In the nineteenth episode of the sixth season of Voyager, I WAS NOT READY. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.
Trigger Warning: For talk of consent, nonconsensual medical procedures, drugging.
It took me a bit to figure out why this episode affected me as much as it did. I thought it was mostly because of my attachment to Seven of Nine. Y’all know I’ve loved watching Seven’s growth on this show, and seeing her become a mother figure to these four Borg kids has been a real treat. But I realize now that there’s another reason why this episode is so important: it celebrates found family, especially for those who have been adopted by other people.
Y’ALL. I WAS ADOPTED. I MET MY BIRTH MOTHER MANY YEARS LATER. Of course I was going to find this story to be super personal! The entire thing is openly critical of the idea that people who are your parents automatically have your best interests in mind. Throughout “Child’s Play,” only Seven is seemingly concerned about this assumption. This manifests as rudeness, though, and even worse, Janeway believes that Seven is just too close to Icheb. The location of his parents was so sudden and unexpected, so it’s not exactly irrational to interpret Seven’s actions through this lens. She doesn’t want Icheb to leave, so she tries to find as many reasons as possible to prevent him from going, right?
I sympathized with Seven throughout this, and the script itself made that easy. (And bravo for the show including a plot about Seven and the kids in the previous episode; it helped push this episode further in terms of emotional resonance.) Not only had Seven been pursuing humanity for over two years at this point, but she was now teaching a new generation of liberated Borgs how to find individuality, too. She had made headway with all of them! They’d learned so much from her! SHE HAD LEARNED FROM THEM, TOO. To have one of those kids ripped away from her and the others was traumatic, and thus, it made sense that she didn’t want this to happen. It made sense that she was heartbroken by Icheb’s gradual acceptance of his parents and of Brunali culture. Deep down, Seven knew that she could never take that away from Icheb, nor could she ever hope to replicate the sort of experience Icheb was going to get with his family, in his culture, on that planet.
Which is why I want to jump ahead and discuss that horrific reveal in the final act because it influences this entire story. It would be nice to talk about Icheb discovering the culture he came from, but even that is a lie. Everything his parents did was to lull him into feeling secure, all so that they could use his body ONCE AGAIN as a weapon against the Borg. The poor kid was devised as a weapon of mass destruction, and his parents always intended on allowing him to be assimilated in order kill the Borg located closest to them. AND THEY WERE GOING TO DO IT AGAIN. Within hours of Icheb’s decision to stay with his parents on the Brunali world, they’ve drugged him and stuck him onto a ship that is nothing more than a Borg trap. What do you do when your parents don’t have your best interests in mind? How do you recover from that sort of betrayal? How do you accept that your parents are the ones who hurt you the most?
I’m sure you can see why this is so uniquely personal to me, though my reality is reversed in many ways. It was my adoptive parents who hurt me more, though I did eventually reunite with my birth mother. To that, I can speak to the reaction that Icheb had when he met Yifay and Leucon for the first time. I had a very similar experience: I didn’t feel anything. My birth mother was a stranger to me! I had no real connection to her, and even after spending a few hours with her, I felt no different. She was just a person who had happened to birth me many, many years before. Yet I grew up hearing stories about adopted people discovering their birth families and having these loving, transformative experiences. I actually wondered if I’d done something wrong. Was I wrong? Why hadn’t this been the case for me?
In the end, it’s about who you care for. Who you lived with. Icheb found “family” on Voyager, and for him, that’s far more important and far more meaningful. Yes, he did believe he had found something new and comforting in his parents, and for some people, that’s their reality. However, the people who cared about him most weren’t related to them at all. Instead, he shared an experience with Mezoti, Azan, Rebi, and Seven, and that is what made them a family.
HELP ME, I’M EMOTIONAL.
The video for “Child’s Play†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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