What was the point of FC?

[tomalak301]

Kind of going on this original title and maybe it's already been asked, but does anyone understand the Borg Queen? All these years and I still don't think I do, considering how Voyager handled her?

[Timo]

I rather like it that I don't understand this character/plot element, either. Fancy finding something alien in a scifi show...

On the surface, it just looks as if the Borg hive mind sort of elected a leader of some kind. Perhaps she's more of a spokeswoman than an actual decider, though, even though her voice gives the final rubber-stamp to Collective decisions. In that, she could be like an insect queen, the lowest of slaves, reduced to serving the hive in some narrow and degrading fashion (whether it be laying of eggs, or communicating with enemies, or thinking on her own brain without being connected to the Collective).

However, there are more intriguing possibilities there. The Queen could be a feature of the Collective that emerged by accident, a parasitic lifeform the Collective would rather do without, but can't get rid of. Or the Queen could have come from outside and carved herself a cozy home in the Collective. Perhaps she is something that the Collective once assimilated but to their dismay got more than they bargained for, something the hive mind couldn't control?

It could be that the Queen has her own agenda, which only incidentally agrees with that of the Borg - the same way a parasite would incidentally wish for the survival of the host lifeform. Or the Queen could be slave to the Collective and work for the Collective agenda, but would most often be employed in sprouting disinformation: lying about her own status, lying about Borg plans, lying about how the Borg really viewed whomever was having this discussion with the Queen.

Certainly it could be argued that in ST:FC, the role of the Queen was specifically and even solely to confuse Picard and Data. A sort of PR specialist, or entrapping prostitute, or something of that ilk.

Timo Saloniemi

[RobertScorpio]

No, sorry, I go with the simple answer here. Bad writing created her, bad writing made her even worse. All it did was gut QWHO, and the principle 'experts' of the Borg in that episode; Guinan and Q. The relentless attack of, well, zombies, that you could not negotiate with is what made the BORG so different.

The Queen just made them yet another Star Trek race, with a bumby-headed ruler, who you could converse with. Absolutely ruined them, all because the producers thought a horny Borg queen would get a rise out of the targeted audience that FC was aimed at; teenage boys.

It worked...they got their erections, and it got FC a lot of bucks. But to me? I think the Borg went downhill from there. In fact, the next big step in the Borg story was yet, another sexy Borg, Seven, aimed at the same crowd. And this time, they weren't even subtle about it.

Rob

[Brutal Strudel]

Timo doesn't care much what the writer intent was--he'll spin an incredibly dense and brilliant theory around some of the dumbest stuff Trek has done and he'll make the dumbest Trek writers sound like a cross between Stanislaw Lem and the Hal 9000. We love him for it.

Really, the queen was born of what you say--a desire to sex us up, as Shatner might speak/croon--and from a silly, rudimentary concept of what the "queen" in an insect colony does. (Termite queens have it so bad they will scrape their legs down to nubs trying to escape their grotesque egg-legging abdomens; they aren't so much slaves of the colony as they are victims of natural selection, as are we all.) Thematically, she was born of something far darker: a misogynistic caricature of the sexually voracious and manipulative chick who not only gets between a man and his best friend but his favorite gadget as well (both "incarnated" in Data). She's the yin to the collective's yang: where the colllective is dispassionate, she's motivated by lust and loneliness; where the collective is direct, she is devious; where the collective uses masculine force; she gives "blow" jobs. Despicable, really. But you know what? So what? FC is still the only TNG movie with a scintilla of entertainment value.

[Falcor5]

Whats the point of FC? The same as any movie to be entertaining and make the studio a profit. First Contact delivered on both counts.

[Tom]

Brutal Strudel wrote:

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Timo doesn't care much what the writer intent was--he'll spin an incredibly dense and brilliant theory around some of the dumbest stuff Trek has done

"Trek Spin" LoL now there an interesting idea.. is trekspin.com free? ..OK calm down just joking...

[Brutal Strudel]

FleetLord wrote:

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"Trek Spin" LoL now there an interesting idea.. is trekspin.com free? ..OK calm down just joking...

Um, I don't get it.

[MyCylon]

FC was very entertaining (more so than any of the other TNG movies IMHO). Thinking too much about time travel stories usually ends up being rather unsatisfactory, I think. It's fun but you can always find plot holes somewhere along the way. Obviously, they're more obvious in some cases than in others. But then this isn't a high concept science fiction movie, now is it?