What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

The Borg have been menacing and scary all of once since 1997. In "Regeneration(ENT)," ironically a Prequel story in a series with the lowest ratings of that era of the franchise. But somehow it worked and made drones a tangible threat to be defeated and avoided.

 

Indeed. That it was all part of the plan makes it feely really dismissive of what the experience has been reported to be.

 

And you would have thought Seven would have been the first to step up and say “guys, you really don’t want that. It f-ing sucks, it’s one of the worst things imaginable”

 

The Doctor once said of Cybermen: "they always get started. They happen everywhere there's people. Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus. Like sewage and smartphones and Donald Trump, some things are just inevitable."

The original Cybermen were from Mondas, "Earth's twin planet", and they began to augment themselves in response to a climate catastrophe (Mondas got thrown out of the solar system – it's not quite clear how). Somewhere along the way they reached a tipping point and they began modifying their brains to remove emotions – in one story someone described this rather poetically as "they surgically removed their souls". We've also seen Cybermen originate on a parallel Earth ("Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel"), and the quote above from "World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls" suggests that other Cybermen we've seen, e.g. in "The Invasion", have an independent origin.

The modus operandi of the Cybermen varies between "we want to convert humans into Cybermen because we believe Cybermen are better than humans and don't understand why humans don't want to become Cybermen" and "we need new recruits to stop ourselves dying out". "We shall survive" was the closest thing the classic series Cybermen had to a Dalek-style catchphrase. So they're kind of Borgy, but also kind of not.

 

YES! A thousand percent agreed! "UNIMATRIX ZERO" completely undid all the horror and terror of assimilation and made what Picard and Seven go through seem meaningless. In one move, this story destroys any last shred of why the Borg are dangerous and terrifying. It's precisely why that is a greatly hated two-parter in my book.

Honestly, "DARK FRONTIER" damaged the Borg so heavily that they became just weak villains. "UNIMATRIX ZERO" was the nail in the coffin for the Borg to be taken seriously.

(ENTERPRISE actually did the impossible... with "REGENERATION", they made the Borg a terrifying threat again. It would have been perfect if the franchise stopped there. But then...

Spoiler: PICARD Season 2

Season 2 of PICARD happened.

 

Chronologically, to me Regeneration fits in with Borg being a scarier threat early on. Yes, even though they were from the future. But in the 24th century they were on the wain.

Kor

 

My biggest issue with Regeneration is that it makes the crew of the Enterprise look sloppy in not cleaning up their mess after First Contact.

 

Yeah, you found my controversial opinion there!

With the caveat that I haven't watched it in a while, I'll address what I think is wrong with "The Big Goodbye."

First of all, the B-plot involving the Jarada was awful, not even funny, just absurd.

The A-story suffers from a clash of paradigms. Cyrus Redblock still behaves as a one-dimensional pulp caricature after the alien scan, so why is it that we or Picard should take McNary any more seriously? Why is it that we should give a shit whether he continues after the holodeck gets turned off? McNary is the one who speaks the titular term of "The Big Goodbye," so there is a dramatic need for us to identify with this holoprogram as a character.

There's a lotta potential there, but it just kinda fizzles, and it's ultimately a shallow excursion into the philosophical depths of what it means to be real. The missed potential in having lassoed a big idea only to let it get away from them, that's the shortcoming here, a shortcoming shared with "Where No One Has Gone Before."

On the other hand, VOY "Real Life" is an example of a very strong third or fourth+ generation holodeck episode that does not suffer from any of the shortcomings that "The Big Goodbye" suffers from as a holodeck episode. The explanation for what's going on in the holodeck is soundly established as due to B'Elanna's programming and not due to some random, inexplicable interaction with alien tech. We care for the characters because the Doctor is invested in them and because they are appealing and dynamic. Any skepticism or cynicism that we might have about their appeal is already baked into the premise under which they are presented originally as clichéd archetypes that B'Elanna has then tweaked. The loss of a child is consequential to the Doctor, therefore dramatic, and so consequential to us. The exploration of what it means to be real is in the contrast between the clichéd "lollipops" that make up the Doctor's family initially and the flawed, dynamic, messy, and mortal versions of them as they are after B'Elanna's tweaks. And for the cherry on top, "Real Life" has the virtue of subtly criticizing the characters of TNG-era Star Trek itself.

 

In one story.

I’d put forward David Banks with a clenched fist intoning “Excellent!” as an alternative.

 

Now I'm not really a Dr.Who Fan but I once caught the whole of the Dalek Invasion of Earth serial on TV. And that whole story was bleak and terrifying as all hell.
And a big part of that was how relentless and merciless the Daleks were and how hopeless that made the whole situation for the remaining humans.

 

Multiple stories if you include the expanded universe.

I'm one of those people who believes that the classic series had no good Cybermen stories after the 1960s; Banks's highly emotional portrayal of a supposedly emotionless being is a large part of that

Though I suppose I could have also gone with "you will be assimilated become like us" or variations thereof, which does appear in multiple episodes. And of course the Cybermen said "resistance is futile useless" multiple times too...

 

It's always fun to see family members get slipped in that way. I'll bet a lot of cast and crew's families got that chance.

My only issue with "Real Life" is that after all that the Doc went through, his holo-family just disappeared after that. Voyager's love for the Big Red Reset Button saw to that.

 

...

You did specify the classic series?

I think... and then I'm getting off Doctor Who 'cause it's a Trek board, that the only good Cybermen stories in the Classic series are The Tenth Planet and The Invasion.

Even post-2005 Doctor Who struggles to make anything of them.

Great concept, much too often squandered.

 

All the more reason to include her.

 

I guess it's a matter of personal perspective.

Between a choice of getting killed in a fight against a Dalek or getting sliced open and have everything that makes me who I am taken away and walking around forever like that... I far prefer death. What the Cybermen do to you... that's a living hell. Either classic version or current series of Cybermen.

For me, far more terrifying that getting exterminated by a Dalek laser beam.

 

Fair enough, but in that version I mentioned they also made "robot men" from humans, which turned into mind controlled automatons. But like, not completely apparently, since the whole story starts 2ith one of those robot men labouring to drown himself in the Thames.
So with the Daleks you might get both. I fact because of that I thought for the longest time that Dalek and Cybermen were the same, just like that the Daleks were the leaders of the Cybermen or something. Haha.