Borg are back? (spoilers)

[ProtoAvatar]

The borg are a monster, not a villain.
A villain is interesting to explore - cardassians, romulans, etc.
The best borg stories are BOBW, First Contact, Scorpion - 'horror' stories in which the borg was largely described as an impersonal entity that cannot really be reasoned with, motivated by the 'will to conquer'; not as unstoppable, but as formidable.

The best way to write a borg story is to keep them in the background, concentrating on your heroes instead.
Alternatively, you could write about borg factions - which are much more interesting than the borg proper: like the one from 'Unity' of from 'Seven deadly sins'; 'Descent' erred by humanising them too much.

The borg are a well-known/popular trek species (present in canon, games, lit, etc). It sells. Which means we will see it again. Actually, since 'Destiny', we already have, in 'Seven deadly sins'.

 

[LightningStorm]

The best borg stories are BOBW, First Contact, Scorpion - 'horror' stories in which the borg was largely described as an impersonal entity that cannot really be reasoned with, motivated by the 'will to conquer'; not as unstoppable, but as formidable.

I disagree. In each of those three stories the Borg were not horror story monsters that couldn't be reasoned with. In BOBW they put a face on the Borg by using Locutus. In First Contact we met the Queen who was very much an actual character and not just a glorified Zombie. In Scorpion we saw that their will to conquer is not so all-encompassing that they can't be reasoned with. They forged an alliance with Janeway in that two-part episode in which we saw actual cooperation. Yes, they are driven by the will to conquer and consume everything, but in order to do that and have any chance of success they have to be reasonable. And in Scorpion specifically they were reasonable enough to realize that in order to conquer 8472 (and then later the Humans in their mind) they needed to work with them for the time being to get what they wanted to rid themselves of the immediate threat. This is an intelligence driven entity not a mindless force-of-nature-like entity.

I've always hated the fact that people refer to them as "a force of nature" they are nothing like a force of nature. What they are is a single entity driven by a single corrupt mind controlling a bunch of enslaved individuals.

To me the biggest problem with most (if not all) Borg stories that we've gotten to date is that they focus too much on the drones which is the "mindless" part of them rather than the collective mind and its intentions/thought processes etc. Even Destiny did this where all they were there, were a plague sweeping the galaxy.

 

[Christopher]

But that just shows how limited the original concept of the Borg as a completely depersonalized entity was. They had to retcon it and make the Borg more personalized to make them interesting -- first by having them suddenly acquire an interest in assimilating a spokesman, then by retconning their completely decentralized nature into a completely centralized one governed by a "queen." They had to keep reworking the idea to make it dramatically viable.

 

[LightningStorm]

Oh certainly. I don't deny the original concept was terribly limited and even one dimensional. Though, I'd prefer to refer to the later incarnations of the Borg as learning more about them or even an evolution of them rather than a retcon of a perceived mistake.

It just bothers me that so many people seem to think the Borg need to revert back to that original boring entity to be good all the while everyone else arguing that that state wouldn't be good, when we have plenty of later evidence of them being made more interesting.

 

[Jakks]

Wasn't it mentioned in Losing The Peace - I think - that Starfleet was sending a group of ships to the Delta Quadrant to see if all the Borg were really gone?

Has anything more been done with that idea?

That would make for a very interesting series of stories...seeing what happen to Borg worlds, what races are trying to exploit the power vacuum in the DQ...all kinds of stuff one could do with that material.

 

[LightningStorm]

Wasn't it mentioned in Losing The Peace - I think - that Starfleet was sending a group of ships to the Delta Quadrant to see if all the Borg were really gone?

Has anything more been done with that idea?

That would make for a very interesting series of stories...seeing what happen to Borg worlds, what races are trying to exploit the power vacuum in the DQ...all kinds of stuff one could do with that material.

Yeah all that happens in the new Voyager books (Full Circle, Unworthy, and upcoming Children of the Storm*).

 

[Jakks]

Wasn't it mentioned in Losing The Peace - I think - that Starfleet was sending a group of ships to the Delta Quadrant to see if all the Borg were really gone?

Has anything more been done with that idea?

That would make for a very interesting series of stories...seeing what happen to Borg worlds, what races are trying to exploit the power vacuum in the DQ...all kinds of stuff one could do with that material.

Yeah all that happens in the new Voyager books (Full Circle, Unworthy, and upcoming Children of the Storm*).

Excellent! Thanks for the info...guess I'm adding Voyager to the 'catch-up' reading list.

 

[Sci]

Wasn't it mentioned in Losing The Peace - I think - that Starfleet was sending a group of ships to the Delta Quadrant to see if all the Borg were really gone?

Has anything more been done with that idea?

Yep. They've built an entire book series around the premise. The series is called Star Trek: Voyager.

 

[William Leisner]

Wasn't it mentioned in Losing The Peace - I think - that Starfleet was sending a group of ships to the Delta Quadrant to see if all the Borg were really gone?

Has anything more been done with that idea?

Yep. They've built an entire book series around the premise. The series is called Star Trek: Voyager.

Though to be clear, the premise came well before Losing the Peace; the idea for the current Voyager series did not come from me.

 

[Thestral]

But only because it was always the standard that the Daleks get destroyed forever and then come back next year - that dates all the way back to their first story.

Ah! Not having seen the old series, I wasn't aware. Nice.

Not "undone" in the sense of, made the events of the plot not happen. But it would certain be "undone" in the sense of, completely undermining the point of the trilogy. Destiny, after all, was about mortality and how we choose to respond to it... These philosophical conflicts can only be resolved by the Collective being permanently dismantled and the liberated drones accepted into Caeliar society. If the Borg are later revived, this fundamentally undermines the philosophical resolution to the conflicts that drove the story.

I disagree. The resolution was done - the Collective was dismantled and the great scourge on the galaxy was dealt with, not by force of arms but by healing and acceptance. If somewhere down the line somehow the Collective is restarted, it doesn't negate what what Hernandez and the Caeliar were able to do or make it any less of a resolution.

To draw a comparison:

Reviving the Borg in a story set in the Destiny timeline after the DEST trilogy would be the equivalent of making a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The entire point of T2 was that there is no fate, that the future is in our hands and we can change it. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines completely contradicted the entire philosophical drive of T2 by essentially asserting, "No, there is fate and you can't fight it." It essentially pissed all over its predecessor. Reviving the Borg would be like pissing all over the Destiny trilogy in the same way that T3 pissed all over T2.

That's, ah, something of a risky comparison, considering what T2 does to T1. From a certain point of view, the resolution of T3 was just restoring T1.

As a similar example, the Cult of Skarro's emergence in Army of Ghosts doesn't undermine the climax of Parting of the Ways.

I think it did, actually. In fact, really, I think "Bad Wolf"/"the Parting of the Ways" undermined "Dalek" -- if I'd had my way, the Dalek in that episode would have been the last of the Daleks, period.

I can see wanting them not to come back, but I don't see a later story's contradiction undermining the earlier story. It seems to me though that this Borg question is not entirely dissimilar to the larger question of when should things be permanently laid to rest in an ongoing storyline featuring popular characters/species (a question exemplified by the... heated... discussions regarding a certain character's demise in TrekLit).