the m0vie blog

Earlier today I posted a retrospective of The Best of Both Worlds, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary this month. I discussed how it managed to basically rewrite the Star Trek rulebook, introducing the franchise’s most iconic villains since the sixties. However, I’ve always found the Borg, those utterly terrifying cybernet hive-minded creatures, fascinating for another reason: they are a text book example of how a long-running franchise can take a viable and fascinating antagonist and then run them into the ground.

Why Borg?

The Borg were introduced as a near incomprehensible evil. A hive mind that takes you and strips away everything that makes you unique. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be negotiated with. They don’t want space or money, or power – they want you. There’s nothing you can give them that will make them stop. They will keep on coming no matter how hard you fight back. They’ll adapt to your strategies and grind you down – they’ll wear you out. It doesn’t matter how many you put down, more will come – and these have learned from their previous attacks.

They are so all-encompassingly powerful that, on their first encounter, Captain Picard has to literally beg a god-like being to save him – a literal deus ex machina, after a fashion. When they return, they shred through Starfleet, converting forty ships into a floating graveyard in a single ship. It’s only luck and the fact that Picard’s brain has been wired into their consciousness which saves humanity. They are pretty chilling adversaries.

However, there’s a problem with using an opponent so powerful who brings such overwhelming odds. Doctor Who has similar problems with the Daleks – thwarting an omnicidal maniac consistently once-a-year tends to diminish the threat that they pose. I’d argue that Star Trek suffers the same problem, just in a different way. While the problem with the Daleks arguably comes from over-exposure – their “once-a-year” defeats must be scheduled into their calendars at this stage – the Borg actually suffered from the direction of their stories and overall arc.

Perhaps because the writers realised that the crew trouncing the Borg even once or twice would lead to a serious drop in the credibility of the threat that they posed, the Borg were generally developed in ways beyond simply being a threat to the Federation. So, for example, in I, Borg we got the story of an individual Borg, lost and separated from the Collective and, in Descent, we got the notion of a fraction which had broken off (albeit not by their own will) from the hive mind. The individual episodes are actually quite good, but the problem is that they hinge on removing the central premise of the Borg, and that which makes them so scary: there are no individuals, there is just one mind above all.

In fairness, it’s perfectly understandable. The Borg premise is inherently simplistic. They are the ultimate nightmare of any individualist society – they exist without a notion of self. This simple idea serves to make them quite a bit incomprehensible. However, these two episodes – and indeed the Seven of Nine character on Star Trek: Voyager – diminish the “unstoppable” angle of the threat. The notion is that the Collective can be broken down into individuals under the right circumstances, that maybe we just need to cut them all off and have a hot chocolate with them and everything will be okay. Such a storytelling angle immediately undermines the danger that they pose – they are no longer a completely alien consciousness that moves in ways we cannot comprehend, but are instead a bunch of individuals waiting to be freed and can be cured by “the power of love”.

It seems that the same storytelling difficulties – how do you have your lead characters engage with an opponent that has no individuals? – contributed to the decision to create a “Borg Queen” role in Star Trek: First Contact. Even though the concept of the character doesn’t sit particularly well with what we’ve seen/heard of them before (although it makes more sense when you consider they were originally imagined as insects), it feels like the concept was inserted so that Data and Captain Picard could have a foil to work against. As with the above examples, it arguably works in context – it’s a damn entertaining film – but each of these storytelling devices has consequences down the line.

Picard really felt the need to complain about the accomodation that Starfleet put him in overnight...

It was arguably in Star Trek: Voyager that the real effect of these decisions with regard to the Borg began to truly weaken their impact, particularly with some new decisions thrown in. The premise of the show – a Starfleet ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant – all but assured that they would encounter the deadly foe (particularly given the release of First Contact at around the same time). In order to get home, Voyager would have to cross the heart of Borg territory. A fleet of Starfleet vessels couldn’t hold their own against a single ship, so how could a lone Starfleet vessel make its way through a densely-populated region of space.

Not withstanding the ultimate copout (a character used a deus ex machina to propel the starship across Borg space), the show decided (at least initially) that – instead of having their characters face overwhelming odds against the Borg – Voyager would ally itself with the Borg. So much for not negotiating with the Collective, which is pretty much what Voyager does in Scorpion. The decision was probably made for the right reasons – having a lone, isolated ship take on the Borg and win would more than likely get rid of any credit they had in the “galactic threats” bank – but it also removed one of their core attributes. Of course, the story also featured an alien species that was so powerful that it could actually humble this implacable foe – and, despite the fact the writers seemed uncomforable pitting Voyager directly against the Borg, they allowed the ship to trounce these new aliens who could trounce the Borg. (Indeed, they’d go on to confront and defeat these enemies once more, and subsequently convincing them to live in peace.)

Between everything that had been done, the faceless menace now had a face (the Borg Queen), the Collective could be negotiated with (as Janeway dicovered) and it could also be fractured through the power of individuality. All of a sudden, the most menacing and unique creations in all of Star Trek had been fairly effectively humbled. It seemed, however, that this was really the point at which the writers stopped caring about the Borg as a credible threat. The ship even got to adopt a pet Borg – Seven of Nine – who fulfilled the show’s “learning to human” role.

And then Voyager’s technobabble effect kicked in.

The technobabble effect is one that Voyager pioneered which basically allowed the crew to do what ever they damnwell pleased as long as they coated it in scientific-sounding terms. So, using the knowledge of various crew members (which included a bunch of adopted Borg children at one point – yes, you read that right), they could develop weapons with adjectives like “multi-phasic” and “trans-phasic” which would trounce their opponents. Defeating and taking on Borg ships became easier and easier, to the point where – during the series finale Endgame – the Borg were robbed of any hint of dignity remaining through the fact that Voyager singlehanded destroyed their intergalactic transport network, basically disabling them. A single ship – when, for comparison – a single Borg ship had destroyed more than forty Starships not ten years earlier.

That’s a hell of an example of villain decay right there, and quite a disappointing one. I’ve heard rumours that the expanded universe novels in the wake of the end of Voyager have done an effective job restoring the credibility of the Borg threat, to the point where they fairly nearly destroy humanity (and, fittingly enough, exact their own revenge on Janeway herself, who is a representation of the kind of villain decay they underwent in the later years), and might even check it out.

And there you have it. A modern history of the Borg.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: borg, borg queen, star trek, star trek: first contact, star trek: the next generation, star trek: voyager, the borg, tthe collective, villain decay |