Petition for a return of the "Q Who" - Borg in the Novels!

[Therin of Andor]

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.

"Jaws 2". The movie itself has a very different flavour (pun intended), because it aims to be a teenage date movie, filled with edible teenagers. The new director knew they couldn't have such few glimpses of the shark until the full-on climax, which had worked so well for the original, so they showed the whole shark very early on, and often. "Jaws 2" has its own cult status (and a new "memories of..." book coming very soon).

But essentially monster Brucette has the same antagonistic behaviour as her late mate, Bruce.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And after Alien and Aliens came the spectacular additional sequels that highlighted how far that concept could be taken, of course.

There was nothing wrong with the CONCEPT. Alien 3 had the makings of a descent movie, it was just VERY poorly executed. And half of Alien Resurrection was, come to think of it, pretty descent, so was the first AvP movie.

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.

But they didn't alter the core concept, not of the aliens at least. In fact, it's a case of the same basic monster appearing in four completely different kinds of stories (five if you include Alien vs. Predator). And that's ignoring the novel tie-ins, comic books, and (some of the) video games.

Which at no point required the aliens to become people. They may have gone from "unstoppable beast that can't be killed" to "Swarm of beasts that aren't that hard to kill" but that just comes down to a storytelling mechanic. The basic premise of the Borg already has built-in features that can handle that amount of variation: sometimes, you're running/hiding from them, sometimes you're fighting a holding action to buy time for someone to escape while they just keep on regenerating over and over again, and sometimes you're just trying to survive the aftermath after the Borg kill everyone. And sometimes you have to do all three of these things. Seeing how the Borg only actually made four appearances in all of TNG, I find it impossible to believe that the original premise was really all that unworkable; it's not as if they actually TRIED to follow it and exhausted all possible avenues.

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.

Yes, I agree. Because they believed -- wrongly at that -- that the basic premise of the antagonist had to be reinvented and wanted to avoid "retreading" ground when it would have been a smarter idea to hit the same ground from a slightly different angle.

The Walking Dead is a really great example of the latter. In either the games, the show or the graphic novels, not a whole lot changes about the zombies or about basic story premise, the changes are all based on the characters and their struggle to survive what is essentially an ongoing plague; the zombies become a known quantity, but one that can't be so easily marginalized. A similar thing defines Alien: Isolation. The game is basically a retread and massive expansion of the premise from the first Alien movie, in that the Alien can't really be killed and the entire point of the game/story is that you have to try and outsmart it or sneak past it.

There's nothing wrong with the basic premise in either case. It's just that if you're LOOKING to write a story that has tense dramatic dialog between a good guy and a nefarious mustache-twirling bad guy, you probably shouldn't make the bad guy a xenomorph. Or, for that matter, a scantily clad female Borg.

 

[Idran]

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.

Yes, I agree. Because they believed -- wrongly at that -- that the basic premise of the antagonist had to be reinvented and wanted to avoid "retreading" ground when it would have been a smarter idea to hit the same ground from a slightly different angle.

Wait, really? I mean, the best installments in each of the series I mentioned certainly weren't the first ones, they tended to be the second ones (if not later for the Elm Street movies (3 was the best)) because they went in a new direction from the first after learning what in the first worked best and what didn't. Take Terminator, for example. T2 was far better than Terminator because they went in an interesting new direction that allowed them to take the concept already explored, see what worked and what didn't, and tweak it. Going from unstoppable antagonist hunting our protagonist to unstoppable antagonist hunting our protagonist with the aid of an unstoppable ally on the side of a protagonist, going monster vs. monster to allow them to ramp up the threat without making the continued surviving of the protagonist completely unbelievable (not to disparage the T-800 in T2 with that term "monster", but hopefully you get what I mean). And then the movies after T2 sucked because they kept doing basically that same core monster vs. monster plot again and again. The later movies didn't suck because they were different, they sucked because they were too similar to what we'd already seen. They were boring.

 

[Christopher]

Also, there's just no comparing movies and TV. Movies come out far more infrequently and tend to be more superficial and action-driven, at least in this genre. TV series have far more installments and are more character-driven and idea-driven. Also, any given antagonist in a series like ST is just one of many, and thus needs to be as interesting as the others in order to remain relevant. So a simplistic, unchanging monster might be sufficient to sustain a few popcorn movies that are mainly about special effects and cheap scares, but television storytelling -- at least for something adult-oriented and dramatic like Star Trek as opposed to something like Power Rangers or Transformers -- demands more substance and more variety.

And you're right, Idran -- generally, the best-regarded sequels are the ones that do something different than their predecessors, like T2. Sure, there are plenty of movie series that rehash the same plots and the same one-dimensional villains over and over and over, but nobody's ever going to mistake them for quality cinema. Star Trek deserves better.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Wait, really? I mean, the best installments in each of the series I mentioned certainly weren't the first ones, they tended to be the second ones (if not later for the Elm Street movies (3 was the best)) because they went in a new direction from the first after learning what in the first worked best and what didn't. Take Terminator, for example. T2 was far better than Terminator because they went in an interesting new direction that allowed them to take the concept already explored, see what worked and what didn't, and tweak it.

Yes, they TWEAKED it. The basic premise remained mostly the same with some modifications. The "newer, smarter, sleeker killing machine" in the T-1000 and later in the T-X were variations on that theme. Reprogramming the old model terminator was a variation as well, but the basic premise was intact.

Terminator: Salvation carried this theme too, for the most part, but then flew completely off the rails by giving Skynet a humanistic avatar with a bizzare-sounding motivation and robbed the entire concept of some of its luster; that, however, can be forgiven if one accepts that the "You were a trap all along" subplot can't be revealed without some amount of exposition.

And then the movies after T2 sucked because they kept doing basically that same core monster vs. monster plot again and again...

T3 had a weak plot that was decently-executed, though, so it is at least watchable. Salvation, on the other hand, also had a strong story premise that went kind of weird at the end.

But it wasn't until Sarah Connor Chronicles that the basic premise of the terminators got flipped upside-down into offkey attempts at personalization; towards the end, the show started to evolve into a Blade Runner imitator.

The later movies didn't suck because they were different, they sucked because they were too similar to what we'd already seen. They were boring.

I never found anything "boring" about the latter terminator movies. The problem with T3 was that it was a simplistic and predictable storyline, and T4 because it was a very complex storyline that went for a contrived and kind of irritating ending.

But then, we're discussing the possibilities for the Borg, yes? The same phenomenon seems to apply here in that the SECOND appearance by the Borg is undeniably the best, and that involved only minor tweaks to their presence. Their third appearance in "Descent" modified it entirely and can be considered more of an anomaly than a transformation; after that point, subsequent appearances were weaker and weaker, and by the time Voyager encountered them in the Delta Quadrant it was already time to replace them with something scarier.

Also, there's just no comparing movies and TV. Movies come out far more infrequently and tend to be more superficial and action-driven, at least in this genre. TV series have far more installments and are more character-driven and idea-driven. Also, any given antagonist in a series like ST is just one of many, and thus needs to be as interesting as the others in order to remain relevant.

And yet they never attempted those kinds of radical transformations for the Klingons or the Romulans in TOS or TNG. The Klingons emerged as "warrior race guys" in "Heart of Glory" and have been that ever since, even well into Deep Space Nine that not only preserved that original premise but EXPANDED on it and sought to flesh it out in more detail. Same for the Romulans, whose basic depiction hasn't changed much since "The Enterprise Incident," or for the Cardassians whose changes since "The Wounded" included new costumes and different makeup and not much else.

It isn't about the need "to do something different to stay interesting" because Star Trek at its most interesting was already formulaic and repetitive. The only thing you could really say is that the original Borg concept wasn't interesting enough on its own, and I simply don't believe that's the case. That concept had enormous untapped potential that has never been fully realized.

 

[JD]

Except the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians were individual characters, so there was a lot more diversity in what they could do with them. You could have good guys, bad guys, characters who had specific desires, characters who were the perfect examples of their culture, and characters who went against their culture. You couldn't have any of that with the original Borg.
The original Borg could have worked as a one or two appearance thing, but after that things probably would have started to get repetitive. IMO enemies are a lot more interesting when they are people who our heroes can interact with. Sure mindless monsters can be fun every now and then, but if you want something to stick around long term and continue to be compelling, it really needs to have more substance than that, especially in a franchise that is, or at least tries, to be as intelligent as Star Trek. If it's just a big mindless action fest, then you can get away with it more. As good as Alien and Aliens are, they just wouldn't work as a regular TV series unless there was a lot more to them than just Xenomorphs attacking ships and colonies.

 

[Christopher]

Except the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians were individual characters, so there was a lot more diversity in what they could do with them.

Yes, obviously. Attempting to use them as a comparison is totally missing the point about the problem with the Borg as originally conceived, which is that they weren't characters at all, just an impersonal force of nature. The comparison would not be the Klingons and Romulans -- who were actual named, individual, speaking characters with personalities -- but to dangerous cosmic phenomena or technological malfunctions or weird space diseases. Sure, we got Trek episodes about all those things, but we only got one episode about each. After they did the first episode about the Enterprise hitting a cosmic string, they didn't come back and do a dozen more episodes about the Enterprise and Defiant and Voyager hitting more cosmic strings. The Psi 2000 virus from "The Naked Time" did come back once in "The Naked Now," but they didn't keep bringing it back once a year, because there was really only one story to tell about it.

The very idea that the Borg could be likened to other alien races at all is an artifact of the later version of the Borg, the version that included Hugh and the Queen and Seven of Nine. Which makes my case for me. The only way to make the Borg into recurring adversaries was to change them into something more personalized, more like other alien races.

As good as Alien and Aliens are, they just wouldn't work as a regular TV series unless there was a lot more to them than just Xenomorphs attacking ships and colonies.

Yeah... You'd need a more personalized antagonist. Indeed, the movie sequels already gave us more personalized antagonists, in the form of the Weyland-Yutani representatives willing to exploit the Xenomorphs and endanger human lives in the name of profit.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Except the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians were individual characters, so there was a lot more diversity in what they could do with them. You could have good guys, bad guys, characters who had specific desires, characters who were the perfect examples of their culture, and characters who went against their culture. You couldn't have any of that with the original Borg.
The original Borg could have worked as a one or two appearance thing, but after that things probably would have started to get repetitive.

Which would be a really good point, except that the Borg only had four appearances in all of TNG and their appearance in "Descent" is EXACTLY the kind of variation of the "mix things up" variety you describe.

The divergence from the Q Who pattern was primarily introduced by First Contact and Voyager was forced to abide by that in Scorpion. And First Contact was the first and only big-screen treatment of the Borg in the entire franchise.

It's really not as if the Q Who premise was actually in danger of BECOMING repetitive. They abandoned it long before it had a chance to do so.

IMO enemies are a lot more interesting when they are people who our heroes can interact with. Sure mindless monsters can be fun every now and then

Yes, they certainly can. And that is a storytelling niche in which the Borg would have excelled.

TOS had no fear of Space Monster plotlines; they gave us the Doomsday Machine, the Space Amoeba and the Cloud creature, and IMO those episodes are still quite entertaining. TNG had its Crystal Entity (twice), Neguilum, whatever it was that tried to eat them in "Time Squared" and the ravioli creature in Galaxy's Child. Voyager, too, had its space monster stories once or twice per season.

Casting the Borg in that role has potential to simplify the writing and content of that theme if and when it comes up in an episode. They're a known quantity, so a viewer doesn't have to waste energy wondering who/what the Big Bad is and what it's after and can instead focus on the "How the hell are they going to get out of THIS one?" aspect of the story.

As good as Alien and Aliens are, they just wouldn't work as a regular TV series unless there was a lot more to them than just Xenomorphs attacking ships and colonies.

Which, again, is why I brought up Alien: Isolation. That's a game and a narrative that takes a good twelve hours to play through even if you're playing it on easy mode, because there's a lot of OTHER shit going on that the characters also have to deal with. Personalized enemies too, in the form of the paranoid armed gangs that have taken over the station now that all the authority figures have been eaten by the Xenomorph and impersonalized enemies in the form of crazy androids, security systems, and of course, the xenomorph itself. Would an episode that included both a devastating Borg attack and a Klingon general trying to exploit the situation for his own gain REALLY require the personalization of the Borg? For that matter, a story about a group of survivors on a space colony that has been wrecked by a Borg attack, struggling to survive as social order collapsed around them? Hell, you could rewrite "Silicon Avatar" and replace the crystal entity with a Borg Cube and it would still work just as well, but ONLY in the original Q Who paradigm.

And yes, the entire concept of the Alien franchise becomes meaningless when you deliberately oversimplify it to "alien attack on ships and colonies." But if you're such a crappy writer that you can't come up with a descent story for an Alien title, you're probably in the wrong industry.

I can't help but feel that the "faceless hivemind is too limited" theory is really just an argument from lack of imagination.

 

[Idran]

You're starting to stray into ad hominems with those last two paragraphs, Crazy Eddie, considering that one of the people in the debate is someone that actively works as a writer in Star Trek. It's been a pretty calm debate so far, and I apologize to the mods if this is backseat modding, but please don't turn to personal insults.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You're starting to stray into ad hominems with those last two paragraphs, Crazy Eddie, considering that one of the people in the debate is someone that actively works as a writer in Star Trek.

I don't know that Christopher was actually part of the writing team on TNG, but I've been wrong before.

Either way, I've never held back from challenging conventional wisdom and I'm, like, 60% sure I'm not going to start any time soon (getting complacent in my old age).

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

I don't know that Christopher was actually part of the writing team on TNG, but I've been wrong before.

He wasn't part of the TNG writing team, but he is a respected Star Trek author who's written multiple novels; the quote in my signature is actually from a novella he wrote several years ago.

--Sran

 

[Unimatrix Q]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes. If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

 

[Idran]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes. If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

Oh, don't worry; the second doesn't follow at all from the first. They have to follow canon in their works, yes, but that's never stopped a Treklit author from criticizing episodes or things they don't like, on this board or elsewhere. I mean, have you seen the framing story for "The Good That Men Do"? And if you're talking Christopher specifically in this thread, you should hear him talk about "Miri", "Alternative Factor", or "The Counter-Clock Incident", just to name a few.

But no, no one's disagreeing with you purely because they're forced to disagree with you, Unimatrix Q.

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes. If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

Well, there are loopholes in that policy for writers clever enough to take advantage of them, but in this case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Even ignoring the fact that the Borg are pretty much done in novels, the Borg of TBOBW forward are the public's preferred perception of the Borg. the concept of assimilation and the catchphrase "resistance is futile" put the Borg in the public eye, and is what generates sales based on them. Therefore, Paramount/CBS is going to want those Borg at the forefront of their merchandising. Simple marketing, really.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes. If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

Well, there are loopholes in that policy for writers clever enough to take advantage of them, but in this case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Even ignoring the fact that the Borg are pretty much done in novels, the Borg of TBOBW forward are the public's preferred perception of the Borg. the concept of assimilation and the catchphrase "resistance is futile" put the Borg in the public eye, and is what generates sales based on them. Therefore, Paramount/CBS is going to want those Borg at the forefront of their merchandising. Simple marketing, really.

BOBW Borg, Yes! But i don't believe that to be true for the First Contact or the Voyager Borg and the Queen in general. Many people including myself hate her and the nanoprobe assimilation concept!

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes. If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

Well, there are loopholes in that policy for writers clever enough to take advantage of them, but in this case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Even ignoring the fact that the Borg are pretty much done in novels, the Borg of TBOBW forward are the public's preferred perception of the Borg. the concept of assimilation and the catchphrase "resistance is futile" put the Borg in the public eye, and is what generates sales based on them. Therefore, Paramount/CBS is going to want those Borg at the forefront of their merchandising. Simple marketing, really.

BOTB Borg, Yes! But i don't believe that to be true for the First Contact or the Voyager Borg and the Queen in general. Many people including myself hate her!

Honestly there really isn't that much of a difference between the Borg of FC and what we saw in TNG. It was easy for me to think of the Queen at the time as another Locutus-style spokesperson. That's a bit harder now, with her Voyager appearances, but whatever.

Regardless, FC is also a case of being a very popular movie, the most popular TNG movie in fact. Therefore, there is more of a push to make sure the tie-ins are consistent with it. And since it was so well-received among the public, I can't imagine very many writers having a desire or inclination to go against it.

 

[Unimatrix Q]

Well, there are loopholes in that policy for writers clever enough to take advantage of them, but in this case, I wouldn't hold my breath. Even ignoring the fact that the Borg are pretty much done in novels, the Borg of TBOBW forward are the public's preferred perception of the Borg. the concept of assimilation and the catchphrase "resistance is futile" put the Borg in the public eye, and is what generates sales based on them. Therefore, Paramount/CBS is going to want those Borg at the forefront of their merchandising. Simple marketing, really.

BOTB Borg, Yes! But i don't believe that to be true for the First Contact or the Voyager Borg and the Queen in general. Many people including myself hate her!

Honestly there really isn't that much of a difference between the Borg of FC and what we saw in TNG. It was easy for me to think of the Queen at the time as another Locutus-style spokesperson. That's a bit harder now, with her Voyager appearances, but whatever.

Regardless, FC is also a case of being a very popular movie, the most popular TNG movie in fact. Therefore, there is more of a push to make sure the tie-ins are consistent with it. And since it was so well-received among the public, I can't imagine very many writers having a desire or inclination to go against it.

Alas, we'll never know how succesful a Trekmovie with the original Borg would have been...

 

[Christopher]

I don't know, but i have the impression the authors aren't allowed to contradict the canon and bring back stuff like the "Q Who Borg" even if they wanted to! Therefore they need to defend the changes.

Once again, I must point out that in Greater Than the Sum, I already reconciled the TNG-style Borg (incubated drones with no prior personality) with the FC/VGR-style Borg (assimilated drones with suppressed memories of their old lives). True, the "Q Who" Borg were a little different from the later TNG Borg, but then, Spock was originally a Vulcanian and Kirk's middle initial was originally R. First drafts are just that. They're the rough initial versions of ideas that get refined as they go. As a rule, they don't come back. But there's nothing preventing writers from reconciling them with what came later.

If that is true, then it's really sad that Paramount/Cbs are about to make sure that (some) fans wishes can't come true...

That's not sad, it's just reality. Different fans are always going to have different preferences, but the show can only be one thing, more or less. But that's what fanfiction is for. That's where fans get to indulge their idiosyncratic ideas for how they think Trek "should" be done.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

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:

This is downright chilling. Good job.

 

[Technobuilder]

I'm kind of glad the Borg had an endpoint. I'd like to see something new going forward. "Catoms" appear to be the "new" Borg nanites and with the those, Soong's Body & Memories in Data's 'hands' and The 'Body Electric' running around, I see possibilities.