Star Trek BS, "The Borg"

            “Rocketboy1313 talks about Star Trek a bit and with no Over Arching Theme”.  Admittedly it is not a great title.  Not a great theme really.  I just had some left over writing from random discussions I have had online and in person about “Star Trek” and decided to throw this out there for consumption.

            Today’s topic is THE BORG.  Kind of.  All of this stuff has official explanations, but I don’t care what those explanations are and have instead written some of my own that I feel make more sense in the context of what I know about the series, and what about this universe that sticks out in my mind.  You can do this too; it is called “Head Canon”.

            Since it is all fictional and doesn’t matter, existing only as an imaginary story to help us ruminate on the world and life to better understand ourselves, the story specifics are meaningless, disregard them at your leisure.

 

Their ships are super rad.

Introduction

            For those who don’t know, the Borg are a race of cyborgs.  They come from a region of the galaxy that they completely dominate.  A vast empire from which these mentally linked shock troops coordinate as a singular intelligence.  They speak as an intimidating chorus of dull voices, they seem their eventual success as such a certainty that they call resistance to it “Futile”.

            The Borg reproduce in two fashions, the first is growing knew biological beings and then attaching cybernetic components as they age, but the other more horrifying method is to inject microscopic robots into the blood of other alien races, bonding with them mentally and making them part of their collective will.  Assimilation of all cultures, scientific knowledge, and striping out all sense of self and personal identity.  They are space-zombies and the single best villains in the franchise.

            They were introduced in “Star Trek the Next Generation” to both the audience and the crew of the Enterprise by the godlike being, Q.  Q’s motives for such an introduction seem to boil down to, “I’m a dick” but regardless of his long-term plans for such actions this episode established that both Q and the Borg had prior interactions with the recurring character of Guinan, a wise bartender character played by Whoopi Goldberg who is centuries old and whose people were destroyed by the Borg… and Really hate Q.

            The Borg became more and more sucky as time went on.  For that matter, so did Q.  Because “Star Trek Voyager” made everything that was big and threatening in “The Next Generation” worse and worse.  Regardless, let me tell you about my fan theory.

My Bullshit

            I actually thought that the Borg might have existed on only 1 planet as a big uni-mind (like "The Matrix") for thousands of years until they encountered some space fairing species.  Their collective intellect is always shown as being vast in knowing things, but rarely good at inventing new things.  I think that the creation of a vast linked intellect led to the society stagnating.

            I think that the species that first met the Borg-Matrix was the El-Aurian, the name of Guinan’s people (Whoopi Goldberg’s people).  Perhaps a scout craft landed far outside their own territory and wanted to learn about the vast and knowledgeable super mind.

This is Guinan on Earth in the late 1800's.

            Maybe Q made the introductions.

            The El-Aurians got assimilated into the mind and that started the Borg on a path of moving from solar system to solar system growing at first in a linear fashion, as they could only breed more of themselves or capture people to add cybernetic attachments, which just seems like a hassle.

            The real start of the Borg’s golden age was the discovery of a new technology, nano-bots which made assimilation of new species so easy that started growing their boarders exponentially.  Finally they decided to go after the El-Aurians’ home world and wipe them out.  The super villain equivalent of self-actualization.  This would explain El-Aurians aversion to both Q and their history with the Borg.

Some More Bullshit
            On “Voyager” the best character was Seven of Nine played by Jeri Ryan, a Borg freed from the uni-mind and returned to a state of being a human (albeit still covered in cybernetic components) who wanted to explore being a human (the race she was before being assimilated) but held onto learned behavior, knowledge, and beliefs from the Borg.  Her knowledge was limited, only a single mind she could hold only a tiny fraction of the Borg’s collective information, but she would often use experiments to further apply her knowledge to help the crew in new ways (she at one point cured death… “Voyager” was often stupid).

            One of Seven’s beliefs was that of Omega.  A theoretical element(?), particle(?), and they went with molecule(?) that would serve as a “perfect” thing.  The Borg see perfection as something that can be attained and Omega as an example of something that is perfect.  But at the same time Seven was always lacking on certain time periods and had holes in her data, so I gelled these concepts together. 

Jeri Ryan gets unfairly maligned, often just labeled as a pretty face, but she is an excellent actress in this series.
When I say she was the best character, SHE WAS THE BEST CHARACTER.

            900 years ago, might have been the Borg’s first experiments with the Omega molecule as a power source which was such a devastating waste of time and resources that the Borg have still not fully recovered and archived all the data from that period. Beyond that they were more insular at the time, seeking that technology rather than expanding, and that explains why they have no strong memories about the prominent empires of the era, like the vast subspace tunnel empire, the Vaadwaur, mentioned in “Dragon’s Teeth”.

            However it is also really possible that with only the minimal amount of data from that specific time, in that specific place, about that specific people would be in the Borg hard drives Seven of Nine has access to on “Voyager”.   This would serve as a good explanation of maybe the Borg not having fractured memories, but just her own data stores being limited (I doubt the entirety of Borg Wikipedia could fit in her cargo bay).

End of my Bullshit

            I have been thinking about “Star Trek” lately because of the new series I have not yet seen.  And probably won’t see for a while because CBS can bite me.

            Hopefully any reading this will find my musings entertaining.  It is just my own head canon.

            (Pardon any grammar issues.  I have a real job now and my time for proof reading has dropped off QUITE A BIT).

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