Beyond the Borg

[Arpy]

TNG's "Q Who": You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you've encountered so far - the Romulans, the Klingons. They're nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard - you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine - and terrors to freeze your soul.

Q said terrors - plural. You don't think Q would have shown the baddest of the bad in the first reveal, do you?What else lies beyond known space that's just as or more terrifying than the Borg? Between the Borg, Q, and the "Conspiracy" aliens, the early TNG writers did a great job of making one fear for the good guys.

...you could also add the death of Tasha Yar to the list. I always found Armus's (sp?) voice a little cheesy but disconcerting in a suffocating way. His drowning Riker and nearly making Data blow Geordi's head off were also wicked. Tasha's on-the-job death was underwhelming but realistic, surprising, and unsettling. And her funeral possibly the best in Trek history. Scary stuff. What else is out there?

 

[2takesfrakes]

STAR TREK's own message of Peace & Understanding necessitates that no matter how odious and/or malevolent a species is ... "Everybody's Human." So, after their initial 15 minutes of fame, the threat - inevitably - gets castigated, defanged and declawed. It's unavoidable. Before the Borg had a Queen, it was a hell of a challenge, trying to Humanise this "species." There was no way to really do it, outside of separating a single individual from the collective and having them "come around,." so to speak. Hugh and Seven of Nine went a long way to helping audiences sympathise with the plight of Borg assimilation and its effect on individual lives, though. It should've just been left as that and not get a Queen involved. But, that's entertainment ... what we crave for, inside.

 

[Karp666]

What else is out there

I think the writers have foreseen the Abramsverse.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Species 8472

 

[Kevman7987]

The Dominion

 

[The Wormhole]

I was just about to say Species 8472 and the Dominion. Q might also have been referring to threats in other galaxies, who despite not being a practical threat to the Federation at least not in the lifetimes of most of the Enterprise D crew, they're still out there are could make Picard shit his pants should Q feel inclined to arrange an encounter.

 

[Annorax849]

Were the Husnock destroyed at that point?

 

[uniderth]

Something along the lines of the Sheliak would be interesting. An alien species that has no interest in us at all and has no qualms about wiping us out. Just as we would have no problems with boiling an ant hill.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It's a big Galaxy out there. There's always someone bigger and badder than the guy you currently know.

 

[DonIago]

Evil!Kes

 

[at Quark's]

Assuming the 'distant origin' theory gains a foothold in Voth society, and becomes a significant underground influence, I could see their ruling class having no qualms about destroying planet earth, and if necessary, exterminating the entire human species, to get rid of a piece of inconvenient evidence that doesn't suit their dogmatic fanaticism. On the other hand, they probably wouldn't be too much of a threat to other species living in the area.

 

[dahj]

What else lies beyond known space that's just as or more terrifying than the Borg?

Kazon.

Their hairstyles are the stuff of nightmares.

 

[UnknownSample]

How about some species who live hidden in various pockets of space, some far off, some right next door, say, next to Earth ... We've been irrelevant to them, then we do something to disturb them... Maybe all their pockets of space are connected and close to each other in their dimension, but far apart in ours.

 

[Arpy]

Part of what was fantastic about the Borg is that they weren't just another evil "empire." Their political and whole biological system was different from our own. I can't take seriously a space-faring superpower that has an emperor or king or pharaoh as the head. The Borg weren't just Klingons with more territory; they were a next step terror. They weren't individual lifeforms; they were the bastardized shadow of what futurists would hope for us...a society capable of sublime levels of communication.

I wonder what would be a next step beyond that. The Great Link comes to mind - a blended society of post-organic(?) lifeforms that maybe are just one big one - even Odo?

In one of the monolith novels, Arthur C. Clarke says the monoliths' creators evolved from organic to electronic lifeforms, then to sentient starships and eventually to beings of thought on the very fibers of the universe or something. I wonder what lifeforms we could evolve into beyond those we see often in sci-fi.

What about beings of energy? Or thought? Organians or Travelers? Could a single one wipe out the Borg without much effort? Is their territory measured not in numbers of lightyears but whole galactic superclusters? Or the spaces between thoughts? What if inanimate galaxies themselves are beings after a fashion? Could they have it out for us? Do they know we'll be gone long before they'd have to lift a finger...er...send an asteroid to wipe us out?

...I wish Trek did more goddamn sci-fi than aliens-of-the-week.

 

[Richard Baker]

Imagine if that single Space Amoeba Kirk destroyed had grown into a simple lifeform and that eventually evolved into an entire civilization which continued to expand. Beings that could extinguish our entire galaxy and never even realize we were there.

If one such Amoeba had been formed (and through pure circumstance be discovered and destroyed just as it was to split into two)- the same could happen again, or has already happened.

That would be something interesting for Q to mention as a bit of the future, something that could fit the descriptive "wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine - and terrors to freeze your soul."

Not the Founders/Dominion level bit of a problem but something almost beyond comprehension.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Species 8472 were only aggressive because the Borg attacked first and then got scared of Voyager's weapon against them.

As cheesy as they are it seems the Saurians could decide at any point humans are annoying and then just kind of wipe them.

Then if they ever met beings who evolved beyond their physical form and are not intellectually evolved, and are more threatening than just pranksters.

The thing about TNG is that other than the Borg, everyone they met who could wipe them out are either friendly or disinterested.

 

[angry apple panda]

Whenever I heard that in "Q Who?" I started thinking about 0 from The Q Continuum trilogy by Greg Cox. If I could imagine a terror to freeze my soul in the greater Trek universe, 0 would fulfill that in spades.

 

[at Quark's]

I had a loose thought the other day. What if Q really just wanted to discourage and scare the Feds from exploring, because he knew they would then start to meet new races, and other stuff that could actually help them to grow closer to the level of the Q, and just used the Borg as a scarecrow ?

(I know, that doesn't match up with his attitude in All Good Things but early Q seemed to take a slightly different stance).

 

[FormerLurker]

Imagine if that single Space Amoeba Kirk destroyed had grown into a simple lifeform and that eventually evolved into an entire civilization which continued to expand. Beings that could extinguish our entire galaxy and never even realize we were there.

If one such Amoeba had been formed (and through pure circumstance be discovered and destroyed just as it was to split into two)- the same could happen again, or has already happened.

That would be something interesting for Q to mention as a bit of the future, something that could fit the descriptive "wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine - and terrors to freeze your soul."

Not the Founders/Dominion level bit of a problem but something almost beyond comprehension.

The Space Amoeba was about to reproduce by fission - not into two, but into thousands. There is a line of dialog that specifies this.

 

[Richard Baker]

CHEKOV: According to Spock's telemetry information, there are over forty chromosomes in the nucleus that are ready to come together, ready to reproduce.
KIRK: If the energy of that organism only doubles, we're dead, and everything within a light year will be defenceless.
MCCOY: Well, all I know is, that soon there'll be two, four, eight, and more. The entire anti-life matter that that thing puts out could someday encompass the entire galaxy.

Sounds to me like it would double the first time, then those two would double, then those four would double. Eventually you would get thousands, then millions and so forth, but the dialog to me seems to indicate a binary fission is about to take place,