Nightmare Fuel / Star Trek: Picard

Poor Icheb is about to get fridged.

WARNING: Spoilers are unmarked.

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Continuing the TV-MA level violence from Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard has quite a few scary moments.

Season 1

1x 01 — Remembrance

• Dahj and her boyfriend getting attacked in her apartment in Boston. With absolutely zero warning, the Zhat Vash agents beam in and plant a knife in the boyfriend's chest (fatally), before attempting to abduct Dahj, whereupon she "activates" and shoots all the operatives dead on the spot.
• The second Zhat Vash attack on Dahj features this on both sides. We see Dahj pull off absolutely terrifying speed and jumping ability, and once the last agent is defeated, he spits some form of acid that rapidly starts dissolving Dahj before both of them are visibly blown up by an overloading disruptor rifle onscreen.
• At the end of the episode, after Narek arrives on the Romulan Reclamation Site, the view zooms out... and out... and out still more, to reveal that the "Site" is actually a derelict Borg cube.

1x 02 — Maps and Legends

• The episode kicks off by depicting the day of the synths' attack on Mars in 2385. First off, the synths fall very much into the Uncanny Valley as significantly imperfect offshoots from Data. Then the main synth depicted, "F8", falls prey to some kind of hacking while his humanoid colleagues take a break, murders them all with shots from a powerful laser welder, redirects the defense grid at the planet's surface, and then takes the same tool and blows his own brains out.
• The Romulan safety briefer at the Reclamation Site implies that very nasty things can still happen to workers on the dormant Borg cube if they do not stick to designated safe zones, and they should flee as soon as their badge turns green.
• Soji participates in the surgery to liberate former Borg drones, which features rather Nausea Fuel-level shots of implants being removed in the process.

1x 03 — The End Is the Beginning

• The beginning of the episode, a flashback to then-Admiral Picard and then-Commander Musiker in the wake of the synth attack on Mars, can be low-key Nightmare Fuel to anybody who has been arbitrarily terminated by an employer.
  • Picard thinks that he's indispensable to Starfleet Command, with all of his reputation, experience and seniority, but they accept his resignation anyway rather than continue with the Romulan evacuation.
  • Musiker, meanwhile, is tossed out of Starfleet just because of her association with Picard, and as soon as she gets a call from the C-in-C's office, she knows exactly what they're about to do to her career. Fourteen years later, she's still furious over that turning point, and not without good reason.
• At the chateau, Picard, Laris and Zhaban are assaulted by Zhat Vash mooks in the middle of the night. Fortunately, they prevail, but multiple rooms of the Picard family estate are smashed up, and they had to pull multiple phasers from locations stashed around the house to pull it off.
  • Jurati is especially shaken up when she takes out the last agent, and is informed that Romulan weapons have no stun setting.
• Shortly afterwards, the four are interrogating their surviving captive, and the operative bites down on another acid capsule and tries to spit it at Zhaban as an attempt at Taking You with Me. Luckily, Zhaban is able to escape his rapidly dissolving vest and the agent's last-ditch attempt comes to nothing.
• Back on the Reclamation Site, Ramdha's rapid descent into a Freak Out and Attempted Suicide right in front of Soji and Hugh is no less unsettling. Luckily, Soji's Super-Reflexes activate and allow her to defuse the situation.

1x 04 — Absolute Candor

• Picard is visiting Vashti in 2385 when he receives the sudden news of the synths' attack on Mars, but by that point You Are Too Late has ensued, and there is nothing he or the rest of Starfleet can do to stop it. As we know from "The End is the Beginning", he subsequently tried to keep the evacuation effort alive, but failed and lost his position in Starfleet in the process.
• Later in the episode, in the present day of 2399, Picard gets himself into a fight with Romulan locals that he is almost certain to fatally lose. Elnor pulls a Big Damn Heroes, but it still entails Tenqem getting his head cut off, again right onscreen and complete with plenty of bright-green blood.

1x 05 — Stardust City Rag

• The episode opens with a brutal scene of Icheb's vivisection for his Borg components at the hands of a black market surgeon. He even gets his cybernetic eye graphically pulled out onscreen. When Seven arrives, the best she can do for her surrogate son is to give him a Mercy Kill.
  • It's not just the chop shop approach to vivisecting living, breathing people (to say nothing of the fact that this is a character we know). At one point, after ripping out Icheb's eye, the surgeon stops and asks where his cortical node is, in this sing-song-y tone, like asking a little kid where they left their lunchbox. It's the fact that there is a person on a table, screaming in pain, bleeding out in front of her, and she's managed to completely reduce him to a slab of meat anyway. In some ways, that's more horrifying than the Eye Scream.
  • This scene holds a particular dread for Voyager fans — Icheb doesn't have a cortical node. Young enough to survive without one, he donated his to replace Seven's malfunctioning unit and save her life in the episode "Imperfection."
• Near the end of the episode, Seven beams back down to the casino in Stardust City to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Bjayzl, and caps it off by disintegrating the amoral criminal with a pair of phaser rifles that visibly blow her enemy into a bloody mess before vanishing.
• After the La Sirena crew have retrieved Dr. Maddox, Dr. Jurati is tasked with saving his life as he struggles to survive serious internal injuries — and then she abruptly turns off his life support, leaving him to expire with Tainted Veins while she reveals that Commodore Oh told her the secret of the Zhat Vash, and that Jurati has now gone from wanting to save Soji's life to wanting to destroy all synthetics.

1x 06 — The Impossible Box

• In-Universe, the Borg are this for Picard. When he does research to prepare for a trip to a Borg cube captured by the Romulans, he lands on a picture of himself as Locutus of Borg. The holographic interface lets us see the picture, including the giant Borg implant, superimposed on Picard's own face. Picard's hand shakes as he compulsively touches that side of his face.
• Upon arriving at the Borg cube, Picard is assaulted by terrifying flashbacks to his time as Locutus of Borg. Only the timely intervention of Hugh and other liberated Borg prevent him from collapsing and falling off a walkway to his doom.
• For all his protestations of falling In Love with the Mark, Narek is still willing to sentence Soji to a slow death by poisonous gas once he and Narissa have the information that they want. Fortunately, Soji "activates" and is able to break her way out of the Zhal Makh chamber.
• Elnor has another Big Damn Heroes moment when he rescues Picard, Soji and Hugh by slaughtering Romulan soldiers with his sword, and the amount of green arterial spray that gushes out of his victims is disturbing. As cute as Elnor's personality may be, it's actually terrifying to die by his tan qalanq, and it helps us to understand why the Tal Shiar is frightened by the Qowat Milat and why the Romulan Secret Police has never been able to wipe out the Cultural Rebel nuns.
• Hugh's statement that the Borg assimilated spatial trajector technology from the Sikarians in the Delta Quadrant. This was a technology that could have teleported the entire crew of Voyager basically anywhere they wished, and now, the Borg don't even have to conventionally invade a planet like they tried in "Best of Both Worlds" or First Contact — they can just go for Boring, but Practical, employ trans-galactic Teleport Spam to bypass any military defenses, and start assimilating practically at will. Oh, Crap! doesn't begin to cover the sheer Paranoia Fuel the Borg now possess.
  • And the Paranoia Fuel will be up to eleven if the Borg ever assimilate any of the still unaccounted for Changelings! Because at this point, the Borg can literally hide in plain sight and insidiously assimilate people by even becoming fog full of manifest.

1x 07 — Nepenthe

• In the opening scene (anyone sensing a pattern here?), we get a Flashback to Zhat Vash infiltrator Commodore Oh's meeting with Dr. Jurati from "The End is the Beginning", where it's made clear that Oh rather forcibly mind-melded with Dr. Jurati to share the secret of the Zhat Vash. The visions Dr. Jurati receives go to the level of Mind Rape, with Romulans mutilating themselves and slaying each other, and planets getting destroyed, although it's unclear if Oh is just being an Unreliable Narrator to get Jurati on her side.
• It's already several years in the past relative to this episode, but it is mentioned that Deanna Troi and Will Riker lost their son Thaddeus when the necessary treatment to save his life was banned after the synth attack on Mars. It quite likely led to their decision to retire from Starfleet to raise their daughter Kestra.
• Jurati's guilt over having killed Maddox leads to her injecting herself with a neurotoxin in an effort to neutralize the tracker she ingested on Commodore Oh's orders. It causes her to collapse to the ground, foaming at the mouth, and at the end of the episode, she's in a coma.

1x 08 — Broken Pieces

• The episode's teaser, in which members of the Zhat Vash experience the Admonition and collectively Go Mad from the Revelation, leading a number of them to bash their own heads in with rocks and one of them to attempt to gouge her eyes out in loving close-up.
• Seven of Nine forming a micro-Borg Collective on the Artifact. She takes on Black Eyes of Evil with green Electronic Eyes and announces "We are Borg" across the cube. Cut to the Romulans ejecting all the unprocessed drones into space.
• Rios's account of the events leading up to Captain Vandermeer's death. They're in a First Contact situation with a pair of aliens, including a beautiful woman who Rios quickly becomes infatuated with. Then Captain Vandermeer, whom Rios has idolized as a father figure, uses a phaser to kill both aliens without warning. Rios gives him the What the Hell, Hero? treatment, which drives Vandermeer to explain that the orders came from Starfleet Security: Execute the aliens, or his entire ship would be destroyed. Vandermeer then Ate His Gun in remorse. Rios's entire world and view of Starfleet were shattered within minutes.

1x 09 — Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1

• Once an Orchid gets a hold of a ship, it envelops it and drains its power, dragging it down to the planet's surface. In the meantime, the crew is left in total darkness, at least until the orchid starts burning up all around them on reentry. For La Sirena, the landing was relatively gentle. But for a larger ship like the Artifact, the result is a massive ship being brought down to the surface with all of the grace of a flower pot being dropped on the floor.
• Sutra is of a design very similar to Soji, but with gold skin and eyes and longer hair, and also projects herself with a confidence that Soji lacks after what she's been through. Sutra is also very cold-blooded, willing to engineer the death of a fellow synth to further demonize the organics and get the other synths to support her plan to call down the ancient synth alliance to purge the organics, and quickly moving to have Picard imprisoned so he can't try to talk the other synths out of the plan. Bruce Maddox and Altan Soong had hoped to make a synthetic life form that could be a second Data, but their efforts resulted in something worse: they made a second Lore.

1x 10 — Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2

• Narek recounts the Ganmadan myth in full, and it's horrendously gory and gruesome. ^note The quote has been modified slightly.
  "A story of the end of everything. Some say it dates back from long before our ancestors first arrived on Vulcan. The story of Ganmadan ("the Day of Annihilation") begins with two sisters, twin khalagu ("demons") who come at the end of time to open the way and unleash the ch'khalagu ("very bad demons"). One sister is called Seb-Natan, the Foreteller. She plays a drum made from the skin of children. She strikes it with a chain of skulls so hard and so long that her heart bursts from the effort. The other sister is called Seb-Cheneb ("the Destroyer"). She carries the horn from a great pale hellbeast called Ganmadan. When she blows a blast on the horn, it will unleash all the ch'khalagu who have been waiting since the beginning of time. The sky will crack, and through the crack in the sky, the ch'khalagu will come ravening. You know about the Thousand Days of Pain. The streets will be slick with entrails of half-devoured corpses. The worlds will burn. And the ch'khalagu will feast and nurse their brats on blood, and pick their teeth with bones."
• The glimpse we get when the beacon opens the portal to the higher synthetics. The whole thing is Red and Black and Evil All Over with Combat Tentacles reaching through the portal. Its default setting is "purge the organics" and it has the power to create an octonary star system just as an attention-getter. If Narek's story is to be believed, it's not the first time they've visited our galaxy. Hopefully they respect Soji's wishes and don't come back...

Season 2

2× 01 — The Star Gazer

• The Borg have returned. And in a big way — the Queen herself shows up to assimilate the Stargazer and take control of all nearby ships.
  • The appearance is also striking: rather than a beautiful woman, the Queen is masked and covered, the mask itself seeming to shimmer as if it's alive before massive tendrils emerge from her back to take control of the ship. Through it all, she just stands there, her force field easily absorbing any phaser blasts to no effect.
• Q also returns and shows that this isn't the jokester that was last seen playfully tormenting the crew of the Cerritos. The first sign that something is definitely wrong is when Q snaps his fingers, it isn't the "WHOOSH" for the previous appearances, but a loud "BOOM". Then, he gets down to business, telling Picard why he's here and when he proclaims that he's at the end of the road not taken, he smirks evily. This is a Q playing for keeps this time.

2× 02 — Penance

• Everything about the bad timeline to which Q sent Jean-Luc, among them:
  • Climate change was never solved in this future, so the Earth is kept habitable only using a system of force fields that mar the sky, even on a clear day.
  • The existence of slavery as an institution on 25th century Earth, full stop.
  • Picard has a trophy room full of the skulls of his enemies, among them Sarek, Dukat, Martok, and a Ferengi that's possibly Zek.
  • Every year, they celebrate an event called "Eradication Day", where the people of Earth gather in ecstatic mobs to watch alien dissidents and sympathizers be publicly executed.
  • A nasty little detail is that the alternate reality's Starfleet badges have bladed edges and can be used as throwing knives. The symbol of peaceful exploration and defense is degraded into a murder weapon.
• Even in her reduced state, the Borg Queen is creepy and unnerving as ever, with a hint of Mad Oracle thrown in for good measure. She also has an odd fascination with Dr. Jurati for some reason, more so than either Picard or Seven despite acknowledging them both as former drones.
• Q is noticeably off, to the point that Picard asks if he is ill. In Voyager, we saw Q wounded, threatened with execution, but we never saw him act like this. Think about what that could mean if this change to the timeline is harming or even killing Q?
  • Q is clearly very agitated, and his usual puckish routine is undercut by a very raw and aggressive tone. He goes so far as to physically strike Picard, leaving his "dear old friend" with a bloody nose.
    Picard: What do you want, Q? Would you come to the point?!
    Q: You want me to cut to the chase?
    Picard: Yes!
    Q: Well the chase is cut, Picard. The chase is bleeding. The chase is dying in your arms, and I am but a suture in the wound!
    [Q pauses, looks around, and steps away from Picard uneasily.]
• In Okinawa, we see high-rise buildings being blown up by rebels, and from the limited context, we have no way of knowing just what these buildings are. From the brief bit of exposition we get, they were targeted to represent other worlds attacked by the Confederation, but the people in those towers may have been guilty of nothing worse than being citizens born into Confederate rule, rather than being willing perpetrators.
• We get to see the skull of a Borg drone in the trophy room belonging to Picard's fascist counterpart, and it's grotesque — bone fused into metal; long lines of Scary Stitches where the skull has evidently been surgically ripped apart and crudely knitted back together to accommodate the addition of the occular implant. It really reinforces how horrifying and painful assimilation must be.

2× 03 — Assimilation

• Everything about Dr. Jurati's partial assimilation with the Borg Queen: to date, the Star Trek audience has witnessed the distinct Body Horror of watching people be assimilated physically, but this is the first time in the franchise's history we've seen, up close and personal, the real-time mental and emotional experience of someone being assimilated by the Borg. Mind Rape doesn't begin to cover it, but worse than the simple crushing of individual will that's been implied before, the actual process is revealed to be much more slow and intimate as the Queen works her way through your paticular mind:
  • The Queen begins by methodically moving through the "rooms" of Agnes' mind one by one — humour, anger, sadness — learning her mind and personality, causing her to experience each emotion in turn: inexplicable laughter, sudden intense rage, and then despair. Once she gets to that room, Agnes confesses her insecurities and loneliness, even implying she's secretly suicidal.
  • Picard warns her that while the Queen will start out only observing the facets of the doctor's mind, once she has a grasp on how her mind works she'll start trying to take control — and then she starts speaking through Jurati's mouth to Picard, and the two start what can only be described as a tug-of-war for control of her body before Picard pulls the plug.
• And the weird creepy FAST way the Queen crawls on her hands towards Agnes who is so terrified she can't even get up and run, just scurry away as fast as she can.
• The Queen telling Jurati that she impressed her. The tone and ramifications of that line was enough to make Picard take Jurati away from the Queen.

2× 06 — Two Of One

• Adam Soong's attempt to murder both Picards by running them down with his car; showing that the man is perfectly willing to get his own hands dirty. Jean Luc manages to get Renée out of harm's way but he ends up injured.
• Going through computer files, Kore discovers the truth: She's not Soong's daughter but just the latest in his many attempts to clone a human with genetic manipulation.
  • The chilling part is Kore going through the files, hearing her "father" talk about one girl after another, seemingly warm but after they die, dismissing them as another failed experiment to move on to the next attempt.
  • There's also an earlier talk of Soong sounding defeated at Kore's condition...not out of true love for her but rather how she's "my life's work," summing up her existence as another experiment and her death would ruin his "legacy."
  • In short, the woman's entire world is shattered as she realizes the scores of "siblings" she's lost, her father is a mad scientist and her entire life is a lie.
• The Borg Queen has taken control of Jurati, and she's about to run loose in Los Angeles. There's no telling what havoc she's about to wreak.

2x 07 — Monsters

• Picard's psyche is literal Nightmare Fuel — when Tallinn goes inside, she finds little Jean-Luc and his mother being attacked by actual monsters, one of whom Looks Like Orlok.
• The reality, however, is arguably worse: Picard's mother suffered a form of mental illness, a symptom of which was apparently manic episodes where she was compelled to flee into the incredibly dangerous and dilapidated tunnels beneath the house which, as Maurice points out, have "a thousand ways to die." And she would compel her son to come with her. At one point, young Picard got stuck in a broken floorboard, and his mother either didn't or couldn't notice in her manic state, leaving him trapped down there for hours until his father found him, which he only did because Jean-Luc dropped his journal in the mad rush to get down. Maurice tried to compel her to get help for her mental issues, but she refused. Eventually, to keep their children safe, Maurice would resort to locking her in a room during her episodes to keep her from doing something like that again. It is an incredibly disturbing scenario, especially for those who know what its like to have a family member suffer from mental health issues, not helped by the Reality Subtext when you know about Patrick Stewart's own family history.

2x 10 — Farewell

• Soong is defeated, and Kore wipes his research on her and her sisters — but he simply returns to older research, including a folder labelled "Project Khan", turning his interests to augmentation...
• Even with 400 years of Agnes cultivating a far more peaceful and benevolent Borg Collective, the fact that they want to join the Federation is still chilling...because they've detected an even greater threat beyond the transwarp array.

Season 3

3x 01 — The Next Generation

• The Weaponized Teleportation of the Starfleet recruitment center. Hundreds, if not thousands, dead by yanking the building right under itself and dropping it onto the city. Whoever the enemy is, they mean business.
• The end of the episode has the SS Eleos XII confronting whoever has been chasing Beverly and her crew. The ship is huge compared to the Eleos and not only does it invoke the Enterprise-E's encounter with the Scimitar back in Star Trek: Nemesis, but there's also the familiar metallic chords reminiscent of V'Ger.

3x 03 — Seventeen Seconds

• The revelation of just who is behind all these attacks: The Founders. Specifically, a Renegade Splinter Faction who never agreed with peace with the Federation and have spent the last two decades building up a secret network for these attacks. Which means once more, Starfleet has to face an enemy who can be anyone anywhere, leading to plenty of Paranoia Fuel.
• The updated Changeling shapeshifting and natural state also qualify. Thanks to the advancements in CGI since Deep Space Nine, they've gone from the familiar metallic chrome to an organic-looking aesthetic that looks like a mix between the Mood Slime from Ghostbusters II and the eponymous alien of The Thing (1982).

3x 04 — No Win Scenario

• We finally understand Captain Shaw's hatred of Picard and Seven, he is a survivor of Wolf 359. An engineer on the USS Constance he and his fifty coworkers and friends faced certain death at the hands of the borg cube under the control of Locutus, and at the last moment he was picked along with nine others for the only escape pod left.
• Vadic communicates with other Changelings...by cutting off her hand and letting it transform into goo and a connection to the Great Link. Granted, it reforms again when it's done but it's still disturbing.
• Also disturbing? That Vadic, a woman clearly not playing with a full deck, actually wants to cut off the pursuit in the Nebula but ordered to continue and eventually agrees. Which just makes one wonder how terrifying are the figures who can get her to back down and look scared.
  • Of course, she'd have every right to be scared once it's revealed that her benefactors are the Borg Collective, so Vadic's sudden dourness and hesitance makes perfect sense in front of the beings that are considered the greatest nemesis to the galaxy at large.

3x 05 — Imposters

• The Changelings have been busy in the last two decades, enhancing their shapeshifting abilities to the point that it takes a full dissection of a corpse for them to revert to their natural forms — which means that Starfleet's standard ways of flushing them out are now useless and anyone, anywhere can be one of them.
• After the Intrepid is damaged by Ro’s exploding shuttle, it pitches forward while disabled, then slowly lifts itself back "up" on the viewscreen, staring down the Titan-A with its phaser arrays and torpedo bays glowing red. It gives it the look of a very angry ship similar to the Reliant and Kronos One, and it backs up that anger with a pair of torpedoes before the Titan can warp away.

3x 06 — Bounty

• We see that Daystrom doesn’t just have rampant AI being held there - they’re a 25th-century Area 51. They got an improved Genesis Device, killer Tribbles and even Kirk, Archer, and Picard’s bodies… or rather had in the case of Picard’s body, since Vadic has it now.

3x 07 — Dominion

• Seven tries to reach out to Tuvok for aid finding Riker but it takes a few minutes to realize he's been replaced by a Changeling. The sight of "Tuvok" breaking into a very un-Vulcan smile is chilling.
• When Picard presses on Riker, "Tuvok" changes into a sickly-looking (if not downright corpse-like) Riker to mock him.
• More troubling is after the call, Geordi tells Picard, "we can't keep doing this," indicating this isn't the first person they've reached out for help only to find they've been compromised or replaced, showing how far the conspiracy goes.
• The revelation that the evolved Changelings are the result of Starfleet experimenting on captive ones to try and create spies under their command. After such torturous experiences, it's little wonder they snapped, wiped out the scientists and went rogue.
• Vadic took on the appearance of the main scientist experimenting on the Changelings, who whistled as she tortured these creatures. (This also has the effect of taking the whimsical-sounding "Three Blind Mice" — the song being whistled — and making it sound creepy as hell.)

3x 09 — Vox

• Everyone wanted to know what the Changelings needed with Picard's body and now we know: they used Picard's Borg-altered DNA to bypass transporter systems and allowing the Changelings to alter people just enough to not realized they've been assimilated.
• The assimilation only affects Starfleet officers under the age of 25 so senior officers are okay...but that still leaves captains unable to understand what is happening as their own crews turn on them.
• The sight of scores of Starfleet personnel (including Geordi's daughters) transformed into drones is the most chilling sight the series has offered. Worse is the voices on speakers of the crews of other ships as they're massacred by the newly assimilated Borg.
• Even if the senior officers aren't affected by the organo-transceiver, they're now forced to do battle against their assimilated juniors, whom they're supposed to be responsible for. We see this with Shaw, a Wolf 359 survivor who's reliving his worst nightmare, only more so.
• The shot of the massive Starfleet, hundreds of ships, now totally under Borg control, ready to sweep down upon a now defenseless Earth.
  Collective: We are Borg. Starfleet is now Borg.
  • The U.S.S. Excelsior is the only Starfleet vessel to repel the newly assimilated Borg from taking over its bridge, which almost certainly means that its senior officers were forced to kill anyone under the age of 25, which would have been most of the bridge crew. And it didn't even save them.
    • For the rest of the fleet, the Titan is the only one we know of where anyone other than the assimilated crew members survive the initial takeover, and that's only because Titan's complement was reduced to a skeleton crew and the senior crew weren't too badly outnumbered. In every other ship the senior contingent would have been outnumbered ten times worse and overwhelmed in minutes.
• The fact that the Borg, whom have suffered Villain Decay for a very long time, come back with such horrifying vengeance and basically annihilate all of Starfleet via mass assimilation with a single command thanks to their Trojan Horse scheme shows exactly why the Borg are the most fearsome in the entire galaxy and the true Archenemy of the Federation that even the aftermath of the Dominion War and what the Changelings did pales in comparison to the sheer power of a fully unleashed Borg Collective.

3 X 10 — The Last Generation

• The chilling sight of the assimilated Titan officers coldly ordering the attack on Spacedock, killing their own comrades.
  • Made even worse by Borg Esmar mindlessly echoing Borg Jack: 'Fire-fire-fire...'
• That red nebula the Borg are hiding inside? Turns out it's not a nebula — it's the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, meaning they somehow managed to sneak a transwarp conduit into the heart of the Sol system without anyone at Starfleet noticing. The implications of this are not lost on the Enterprise crew: if not for Admiral Janeway decimating the Borg Collective in 2378, it's very likely that conduit would have become ground zero for a conventional invasion at some point, and that's not a fight Starfleet would be likely to win.
  • Oh, and that cube hiding at Jupiter? It's friggin' huge, more so than any other cube. Even her antennae dwarf a Galaxy-class starship. That's what the Enterprise-D is up against.
• The vast majority of the Borg drones on the cube are dead, consumed by their Queen. Whereas the Collective made a big show of promising "perfection" to its drones, we see here that they are ultimately expendable and the Queen will not hesitate to drain them to preserve herself. We even get a close-up of one drone's rotting skull.
• The Borg Queen is more horrific than ever, mutated into a twisted and monstrous creature looking more like a H. R. Giger creation hanging from the walls and mocking Picard.
  • The Borg Queen's condition after all this time speaks volumes about the destructive power of the neurolytic pathogen that Admiral Janeway used back in Endgame.
  • In her previous appearances, the Queen would always try to maintain a veneer of collected calm that hid her vindictiveness and cruelty when conversing with her enemies. This time, the mask comes off as Picard finds himself face-to-face with an unhinged monster seething with rage over the destruction of the Collective that wants nothing more than to see the Federation burned to the ground.
• The Queen's plan is for not just for her new drones to assimilate, but also for them to forcibly reproduce, essentially committing mass rape on a scale of millions. Squick doesn’t even begin to describe it.
  • The Borg’s new ability to naturally procreate takes on an even more horrifying context in that the Collective no longer has any need to assimilate other species in order to reproduce. Instead, as the Borg Queen proclaims, their new goal is to exterminate all life in the galaxy until nothing else is left but the Borg. In other words, the Queen is going to force Starfleet's assimilated youth to commit both rape and genocide.
• Once Spacedock finally falls, the Borg start targeting Earth's cities. All of them. At the same time, the Titan has been disabled, so Seven and her crew can't do anything to stop the imminent Orbital Bombardment.
• Yes, the assimilated officers are freed of the Borg influence... but also now have to live with the memories of what they've done and the countless murders they unwillingly committed. The Borg may have been defeated but the scars of their actions will remain for a long time.
  • The crew on Spacedock during the battle arguably had it even worse. They knew what was going on. That it wasn't the fault of the crews on the ships who had been their comrades and peers only moments ago. And that unlike Beverly and Jean-Luc who were able and willing to take the risk to get back Jack rather than just kill him? Spacedock didn't have that luxury. To try and protect Earth, their only option was to destroy every starship they could destroy as fast as they could - and their crews right alongside them. And they had to make that choice of their own free will and deal with the nightmare of Borg Assimilation turning allies to enemies one final, horrifying, time.