Dark Frontier
The crew of a spacecraft trying to get back to Earth once again encounter a race of cybernetic organisms bent on Galactic domination.
Ex-Borg character Seven of Nine (played by Jeri Ryan) struggles with her past as she rediscovers her humanity aboard the spacecraft.
[2] In this episode, the crew of Starfleet's USS Voyager encounter the Borg "queen", a character introduced in the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact.
[4] This episode is noted for a heist plot-device, in which Voyager plans to make off with Borg tech, and also for expanding the character story of Seven of Nine.
After Voyager manages to destroy a Borg probe by beaming a photon torpedo aboard, Seven of Nine finds data nodes filled with tactical information among the debris.
With it they locate a heavily damaged sphere nearby, and Captain Janeway decides to plan a "heist" – invade the Borg vessel while its defenses are down and take its transwarp coil, which will shave about 20 years off of Voyager's journey.
Hoping to find information that will give them a tactical edge, Janeway assigns Seven to study her parents' field notes that Voyager recovered from the Raven.
The sphere's shields and transwarp drive will be offline for the next 72 hours, allowing the crew only a short time to plan and execute the mission.
Their simulated mission fails when Janeway and her team take too long and the Borg regenerate their sensor grid and detect the intrusion.
When Naomi Wildman begins asking her questions about the Collective, Seven hallucinates that the Borg have accessed her neural transceiver and know about Janeway's plan.
They use the stolen coil to take the shuttle into transwarp space, and incorporate multi-adaptive shielding based on the Hansens' field notes from the Raven to go undetected by the Borg.
On Voyager, Chakotay orders Torres to fire a full spread of photon torpedoes at the conduit threshold, collapsing it just as the shuttle bursts through.
[15] ScreenRant ranked "Dark Frontier" the eighth best episode with the Borg, based on an IMDB rating of 8.6 out ten.
[17] Screen Rant rated the Borg Cube as the second most deadly spacecraft of the Star Trek science fiction universe.
[19] Nerdist suggested watching "Dark Frontier" as part of an abbreviated binge-watching guide featuring USS Voyager's confrontations with the Borg.
[22] Comic Book Resources highlighted "Dark Fontier" for Seven of Nine noting it was one of the "fascinating Borg-centric entries" along with "Infinite Regress" in season 5.
[24] SyFy Wire ranked "Dark Frontier" as one of the seven essential episodes about Borg to watch as background for Star Trek: Picard.
[26] They felt that in this episode women were part of the show's "epic narrative", and they evaluated based on such themes as woman in Hollywood and as an evolution of the character Kathryn Janeway.
[33] The box set includes 7 DVD optical discs with all the season 5 episodes, extra features, and a Dolby 5.1 Digital Audio track.
