Seven of Nine, played by
Jeri Ryan
As ratings began to slump in the third season of Voyager, writers decided to bring in some eyecandy, and so hope to spice up the mostly boring storylines being trotted out at the time. Enter super-sexy Jeri Ryan in a circulation-cutting-off-tight catsuit as Seven of Nine (full name Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjuct of Unimatrix Zero) as a Borg drone cut off from the hive mind and marooned on Voyager. After some initial resistance her human persona begins to resurface as she starts to remember her former life, and soon she is almost the perfect fusion of Borg and human. Taken under the wing of The Doctor, she learns (or re-learns) about human interaction, emotion, weaknesses and strengths, and the two become good friends.
As far as Janeway was concerned though, conflict erupted between the two as the captain continued to treat Seven like an unruly teenage daughter, and we all know how that goes. Seven would frequently challenge or even disobey Janeway’s orders --- sometimes she would be right in doing so --- and the captain would react to this flouting of her authority in the way she always did, that she was right and everyone else was wrong. Seven’s addition to the crew bolstered the show’s failing ratings and injected new life into a series that was just really limping along at that point, without many strong characters to drive it, unlike the three previous incarnations. However because of this she did become a focus of many of the storylines, tending to sideline the other actors, which did not obviously go down well with them. Her appearance also signalled a much more active role for the Borg in the series, and they appear in Voyager more than in any other of the franchise’s series.
Seven’s struggles to reclaim and understand her submerged humanity, and her attempts to decipher and comprehend human behaviour mirror both those of Data in TNG and, to an extent, Spock in the original series. There are parallels too, with Odo in
Deep Space 9, as an outsider looks in and tries to figure out what the hell is going on? As Lister remarked caustically in “Red Dwarf” once: “There are no sexy aliens with beehive hairdos who say
Show me more of this Earth thing called kissing!” But Seven’s stories did at least inject some needed drama and conflict into a show that had been just marking time for about two, maybe three seasons at this point, with no real direction and certainly nothing resembling a story arc. She is also instrumental in getting the Voyager crew home, when she discovers an alien communications array and they manage to get a message back to Federation space, however this also triggers their pursuit, capture and extended torture by the Hirogen.