Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The Borg Cube You Need To Know

Following the success of UPN's decision to air both parts of "The Killing Game" on a single night, the producers of Star Trek: Voyager were asked for a followup television "movie". The result was season five's "Dark Frontier", a two-hour event which depicted the crew of the USS Voyager pulling a heist on a Borg ship, intercut with scenes from Seven of Nine's childhood assimilation.

The supersized episode featured several new additions to the Borg canon, including the notion that the Borg were in fact known to the Federation well before Q's forced-first contact with them in Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season. In Voyager's retconned Borg history, Seven of Nine's parents, Magnus and Erin Hansen, were loose canon scientists chasing down rumors of the cybernetic race with their young daughter, Annika, in tow.

The flashback segments of "Dark Frontier" take place aboard the Hansen's starship, the Raven (previously seen as wreckage in the aptly titled "The Raven"), a kind of makeshift family home slash research vessel. Among the Hansen's belongings was a model of a Borg cube, which young Annika can be seen playing with early in the episode. Magnus scolds his daughter, telling Annika that the model is "not a toy".

...But actually it really was a toy.

Annika's Borg cube was in reality a commercially available "lights and sound" Borg cube produced by Playmates Toys in 1994, part of their expansive collection of Star Trek action figures, vehicles, and role-playing toys.

Star Trek: Voyager's property department previously raided Toys R Us for props two seasons prior, during the production of "Scorpion", repurposing several Playmates' Star Trek: First Contact Borg drone action figures for Kes' grisly Species 8472-induced vision of a pile of Borg corpses.