Throughout the second season of “Picard,” Dr. Jurati (Alison Pill) butted heads with that universe’s evil Borg queen (the late Annie Wersching), and the Borg queen ended up assimilating Jurati’s mind. This was, thanks to a time warp, all set in the year 2024. When the series returned to the future, it was revealed that Dr. Jurati had been a Borg queen for centuries, and was only assimilating the Stargazer because she needed a fleet of starships to stop a massive and destructive spatial phenomenon that was, prior to that instant, never mentioned. The Jurati Borg explained that unity, diplomacy, and working together was the new ethos of the Borg. “Picard” implied that the Borg — the entire species — had turned over a new leaf and that they wouldn’t be villains anymore.
Thanks to the new season of “Picard,” however, it seems that Jurati’s “kindler gentler Borg” were a one-off fluke, and that the Borg have been left intact as a soulless species of conquering cyborgs. Thank goodness.
On the latest episode of “Picard,” called “No Win Scenario,” Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick) is taking a load off in the holodeck before he and his crew are likely to be destroyed inside a destructive nebula. Because he is a massive jerkwad (but, y’know, respectable), Shaw points out to Picard that the latter was once assimilated, and that he was at least indirectly responsible for the 11,000 deaths at the Battle of Wolf-359 (Shaw barely escaped with his own life, and has the emotional scars to prove it). Although Shaw’s first officer was once Borg (Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine), he doesn’t have a rosy view of them. “The Borg are still out there,” he says, implying that the Jurati Borg was but a fluke.
Importantly, Shaw says “Forget that Stargazer s***,” directly contradicting the finale of season 2.
