Full spoilers follow for Star Trek: Picard Episode 7, “Nepenthe.”
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One of the more surprising reveals in the ramp-up to Star Trek: Picard was that Jonathan Del Arco would be returning to the role of Hugh the Borg for the new series. Hugh was only seen in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation which aired almost 30 years ago, but the character had a distinct impact on fans as he allowed us to peer behind the veil of that villainous cyborg race. We liked Hugh. We really, really liked him!
But much has changed for the character in the years since he had a glowing, mechanical eye and tubes coming out of his molded Borg suit. No, the Hugh of today is just a man with a tortured past — and Del Arco wouldn’t have it any other way.
Finding the New Hugh
Almost three decades have passed not just for Del Arco but also for Hugh, and as such the character has changed quite a bit since when we last saw him in the TNG episode “Descent, Part II.” It was there that we first got a hint that Hugh’s future might be as a leader of ex-Borg drones — now called xBs in the era of Picard.
“I did a bunch of small things that were physical things to tie the two timelines together,” he says. “Obviously a lot of it was physically and emotionally [and] had to do with the fact that he was much more machine then than he is now. … I worked on creating some kind of connective tissue so when the fans saw it, it would be just enough. I didn’t want it to be an overbearing, robotic thing because that would’ve been silly, or a copy or mimic of the speech pattern because, frankly, no one speaks the same as when they were 18 as when they’re in their 40s or 50s, so I wanted it to be organic.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=I%E2%80%99ve%20changed%20as%20a%20person%2C%20Hugh%E2%80%99s%20changed%20as%20a%20person.%20We’re%20still%20the%20same%20people%20inside.”]
Again, the time that has passed for the actor has also passed for Hugh, and Del Arco used that to his advantage.
“I wanted to do a normal human evolution,” he says. “I’ve changed as a person, Hugh’s changed as a person. We’re still the same people inside, but we developed ourselves. That was the challenge and it was really kind of one of the most fun slash scary things I’ve had to do as an actor, to kind of rediscover him.”
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The Artifact and What Happened Since The Next Generation
As far as Hugh’s backstory between where we last saw him on Next Generation and where we pick up with him as the leader of the Borg Reclamation Project on the Borg cube known as the Artifact, Del Arco says that he did discuss it extensively with the writers of Picard.
After Jean-Luc told him in “Descent, Part II” that he, essentially, could be a leader, Hugh took that to heart and took charge of the ex-Borg from that episode. Eventually, they became part of the Federation, and then when the cube that would become the Artifact entered the picture, Hugh was the Federation’s natural choice to make sure there wouldn’t be a “humanitarian crisis” on the vessel.
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“It went from bad to worse on the cube,” he explains. “And so he’s got a sense of, ‘Oh my God, we’ve been abandoned,’ because the Federation no longer has [influence there]. We agreed to sign up for this thing with a full backing and now we’re kind of alone on the cube. And though he’s free on the cube, he’s actually also a prisoner. So I really researched that — the Holocaust and how even in the ghettos in the Holocaust, they had leadership which … had a higher ranking than the prisoners. And all that was really fascinating to me because there’s a lot of gray area, and gray area is really fun to play with as an actor. Sometimes it’s just black and white. So he had this struggle in trying to keep the line, push back when you can. Obviously we see what happens to him. You know, there’s a limit to how much you can push back.”
Speaking of which…
The Death of Hugh
Ultimately, Hugh’s return also meant Hugh’s end, as he was killed by Peyton List’s Romulan baddie Rizzo in “Nepenthe” while trying to help his fellow xBs. Del Arco says that while he didn’t know of Hugh’s fate when he was first asked to return to the role, he found out early enough in the process to use it to inform his performance.
“It’s very liberating knowing that this is how it’s going to end, because I just thought, ‘I’ve only got one shot at this now to really end this right and to really, like, go big or go home,’ he says. “Don’t leave anything on the table in terms of my investment and my work. This role is so incredibly important to me for essentially a variety of reasons, from personal to professional, but I really wanted to take what they’d written and do it justice and make good choices, be rational and have them make sense and have them be in line with what I want the legacy of the character to be.”
That Hugh spends his final episode and, indeed, his final moments with the Romulan Elnor (Evan Evagora) is surprising, and yet it works very well in the context of the episode as the two attempt to defy the Romulans who are running amuck on the Artifact. Indeed, Hugh gets a great final line when he says to Elnor, “I was that much of a hopeful fool again for a minute. Thanks for that.”[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=I%20think%20he%20saw%20a%20lot%20of%20himself%20in%20Elnor.%20Hugh%20used%20to%20have%20that%20sense%20of%20innocence%2C%20of%20righteousness.”]
“I was like, ‘This is Hugh’s last moment and I’m going to make some personal choices, and so I’ll make them personal choices about how I want them to be,’” says Del Arco. “And I think there were a lot of things about Elnor that for me resonated as a gay man.”
There certainly is a spark between the two characters in that moment. And while reps for CBS say that Hugh has not been identified as gay, Del Arco took his own experience as a gay man into consideration when playing that scene.
“You know, I think he loved him,” he says. “I think in essence he might’ve been in love with him in the time that he was there. I think that the hope was really someone loves him. Someone who was idealistic. I think he saw a lot of himself in Elnor. Hugh used to have that sense of innocence, of righteousness. And all those things were hopeful to him, because he hadn’t been in a space of hope for all this time. And I think for a minute he thought, ‘You know, I think me and the kid can go all the way with this. We could take the cube. We could save it.’ And there you go. It didn’t work out.”
And yet… could Hugh return someday despite his death? This is Star Trek, after all. Crazier things have happened.
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Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!