Oh I fully appreciate the sex appeal. Crass as the idea is to boost ratings by casting a bombshell in a bone tight catsuit, credit where credit’s due it worked. A lot of TVs got tuned to UPN to look at that silver vinyl suit.

Turns out Seven was a massively important character; she got to do a lot of very important Star Trek stuff. Star Trek is at its very best when it’s exploring the human condition and often does so with a human adjacent character who is on the edge looking inward at humanity: Spock the human/vulcan hybrid. Data the android. The Emergency Medical Hologram. And Seven of Nine the former borg.

There’s some clumsy men writing women stuff in there but she has a lot of smaller moments where she slams up against the subtleties of human communication; As a borg she’s as diplomatic as a rifle cartridge and as subtle as her costume. The best stuff with Seven is her fairly unique position in the franchise as a cult escapee. She deals with some heavy shit, the trauma of being assimilated as a child, growing up in the collective and then being taken from it.

And Jeri Ryan did a world class job at bringing the character to life.