BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [SCORPION]
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ST DVD screenshots, film screenshots, and episode screenshots from [#68 and #69 Scorpion] by Janet.

 

Brannon Braga, supervising producer

Brannon Braga: I guess the third thing we decided to do (for Season 3) was get the Borg more involved in the show. After the movie [Star Trek VIII: First Contact] came out we were kind of staying away from the Borg to give [Star Trek VIII: First Contact] its breathing room. But once the film was released it just seemed to me that the Borg could be to [Star Trek Voyager] what the Klingons were to [TOS] or [TNG] or the Cardassians were to [DS9]. We needed our own villain to help define the show.

The Borg Queen with her captive, Picard, in [Star Trek VIII: First Contact].   The Borg Queen (in this film played by Alice Krige) will appear in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier], [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero] and, with Alice Krige again in the role, in [#171 and #172 Endgame]

Chakotay shows Janeway a Borg drone corpse, found on the Sakari planet, [#58 Blood Fever]

Rick Berman, executive producer

Rick Berman: I believe the reintroduction of the Borg into [Star Trek Voyager] had a lot to do with the success of our second film, [Star Trek VIII: First Contact], which was one that was focussed purely on the Borg and which introduced us to the character of the Borg Queen. That really was written and produced during the Second Season of [Star Trek Voyager]. The thought of continuing with the Borg was extremely tempting. By the Third Season of [Star Trek Voyager], we started bringing that to fruition.

a Borg cube and Borg drones in [#59 Unity], a Season 3 episode

Jeri Taylor: The thinking was of course that the Borg were the most phenomenal villains that Star Trek had known to that point, and they had originated in the Delta Quadrant (established in [TNG]), and we were in the Delta Quadrant, and so it just seemed inevitable that they would eventually encounter them, and they did.

Jeri Taylor, executive producer

Rick Berman: One of the interesting things about the Borg that just by their definition they were able to be anywhere that we went. The same thing with Species 8472, a species that can come out of nowhere through wormholelike anomalies, subspace this and that, creatures that you can run into in the Second Season or the Seventh Season.

Jeri Taylor: Brannon is one of those incredibly creative people who's always got his synapses firing way out there on the horizon, and he had wonderful wonderful ideas throughout the whole thing. It would've been impossible to do the series without Brannon, and so that Species was his idea.

the away team encounters a gruesome 'sculpture' of dead Borg bodies	a member of Species 8472 attacks Harry Kim
Species 8472 bioships join weapons fire to devastate a Borg planet	the Borg planet is about to explode
Borg cubes flee the debris flying out from the explosion	a Borg cube, with Voyager captured by its tractor pulse, hurtles away

#1 Kim explores a crippled Borg cube #2 Kim is attacked by an unknown alien, later identified using the Borg designation as Species 8472 Garrett Wang

Garrett Wang (plays Kim): I like that episode because all of a sudden now you have an enemy which is even more fearful than the Borg, an enemy that can singlehandedly take out the Borg, who could that be, you know?! Well, up to that point, I mean, the Borg was the end-all, be-all of all enemies. Nobody could beat them. Well now, you've got these guys. They're from a part of the universe that is fluidic space, what, it's all fluid?! They can survive in our space without any type of life support. So that episode was for me....I loved it. It introduced a new villain. The sci-fi fan in me really enjoyed working on the episode for that. I mean, I wasn't too happy that for most of that episode I was on a biobed with green gloop on my face - who else but Kim needs to be tortured, you know, and in the biobed?! No one else, just Kim!

#3 Kim in agony, after the Species 8472 attack #4 Kim on the primary biobed in Voyager's sickbay Garrett Wang

Bryan Fuler, executive story editor, co-producer: "Originally Seven of Nine was coming on as the wild child, raised by the Borg insteady of by wolves, and she was being taught to be human again. The assimilation process is a violation, a rape that strips everything you are away from you. Janeway's and Seven of Nine's is a more human relationship, a meatier relationship than even Kirk and Spock (in [TOS]). Janeway was trying to save this woman's woul after it has been stripped away by the Borg. That's a big story. It's all very powerful, and it translates better than the Kirk-Spock dynamic. It's a mother trying to save her daughter. It's all about redemption. When Seven came aboard Voyager, the show came into its own. Everything seemed to snap into focus in a way it never had before."

David Livingston, director

David Livingston: That was fun, because we got to deal with CGI figures. Star Trek had not always been on the cutting edge of CGI technology. They continued to use real models and shoot motion control shots etc. And when it got to [Scorpion] there was no choice but to create a CGI model. We couldn't do something realistic. The artists and the post-production people created this terrifying creature that you see sort of at the end of [Scorpion]. It was kind of played a little bit like 'Alien', you know. You don't really get a huge look at it, which to me is always the best way to portray these things. You look at them too long and too closely they start to fall apart a bit.