Star Trek Nearly Made Picard A Mass Murderer

To understand how this Star Trek spinoff nearly made Captain Picard into a mass murderer, it’s important to review what happened in the Voyager episode “Scorpion.” In that episode, Janeway and the crew are nervous about entering Borg space, and rightfully so.

After all, the last time this crew heard about a Borg Cube, it was when the bionic villains killed over 11,000 Starfleet officers at the Battle of Wolf 359. Soon, though, the Borg and Janeway alike must deal with a scary new villain, Species 8472.

These new aliens are scary because the Borg cannot properly adapt to them. As such, these creatures can tear through Trek’s scariest foes with ease. That fact is made clear when the crew encounters a pile of mutilated Borg parts in a scene that, once upon a time, would have made Picard an accidental mass murderer.

“Scorpion” was co-written by Brannon Braga, a talented creator who also served as producer on Voyager. Long before this episode was written and even before everyone decided to bring the Borg back, he had a creepy vision stuck in his head. Specifically, he had a vision of Janeway and the Voyager crew encountering a creepy graveyard of Borg bodies.

What does this have to do with Picard, and how would it have made Picard into a mass murderer? According to Braga, this would have been “an interesting payoff” to First Contact. Braga didn’t think these bad guys would stay dead very long, though. “Obviously” he said, “Somehow they’ll come back to life.” Though he did not indicate how that would happen.

All of this goes back to the climax of First Contact in which Captain Picard killed the Borg Queen by first melting off her skin and then breaking her robotic neck. This was meant to be a cathartic moment for the captain because he spends most of that film trying to process the trauma of being abducted and assimilated by the Borg years ago.

If Braga had his way, though, we would have later found out that Picard destroying the Borg Queen would accidentally make our erstwhile captain into a large-scale murderer by killing some (or maybe even all) of the Collective.

Eventually, of course, Voyager went with the explanation that the stacked pile of mutilated Borg parts (something that seemed inspired more by David Cronenberg than Gene Roddenberry) was due to Species 8472. However, I can’t shake the thought of how weird it would have been to connect this episode to First Contact. Not only because it would make Picard a murderer but because it would actually ruin one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In the episode “I, Borg,” the Enterprise rescues a single Borg drone, and Picard is pleased when Data and Geordi La Forge come up with a plan to infect the drone with a fatal virus he could take back to the Collective. Dr. Crusher objects to the plan because it would make Picard and the brewer murderers guilty of nothing less than genocide. Picard disagrees with this assessment, but he backs off with the plan and even offers the drone asylum after he develops a sense of individuality.

Put another way, The Next Generation already made a big deal of walking Picard up to the “mass murderer” line and then having him walk away. Turning Picard’s vengeance on the Borg Queen into the same kind of genocide he wanted to avoid in “I, Borg” would have made the events of First Contact retroactively much sadder. Fortunately, the Voyager writers went in a different direction, and while that led to a fairly forgettable CGI villain, it also kept the soul of Jean-Luc Picard intact.