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The next Big Bad?

Eh, Doctor Who showed that no matter how many times you kill the Daleks, they'll always come back.

This isn't Doctor Who. As I said, Destiny was not meant to be a fakeout, and frankly I think it's unfair to Dave to treat it as though it was, as though the massive impact it had on the Trek universe is something you can just wave away as a temporary aberration.


Besides, I'm personally HOPING the Borg come back. I'd like to see the Borg from an alternate reality or perhaps V'Ger remaking them or whatever come back and promptly eradicate the future we saw in WTC.

You can safely assume that nobody associated with the current Trek Lit continuity is ever going to associate the Borg with V'Ger. Destiny pretty definitively established there was no connection between them, even aside from the fact that it should be obvious that they have nothing in common. And what I established in Ex Machina and The Buried Age about the post-TMP journey of the V'Ger/Decker/Ilia entity is completely incompatible with the notion of it having any interest in recreating the Borg.


The Romulans under (even though he doesn't exist in this reality) Nero illustrated a much more powerful threat than they ever really got to illustrate as Red Chinese analogues.

First off, the Romulans were never "under" Nero. He wasn't their ruler, he was just the captain of a single ship.

And second, of course he exists in the Prime reality. That's where he came from in the first place. It's just that he leaves the Prime reality in 2387 along with Spock and spends the rest of his life in an alternate reality. But he was born and grew up in the Prime reality.
 
^And I think it's very sad that SF has used the cliche of resurrection so often that fans come to expect it. It should be an exception to the rule. It robs stories like this of any meaning if readers or viewers just assume that whatever change was made will be temporary.

The unambiguous intention of Dave Mack, Marco Palmieri, and Margaret Clark when they developed Destiny was to eliminate the Borg once and for all, decisively and permanently -- not merely as a cheap fakeout that would quickly be undone. Destiny was meant to be the final Borg story, and it eliminated them quite definitively without any help from me.

Unfortunatly you can count me as being among those who expect a return. Not by the current editors and authors but you never know what will happen in the future. One day somebody will decide that the Borg will return and that will be that. They're a well known Trek villian and it's invevitable that they will be back in some form.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see Anna Sandesjo back at some point. As they say in the comics, we never saw the body. Not saying that one will happen, just wouldn't be surpised if it did.
 
I never want to see the Borg again. Ever.

Any other resurrections will be judged on their own merits...
 
Wow, I'd like to see Decker as a Borg drone. That was the way to go. Grinding metal is what I call an idea done not right. GR thought Q was a V'ger virus, didn't he to which I say he was also the prodict of the V'ger convergance and transcendance. Liberating Decker would have been cool and maybe Ilea was the Queen. Obviously the assimilated worlds would have been those planets V'ger encountered and stored as data pattern memories to be revived once it's journey was complete. Well, looks like will never happen.
 
This isn't Doctor Who. As I said, Destiny was not meant to be a fakeout, and frankly I think it's unfair to Dave to treat it as though it was, as though the massive impact it had on the Trek universe is something you can just wave away as a temporary aberration.

Frankly, that assumes the value of Destiny as "the End of the Borg" outweighs the value that would come from their return story. In the end, it's all about the presentation and the value of the story.

You can safely assume that nobody associated with the current Trek Lit continuity is ever going to associate the Borg with V'Ger. Destiny pretty definitively established there was no connection between them, even aside from the fact that it should be obvious that they have nothing in common. And what I established in Ex Machina and The Buried Age about the post-TMP journey of the V'Ger/Decker/Ilia entity is completely incompatible with the notion of it having any interest in recreating the Borg.

So noted.

First off, the Romulans were never "under" Nero. He wasn't their ruler, he was just the captain of a single ship.

Yes, he was the first Romulan villain in a long time and a very effective one as the Captain of a ship and a terrorist as opposed to that of a nation state.

And second, of course he exists in the Prime reality. That's where he came from in the first place. It's just that he leaves the Prime reality in 2387 along with Spock and spends the rest of his life in an alternate reality. But he was born and grew up in the Prime reality.

Yes, but he evacuated to Star Trek Universe-2 (or whatever we're calling it) with Spock. So, he no longer exists in the Star Trek universe. I think we were just having a miscommunication.

Unfortunatly you can count me as being among those who expect a return. Not by the current editors and authors but you never know what will happen in the future. One day somebody will decide that the Borg will return and that will be that. They're a well known Trek villian and it's invevitable that they will be back in some form.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see Anna Sandesjo back at some point. As they say in the comics, we never saw the body. Not saying that one will happen, just wouldn't be surpised if it did.

To be fair, I understand people who don't want the Star Trek Expanded Universe's "Big Crisis" invalidated. Also, it's a very rare resurrection that is done right. "The Search for Spock" is about the only time in fiction I've ever really seen it done well and maybe the return of Jean Grey.

The first one.

Really, I think the Borg are sort of overused as a concept. I think Voyager overused them. I think that anytime someone has a neat bit of unanswered Star Trek lore and they go "The Borg did it" it's a bad idea. Really, I applaud Lit for making the evil "Brain Bugs" to be evil Trill.

God knows, I dreaded the possibility of the Temporal Cold War being about the Borg.

I do, however, think that destroying the Borg was a mistake. No matter how awesome Star Trek Destiny is, you shouldn't break the toys you take out of the Star Trek toy chest. You should play with them, pose them, and put them back in the toy chest the way you found them unless you are:

1. The creator of the toys.
2. Your change will open new story avenues.
3. The death you give them is SO AWESOME that it is better than any new stories that can be told with them.
 
I never want to see the Borg again. Ever.

Ditto. The Borg are done and over with, and bringing them back would just rob them of any dramatic power whatsoever.

I liked the Borg a lot but have also had enough of them.

As for another big bad how about the Andorians? (Sorry, couldn't resist:devil:).

If there is to be another super threat I would want to see something that atacks the Pact & forces them to ask the Alliance (Feds, Klingons, etc.) For help because it threatens the entire galaxy. Personally I've had enough of these for now, the Dominion, the Borg, let's go back to Picard's question from Insurrection "Does anybody remember when we were explorers?" & explore. Enough trouble will come from that.
 
I think that in the case of the borg, the death was so awesome that bringing them back would cheapen them...

How do you cheapen a Borg? I'm curious, are they a joined species subsumed into the Caeliar. I also like to thing that the Dominion started as a single race with the Founders et al.
 
Frankly, that assumes the value of Destiny as "the End of the Borg" outweighs the value that would come from their return story. In the end, it's all about the presentation and the value of the story.

Sure, if somewhere down the road, someone comes up with a resurrection story worth telling, that's one thing. But what frustrates me is when readers/viewers are totally unaffected by a story involving a death or permanent change because they just shrug and say "It'll be reversed soon enough." That attitude is very damaging to the attempts of us writers to get you readers to care about what we write. This is why it's a bad thing that resurrection has become such a cliched and overused plot device. Death, where is thy sting?


I do, however, think that destroying the Borg was a mistake. No matter how awesome Star Trek Destiny is, you shouldn't break the toys you take out of the Star Trek toy chest. You should play with them, pose them, and put them back in the toy chest the way you found them unless you are:

1. The creator of the toys.
2. Your change will open new story avenues.
3. The death you give them is SO AWESOME that it is better than any new stories that can be told with them.

The creators of the "toys" (or rather, the licensing department of the studio that owns them) gave the books permission to get rid of the Borg (and technically they were redeemed/transformed, not destroyed), because they had no expectation of 24th-century Trek returning to the screen in the foreseeable future. The "leave the toys as you found them" attitude is mainly found when the original series is still in production; tie-ins published after a series has ended are often given more freedom to make major changes.

And I think Destiny opened a lot of new story avenues, some of which we've seen explored in Losing the Peace, A Singular Destiny, Unworthy, and probably others. Let's face it, the Borg in and of themselves are pretty boring. They're just a faceless force of nature. Most "Borg stories" haven't really been about the Borg themselves, they've been about liberating drones from the Collective or dealing with the aftermath of Borg invasions or the like. They've been more about the consequences of what the Borg did or the reactions to it than about the Borg themselves. So I don't think removing the Borg themselves from the equation really changes that much, because the galaxy will be experiencing the long-term consequences of their actions for a very long time to come. Even if the Borg no longer exist, they still played a profound role in the history of the galaxy and so their influence will continue to be felt.


Technically Nero was the Praetor, by virtue of having the sacred stick...

According to Countdown, a non-canonical tie-in comic. The movie itself is silent on the question.
 
I was going by the movie, from what I recall he had the stick and was being called "Prod" which I took to mean Praetor...

Never read Countdown, the ideas irk me...
 
I like it when we get recurring antagonists, but I don't know if I necessarily want a new big bad. As for antagonists (I don't think any of the races in Trek, other than maybe the Borg and Dominion, are really collectively evil enough to be called bad guys), introduced in the series that I would like to see again, the ones that come to mind quickest for me are the Vaadwar, Voth, and Sphere Builders (I know their plan in ENT was stopped, but I wouldn't put it past them to pop up and cause more trouble). Several people mentioned Species 8472, but I was pretty confident that In the Flesh and Places of Exile resolved the issue with them pretty thoroughly. I knoq PoE was in an alternate universe, but I was under the impression that what was established between it's Voyager and The Groundskeepers was meant to apply to all universes. I think it's also worth pointing out that they appeared in Unworthy (well Valerie Archer did) and appeared to harbor no overt hostility toward Voyager (at least that I can remember).
 
Technically Nero was the Praetor, by virtue of having the sacred stick...

According to Countdown, a non-canonical tie-in comic. The movie itself is silent on the question.
Towards the end of the film, a heavily accented voice amongst Narada's bridge chatter distinctly calls out "Praetor Nero!"

I'd hardly call it definitive or binding, and obviously Nero wasn't a legitimate Praetor, but it's there.
 
Technically Nero was the Praetor, by virtue of having the sacred stick...

According to Countdown, a non-canonical tie-in comic. The movie itself is silent on the question.

Also, DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" made it very clear that to become Praetor, someone has to be confirmed by the Continuing Committee.

It's safe to say that, following the destruction of Romulus and the apparent decapitation of the Romulan government (literally and otherwise), lines of succession were broken.

The Debrune teral'n is most plausibly read by me as an icon proving that one has a right to rule, a physical metaphor of one's right to rule. Nero having a right to rule the RSE by taking the teral'n from the murdered Praetor is not unlike a thief having the right to rule the United Kingdom if he stole the British Crown Jewels. Only someone with a vested interest in the individual in question and/or someone unbalanced would accept such a tranfer of power through such irregular and illegitimate means.
 
I like it when we get recurring antagonists, but I don't know if I necessarily want a new big bad. As for antagonists (I don't think any of the races in Trek, other than maybe the Borg and Dominion, are really collectively evil enough to be called bad guys), introduced in the series that I would like to see again[.]

I don't think that the concept of the Big Bad would work for the Trek literary continuity, anyway. "Big Bad" comes from Buffy, which every season built up a conflict with a single villain of note who would be dealt with at the end of the episode. In the Trekverse, what could a season be? The production of novels is too slow for this to work.
 
Yes, but he evacuated to Star Trek Universe-2 (or whatever we're calling it) with Spock. So, he no longer exists in the Star Trek universe. I think we were just having a miscommunication.

The novels aren't up to 2387 yet, so as of now, Nero, Nero's crew, and Spock still exist in the prime universe.
 
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