The Borg are Dalek Lite.
Judy and Gar Reeves-Stevens on Season 5
- Thread starter gblews
- Start date
The Borg are Dalek Lite.
Exterminate! 
Actually, for me, they were cool until TNG's Descent and First Contact, though they made one last slightly cool appearance in the premiere of DS9. They were way too easily beatable after that. It seemed like every writer on the staff wanted to tap into the Borg, and some tried to humanize them too much. The Borg should have been left kind of lurking in the background, with the threat of another incursion at any moment hanging over the Federation, and should only have been seen once every few seasons at the most.
No offense intended Anna, but I don't understand this attitude at all. I've been watching Trek since TOS debuted and there is no first run episode I would refuse to watch based on "principle" alone. There are several I wouldn't watch AGAIN on this basis, however.
If this had been an idea concieved by Bermaga, I might understand, but we're talking about two of the best of Trek writers. Two people who understand and like Trek, and it's fans. If anyone deserved a crack at this most difficult but intriguing idea (as well as the benefit of a doubt), they did.
If we'd seen the episode, I bet there is better than a 50% chance you would have liked it, that is if you were willing to ease up on your principles a bit.
Actually the Queen is not an individual. She represent the entire collective and the body is nothing more than a conduit for them to speak from. Your theory still works even with the clarification though.
But it stands to reason that her own original consciousness could be so powerful that her own needs could "sway" the collective into something.But J & G's idea is interesting. It would have been nice to have seen it on the screen.
I have no doubt this team would have done a better job of this idea than anyone else on staff, especially Bermaga. Doesn't meant it should have been, nor that there are other, less exhausted ideas for Trek that could have been done, like the Vulcan/Romulan war I mentioned.
I mentioned in another thread that I'm far from the nitpicky type, but even I can't buy the idea that a 22nd century starship is going to easily defeat the Borg not once, but twice. A couple other people have mentioned that the Borg have been into the ground by both TNG and especially Voyager.
"Regeneration" was a good episode, but I'm just as glad to be done with that species for any and all future Trek series. There are plenty of other aspects in early Trek history that deserve development much more than the Borg, and just because it wasn't Bermaga that came up with the idea doesn't make it any less stupid.
IMHO, of course.
The nature of the Borg Queen seems to spawn the most number of theories since the writers made her so nebulous.
FC, for the most part, made her seem like she was simply a physical construct that the Hive mind became. In other words whenever we interacted with her it was really the Collective. However, there were some moments where she would behave like a single entity controlling the Collective like when she behaved like a scorned lover at Picard/Locutus' rebuke.
In reality the vagueness surrounding her in FC was the result of disagreement between Berman, Braga and Moore. It was discussed in various interviews over the years including the Star Trek The Magazine Borg issue from Feb 2001.
Moore saw her as a single individual entity not an avatar. She was behind the curtain pulling the strings. He felt sorta bad altering Hurley's original idea. She had her own mind that imposed her will on the Collective. Effectively she was a leader, there was only ever just one of her and her death would have been the end of her in FC. He saw her as "the big Kahuna of Borgdom". She was unique.
And that fits in with the oft-debated line about thinking in such three-dimensional terms. Afterall if there is only one unique one at a time how ould she have survived the destruction of the BoBW cube.
The three-dimensional reference clearly came across to me as the Queen scolding Picard for forgetting that being Borg and part of the Hive Mind transcends the physical--three-dimensions- and is all about shared thought. So the reason Picard didn't remember the Queen very well was because she really wasn't on the cube in BoBW but was there with him in his mind whispering to him among thousands of minds. It also explains how she survived the cube's destruction without a lot of the mental acrobatics that theories such as subspace transporters, escape sphere taking her away before the explosion etc involve. She was safely back at Unimatrix One coordinating the Hive like we saw numerous times on VOY. It was just with FC she physically went along.
The flashback came across to me as one of those stylized memories where the Queen wasn't really there but was meant to represent her connecting with Locutus inside his head hence her standing on his side whispering into his ear.
Berman, on the otherhand, didn't want to do that because he thought she might end up on Voyager. So they compromised hence all the cryptic answers in FC.
Then when the Queen popped up on VOY in "Dark Frontier" they had intended Alice Krige to resume the role but her schedule conflicted so Susanna Thompson was hired. In an interview Thompson said she had asked Braga whether she was the same Queen in order to know if she should tailor her performance to Krige's. He told her she was a different Queen.
As VOY continued using her it became obvious Braga saw her as a central leader with her own mind and the drones became nothing more than mindless henchmen. The UZ Queen spoke of having been assimilated as a child. Compare that to the Collective in its TNG heyday where the Borg didn't come off as lumbering zombies but part of a unified mind derived from their combined intelligence.
Even in Dark Frontier the Queen discusses that she was part of species 125 demonstrating the body wasn't some template cloned each time a new queen was needed. It was strongly hinted that a Queen was created from a pre-existing assimilated drone and then given the Queen makeover where she would take over Unimatrix One and coordinate the Collective.
But as this shows even among the writers there is a different idea of what the Queen is. In fact, Krige commented on this when she was working on FC and asking people. They would give her different answers so she decided to develop her own.
FC, for the most part, made her seem like she was simply a physical construct that the Hive mind became. In other words whenever we interacted with her it was really the Collective. However, there were some moments where she would behave like a single entity controlling the Collective like when she behaved like a scorned lover at Picard/Locutus' rebuke.
In reality the vagueness surrounding her in FC was the result of disagreement between Berman, Braga and Moore. It was discussed in various interviews over the years including the Star Trek The Magazine Borg issue from Feb 2001.
Moore saw her as a single individual entity not an avatar. She was behind the curtain pulling the strings. He felt sorta bad altering Hurley's original idea. She had her own mind that imposed her will on the Collective. Effectively she was a leader, there was only ever just one of her and her death would have been the end of her in FC. He saw her as "the big Kahuna of Borgdom". She was unique.
And that fits in with the oft-debated line about thinking in such three-dimensional terms. Afterall if there is only one unique one at a time how ould she have survived the destruction of the BoBW cube.
The three-dimensional reference clearly came across to me as the Queen scolding Picard for forgetting that being Borg and part of the Hive Mind transcends the physical--three-dimensions- and is all about shared thought. So the reason Picard didn't remember the Queen very well was because she really wasn't on the cube in BoBW but was there with him in his mind whispering to him among thousands of minds. It also explains how she survived the cube's destruction without a lot of the mental acrobatics that theories such as subspace transporters, escape sphere taking her away before the explosion etc involve. She was safely back at Unimatrix One coordinating the Hive like we saw numerous times on VOY. It was just with FC she physically went along.
The flashback came across to me as one of those stylized memories where the Queen wasn't really there but was meant to represent her connecting with Locutus inside his head hence her standing on his side whispering into his ear.
Berman, on the otherhand, didn't want to do that because he thought she might end up on Voyager. So they compromised hence all the cryptic answers in FC.
Then when the Queen popped up on VOY in "Dark Frontier" they had intended Alice Krige to resume the role but her schedule conflicted so Susanna Thompson was hired. In an interview Thompson said she had asked Braga whether she was the same Queen in order to know if she should tailor her performance to Krige's. He told her she was a different Queen.
As VOY continued using her it became obvious Braga saw her as a central leader with her own mind and the drones became nothing more than mindless henchmen. The UZ Queen spoke of having been assimilated as a child. Compare that to the Collective in its TNG heyday where the Borg didn't come off as lumbering zombies but part of a unified mind derived from their combined intelligence.
Even in Dark Frontier the Queen discusses that she was part of species 125 demonstrating the body wasn't some template cloned each time a new queen was needed. It was strongly hinted that a Queen was created from a pre-existing assimilated drone and then given the Queen makeover where she would take over Unimatrix One and coordinate the Collective.
But as this shows even among the writers there is a different idea of what the Queen is. In fact, Krige commented on this when she was working on FC and asking people. They would give her different answers so she decided to develop her own.
While it is an interesting idea, I doubt it would have happened. Just because they had and idea, doesn't mean it would have actually turned into an episode. It is probable that, given the potential continuity messiness of this, Coto (and whoever else would have been EPs that year) might have nixed or at least altered the storyline a bit.
I dunno...just my hunch.
I dunno...just my hunch.
Which makes very little sense. How could T'Pol know where the signal was intended to go? She would only have the direction, not any knowledge of the intended distance. For all she knew, the signal was sent to the next star system in that direction, and would reach it in 4.7 minutes. Or to the next galaxy, taking thousands of years.
Yet we have two actors play the (respective) Queen(s) twice, these characters supposedly physically dying between the appearances. Having the Queen's body always be a clone from some template or another (such as an once-assimilated prime Species 125 specimen) would fit that evidence just fine.
Since we already saw two different Queen templates, the episode could have been written by using a third template, this time a human female, played by a third actor. The events of "Regeneration" could have given birth to the Queen concept - that is, the recyclable Queen concept.
Agreed, though, that it would be extraneous and annoying that the Borg Collective would undergo a major upheaval as the result of a chance encounter with a two-bit species, after having been a stable and successful galactic power for at least centuries and possibly thousands of centuries. It's much more effective dramatically if the Borg just are, and cannot be changed.
Timo Saloniemi
If anyone could make it work the Reeves-Stevens could. They know their Trek better than most of the writers did.
I don't like this idea at all and am glad they didn't do it. That being said, it is possible they could have gotten it to work (out of everyone, they would have had the best chance).
Captain X
Rear Admiral
I don't much like the idea either. It was lame enough that they put the Borg on ENT to begin with (and thus had to weaken them so they could be beaten in this era), but doing an "origin of the queen" episode would've been that much worse. Why would we even want to know how the Borg or their queen got started? Part of what made them so scary was not knowing that kind of stuff.
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