Borg
Ten years after the U.S.S. Enterprise barely stopped a Borg attck on Earth, Cadet Furlong is evacuated from his cadet cruise when his ship is diverted toward another battle with an incoming Borg cube. Furlong is angry with the decision – and his new orders bring painful memories of his father’s death aboard the U.S.S. Righteous at Wolf 359 to the surface. Before Furlong can evacuate, however, Q appears to him and offers him a chance to fight the Borg – not in the here and now, but in the past, aboard the Righteous, alongisde his own father. Furthermore, Q gives Furlong the chance to change history and save his father’s life. After a few false starts, Furlong – with Q’s help – assumes the role of Righteous bridge officer Lt. Sprint, with Q taking on the guise of the ship’s doctor to advise (and admonish) Furlong. Every decision Furlong makes could change history and help his father and his crew survive – or it could making his father’s death at the hands of the Borg inevitable. Q is able to give Furlong the chance to go back and correct some of the mistakes he makes, but even the omnipotent being says he can only give Furlong so many chances to change the past. But even if Furlong can save his father and the Righteous crew, will they escape destruction in one Borg attack only to face another?
written by Hilary J. Bader
based on the CD-ROM game Star Trek: Borg scripted by Hilary J. Bader
directed by Karen Frillman
audio from game movie sequences directed by James L. Conway
music by Dennis McCarthyCast: Howard McGillin (Cadet Furlong), John DeLancie (Q), Jeff Allin (Lt. Ralph Furlong), Barry Lynch (Captain Andropov), John Cothran Jr. (Counselor Biraka), Marnie McPhail (Ensign Targus), Murray Rubinstein (Dr. Quint), Juli Donald (Shoreham), Majel Barrett (Computer Voice)
Notes: This audio drama essentially adds narration to bridge the gaps between the interactive movie sequences filmed for the computer game Star Trek: Borg; only Furlong’s retrospective “log entries” were newly recorded just for the audio drama, while the non-narrated, full-cast scenes were simply the audio from the game’s filmed segments. The game’s time frame of ten years after The Best Of Both Worlds places the Borg attack that results in Cadet Furlong’s evacuation sometime during Star Trek: Voyager’s fifth season – or two years after another Borg attack chronicled in Star Trek: First Contact.
The cast of the game and the audio drama based on it is loaded with Star Trek veterans; Barry Lynch played the role of Federation defector DeSeve in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Face Of The Enemy. John Cothran Jr. appeared in Next Generation as the garrolous Klingon Nu’Daq in The Chase, as Telok in the Deep Space Nine episode Crossover, and as Gralik in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode The Shipment. Jeff Allin played the role of Ensign Sutter, whose daughter’s Imaginary Friend was the villain of the episode of the same name. Marnie McPhail appeared as an ill-fated Enterprise crewmember in Star Trek: First Contact (who, ironically, was among the Borg’s first victims in that movie), and the Star Trek: Voyager episode Innocence, as well as numerous guest appearances in Sliders and The X-Files. While Murray Rubinstein hasn’t appeared in any other Star Trek projects, he did appear as Thomas Veil’s ill-fated friend Larry in another UPN series, Nowhere Man. Juli Donald appeared in the Next Generation segment A Matter Of Perspective and in the Deep Space Nine episode Prophet Motive; she was also one of the Starfury pilots in the Babylon 5 episode The Fall of Night.
James L. Conway directed many episodes of Next Generation and Voyager, while Dennis McCarthy scored dozens of episodes from the Next Generation premiere onward. (The packaging for Star Trek: Borg mistakenly credits Jonathan Frakes, not Conway.)
LogBook entry by Earl Green
Notes: As with Voyager’s two-part episode Future’s End, set partly in 1996, this episode contradicts the original series episode Space Seed, which placed Khan and the Eugenics Wars in 1996; the later spinoff series Enterprise confirms this rewriting of Trek history by dating the Eugenics Wars and the augments to the 22nd century, rather than the end of the 20th.