I always thought they should have just left it at Worf's statement - it's a mystery, and something that Klingons find somewhat embarrassing. Not everything has to be explained.
Petition for a return of the "Q Who" - Borg in the Novels!
- Thread starter Unimatrix Q
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I always thought they should have just left it at Worf's statement - it's a mystery, and something that Klingons find somewhat embarrassing. Not everything has to be explained.
Well, it was Enterprise's fourth season. They were kind of going overboard with the fan service. It would have been more surprising if they hadn't tackled that issue.
Kobayashi Maru. When the writers don't follow up on such plot points, people complain bitterly, such as "If only Berman and Braga would grow some balls and just explain..."
It was a story ripe for canonical explanation from the moment Kor, Kang and Koloth turned up on DS9 with forehead bumps.
Except that that was implicitly reinforcing what Roddenberry always claimed, that the Klingons had always had ridged foreheads but TOS hadn't had the budget to show it correctly. (DC's first series did the same thing with Koloth and Kor, redesigning them as TMP-style Klingons without explanation.)
Creators tweak their ongoing creations all the time. Generally the intent is to simply pretend it was like that all along. But there are always some fans who don't accept that and want it explained in-story. That doesn't mean the creators are obligated to give them an explanation. As I said, the only reason "Trials and Tribble-ations" bothered to address it is because it had to use TOS footage, which forced the issue. If they'd used a different episode for their anniversary story, one without Klingons, then "Affliction" and "Divergence" might never have happened.
Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking "Why did they switch from the turtleneck uniforms in the early episodes to the black collars in most of TOS? There must be an episode or a novel or a short story somewhere that explains it!"
^I know you meant that as a joke, but I do sometimes wonder about the motivation behind some of the uniform choices we've seen. For instance, I never understood why the pre-TNG uniforms were class-B versions of the TWOK uniforms (no turtleneck or belt), or why rank insignias for the TWOK uniforms were so different from those used at other times.
--Sran
--Sran
I feel it should've been the other way around. The TWOK-style jackets were too dressy for everyday fatigues. The standard duty uniform should've been the turtleneck without the jacket, much like the pilot-era uniforms. Besides, the jackets without the turtlenecks, as used in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and such, just looked weird.
But personalizing the BORG is the wrong way to go about that, IMO.
Imagine what the Jurasic Park movies would have been if the somebody decided to give the velociraptors a lot of villainous, menacing dialog and visions of world domination.
I think the Q Who incarnation has potential if you can just find a way to explain their continued existence in that form. They would be a species that seldom communicates with anyone and rarely stays in any one place for long. They just show up one day, unannounced and unexpected, target something that just happens to catch their interests, rip it to shreds (taking whatever it is they're after) and then leave. People who don't have the means to fight them learn to avoid drawing their attention, and people who DO have the means learn that fighting the Borg and DEFEATING them are completely different things.
You can actually set "Borg attack" as the premise for many different kinds of stories as long as the stories center around the characters' struggle to survive said attacks. For example: if the Captain and First Officer are stranded on a space station after a Borg cube assimilates the entire space dock and its power systems; this becomes a disaster/survival story rather than just a "fight the bad guy" story, especially if the climax involves the rescue ship having to beam the survivors aboard and then find some way to evade the Cube as it comes back for seconds. Or if the hero ship arrived at a planet that is being visited by a Borg cube every ten months with a demand that they sacrifice twenty of their very best engineers and mathemeticians for assimilation, failure to do so resulting in the Borg destroying one of their cities.
There are many possibilities that would have the Borg remain a faceless and inscrutable foe, and I think they would have more longevity that way. They don't believe in conquest, so they never come at you with a massive strategy; they don't have a concept of politics or borders so you have no idea where they're going to be or who they'll go after next.
It's worth a try, though. I think Vendetta did a very good job of this, but more importantly, I think the attempt to conventionalize the Borg didn't actually make them far LESS menacing in the end.
Even some very small tweeks could have avoided this. Take the creepiness factor up to eleven by replacing all of the Borg Queen's lines in "First Contact" with the droning chorus voice of the entire collective, speaking in the background and dozens of interchangeable drones that just happen to be in the room.
BORG HIVE: Is it becoming clear to you yet? Look at yourself, standing there cradling the new flesh that we've given you. If it means nothing to you, why protect it?
DATA: I ...I am simply imitating the behaviour of humans.
BORG HIVE: You are becoming more human all the time. Now you are learning how to lie.
DATA: My programming was not designed to process these sensations.
BORG HIVE: Then tear the skin from your limbs as you would a defective circuit. ...Go ahead, Data. We won't stop you. ...Do it. Don't be tempted by flesh.
DATA: <sighs>
BORG HIVE: <Three random female drones appear from the background> Are you familiar with physical forms of pleasure?
DATA:
I'm picturing your change to First Contact and it just feels wrong to me; not wrong in terms of creepy, but wrong in terms of it not making any sense to me. The Q Who Borg wouldn't have cared about addressing Data, they just would've disassembled him, found out how he worked, and incorporated any new design aspects into their own functioning.
But they need Data's encryption code, which for some reason can't be obtained merely by assimilating him (probably because doing so would compromise his memory).
Plus, that would be a very nice explanation for why the "Queen" even exists. The Borg figured out that Data had something they needed and they couldn't take it by force, so for once they tried a more subtle approach. And it fails, not because Data remains aware that the Queen is completely evil, but because he realizes that she isn't much more than a meat puppet being waved at him by the collective.
OTOH, the entire premise of First Contact doesn't make any real sense in this context unless there is also something very specific in the Enterprise computer that they can't get via brute force.
I'm probably biased, though. When it comes to the Borg, I can't actually think of ANYTHING I would have liked less than introducing the Borg Queen.
I thought they looked OK with the crew necked shirts they wore in "Tapestry", so I don't think they specifically required turtlenecks, but I agree they looked weird when they just wore *nothing* underneath.
But they need the belts. They look terrible without the belts.
Oh I know. But the general public/casual viewers didn't necessarily have access to Roddenberry's interviews nor the tie-in comics.
It's odd what people will and won't accept. You never hear anyone demanding an explanation for why Saavik got extensive cosmetic surgery between TWOK and TSFS. (Although I do remember plenty of fan theories about Number One and Chapel being related.)
The current Taurik/Vorik thread also speaks to this...
People understand unavoidable production realities like recasting a character--and even then, it sometimes gets remarked upon within the story. (Due South, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Tomb of the Dragon Emperor are three random examples that come to mind.) On the flip side, when a popular character (Sherlock Holmes or Superman, for instance) has been played by multiple actors, there is usually an understanding that the stories with the same actor in the role share a continuity.
As long as we're talking about The Search for Spock, it's the difference between not needing an explanation for why I hear music when the Enterprise leaves Spacedock and definitely needing an explanation if the Enterprise had suddenly looked like a completely different ship from the one that had appeared in The Wrath of Khan.
Recently, when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had Seth Green take over the role of Leonardo, they justified the voice change as a result of his extensive injuries in the previous season finale affecting his vocal cords.
And of course there's the ever-popular plastic surgery excuse in soap operas.
On the other hand, there was Don Cheadle's metatextual first lines taking over the role of Jim Rhodes in Iron Man 2: "Well, it's me, and I'm here, so get over it and move on."
In TOS, they sometimes recycled stock Enterprise footage from the pilots (with the dark, spired nacelle caps, rear nacelle grilles, higher bridge dome, larger deflector dish, etc.), intercutting it with footage of the series Enterprise, so sometimes the ship would randomly jump back and forth between the two versions. At least one fan tech reference asserted that the nacelle caps had spires could be extended and retracted as needed, although it didn't attempt to explain the other changes. But I think most of us understand that it was meant to be a ship with a single consistent appearance, and what we were seeing was merely an imperfect approximation of the intent.
It's quite fun trying to decide if visuals should be taken as in-universe truth or not, and if so whether they need to be explained away or whether they can be accepted as making sense. The frequently reused ship designs is a perfect example, of course. The Rigelians in Enterprise, for one, are using ships that were originally Axanar and Hazari. We can easily assume that the Rigelian cargo ship is indeed "in fact" the same design as the Axanar cargo ship - the two civilizations are quite proximate, so they could easily be buying from the same shipwrights, or else one of them is purchasing from the other. Of course, there are then complications - since the Axanar cargo ship shares a design lineage with the Axanar military vessel in the same episode, do the Axanar purchase their entire fleet from someone else (Rigel?) or is this an Axanar design lineage and the Rigellians sometimes use Axanar-built ships (seeing Rigelians using, buying, selling or bartering pretty much anything shouldn't be too much of a problem, not with their commercial influence)? The scout ship though - there's no way that could be the same design as a Hazari vessel two centuries in the future and half a galaxy away, so we have to ignore that similarity. Although how we do that is an interesting question - do we "substitute" a new ship, do we assume a supreme coincidence in design, or do we just refuse to consider it at all?
In my "fanon", for example, I assume that Tamarian, Klaestron, Drayan and T'Lani ships are all utilizing the same basic design because of some technobabble reason that leads to it being the most effective set-up when your warp technology has progressed down a certain branching innovative path. So I accept that they're very much alike in-universe, though I "exaggerate" the differences. (I spend far too much time thinking about these things, don't I?
)I imagine that no-one has an entirely consistent approach to this.
Some things need explaining, some are just accepted or ignored. I suppose you could say the criteria for judging what to do involves the degree to which it allows for enjoyable speculation on the universe without getting in the way of enjoying the show.
I think it's all about what can reasonably be controlled in a production.
When a role is re-cast, the audience can understand that people get hired, people get fired or people leave for other jobs. A TV show or movie series can reasonably control the personnel only so far and the audience gets that. "The role of 'James Bond' will now be played by Roger Moore." Audience nods and continues to eat popcorn.
But what can be reasonably controlled in a production is cosmetics, and for a cosmetic change, the audience needs basic and understandable reasons for that change or an in-story reason is required.
Why isn't Geordi wearing his visor anymore? Oh, I see: He got contacts instead.
Why is Andy on Parks and Rec ripped now? "I stopped drinking beer."
Why doesn't Janeway have a bun on her head anymore? Simple, she got a haircut.
Why did Ollie cut his hair on Arrow? Ra's Al Ghul training, naturally.
Why did Felicity cut her long tresses before season two of Felicity? Because Keri Russell aggressively hates her fans, of course.
Why do the Klingons have prosthetics on their foreheads now?
The last one is a little outside our basic human experience and leaves us scratching our heads. Robin Curtis as Saavik is easy to accept; an entire alien race changes the structure of their faces over the course of a decade is a bit harder to swallow without some exposition to wash it down.
Except that TOS had more humanlike Klingons because it didn't have the makeup budget to do something as sophisticated as what TMP could do. So they couldn't really control the cosmetics (almost literally) at the time. They were forced to operate within limits that later productions were free from.
Sure, we did get a couple of "forehead aliens" in the series proper -- Ruk and the Vians. But there was only one of Ruk and two of the Vians. A whole ship or battalion or barroom-full of Klingons would've been harder to pull off. (Unless they put all the background extras in helmets, but they'd already done that with the Romulans.)
And I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say the audience needed an explanation for the Klingons' change. Sure, a lot of fans, myself included, wanted an explanation, and many of us came up with ones of our own. But the franchise itself went from 1979 to 1996 without even acknowledging the change (even implying in "Blood Oath" that TOS Klingons had really had ridges all along), and from December 1979 to February 2005, a bit over a quarter century, without providing an explanation for it.
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