The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek First Contact

6. Captain's Outrageous

Star Trek: First Contact
Paramount

Picard's experience being assimilated by the Borg is the stuff of nightmares, and that he's in any way functional in the aftermath of same is miraculous...or the stuff of episodic TV where long-term consequences were routinely forgotten for the expediency of getting 26 shows out a year.

Still, Picard’s cavalier gunning down of a member of his crew in the process of being Borg-assimilated is shocking, particularly in light of the fact that he’s living proof that it’s possible to come back from being plugged into the Collective.

Is he really so haunted by his experience that he’d rather have been killed than rescued and reclaimed?

Sure, maybe sensing the Borg voices has hit him so hard that he’s snapped, but if so there should have been a character-rebuilding moment where he realizes how horrible his trauma has made him and this motivates him to make things right…or make it so. That there's no such moment of realization is...well, you know the drill.

 
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Contributor
Contributor

Maurice is one of the founders of FACT TREK (www.facttrek.com), a project dedicated to untangling 50+ years of mythology about the original Star Trek and its place in TV history. He's also a screenwriter, writer, and videogame industry vet with scars to show for it. In that latter capacity he game designer/writer on the Sega Genesis/SNES "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time" game, as well as Dreamcast "Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future" where Tom Baker performed words he wrote.