Hypothetical: You are a writer in 1990. ‘The Best Of Both Worlds’ 2-parter has just finished airing. You have been tapped to be the “Borg Person” in the Star Trek writing room. You are tasked with writing the next Borg episode as well as given the opportunity to create a story bible for future Trek writers to adhere to for the Borg.
Your episode is to be ready for some time through the end of season 4 to the middle of season 5. What do you do with the episode and the Borg? You are not constrained by Borg canon that has been written after BOBW.
Some rules:
You can’t not use the Borg. I know some people just want them to be mysterious and not show up again, but to engage with the question you have to write something.
You can’t just kill off all the Borg. They must be usable for future writers. If you make them disappear, know it will be undone.
The ideas must be plausibly filmable with the resources of TNG production.
This is 90s TV, so you can do a 2 or maybe even 3-parter but your Borg ideas can’t eat the entire show. TNG must still be able to support non-Borg episodes.
Something with an alien species that wants to join the borg. Maybe their home system is in a bad way, or they just believe in the Borg’s ideals.
Do you just let them throw themselves in and destroy their society? What about people who don’t want to join? What if them joining the Borg is strategically bad for the federation?
Maybe this was done and I forgot
I’d remember a transhumanist species. It would be an interesting premise for an episode…
Dance party.
Obviously.
(Also, I would find a way to link any future Borg stories with Conspiracy so that didn’t go unresolved forever.)
Inclusion of the Conspiracy bugs might help explain the change in strategy employed for Picard. But mostly to scratch that 36 year old itch.
This is probably controversial, but i always disliked how the Borg seemed to assimilate for the sake of assimilation? It was sometimes explained as their way of growth or achieving perfection, but that always rang a bit hollow as a motivation.
If I could write a longer term direction, it would be interesting as a quasi-justifiable thing; have the Borg be the boogeyman in the dark of space, until we find out its collective drive to assimilate is a way to insulate itself against some greater evil.
I’ve always liked stories of eldritch horrors lurking in the depths of space, so one way you could do this, is for there to be something lurking in subspace; warp drive weakens the fabric of space holding it back, which explains the Borg using transwarp conduite instead. This horror would be able to easily subvert individual minds to its needs, but the collective acting as a whole could resist it.
A “bad guy” doing bad things for an understandable reason is much more interesting that them just being straight-up evil. So in general I would aim for something like that.
Voyager kind of did that with Species 8472.
I’d always assumed they were the result of implant technology going rogue, and over time it looks like what we see.
Kind of like the WH40k Tyranids, who are apparently fleeing something even more terrifying than they are.
Is that right? I hadn’t heard that.
Well I heard it in a comment here, without citation. I just did a brief search and someone else said that lore detail has been superseded - sorry for the r.ddit link https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/mqa6ip/if_the_tyranids_are_running_from_something_what/
GW strikes again :D
I would have decided that the Enterprise encounters a dead Cube. There is no power and all the Borg inside are dead. After an investigation, they realize that there is a deadly species that not only resisted assimilation, but dealt the Borg a heavy blow militaristically.
It would be the season 6 cliffhanger in place of Descent, basically Voyager’s Scorpion but several years early. Though it would probably result in Seven of Nine never becoming a character.
Another idea I’ve had recently is a system of worlds that are thriving and even more technologically advanced than the Federation. The catch is the Borg come by every stellar year and cull large numbers of people in exchange for peace.
We get a flashback to thousands of years ago when the Borg were not monsters but just augmented humanoids. They approached this species when they had just discovered space flight and offered their enhancements as a gift. Some accepted and others did not, causing a schism. Somehow, as the Borg became more forceful, the ones who rejected assimilation reached a deal which let the Borg take their sick and infirm and criminal class in exchange for leaving everyone else alone.
Obviously, the status quo is found to be untenable and Starfleet steps in to push the Borg out, making enemies of the new race. Stargate Atlantis did a story like this with the Wraith.
“NO SKINTIGHT BODYSUITS!”
