I’m still left rubbing my hands in excitement.
So given those promises, I’d peg this as a Warp 3. But “Q Who?” has something much more powerful going on than just a new villain and some cheesy effects: it represents the complete take-down of the philosophy of the first two seasons. We’ve spent two years listening to how the Federation is perfect and everyone is so special and they go on these amazing adventures and know what’s best… and then Q comes up and tells them it’s all bullshit and there is plenty out there in the universe that will kill them, and if they’re going to cry about it they should pack their bags and go home. It’s amazing. All of us at home seething at these smug bastards occupying our Enterprise, and someone tells it like it is. These people are arrogant! They don’t know what’s out there! Space is terrifying and wonderful and deadly! It finally steps into its own as a descendant of the original series, and you get the feeling they’re about to embark on an adventure–one worth having–for the first time.
Just try to keep that in mind when you watch “Up the Long Ladder.”
Torie’s Rating: Warp 5 (on a scale of 1-6)
Thread Alert: Borg babies! I guess is supposed to be creepy but between the bad costumes and cheap plastic accoutrement it just looks like trick-or-treat at the baby Gap. I mean look at his widdle hat…
Best Line: Q: If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it’s not for the timid.
Trivia/Other Notes: I’m sure we all know this, but it bears repeating: the Borg are named such because they’re cyborgs, and they were initially supposed to be a race of insects, but that’s too expensive.
Ensign Gomez must have pissed off someone other than me, because she’s in the next episode and then never appears again. You don’t think you know her but you do: Lycia Naff was the triple-breasted Martian prostitute in (the original) Total Recall.
If you thought the Guinan/Q standoff looked weird and/or familiar, it’s because it’s the stance she uses in The Color Purple when she finally stands up to her abusive husband. That’s not loaded, or anything…
Q bouncing the ball in the shuttlecraft is, of course, a reference to The Great Escape.
Previous episode: Season 2, Episode 15 – “Pen Pals.”
Next episode: Season 2, Episode 17 – “Samaritan Snare.”
I think we’re sufficiently jaded from years of great shows and tense moments because I still remember the first time I saw this, during it’s second airing (after a friend of mine raved about the episode) it scared the bejesus out of me. Granted, I was all of 15.
Back in the day when all you had were Ferengi, Romulans and Klingons, the Borg were something else entirely. The tension in the episode, the discovery that this was something that was utterly alien to [i]Enterprise[/i] and her crew, even the silly looking cube all stacked up to something that really left an impression.
Nowadays, of course, it’s not such a big deal. But as an episode in its time, this one really blew us all away.
I liked this episode quite a bit when it first aired, and I can see it has aged well.
It restores a sense of scale and danger and unknown to the universe in a way we haven’t seen since “Where No One Has Gone Before” and will so seldom see again in the TNG run. There are definitely things Out There beyond the scope of humans to defend against.
This is probably my favorite Q episode. He definitely comes across as less cuddlesome, more rancorous and unpredictable than we have or will see him, indifferently exposing a swath of crew to painful death.
The captain heads to Officers’ Quarters (really? They have their own district away from the riff-raff?)
Yes. That’s one of the fixtures of an officer/enlisted hierarchy. You keep them separate and discourage social mixing. You don’t make friends with people you have to order into certain death someday. Troi finds out why, later.
It’s why the captain has to ask permission before entering the officer’s wardroom, as well. Captains get to be friends with no one.
Oddly, I find I have very little to say about this episode. I didn’t much care for it when if first aired, mostly because it featured Q. John de Lancie is a terrific actor and he can do a lot with what he’s given, but it’s still Q. He’s a little better than APPDEBs like at Farpoint or in “Justice”, but only because he talks.
The other big problem is the retcons. Not just that Q promised to leave them alone – he has his excuses for that – but the claim that the Federation wouldn’t have encountered the Borg for another hundred years while at the same time making it clear that they were responsible for the attacks on the outposts at the end of season 1. You really can’t have both at the same time.
An insectile race (the Zek? The Ect? Borg was such a stupid name) may or may not have been scary. Big bugs creep me right the hell out, but other than that? The fact that doing them that way would have been too expensive shows how quickly SFX advanced over the next few years. By 1994, Babylon 5 was able to have a CGI praying mantis dude show up occasionally (rendered with an Amiga, no less) and 3 years after that Voyager came along with Species 8472 (hut, hut, hike!). That’s less than a decade from “We can’t do that” to “frequently appearing effect that doesn’t hurt our budget at all.”
As a kid, I remember being really excited by the ending to this episode. Before I even knew what the word “continuity” meant, the idea that an episode could introduce something that could come back many episodes later was really appealing to me. Of course, back then I was still waiting for those aliens from “Conspiracy” to turn up again.
The
CybermenBorg cube also stuck with me long after I saw this episode for the first time. It looks so alien, and so unlike anything I would think of when I imagined a space ship. Where’s the front of that thing and where’s the back? How could a square have its own means of propulsion? Seriously.. that thing freaked me out more than the actual Borg.I’ve always wondered why the
CybermenBorg bothered to attack the Federation if it was so far away. Why waste all that time and energy on one civilization when there are so many other life forms between Borg space and the Federation just waiting to be assimilated?I was both impressed and underwhelmed by my re-watch of this episode. I’ve always liked Q, and this is one of his finest hours (though he is wearing on me a little), but I was impatient to see the Borg, and I was surprised at how long it takes them to get there. Why are we being introduced to this annoying ancillary character who seemingly serves no purpose? You half-expect her to be one of the 18 dead later in the episode, right? And did it seem like Geordi was kind of…flirty?
It’s a little hard to separate this version of the Borg from what we see of them later on. Like Torie, I thought they’d be a little creepier. Instead of adowable Borg babies, I wanted them to find their missing crewmates being converted into drones. The ship looks smaller than I remembered, and it’s surprising Enterprise is actually able to do so much damage to it–especially when Worf misses the tractor beam twice before finally hitting it. Get it together, Worf!
But they were the first new alien race introduced on TNG that is both interesting and dangerous–and different from anything we’ve seen on the show before. They are powerful and mysterious at first, and it still gives me chills when they carve that section out of the saucer; at that moment, I was thinking of Star Trek II, and how we really needed to cut to a shot in a corridor showing the destruction from the inside.
The episode does feel incomplete to me, particularly with Q’s last-minute save, but it represented a big step in storytelling: drawing on previous, seemingly insignificant continuity and setting the show up for other episodes with this ominous ending.
I love Torie’s analysis of Q’s motivations here, which were less clear to me as I watched. Was he really banished by the Q, or was it all a ploy? Wouldn’t the Borg have discovered the Federation pretty soon anyway, since they were already attacking Romulan outposts?
I appreciate Picard’s sentiment that they’re ready to face whatever’s out there, and the lesson Q teaches him. In the end, it really was Picard’s arrogance that brought them under the Borg’s attention; if he had listened to Guinan and headed home, they might have escaped unnoticed. (I was also confused about how much people know about Guinan, and why she’s so vague about everything.)
So I wavered between warp 4 and 5, but in light of recent and forthcoming episodes, and the importance of this story to the Star Trek universe, and how they pulled out all the stops to try to make this feel BIG–that slow pull-out on the crew inside the Borg cube is amazing–I’ll give it a 5.
There’s plenty it nit-pick in this episode (if they are all officer’s then what the hell is officer’s quarters? What si Gomez in the story, she serves no purpose what so ever.) However, eve though it is a Q episode I generally like this one. the characters are in over their depth, there’s a real sense that the universe is grander and more dangerous that the backward nativie stories that the show had been telling, and Q isactually right for a change. They were arrogant and not ready.
What annoyed me the most was th away team trip to the cube. You already know that this is an implacable and hostile species, sending three people to poke around is foolish. (though that could have been saved had the reason been rescue, the hopes that the in the section lifted by the Borg might be saved. And you could have paid off with the crew – convereted to borg, attacking the rescue team.)
still, this was so much betetr than what had come before, sadlyn what lies ahead is the neutering of the borg…
(Re)watching this episode, I was struck by the idea that this might be TNG’s take on the Kobiyashi Maru no-win scenario.
I mean, here you have this new ST captain who is clearly the shining star of the series to date, and you have writers who want to “take him out on a test drive.” What do you do? Well, you recreate Kirk’s iconic moment (the moment that turned him into an icon) and play it against this new captain.
Here, the strength is in pliance, Picard’s willingness to be humble and ask for help—a reed versus the oak moment, if you will—which is really quite in contrast to Kirk. Picard wins because he is not a stuffed shirt with a tin star. We viewers think here, yes, Kirk might’ve failed Q’s problem. This is a new kind of captain, we’re thinking.
I tend to think a lot of this masterful foresight we’re told about by the Creative into how they always intended to introduce the Borg is itself a lot of retconned, after-the-fact horseshit. I mean, this is a series that hasn’t shown a lot of quality to date, a lot of intelligence to date, and we’re expected to believe they had they whole Borg story arc plotted out… instead of, as I suspect, it being yet another plate of pasta thrown at the wall to see what stuck (as, I believe, the character of Gomez also was, and didn’t [stick]). No, I think the ready-made “implacable enemy” was trotted out for “All Good Things” and worked out so brilliantly, so wonderful, that someone retconned “I meant to do that, gimme a retro-Emmy” on to this episode.
In the same way everyone wants to be the reincarnation of Napoleon, not his stable boy, everyone involved in TNG wants to take credit for the Borg, the whole enchilada, not the Ferengi or, ulp Pakleds. IMO.
At any rate, it is interesting to ponder WWKD regarding the Borg/Q problem presented here.
Correction: …trotted out for “Best of Both Worlds”…
As for the character of Gomez, I must wonder if she isn’t some protypical stab at the “Everyman” in what would ultimately become most recognizable as Barclay.
As Torie notes, you have this perfect universe in which every lead character is unique, most excellent, gifted, marvelous, wunderkind, etc. And you’ve got Gene cracking a whip that, by golly, everyone who inhabits this universe is this special, this amazing. And you have the writers glancing sadly at one another, saying, “How are we supposed to write compelling drama around this?” Especially when most television of the era is focused quite heavily on human flaws, follies and foibles.
So I can see back pressure from writers in wanting to add an “Everyday Joe,” someone vulnerable to the awe and mystery, to the cast. For comic relief, for viewer identification, whatever.
There are several of these stabs. I would place O’Brien as more or less one of them. Barclay is its ultimate expression. But I think Gomez is understandable as a test of the writers’ cry from the parched, unwatered wilderness Gene created for character drama.
@ 1 Toryx
Aww, it’s good to have that perspective. I saw this years later in syndication, and I remember my first Borg episode as “I, Borg” (which still sticks with me).
@ 2 Lemnoc
Agreed on all points.
@ 3 S. Hutson Blount
But there is no officer/enlisted divide in this series. O’Brien hangs out with Worf. La Forge goes out for drinks with his subordinate (who is admittedly an officer, but still!).
@ 4 DemetriosX
I really don’t shed any tears that the Borg weren’t bugs. That’d be creepy, yet ironically not as effective at conveying the hive mind thing. And I think cyborgs were long overdue as a TV villain.
@ 5 JohnSteed7
The cube didn’t freak me out until they beamed aboard. It’s just so soulless to watch these sorta-people plug themselves into the motherboard.
“The Neutral Zone” implied the Borg were awfully close to the Federation already. Like Demetrios, I don’t think the writers can really have it both ways…
@ 6 Eugene
Geordi seemed a little flirty, but also had some obvious contempt for her, so that was weird…
As for Q’s motivations, I think he really was kicked out of the Q, and as such decided to commission some no holds barred entertainment. What’s to stop him now, right? It’s exceptionally wicked.
@ 7 bobsandiego
I had exactly the same issue. What on earth are they going to accomplish by beaming over?! But maybe it’s just another example of their naive arrogance, to think everything out there in the universe is not just safe but easily explicable.
@ 8 Lemnoc
I really, really love this interpretation. I kind of want to print it out and tape it to my desk. You’re absolutely right. This is Picard’s Khan, in a way. His arrogance means the death of those 18 people. If he had listened to Guinan (or even given Q the benefit of the doubt and erred on the safe side) none of this would have happened.
What I don’t understand (and Eugene mentions this) is why Guinan is so mysterious. Don’t you think SOMEONE, before she was assigned to the flagship of the Federation, would have been like “So, nearly last of your kind, eh? What happened to your people? Whoa, what Borg?!?!” And don’t you love that once they finally sit her down for a debrief, they abandon the meeting halfway? Um, I’d think you’d want to know what she has to say…
While it’s just speculation since it was never addressed in the series, there is a way for the Borg to be responsible for the damage seen in The Neutral Zone yet have the first viable encounter be a century away. The Borg sends out long range exploration/scout ships which travel in great circle routes to get a sampling of what resources are available in the surrounding areas. These ships will return to Borg space then the Collective evaluates the findings to set the priorities for their next series of campaigns.
Were that the case, you could reason that Q taking the Enterprise out there, then Picard’s decisions and actions, caused the Borg to take an early interest in the Federation. Could it be that they didn’t know that Q was responsible for the ship appearing in their space and they wanted what they thought was some new technology?
@12 Ludon
Could it be that they didn’t know that Q was responsible for the ship appearing in their space and they wanted what they thought was some new technology?
That is a great point, and I meant to mention that: What the hell did the Borg think when the Enterprise warped away (sideways!) just when it was nearly destroyed? They would either want to acquire that technology or proceed cautiously, wary of the Federation’s strength. Though they’ve just scanned the ship, so they know exactly what its capabilities are.
I also don’t understand why the Borg pick a couple of pieces off fallen drones and then incinerate the body on the spot, instead of just transporting back with the corpse and harvesting all the parts they want.
I think the most frightening part of the Borg to me is the way they ignore you while you’re wandering around their ship, because they really can just destroy you if they felt like it.
@Eugene #12
Supposedly ants will do this too — if you don’t obviously smell like an intruder and they aren’t warrior caste, they’ll just go about their jobs and ignore you. I actually thought it was kind of believable that the average Borg will just sort of carry on with whatever the currently assigned task is and pay no attention to the man in the corner. What’s more surprising is that they don’t seem to have triggered any sort of security alarm by beaming over…
@11 Torie: there’s hardly any enlisted personnel that we see, ever–which might be the best evidence of a class divide. Even in “Lower Decks,” they’re all ensigns.
@13 Eugene
More speculation. The items taken from a fallen Borg could be the buffers and short term memory units holding information that was waiting for a transmission window to forward that information on to the Collective.
Also. I had thought about the Borg having scanned the ship. They’d have an idea based on that information what the ship should be able to do but they did all of a sudden detect it within their space then they saw it leave their space in a way differing greatly from that information.
—a thought provoking episode to be sure—interesting to reflect upon because in retrospect we know what the borg are capable of—why don’t they crush the enterprise and be done with it?–i feel this way at points with “best of both worlds” too—but like the predators of the insect world that the borg were supposed to be–careful sizing up of prey is common–i keep hearing in my mind dr. morbius when he said in forbidden planet “this is just a foretaste”–Q of course is growing in his importance to this series–as playfully malicious as he is–he serves to make the captain better, see “tapestry”—i for one am glad that guinan is mysterious–it provides depth for what becomes a character of great importance in this series—she listens–but she doesn’t tell—ensign gomez does have one thing right—“working with so much artificial intelligence can be dehumanizing”—and then i see groups of people looking at their phones, instead of having conversations—-
@ torie 11 .La Forge goes out for drinks with his subordinate (who is admittedly an officer, but still!).
The fact she is an officer is really everything.Now is our current system he would be in very serious trouble for flirting with a person directly under hsi command, it would be better for him if she were a security officer, or a non-command line officer like medical. But yeah, as military fiction Trek is pretty poorly written.
If I were on the Enterprise I would want to get my hands on the person who programmed the ship’s computer though. Really, I can take the captain off the ship and the computer won’t tell and unless someone asks?
For pete’s sake this is a universe with teleportation, so it is not inconcievable that an enemy could beam aboard and snatch the c.o. and in that case it would be friggin’ nice if the ship’s computer would tell someone.
Friggin’ Q. The more often I watch them, the less I like episodes with Q.
Now, don’t get me wrong. deLancie is a wonderful actor, and I’ve enjoyed him in other things, including the Star Trek Symphony thing (he and Robert Picardo were the hosts, and were really funny). But I don’t like Q, because I don’t enjoy Space Douches, and Q is the spacey-est, douche-iest of them all.
The only bit I really liked in this one was the Borg taking a core sample of the Enterprise. It was such a quintessentially scientist-y thing to do with something you don’t yet understand. It wasn’t an attack, per se: it was just doing what Curiosity is on Mars, sampling in the search for scientific advancement.
That the Borg take that sample in the name of self-improvement doesn’t even change it much: we do the same, all the time, with all kinds of core samples, and we don’t concern ourselves a whole lot with whatever life forms way-below-us think of the process.
That’s about all I liked, though. I remain thoroughly curmudgeoned about the whole thing.
@ 18 “Really, I can take the captain off the ship and the computer won’t tell and unless someone asks?
For pete’s sake this is a universe with teleportation, so it is not inconcievable that an enemy could beam aboard and snatch the c.o. and in that case it would be friggin’ nice if the ship’s computer would tell someone.”
Yeah, it’s a weak concept. Don’t forget, they’ll do it again in a later season ( Alliegience” ), but at least that time there will be a faux Picard left in his place. Of course, if you want to play devil’s advocate, you could say that Q fixed it so that the computer would’nt notice his disappearance until asked.
Yay, someone else loathes Q! Why is he even in this episode? (Why is he in any episode?) In “Q Who” he could easily be replaced by the bog-standard TNG “anomaly” as an excuse for the Enterprise’s miraculous transport to a far distant part of the galaxy (and their rescue therefrom) and we’d lose nothing. Hell, it might even be a stronger episode without Q’s appearance because right from the start, thanks to Q’s derision, we know from the start that things are going to go badly wrong; without Q we’d have more suspense.