The BORG, and the Lost potential
- Thread starter STEPhon IT
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I was thinking Soren's therapy made her/him asexual by the end of the story.
I mentioned on another thread about Star trek Generations missing a huge opportunity not showing the destruction of the El Aurian world by the Borg to lift the backstory of Guinan and of course the villain of the piece Soran. There were evidence to the Borg's aftermath where it appeared landscapes from cities were ripped out of the ground, I could only relate my imagination to Unicron in Transformers. I would like to know what you would visualize the Borg does to a technological world or city and their methods of doing it? Could a Cube simply enter a world's atmosphere and start the horror from there?
You mean the horrible TNG episode that skirts around any of the real issues and ends with the message:
"Hey, re-education therapy WORKS!..Hallelujah!"
^^^
No, I'm not gay, but yeah, "The Outcast" was NOT a good episode on the issues of sexual identity (IMO).
I always liked the Borg scooping much more than the concept of beaming down drones to assimilate the population. Way scarier to imagine the Borg cutting cities out of the ground and lifting them up with tractor beams into the cube, while the panicking people are running around in the streets.
A good depiction of this can be found in Peter David's TNG novel "Vendetta". A must read for every fan of the Borg and a reminder of how scary the Borg once were. Before First Contact and Voyager.
I agree; it was always my understanding that the Borg were "tech first, people second", so while the assimilation of people to keep their numbers up makes some level of sense, it's neither as terrifying nor as sensible as the planet-scooping concept. I still love how in "Q Who" they cut a chunk of the E-D right out of the ship.
That method of chaos would have been a perfect foundation of why victims hated the Borg so much. Nothing can be more tragic to witness the Borg pulling everything out of the ground and seeing loved ones helplessly drawn within the event horizon and barely living to tell their story.
Yeah, that was actually a major plot point of the novel. We see the Borg scooping up the cities on a planet (Penzatti) in great detail with only few people surviving, just because the tractor beam holding that last peace of a city was interrupted when an unexpected enemy fired on the Borg cube.
The piece of the city crashed back into the ground, collapsing many of the still standing buildings. Killing more of the survivors.
When the Enterprise and another starfleet vessel later arrive, they are able to save some people. One of them an earlier introduced character who lost his family in the attack and came to hate the Borg with a passion.
The novel shows in great detail a Borg attack like the ones mentioned in "The Neutral Zone", "Q Who" and the one against the New Providence colony in "Best Of Both Worlds", from the perspective of the Borg as well as from that of their unlucky victims on the ground, with all of the merciless calculus and efficience of the collective and the horror of the population on the attacked planet.
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The scooping out of cities thing was never really abandoned as a concept-
"Best of Both Worlds part 1," TNG season 4:
"Child's Play," Voyager season 6:
Now when i think about it, wasn't one of the early plans for Enterprise's "Regeneration" to show a scooping attack?
I definitely would've like to have seen it; to me it would be a horrifying site to see people and landscapes being pulled up into a Borg Cube. As far as I know, none of the Trek series or movies has ever shown that.
By the way, one of the (few) things i didn't like about the Destiny trilogy written by @David Mack is the lack of Borg scooping.
Simply destroying everything, technology included is very un-borglike imo. Kill everyone in the Alpha Quadrant doesn't necessarily mean destroying everything. If they scooped the planets, the lack of breathable air in space would have been sufficient to get rid of the enemies of the Borg.
Just holding a grudge wouldn't stop the Borg from going after the technology, one would think...
Simply destroying everything, technology included is very un-borglike imo. Kill everyone in the Alpha Quadrant doesn't necessarily mean destroying everything. If they scooped the planets, the lack of breathable air in space would have been sufficient to get rid of the enemies of the Borg.
Just holding a grudge wouldn't stop the Borg from going after the technology, one would think...
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I don't if it would have worked with the story they ended up doing, but it certainly would've been cool to see. And Enterprise could've been the show to do it, as they were using cgi pretty well at that point.
I would guess throughout their time of existence the Borg had evolved in their methods of assimilation and terminating a society. I bet as they learned and grew as automatons the rate of efficiency of their methods increased. If Cubes, like satellites, spread throughout the cosmos the Borg could gain information on how to take worlds at an elevated levels. Quite interesting and horrifying at what this species could do if the writers progressed the potential of the Borg.
Think by the time Destiny rolled around there wasn't more in terms of worthy technology for them to assimilate. Add to that the Federation had inflicted a great of damage on the Borg.
The events of destiny are purely a vendetta to destroy the Federation and remove it as thorn in the collective's side.
Actually scooping planets in Federation space would have made a lot of sense for the Borg, because Voyager returning with futuristic technology like transphasic torpedos and ablative armor means that this tech would most likely be examined and advanced on some UFP planets.
So the chance is great that there would be some interesting technology for the Borg to get.
The reason why the Borg don't scoop anything in "Destiny" is because by then the Borg have concluded that the Federation is longer worth the bother of trying to assimilate. They no longer care whether they might gain anything by assimilating any of the Federation's member races or tech.
Like cutting off a tree branch that has leaves but also rot on it because you know it's ultimately going to rot away in any case.
Like cutting off a tree branch that has leaves but also rot on it because you know it's ultimately going to rot away in any case.
That’s not at all what the episode is about.
It’s about a society that betrays its people by altering them instead of letting them be themselves.
And “re-education” therapy COULD work at sufficiently advanced levels of manipulation. That doesn’t make the betrayal any more right.
One could also genetically alter people toward an opposite norm, making everyone gay. Or asexual, only to reproduce via efficient “superior” genetic engineering methods.
Resistance is futile.
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