I take it you've never heard the "'James Bond' is just a code name" theory that's semi-popular among some Bond fans?
Petition for a return of the "Q Who" - Borg in the Novels!
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I take it you've never heard the "'James Bond' is just a code name" theory that's semi-popular among some Bond fans?
I take it you've never heard the "'James Bond' is just a code name" theory that's semi-popular among some Bond fans?
Which I gather is disproven, or at least argued against, by Moore-Bond mourning at the gravesite of Lazenby-Bond's wife.
I'm partial to the "James Bond is a Time Lord" theory myself.
I take it you've never heard the "'James Bond' is just a code name" theory that's semi-popular among some Bond fans?
Which I gather is disproven, or at least argued against, by Moore-Bond mourning at the gravesite of Lazenby-Bond's wife.
I'm partial to the "James Bond is a Time Lord" theory myself.
From what I remember, they either handwave that or say "it's just part of the cover" or something like that, but it's been a while since I saw the full argument for it beyond the casting.
And I thought about mentioning that one too, but it tends to lead down the "everyone is a Time Lord" path that a certain trope-cataloging website likes to indulge in (if only slightly seriously).
Bond is a Time Lord, Leiter is a code name, and Blofeld needs extensive reconstructive surgery after every defeat by Bond. 
I take it you've never heard the "'James Bond' is just a code name" theory that's semi-popular among some Bond fans?
Which I gather is disproven, or at least argued against, by Moore-Bond mourning at the gravesite of Lazenby-Bond's wife.
Bond is more than a code name. Bond is an entire role.
They're just really, really committed to that role.
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 really like to read it! But please no f...ing Borg Queen and no assimilations...
@All Star Trek Autors on this board: What is your stance on unloved canon issues and retcons? Is it possible to re-retcon things for the novels or must things stay in line with the latest canon?
As a rule, the later stuff takes priority, which is why Spock isn't a Vulcanian and the ship doesn't run on lithium crystals. But there have been a number of cases where authors have tried to reconcile some of the older stuff with what we've learned since -- like my own reconciliation of the TNG vs. FC/VGR-style Borg in Greater Than the Sum, or the way one of the Trill-related DS9 books offered an explanation for the Odan-style hosts.
I'd say it depends on whether there's a story worth telling. You don't do it just for the sake of continuity porn, you do it if it lets you add something interesting and useful to the universe.
In fact, the excellent novel, "The Captain's Table: Fire Ship" covers the image change very well!
The two-part DC Comic storyline, leading up to ST III, cleverly used pon farr action scenes to enable the artist to slowly slant a Kirstie Alley-style Saavik's eyebrows higher and higher. In the ST III adaptation that follows, they use Robin Curtis's likeness and hairstyle, then the next arc of comics fall back to a more generic Saavik look, but the eyebrows stay slanted for the rest of the character's participation in the comic!
^"Pon farr action scenes," Therin?
It seems Saavik had been bonded to Xon ("Phase II") when first rescued from Hellguard, but he is operating undercover in Romulan space. Saavik enters the plak tow but there is no Xon nearby to resolve her condition and she steals a shuttlecraft. Lots of closeups on her grimacing face (and angling eyebrows) as she desperately seeks him out.
As you say though, I think there have been sufficient explanations given for that in the books now that we don't have to write them off as different species. There are ways both the TNG and DS9 versions can be true.
The ridges - It could just be simple racial variation. Given how human-looking so many other races in Star Trek are, would someone from another planet necessarily understand that a Nigerian and a Norwegian are the same species? So there's no need to say that Odan's host and Dax's host are different species.
The symbiont - "First Steps" establishes that Odan is much older than Dax. "Unjoined" establishes that symbionts get bigger and grow extra bobbly bits as they get older. So why not just say that Odan looks different because he's older?
Personality dominance - It's not explicitly stated in "The Host" that the symbiont personality overwhelms the host. Certainly it's implied, and it was probably the intention of the writers. But it's not said flat out. So that gives you the wiggle room to hand wave the difference away by saying that it was just a stressful day, or that it's the difference between a Trill host and a human host.
And so on.
My point only being that I agree that there are always ways to explain this stuff away. I don't always need there to be an explanation - I'm happy with the 'it was always this way' excuse - but it can be done.
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Sure, but the point is that the show's writers didn't bother with that. They just ignored the parts they didn't want to use. Generally, writers are far less attached to their own old ideas than their audiences are. After all, writing is a process of trial and error and discarding ideas that didn't work. Ideally you discard those ideas before the audience ever sees them, but the makers of an ongoing series don't always have that option.
So you're far more likely to see such attempts at rationalization or reconciliation from new or outside authors rather than the original authors. For instance, Gene Roddenberry was content to retcon the Klingons' appearance, but it was Manny Coto, Mike Sussman, and the Reeves-Stevenses -- all fans who went on to become writers -- who took it upon themselves to actually explain it.
Thanks for the explanation, Therin.
Without context, a "pon farr action scene" sounds like a descriptor from the back cover blurb for Vulcan Love Slave.
This is something I've thought a lot about, and I have to say I don't agree with the notion that the Borg were changed from their Q-Who "faceless cyborg technology-consuming locust swarm" incarnation because that was an inherently bad idea. I think it was a very good science fiction idea. Maybe one that was better suited to a harder-SF novel and not a TV series, perhaps.
What happened was that Michael Piller came up with an excellent idea--having the Borg assimilate Picard--to tell a very compelling Riker story. And once The Best of Both Worlds proved so very successful it just kind of snowballed from there. I personally believe the architects of the novelverse missed a golden opportunity to tell a really good story about how the Borg might have morphed from their Q-Who incarnation to the generic horde commanded by a stereotypical Evil Overlord that we saw on Voyager. This is just my opinion, but I really didn't enjoy the direction they went in with the Caeliar and all that.
What happened was that Michael Piller came up with an excellent idea--having the Borg assimilate Picard--to tell a very compelling Riker story. And once The Best of Both Worlds proved so very successful it just kind of snowballed from there. I personally believe the architects of the novelverse missed a golden opportunity to tell a really good story about how the Borg might have morphed from their Q-Who incarnation to the generic horde commanded by a stereotypical Evil Overlord that we saw on Voyager. This is just my opinion, but I really didn't enjoy the direction they went in with the Caeliar and all that.
Not an inherently bad idea, just an idea that really only works once. It would've been far harder to get multiple interesting stories out of the Borg if they'd remained completely impersonal.
I don't think the novels have ever treated the Queen as an "evil overlord." If anything, the novel continuity has treated the Queen as a specialized, replaceable component of the Collective. Homecoming and The Farther Shore introduced the idea of the Royal Protocol, the core control software that's installed into a drone designated to become a Queen. Resistance focused on the biological process used to convert a drone into a Queen form. (And I tried to show in Greater Than the Sum how those two ideas can fit together.) Both Resistance and Before Dishonor focused on the ways in which a Borg population deprived of a Queen will operate to generate a new one, whether by converting an existing drone or assimilating a host. So the novels' Queen is really more an operating system or CPU than an overlord. Destiny did establish that the Queen identity was a degenerated form of an individual personality, but I don't recall it focusing a lot on the Queen at all, instead portraying the Borg more as a vast oncoming horde.
Oh, I'm not saying that the novels depicted the Queen as an Evil Overlord. Voyager did that. Not that I'm blaming the people who worked on that show; they took their marching orders from the same executives who greenlit Homeboys In Outer Space. I think the folks who work on the novels made a valiant effort to rehabilitate the Borg in Voyager's wake; the creative choices just weren't ones that I personally enjoyed. Not saying that anyone did bad work (Except the UPN execs. Those guys sucked.)
I don't think that's true on a microlevel like that; I don't remember hearing that Voyager had any significant level of executive interference, it was largely Berman's project as far as I'm aware. The only thing that really comes to mind in terms of directing the plot is a rumor I heard years ago that they wanted to fire Garrett Wang for some kind of on-set drama after season 3 but couldn't because he'd placed on a 50 Sexiest Men poll, but I've never really bought that story. Even bringing Jeri Ryan on was Berman's decision based on interviews with him after the show wrapped, it wasn't an executive thing.
I still disagree. Once again, because there are SEVERAL franchises whose main antagonist remains totally impersonal on a consistent basis. the "Alien" movies being an excellent example: Nobody really knows what the aliens are thinking, or what they're talking about, or what they even want. The point of the story is to SURVIVE them, not argue with them. So Ripley doesn't go into the Queen's lair and try to talk the queen into giving Newt back; the Queen doesn't strut around in circles taunting her about how "I almost got you on the Nostromo... I was there the whole time, don't you remember? Kyahahahahaha!" No, she goes down into that nest, grabs the kid, and then fights her way out with a flamethrower. Which, amazingly, doesn't actually work and she winds up blowing the queen out of an airlock when the damn thing follows her to her ship. No dialog there except for the famous "Get away from her you BITCH!"
Hell, even World of the Worlds ultimately has this same dynamic. In NO version of that story are humans capable of communicating with the Martians, and the Martians aren't that interested in trying. They come off as faceless unknowable killing machines that can't actually BE defeated by conventional means.
What you're basically saying is that Star Trek isn't equipped to tell "space monster" stories. But that's nonsense, we KNOW that it can. The problem was the Borg as originally conceived were a race of monsters, where subsequent writers re-imagined them as a race of techno zombies.
And after Alien and Aliens came the spectacular additional sequels that highlighted how far that concept could be taken, of course.
Not really the best example if you want to show how a space monster can continue to be used well beyond the first story featuring it without altering the core concept.
Which even Aliens didn't do. The first movie was a horror movie against a single unbeatable foe, the second was an action movie against a group of creatures tough but not impossible to kill. It would be completely possible to replace Ripley and the xenomorph designs and have no one even guess that Alien and Aliens were even connected.
I seriously cannot think of any franchise that continued to use a monster antagonist well over multiple installments without changing something significant about the monster. If you don't do something new with it in installments beyond the first, you're just retreading ground. That's why the later Freddy and Jason movies sucked, it's why the later Alien movies sucked, the later Terminator movies, etc.
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