the m0vie blog

This January and February, we’ll be finishing up our look at the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and moving on to the third year of the show, both recently and lovingly remastered for high definition. Check back daily for the latest review.

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

The Borg are, quite possibly, the most significant addition to the Star Trek mythos since the Klingons. They are one of the few modern pieces of Star Trek lore that will be instantly recognisable to a broader audience. They have featured, in some way, in all four of the Star Trek spin-off series. They are constantly rumoured and suggested as a viable antagonist for the rebooted film series. The Borg are a pretty big deal.

And yet, like so many pop culture villains, they seem less threatening the more we know about them. One of the more frequent complaints about the use of the Borg in Star Trek: Voyager was that it made the aliens more familiar, more understandable, more relatable. Continuing to build off the premise of the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg became an alien species that Janeway would reason and negotiate with, in stark contrast to Q’s characterisation of the collective in Q Who?

Although Star Trek: Enterprise did manage to turn the Borg’s fascination with mankind into a causal loop, televised Star Trek never managed to produce an origin story for those cybernetic monsters. Ever ready to fill in a perceived blank in the canon, the expanded Star Trek universe has actually proposed a number of origins for the Borg.

There’s a debate to be had about whether we need an origin for the Borg. After all, part of what made the Borg such a compelling adversary was how absolute they were. They were unwavering, uncompromising and unstoppable. The Borg are. They are something truly monstrous and almost impossible to comprehend for our heroes, a species unlike any other species in the Star Trek canon.

Of course, they didn’t remain that way. And although Voyager tends to attract a lot of criticism for “diluting” or “weakening” the Borg, it’s a process that began with The Best of Both Worlds and continued through Star Trek: The Next Generation. And, to be fair, it’s a decision that is entirely justifiable and understandable – and which produced a number of fantastic stories. After all, stories are built around change and dynamic movement, the very act of involving the Borg in stories meant that they had to change and evolve, despite the fact that their stubborn implacableness was a vital part of their identity in Q Who?

An inflexible enemy incapable of change is a fantastic concept, but difficult to execute within the context of an on-going narrative. Though Q Who? argued that the Borg were only interested in technology, The Best of Both Worlds had them assimilating Picard. Then Locutus suggested that life forms could be adapted to serve the Borg. Then the Enterprise introduced the concept of individuality to the collective, caused a schism in Descent. First Contact gave us the Borg Queen, giving us the personification of the Borg Collective. From there, concepts like Unimatrix One flowed logically.

So, if the Borg can change, it makes sense that they should have a beginning. The expanded universe has offered a number of origins for the Borg. These origins tend to fall into familiar patterns and tropes, using the Borg in fairly conventional narratives. Given the importance of the Borg in the grand tapestry of Star Trek, it’s no surprise that their origins are typically “big” “event” stories, ones that satisfy various preconceptions about how our characters are the centre of their fictional universe.

Star Trek: The Manga and Star Trek: Legacy both tried to tie the origin of the Borg back to the original Star Trek, as if to make the Borg something of a linking thread among the Star Trek franchise, an enemy spanning all possible generations – it’s just that Kirk never realised how close he came to facing them. These stories seem to suggest that Kirk must be the centre of the Star Trek universe, so that he must be related (even tangentially, in the case of Legacy) to the creation of the Borg. That’s your standard “hero creates villain” trope, a standard of this sort of storytelling for quite some time.

David Mack’s Star Trek: Destiny trilogy gets points for cleverly serving as both an origin and a final story for the Borg, bringing their creation a full circle. After all, if you are going to accept the flexibility of the Borg, and dismiss completely this idea of the Collective as a constant, that’s a smart way to do it. “I am the beginning, the end,” the Borg Queen boasts in First Contact, and given the way that Enterprise had already put the Borg’s first contact with mankind in something of a time loop, it makes a certain amount of sense to link the beginning and the end narratively. (If not causally.)

And Destiny also has a variation of the “hero created villain” trope. Although the Borg are not created by any of our Star Trek regulars, they are created by the crew of the Columbia, who were recurring guest stars on Enterprise. While it’s not as direct as putting Kirk a degree or two away from the origin, it still links the Borg to humanity. It still suggests that humanity as a whole are ultimately responsible for the creation of their own worst enemy. (In fact, the Borg origin is really one of only a handful of problems I have with the otherwise superb Destiny trilogy.)

As such, Annie Reed’s The Beginning is probably the best possible origin story for the Collective. Published in Strange New Worlds VI, it focuses on the creation of the first Borg Queen on an anonymous alien world. It works quite well, because it avoids explicitly mentioning the Borg until the last line, even if there’s a lot of hinting and suggestion in the short story. (The presence of nanobots should be the first clue, but Reed structures the story so it becomes more obvious as it goes along, with star-shaped mechanical implants breaking skin eventually dropping in words like “assimilate.”)

Reed shrewdly avoids too much foreshadowing or foreboding in her short story. There’s no mention of the Federation or of humanity or anything like that. The Borg are allowed to develop completely independent of the rest of Star Trek continuity, which is a nice touch – all too often the Star Trek universe can feel a little too crowded or incestuous in expanded universe materials. Instead, Reed tries quite hard to merge various interpretations of the Borg in one internally consistent portrayal.

So the story focuses on the Borg Queen, treating her as a focal point of the race, but it also builds on the rather basic body horror themes that informed a lot of the early Borg stories. Reed postulates that the Borg are the result of bio-engineering gone horribly wrong, with nanobots instructed to “perfect” their host – in essence turning the Borg into a horrifying twist on the infamous “grey goo” scenario – self-perpetuating nanobots consuming everything they come in contact with. It’s a simple explanation for the Borg, but an effective one.

Reed doesn’t focus on the Collective aspect that much – narrating primarily in first person singular from the perspective of the Borg Queen. As a result, the Borg don’t necessarily feel as alien or unsettling as they should. The short story’s protagonist remains eerily relatable for most of the text, and there’s a sense that The Beginning might have been a little stronger had it been more willing to explore or play with the more unsettling aspects of Borg transcendence – the emergence of the Collective and the subsuming of the individual.

The skewing of the Queen’s perspective as her views realign with that of the emerging cybernetic race is suggested quite well, but The Beginning never allows that individual her to get truly lost and consumed. There are hints here and there, from her faltering memory to the suggestion that the nanobots are thinking for her, but the central character never becomes truly unrecognisable and alien. She never feels as strange as one might expect from the Borg.

Still, this is a minor problem. As far as Borg origins go, The Beginning is the strongest of the bunch, if only because – somewhat ironically – it feels so organic.

Read our reviews of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

• The Child
  • Supplemental: Phase II (1978) – The Child
• Where Silence Has Lease
• Elementary, Dear Data
  • Supplemental: Embrace the Wolf
• The Outrageous Okona
• Loud as a Whisper
• The Schizoid Man
• Unnatural Selection
  • Supplemental: Deep Space Nine (Marvel Comics) #3-4 – The Cancer Within
• A Matter of Honour
• The Measure of a Man
  • Supplemental: Myriad Universes – Echoes and Refractions: Brave New World by Chris Roberson
  • Supplemental: The Measure of a Man (Extended Cut)
• The Dauphin
  • Supplemental: Masks by John Vornholt
• Contagion
• The Royale
• Time Squared
• The Icarus Factor
  • Supplemental: The Lost Era – Deny Thy Father by Jeff Mariotte
  • Supplemental: (DC Comics) Annual #2 – Thin Ice
• Pen Pals
• Q Who?
  • Supplemental: Strange New Worlds VI – The Beginning by Anne Reed
  • Supplemental: Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who – Assimilation²
  • Supplemental: The Newspaper Strips – Beware the Omnimind! (aka Restructuring is Futile)
• Samaritan Snare
• Up the Long Ladder
• Manhunt
• The Emissary
• Peak Performance
• Shades of Grey

Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: best of both worlds, borg, Collective, february, kirk, Klingon, Next Generation, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: enterprise, star trek: first contact, star trek: voyager, StarTrek, voyager |