Cynical 'Unimatrix Zero' Review

Over at the Cynics Corner, David E. Sluss has put up his review of 'Unimatrix Zero', the Voyager season finale. In the review, Sluss awards the episode a 4.0, mainly complaining about what the episode did to the image of the Borg:

EUNUCH OF THE WEEK: Is there any doubt? It's the Borg Collective, who have never, not even in last year's execrable "Dark Frontier," looked as incompetent and ridiculous as they do here. Indeed, they hardly behave like a collective mind at all, but instead like a bunch of mechanized creatures shambling around and acting in response to verbal orders and threats from the Borg Queen, who stands around monitoring everything on her television. If you look at the actions of the Queen and her drones in this episode, there is very little that suggests that they are all connected as a single mind, and quite a bit that suggests that they don't. For starters, we have the Queen watching events on her television and explaining the disease and her actions verbally to the drones around her, neither of which should be required within a collective mind. Granted, we can chalk this up to "storytelling license," since the exposition has to be done somehow, but it's still a total corruption of what the Borg are supposed to be about. And there are alternatives, such as the simple solution of having the Queen "think" her instructions with a voiceover rather than moving her lips. Similarly, the dismantling of drones to find out what's wrong with their pieces-parts and to determine the exact frequency of Unimatrix Zero shouldn't be necessary either, but then we'd have missed out on the "shock value" of all those disembodied heads (and, by the way, isn't the main processor for a drone in the guts rather than in the head, according to Worst Contact?).

[...]

The bottom line, to coin a phrase, is that the Borg have been turning into suckers for years, since Next Generation's "I, Borg" in fact, with each appearance stripping away more and more of their credibility, and now it looks like they've hit rock bottom (until Part II and next November's reported "Borg Event" at least).

Also up on the site is the Cynics Corner preview of season seven, in which the recent comments on 'Voyager' by UPN entertainment president Tom Nunan are run through the Cynics Corner Translation Matrix to see what they really mean.

The Cynics Corner season six review, including the Third Annual Cy Awards, should be up in a few weeks.

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