Why haven't the prime universe Kelven and Franklin shown up novels?

Time travelling gaydar!

 

You and me both! I mean sure they could have had Spock look up from a text which, if freeze-framed and analyzed by fans was about infinite timelines and how there's probably a timeline where everything looks totally disco, which would have saved a heck of a lot of arguments about timelines and what's what and all that jazz, if it had just been a straight reboot.

 

Pretty sure the arguments would have just been replaced by some other equally tiring arguments, haha. But yes, I would have preferred some kind of stray mention of Old Spock having a different quantum signature a la Parallels.

That would have made Nero's crusade all the more silly. "I'll destroy planet Vulcan! ANY planet Vulcan!"

 

I believe their thinking was that fans might not accept a straight reboot, because Trek fandom doesn't have any experience with incompatible continuities (even though some franchises thrive on them -- Spider-Man, Batman, Godzilla, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, etc.). So they were trying to avoid having fans go "Oh, I refuse to watch that because it's not the real version of this totally made-up thing." They failed to realize that many fans would do that anyway, that they've done it with every revival of Trek there's ever been.

 

Indeed! One should never underestimate a fandom's ability to complain about that which they love.

 

I really really would have preferred just a hard reboot. Well, that and different writers (Simon Pegg can stay though)

 

Sure, theoretically you could have, if you were working backward from what we got and trying to find an alternative way of telling that same story. But that's obviously not what the filmmakers were doing when they first came up with the idea for the film's story. They only came up with that particular story premise because they wanted the old and new universes to be connected. If they hadn't started out with that as their goal, they probably would've come up with a completely different story, not just a variation on this one.

 

I'm entirely fine with this but I always believed we'd return to the Prime Timeline.

Which we have.

I should also note I say this as someone who was entirely okay with the hard reboot of Star Wars' continuity because I was happy to see that considered "closed" because all of the stories which could have been told had been told and things had gotten ridiculous. Star Trek's EU is, by contrast, still quite thriving with two entirely enjoyable futures.

I'm also going to stun people by saying, yes, I enjoy both universes.

 

Except if it's in the Novelverse the Borg can't be involved.

 

I wouldn't at all be surprised if we end up with a couple of cubes "missed" because a good villain never dies.

 

I don't really see how, even the Borg who weren't connected to the Collective any more were given the option to join the Gestalt.

 

I'm just saying: "how many times have the Daleks been wiped out?"

 

Fortunately, the post-Destiny novels have been more consistent than the ones that came before, which makes this continuity far more consistent than Doctor Who canon. I hope they continue that trend, and the Borg are gone for good.

 

I suppose there's something to be said for the fact the Borg were always something which needed to be used sparingly. Some villains can be used forever but the Borg were a bit like Bane in that the more he was used, the less interesting he became.

 

Edited.

 

That's the thing, though -- the Borg weren't really a good villain. As originally conceived, they were an impersonal force of nature, and a force of nature isn't really a villain, just a threat. Villains need to be personal. And you can't really get more than one story out of fighting a force of nature. That's why the concept was quickly changed to make them more personal, with assimilation of people rather than technology becoming their goal, and the stories generally tended to be about current or former drones dealing with their individuality. And then the Queen was introduced to force them even further into a conventional villain mode by giving them a single face and voice, and that compromised the original concept a bit too much. It even got to the point in later Voyager where we saw the Queen issuing verbal orders to her drones, which is forgetting the whole "collective consciousness" thing.

So eventually it reached the point where the only story left to tell about the Borg was the one the shows and movies never did -- the full-scale invasion, the swarm of locusts descending in full force. Well, that and the story of their origin. And Destiny covered both of those pretty definitively. So what more is there to say? And how could it not be an anticlimax?

 

Yeah, Destiny was a perfect ending (and beginning) of the Borg, and I think bringing them back, even for a one off, would ruin that.

 

I always felt the biggest problem with the Borg was they were treated as a force of nature or Space Zombies when the were probably best left a bit more ambiguous. I think part of that had to be the nature of the fact you want to keep them scary but the fact you can't think of them as "evil, evil, evil, awful." It was why I always liked the Cooperative because you had an argument the Borg could be seen as a good thing for some people.

For me, I liked the fact the Borg wouldn't attack you if you stayed out of their way on their starships. Just the idea, for example, they might show up at a planet, scan their databanks and then leave. The idea they weren't EVIL per se but simply scientists who had absolutely no care whatsoever about individual lives--a bit more Enders Game than Cybermen.

Otherwise, yes, as Christopher says, the only use for them is attack attack attack.

Why as a child, I was all about the "Wipe out the Borg" plan.