That was a ressikian flute… xD
why no 'Star Trek vs Aliens' comic series?
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
- Start date
That was a ressikian flute… xD
That first cover gives me Borg vibes.
The image of the Xenomorphs with tracing lasers coming out of the carapaces is pretty chilling, too. The Borg found something to assimilate... and then it assimilated them. Clearly, it's taking the Alien 3 idea that the Xenomorphs take on characteristics of the body the Facehugger hosted in, even if it doesn't make any sense (because the lasers aren't biological).
Except Borg have nanoprobes in their bodies, so a Facehugger that gestated in a Borg drone would absorb some of its nanoprobes, which could create tech components in the mature Xenomorph. Mutual assimilation.
Ah, good point! I was thinking of/hung up on Picard/Locutus' laser, which wasn't created by nanoprobes, forgetting all the others, like in First Contact, that were. 
It's always been kind of weird to me how TNG's writers did one of the very first TV episodes about nanotechnology in "Evolution," then basically forgot it existed until First Contact.
The third one also look like the interior of a TNG era Borg Cube.
I keep looking at Woodward's covers, and thinking about the likely story based on those covers, I think I'm okay with it not happening.
Woodward says there was a script for an FCBD prologue. My hunch is the prologue would have involved a Borg cube finding a ship in space -- maybe a Space Jockey ship? -- capturing it, assimilating it, unaware of the horrors in the cargo hold (which we the readers would recognize but the Borg would not) and... the shock reveal on the last page is a Borg drone with a Facehugger wrapped around its face.
The presence of Borg elements and the Romulans on the covers suggest to me a story that might involve a derelict Borg cube in the Neutral Zone, but this isn't any ordinary Borg cube--it's infested with Borg-hybridized Xenomorphs--and the mystery for the Enterprise crew is to uncover what is going on, what has happened to these Borg (and, presumably, Romulans), and once they've worked out the lifecycle, prevent these creatures from falling into Romulan hands because they would be a terrible bioweapon.
One problem I keep running into in thinking about this is that TNG-era medical technology is damn near magic. It's not Larry Niven autodoc magic -- where Bey Schaeffer regrows his entire body from just his head in an autodoc -- but when you have transporters you can hold someone impregnated with a chestburster in a transporter buffer and you can remove it with a medical transporter. I'm sure one could invent technobabble reasons why certain things wouldn't work -- do phasers affect a Xenomorph body? can the Enterprise's sensors detect a Xenomorph warrior moving within the ship? -- but that also feels like a nerfing just to make the Xenomorphs dangerous to the TNG characters.
The other problem... everything I think this story could be doesn't feel much different to me than a post-First Contact Borg story. Nanite assimilation is an interesting addition to the Borg, but it also changed them into effectively cyborg Xenomorphs.
And, ultimately, I doubt the Tiptons were the right writers to really shatter the complacency of Jean-Luc Picard and his crew. "The universe is not made for us," Carl Sagan said. It's a scary, hostile place, and TNG was never good at showing that.
"Operation Annihilate!" with Xenomorphs would have been a good starting point.
