Star Trek: 25 Greatest Next Generation Episodes

9. I, Borg

In the third installment of the series featuring the Borg, the Enterprise intercepts a distress signal emanating from a nearby moon, where they discover a crashed Borg scout ship with one surviving Borg. The Borg, known as Third of Five, is taken aboard for medical treatment, causing much dismay and discomfort for the crew, especially for Picard, who is still fairly traumatized from his experience with the Borg the year before.

The Borg takes a liking to Geordi, who tries to teach him that it is better to think as an individual than as a collective, and even gives him a sense of identity by calling him Hugh instead of Third of Five. Meanwhile, the crew debates whether or not to return Hugh to the collective as well as whether or not to return him with a virus that could ultimately destroy the collective.

As easy as it would be to use Hugh to destroy the Borg collective, they decide the moral thing to do would be to send him home free of tampering. However, in their next encounter, the Enterprise crew will discover that by giving him individuality, they managed to do great damage the Borg without the virus at all.