The Enterprise responds to a distress signal from a remote Federation outpost, on arrival they find an unknown ship in orbit unresponsive to hails. An away team is sent down to the outpost on the surface where remains all the signs of an armed attack. An investigation begins but upon opening a door a Borg drone is revealed. The away team and the Brog drones engage in an atypical exchange of weapons fire, the Borg seemingly uninterested in assimilating the away team. During the fight, Data attacks one of the drones and kills it while shouting, "Stop! Stop! Stop!" The Borg leave and the away team returns to the ship and short pursuit takes place on the unusual Borg ship. It soon disappears into a previously unknown means of FTL transportation.
Data says that he "felt angry" during his killing of the Borg and relieves himself of duty so he can investigate what's wrong with him, meanwhile an investigation begins on the new and strange Borg behavior.
It's feared the Borg are gearing up for another run on the Federation so Starfleet begins fortifying itself and putting everyone on alert, Admiral Nechayev admonishes Picard for the incident with Hugh in the previous season, namely for letting Hugh go and not enacting his plan that could have destroyed to Borg. She tells Picard to not let a similar opportunity escape him this time.
The crew is able to figure out that the Borg are using a new type of propulsion system that uses, essentially, artificial wormholes to leap between points in space. This is how their ship is now to appear and disappear so easily. They're still uncertain about the Borg's new strange behavior, namely a drone showing concern for a fallen drone's death.
Data has been trying to generate other emotional states within himself but is unable to. Counselor Troi asks him why he hasn't been trying to recreate the one emotion he knows he can now experience. Anger. Data says because it's a "negative" emotion, but Troi's -quite correctly- points out that there's no negative emotions and even anger can lead to positive outcomes. It's what one does from those emotions that counts.
Data recreates the Borg encounter on the holodeck but isn't able to recreate the emotions, before he can get Geordi to help disable the holodeck's safeties so the lethality of the simulation will be real, everyone is called to the bridge.
The Borg are attacking another planet near the Enterprise and the ship intercepts, the Borg flee and the Enterprise gives chase and is able to slip into the Borg's artificial wormhole. On the otherside the Borg send a small invasion party to the ship and are able to escape back through the wormhole while the bridge deals with the invasion party. Riker remarks at another Borg change, they no longer disintegrate their dead and simply leave them behind.
One of the Borg is able to be recovered from his injuries and though it poses a danger, Picard insists the Borg be awoken to answer questions. The Borg continues to demonstrate un-Borg like behavior including having a name and not a designation and referring to a leader called simply "The One." The Borg, however, refuses to answer questions. Picard leaves and Data is left behind to find a way to extract information from the drone and to discover any changes it may have over Hugh's initial scans.
The drone activates a device on his arm and is able to verbally manipulate Data, taking advantage of his new emotion(s.) Data and the drone flee via shuttle and are able to enter an artificial wormhole. Geordi is now able to duplicate the process and have the Enterprise follow, they arrive over 60-light years away near a habitable planet now devoid of civilized life.
The planet's atmosphere precludes scanning so an away team is sent down to investigate the determined landing spot for the shuttle. No one is around, so a massive search party is set-up using most of the Enterprise's crew; leaving a skeleton crew on the ship commanded by Dr. Crusher.
A team comprised of Picard, Geordi, Troi and a Yellow Shirt manages to come across a building in their search grid and enter it, they attempt to leave when nervous about the building's status but are blocked by a swarm of drones. Lore comes out and addresses Picard and co. and announces his plans to use the Borg to bring down the Federation and to help him he has Data at his side.
To be continued....
Sigh. Personally, this for me is the weakest of the two-part season finales. Granted it's not like there's a lot of them but the episode just doesn't work for me. It's not that it's bad, but it's the first misuse of the Borg in what'll become a long-line of misuses between this episode and the end of the "Prime Universe" franchise. With one quick diversion to "good" in the movie "First Contact."
There's nothing strictly wrong with the episode it's well made, looks good, and bringing Lore back as a villain all is fine and good but the use and manipulation of Data here doesn't work for me. It almost makes Data seem way to weak and easily manipulated. Sure on a basic level he's a machine, but you'd think he'd have the best of all malware programs in him to prevent intrusions like the on Lore is doing and to "know" when he's being manipulated and those manipulations not being able to so easily change his motivations and behavior.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself, a lot of this comes up more in the second part.
We're given a new propulsion means they we pretty much never see again (and I don't recall from the second episode what about it, if anything, made it unusable in the future) and we see a new design of Borg ship we also never see again. (Though, it's likely limited to this faction of Borg.)
It's not revealed until the second episode, but it is interesting to see what became of Hugh and how the "individuality malicious program" in him didn't bring down the collective; this would suggest their "really confusing 3D-artwork print" likely wouldn't have worked either for the same reasons. The Borg simply got rid of the defective drones.
To his credit, Brent Spiner does a really good job here with Data's dealing with emotions and the brief bit we see of Lore at the end. We also get one of the better counseling sessions from Troi where she does give the great advise/remarks that there's no "negative emotions" and how one thought to be negative -like anger- could drive a person to do something positive.
The opening scene with Data playing poker with holodeck recreations of Issac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking (played by the real Stephen Hawking) is a good scene, though a couple moments of it seems to rely on "myths" about the two older noted scientists. Newton and the apple and Einstein being bad at simple math.
This episode also stands out in that the episode title is shown during the first exterior-shot of the ship between scenes, followed by the on-screen producer/actor/writer credits. This was done so as to not be a distraction between the action scene that opens the first act.
I believe in this episode is the first time in a while we see the little "sub-compact" shuttle used as opposed to the larger shuttle. This was probably because the "prop" could more easily be taken to a location for filming as opposed to larger "prop" of the shuttle we see more often in the later seasons.
Which, by the way, the episode makes great use of location-shooting here; not something we saw on TNG a whole lot. Not only good location shooting but the filtering for the scenes looks very good and while doesn't give the planet an "other worldly" or "alien" feel or look, it does give it a nice different look to maybe distinguish it from Earth.
TNG for most of its run avoided using the "Red Shirt" trope so often seen in TOS. You know, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and "Crewman #6" in a red uniform beam down to a planet. You know that last guy is toast in order to "prove" to us how dangerous the situation is.
In TNG the "grunts" wear yellow uniforms (the new color for the security officers) but there's very few occasions where we see them go on an away team only to die to make the situation seem serious. Even on the ship we see them all of the time and only fairly rarely are they killed in an encounter; though they do get their asses kicked a lot.
Here? This poor schlub might as well have been put in a TOS red uniform with how he's used to cater to this trope.
Meh episode. It's not good, it's not really terrible, it's just there. But, no serious flaws, I suppose; other than relying on The Borg for a season finale again. But it's early, so the Borg weren't yet overused by this point.
Next week or conclusion and begins our slog through TNG's Seventh and Final season which should take us into the first or second week of March. And, man, are we going to get our feet wet between now and then.
