On rewatching ST: Voyager s06e09 "The Voyager Conspiracy"
and being struck this time around for some reason by the progression of Seven's delusions, and how they culminate in this thing that is so uniquely world-destroying for her - i.e., that Janeway's primary mission is to deliver up Seven on a silver platter to Starfleet to be dissected - that she runs away in rage and despair.
Janeway and Seven's relationship is just. so fascinating. because there is such a foundation of mutual affection and respect and trust, but also what that foundation was laid upon was Janeway yanking Seven out of the Collective and forcibly unassimilating her. Which was a necessity, but also extremely traumatic for Seven because of the length of time she spent as a Borg drone, which in turn for much of her time on Voyager she is so traumatized by that she's unable to see it as trauma at all.
It's only in a moment like this, at the end of "The Voyager Conspiracy" - voice shaking as she hurls truly awful accusations at Janeway - that the trauma breaks through into her conscious awareness. And it's no surprise that it takes the form of one of her deepest fears: that the one person in the universe that she's come to trust and love implicitly in fact cannot be trusted; that she is, or even could be, involved in orchestrating her trauma; that she doesn't care for Seven at all.
I feel like Janeway's tender and impassioned talking down of Seven ("Stardate today" etc.) tends to get most of the attention in this episode, so here's a reminder of what Seven's accusations actually were if you'd like them:
That Janeway is the face of an organization who intentionally sacrificed up the child Annika Hansen to be assimilated by the Borg, and then recovered, bodily dissected, and studied by Starfleet
That Janeway's "mission" in the Delta Quadrant was one person: the woman, the drone, that she had pretended to befriend and mentor
That Janeway extracted Seven's implants and molded her body specifically to recover any knowledge Seven would have had from the Collective about both of these things
That Janeway "found" a way back to the Alpha Quadrant only in order to send Seven of Nine back to be "dissected and analyzed" (as Seven spits with fear, rage, and disgust)
Like - god. There is so much going on here, not just with regard to Seven's relationship to Janeway, but Seven's relationship to Seven, her own body and her own mind. There's so much here popping out to scream at her that's usually hiding, so much of it horror about her own body and her own rights to it.
And it's just very interesting and very telling that this is something that only pops out to scream at her - or that she's only able to hear that screaming - when her mind is already in overwhelm and overload. The plot of the rest of the episode functions to get Seven and us here, to the point where Seven can say these things for the first time since she's been unassimilated.
Where, coincidentally or not, Janeway can hear them.
And I just wonder what else either of them did with those things after Seven took down the forcefield, after Kathryn knelt before her, after they were back on Voyager... when none of those things could go back in the bag.
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