Continuing the coverage of the TV movie Dark Frontier, Jeri Ryan discusses her time on Voyager and Seven's return to the Borg.

It's been some time since the crew of the Starship Voyager faced an assault from the Borg Collective. They last appeared en masse in Scorpion, the acclaimed two-parter that bridged seasons three and four and introduced the latest crew member, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). However, this February the Borg are back. And they want Seven returned to them…
"It's a movie," enthuses Jeri Ryan of Dark Frontier, the two-hour epic that will air on UPN during the sweeps period. "It could have been a feature, the script is so outstanding. You can always tell the Brannon Braga scripts: they're phenomenal, and this script is a perfect example of his work. It's Seven of Nine and the Borg Queen, who we haven't seen since First Contact."
When it is pointed out that the Queen, played by Alice Krige, died at the climax of the eighth Star Trek movie, Ryan laughs.
"It's a different Borg Queen! Come on, this is Science Fiction - work with me here! It's not Alice Krige. I think they were checking her availability but she was working on something in South Africa. They got a very talented actress, Susanna Thompson, and she was wonderful."
It seems that Dark Frontier could be the story that Voyager fans have been anticipating for months. Ever since Seven's début, when she was forced to join Janeway's crew and adjust to becoming human, it has been inevitable that the Collective would attempt to track her down. Stories like The Raven, Drone and Infinite Regress have featured the Borg, but Dark Frontier promises to be the showdown, which will put Captain Janeway head-to-head with the leader of the emotionless cyborgs.
"There's so much I want to tell you, but I'm afraid I'm going to give away plot points," says Ryan, frustrated. "Janeway decides that they're going to start assimilating the Borg, because they come across a crippled Borg scout ship. They're going to attack the ship to get their Transwarp coils so they can get home faster. The Borg know about this plan, and the Queen contacts Seven of Nine and essentially blackmails her to come back and join the Collective in order to save Voyager. So the threat is you can either come with us, or we can kill you all and your crew can never get home. That is Seven's choice and she can't tell anybody this, because she knows that Janeway will try and save her.
"Part of the reason that the Queen wants Seven back is because she is an individual now. She has lived among humans as an individual for a year and a half. No Drone has ever done that before. They want her individuality and her humanity - they don't want to reassimilate her, they want her to join of her own choice so she can help them assimilate humanity."
With Space battles, chase sequences, outstanding production design and some brilliant character scenes, Dark Frontier promises to be the closest Trek has ever come to presenting a big-budget feature for television.
"It touches a lot on the relationships between Seven and Janeway, and Seven and the Queen," Ryan clarifies, "and the way Seven has been torn in two directions. It's sort of like a birth mother and an adoptive mother. It's beautifully written, there are some really wonderful scenes, and I'm really excited about it. It was so much fun to do."