Of course, Shaw has very good reason to hate a former Borg. As Shaw explains in an episode, he was present at the Battle of Wolf-359. Borg attack “The Best of Two Worlds” from the famous “Next Generation” episode (September 24, 1990). He explained that at the time he was a young engineer who wanted to start his career on a Federation starship. Led by an assimilated Picard, the Borg attack destroyed all of his ship’s senior personnel and some 40 other officers who had outstripped him. Shaw had to take command. It seems that being a captain was a career path he never wanted to take, but he still got stuck.
So Shaw looked at both Picard and Seven of Nine with an undiplomatic eye. Traumatized and stuck in a job he hated, Shaw resented Seven and Picard’s demand for respect. All he saw were once soulless cyborgs. Eventually, Shaw’s suspicions would prove correct; Picard’s brain never completely lost its Borg influence, allowing his generation to infiltrate an entire fleet of starships. #ShawWasRight
Terry Matalas wrote that it was from this trauma that Shaw refused to call Seven by the name he had chosen. It will not use a Borg name. Shaw begins to respect Seven, but this is conditional. It still has problems. As Matalas explains:
“Sometimes I don’t know how much he’s aware of it. Because at the end of this episode he has tremendous respect for him, so he says, ‘Hansen, you take this.’ He lets him blow up the Shrike. I mean, there’s a mentor in there because they had disagreements about the results. “He wants her to be great. He’s letting her have that satisfaction in the moment.”