It also permanently ruined the borg forever. Far worse than anything tng or voy ever did or could
Don't agree at all. Listen, the Borg were just never going to be as scary after "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II," because a lot of what made them scary in "Q Who?" and "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" was how
unknown they were and how they seemed to lack emotionally relatable motivations. They were, from a storytelling analysis point of view, monsters rather than characters. And a threat you don't fully understand is always scarier than one you do. That's often the key to making things scary in visual art -- keeping them mysterious and making their motivations unrelatable
"BoBW Part II" and then "I, Borg" both undermined the feeling of mystery with the Borg -- we started to understand how they operated, what their vulnerabilities were. Then
Star Trek: First Contact introduced the Borg Queen, and suddenly the Borg were no longer monsters but instead characters with a comprehensible leadership structure whose leader acted upon emotionally relatable motivations. And also,
First Contact and, subsequently, VOY "Unity" and "Scorpion, Parts I & II" further undermined the feeling of mystery by establishing details about how the assimilation process worked (nanoprobes) and how Borg technology could be modified by Our Heroes. And then of course suddenly we have a Borg main character and we learn all sorts of things about the Borg, and then the Queen has this emotionally abusive mother/daughter relationship with her, and then there's this Unimatrix Zero resistance group so suddenly the Borg have
dissidents...
The bottom line is that the very act of bringing the Borg back after "BoBW" meant they were never going to be as scary. Because stories about monsters are dramatically unsustainable -- after a while, the repetition of how the monster operates inherently undermines the feeling of mystery. (Think of how every sequel to
Alien after
Aliens is just diminishing returns.) Plus, the lack of personality forces the writers to make the stories about how the characters react to the monsters rather than about the monsters themselves -- the equivalent of how most natural disaster movies aren't really about the disasters but about how the characters cope with the disasters. (And the few that
do focus on natural disasters just end up feeling numb and boring, like the
2012 film.) And even then, focusing on how the characters respond to the threat rather than on the threat itself starts to get boring, because it's gonna start hitting the same kinds of emotional beats over and over again.
So to avoid all that, the writers introduce the Queen and transform the Borg from monsters into characters with subjectivity. But then
that also undermines the feeling of scariness, because suddenly there's this antagonist character we can comprehend and relate to and analyze, and we realize that ultimately she too is a subjective being who is limited by her wants and needs just as we are. It's dramatically more sustainable, but it still undermines the feeling of dread.
The bottom line is, the Borg will never, ever be as scary as they were in "Q Who?" and "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I." The very act of bringing them back will
always undermine that. So we -- both creators and audiences -- should just let go of that desire. It can never be fulfilled.
Instead, we -- both writers and audiences -- should embrace the idea of using the Borg as
characters, as a culture with its own idosyncrisies and subjectivities, or as rather a family of interrelated but sometimes opposing cultures now. Stop trying to make them scary monsters and start exploring them as a distinct culture like the Cardassians or the Klingons or the Romulans.
I honestly think the Jurati Borg are the most interesting thing
Star Trek has done with the Borg since Seven of Nine was introduced on VOY. We finally have this alien culture with some fundamentally
alien values but who we can't just write off as bad guys because they honestly want to be our friends. But their very desire to be friends and neighbors with us forces us to re-examine our fundamental values and fundamental assumptions about what life is supposed to look like. I think that's a lot more interesting and exciting a vehicle for storytelling than just trying to re-create "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I."
No. It gives future writers, if they want to bring back the Borg like they were in "Q, Who" or "Best of both Worlds", a way to do this. Without the Queen or the Zombie stuff.
Possibly! I mean, Jurati is clearly a kind of leader, but the Jurati Borg probably have a fundamentally different structure than the traditional Collective. I like to imagine that they're less a
hive than a
gestalt. And they could probably be kind of creepy even if they're not hostile!
