Did Captain Janeway do the morally right or morally wrong thing refusing to let Seven of Nine return to The Collective?
It was totally fine. Borg implants or not, she was still human. She also didn’t have a choice about becoming Borg at such a young age. When her connection was cut with the collective, she basically became a child again making her Janeway’s responsibility. (That was close to Janeway’s logic I believe, and I agree with it. It was a human decision for another human who was incapable of making decisions.)
The biggest thing is that Seven has already signed a contract with UPN, so she was kinda stuck for a few episodes anyway. Janeway knew this, so after thinking about it over a 50 gallon drum of coffee and a few packs of menthol Kools, she decided to just run with it and make it dramatic. (The Borg attorneys failed to overturn the terms of the contract even after several weeks of absolutely phenomenal work.)
Set aside the predictability. Would you say the same goes for “Day of Honor” when Seven is willing to give herself up?
I watched through Day of Honor a couple of times today, but it was kinda choppy for me since I had to work.
I just want to clarify “give herself up” in that you mean she is willing to become part of the Voyager “collective” and puts aside her need to return to the Borg?
If my above assumption is correct, then yes. She is growing exponentially personality wise, but there are significant challenges in doing so.
Personally, I have been around engineers my entire life. Some people I know could rattle on for hours over something like p vs np even if they just learned about it a few hours ago. Put that same person in a complex social environment and they are absolutely clueless. It’s similar to Seven.
Assuming I didn’t know anything about her timeline after Day of Honor, my guess would have been it would take years for her to learn how to operate in a complex structure like we are accustomed to. Janeway seems bright enough to understand that as well. So yeah, it would be a very long time before she could make the kinds of decisions we take for granted and Janeway would have to do that for her like a parent.
Fast forward a bit to Picard, you can see how long it took for her character to develop into something that didn’t resemble a robot. (I am willfully excluding some later episodes of Voyager that were kind of odd, btw.)
