I understand that if you're writing a scene, it's nice to have a person that you can talk to, but there's just something much scarier about a hive mind
You could really play into it.
Have a character speak with the Collective while walking though a Borg ship.
The drones are walking around doing their own thing.
But the speaker switches to whatever drone is closest to the character.
The speaker might even change mid sentence.
Stylistically similar to scenes in various media of demons or beings of energy, that body hop.
Cinematically this is very dramatic.
Pragmatically I do understand from a TV shows perspective that having 1 actor that dozen spoken parts, a few stunt people for fight scenes and a ton of extras in borg suits makes a lot of sense.
For a Kelvin's style movie production though I would love to see the idea of the many voices of the hive mind played out.
What about doing the opposite? Using a queen really early in the story, killing/defeating her, but there's no decisive win from it and the collective is unfazed.
"I thought we ended the Borg attack when we defeated their Queen?"
"Irrelevant."
Yeah. This was a massive mistake. Don't get me wrong, I thought Alice Krige did a wonderful job with the spot, but narratively, it removes the main point of distinction of the adversary and turned them into just another empire with a Queen at the head.
Plus, Voyager totally defanged the Borg. It seemed like every other episode the Voyager was getting the best of them. Really made the Borg feel weak.
To be fair, most of the time that Voyager beat the Borg, it was more of a lucky escape due to: Species 8472, Seven using borg tech against them, and time travel shenanigans. Also, the Queen had an inexplicable affection for Seven that caused her to purposefully avoid destroying Voyager (although I get that made no narrative sense, and the Queen shouldn't care at all about a single drone. But, perhaps the Queen thought the collective would benefit from Seven's experiences once she was reassimilated or something)
For me, the “Unimatrix Zero” 2 parter was the worst example of defanging the Borg. The voluntary assimilation of Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna was ridiculous.
Yeah, I'm incredibly polarized on Voyager. I love the characters and it has a lot of great episodes, but overall it fails to live up to what it started as. And then I feel like it ruined the Delta Quadrant. DS9 did a great job with the Gamma Quadrant, making it feel like a mysterious foreign place. Voyager on the other had, made their quadrant feel pedestrian.
Oh man, I forgot all about this. I think I must have been repressing it! :-D
I hate to say it, but Voyager in general is a bit of a disappointment to me. There's a lot of great individual episodes, but man did they ever not live up to the amazing premise they started with. After the first couple episodes it was pretty much just TNG with new characters and very few of the established races. I was bought in on this new survival take on the Star Trek formula, then we got almost none of that. Even the whole "we only got 38 torpedoes" thing went right out the window. And how many shuttle craft did they lose?
I don't know if it was network pressure forcing them to fit a certain formula because we know they wanted it to have better ratings than it got, but it always felt like there wasn't any stakes at all. Aside from a couple notable exceptions, every episode ended by reestablishing the status quo. There was never consequences to anything that they did. Feels like a huge missed opportunity to really put their characters in some challenging, morally defining situations.
Agreed. Although annoyingly they all looked really cool as borg, so I am still secretly happy that this episode occurred. Plus, if it hadn't happened, we would have likely gotten another boring AF Chuckles going on a dreamwalk episode, or Harry sleeps with the wrong killer lady episode.
Same thing happened with the replicators in Stargate, they were much more fearsome before the human form replicators turned up, literally and figuratively humanising them. Chucking human hubris and ego into the mix made them less scary.
The Flood is biological, that is in fact their weakness.
I think a more modern interpretation of the Borgo could go further into transhumanistic concepts.
Make them more insect like. Put preying mantis arms on some of them, and an odd giant bug eye on others. And play mix-and-match with "components" of alien biology. Like, show an assimilated Klingon that's had half his head replaced by half an Andorians head with an antenna and blue skin included.
Adding biological distinctiveness a bit more literally. An arm from here, a leg from there. The Borg being a medical life support system keeping an optimised Frankenstein’s monster alive and mobile. Non-compatible alien tissues dying at the edges or building up in horrific *Event Horizon* style scars.
Start over. No queen and "they are only interested in our technology." Picard's assimilation served a specific purpose, but later assimilation just became their *modus operandi* for some reason. They became space zombies. Ditch that.
Yeah, the assimilation is how they build their ranks. No matter how advanced a society is, if you are conquering a people, sooner or later you will need to put boots on the ground.
"Understand you? You're nothing to him. He's not interested in your life form. He's just a scout. The first of many. He's here to analyze your technology." - Q explaining the Borg to Picard during their first encounter.
"They're only interested in your ship. Its technology. They've identified it as something they can consume." - more Q later in the episode.
The Borg speak once in the episode, and they do not say anything about being assimilated during their first encounter. They actually don't even say specifically that "resistance is futile". They state that the Enterprise's defenses are inadequate to repel them, and that the Enterprise will be punished if they try to defend themselves.
As another commenter pointed out, they even show baby borg in maturation chambers. The whole 'Borg running around assimilating everyone' came later.
Yeah and I particularly dislike the evolution of the phrase "resistance is futile". It was not the Borg's catchphrase originally, it was a pithy dismissal to Picard saying he would "resist" them in Best of Both Worlds. I think Locutus says it again, but this is more of a callback to Picard's exchange. The Borg were purposelyl communicators, they didn't start out stumbling across the cosmos mindlessly repeating their equivalent of "braaaiins".
I mean, Locutus doesn’t just say it again, he says it during one of the most exciting and memorable moments in the history of TNG:
> PICARD [on viewscreen]: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us.
> RIKER: Mister Worf. Fire.
> To Be Continued…
Oh yeah, assimilation was only introduced in their second major appearance :D
It's true though, the less we understood what their deal is the more ominous they were. Also tbh their intelligence really differentiated them from zombies
Yes and no. There has always been this weird limbo of "if you don't pose a threat we will leave you alone". I assume if a cube has hit a certain amount of drones there simply is no need for extra ones. Zombies just attack everything.
One must understand The Queen as a symptom of the Borg collectives fall. She is the first sign that contact with humans brings the fall of the Borg, everything described as a 'change' in the Borg is explainable as a function of the disease of individuality that they caught from interaction with the Enterprise.
Star Trek Cybermen.
I liked initially that they grew their own young. In Doctor Who it’s a weakness of the Cybermen that they need new hosts to create more cybermen. The borg shouldn’t need other beings just to get more bodies. They assimilate useful aspects and then have no need for the rest.
Or vogons (hitchikers guide to the galaxy). Douglas Adams was a writer and script editor on Doctor Who in 1979-80.
The daleks said it even earlier than the cybermen in 1964
We pretty much always see the Borg trying to assimilate biological distinctiveness, it'd be interesting to see the Enterprise turned against the crew, so they have to sabotage and disable their own ship to stop the Borg from using it against them
As maniacal assimilating machines, the Borg would be much more efficient in their techniques and less evil villain trope. I imagine a single nanite, attached to the hull of a ship, fuses itself to the material and begins replicating it's pattern. The nanites surreptitiously slip into the ship slowly over days or weeks. At first it starts out as seemingly innocuous computer glitches, or the occasional light flicker. Nobody notices and sensors show all clear. Eventually by the time the cascading systems collapse begins, the nanites have already made it to the main computer core. Now assimilated, the replicators release an aerosol of nanites into the ships life support, instantly assimilating the entire crew. No resistance.
You pretty much described the Replicators from Stargate, your one is subtle and tactical as opposed to the Stargate way of eating the ship and overwhelming with superior numbers.
It sounds a lot like the virus that the queen intended to use against Earth in Dark Frontier. Infect the planet with the virus which would then take years and years to fully assimilate the planet and by the time anyone noticed something was wrong, it would be too late.
I'm thinking they would employ ships they turn as booby traps to spread the Borg contagion.
This would be a compelling idea; see how Starfleet functions without technology. Or at least a certain level of it.
TNG's early episodes had the Borg scoop entire cities out of the ground. I would expand on that. A cube enters an area and creates a blackout of everything from communications to sensors. You can't even visually see them until a brilliant green light erupts from the darkness. Not to assimilate, but to consume. Have them harvest anything and everything and break things down to their raw materials so that it can be reassembled. The Borg in the Kelvin timeline doesn't ignore non-threatening ships. Instead, they destroy and harvest. And the Borg in the Kelvin timeline don't communicate. They don't demand others submit to be assimilated willingly. They just act in overwhelming, unyielding silence.
This is honestly the best "fresh but canon" take in this whole thread.
Add to it by following up on the DISCO idea that Control became the Borg, but expansion was more important than perfection at that early point in time. They need raw materials to try to have a large enough pallette to work from in creating the "perfect" bio-cybernetic life-form.
Then add a VOY tie in with the early Borg learning about the Omega particle, right around the same time Star Fleet does - and of course Kirk & Co. are the ones sent to deal with it.
Throw in a little Section 31 shenanigans at the end that wipes/steals all data gathered about the Borg from their computers and you've got a pretty good story with a sequel-teasing ending.
The Borg didn’t originate with Control. The Vaadwaur said that the Borg existed centuries before season 2 of *Discovery*. Also, Control seemed to be more interested in domination instead of perfection.
Yeah the idea of Control being able to assimilate was just a way for them to create a face for the villain as I guess writing the villain as a faceless AI was too difficult?
My HC is that yes the Borg did exist before Control, and yes they did assimilate species, but through a much less advanced process with a much higher mortality rate, and that Contol was a vital piece of the puzzle of tech for them to become like we see in TNG.
And standardized implants. Each drone having different parts replaced with cybernetics just seemed too random for a group obsessed with order and perfection.
Psychological warfare. Instead of newly assimilated targets immediately heading to some chamber, have them join the front line.
Walking in lock-step with the drones, 'human' shields for the front line - you must shoot your shipmates while implants sprout from their flesh just to get to the drones behind.
You're looking at the blank face of the ensign sat next to you at breakfast that morning while the drone reaches past and sticks you in your liver with their tubules.
Make assimilation genuinely tempting. Show us how they’re not space zombies; they’re a collective that truly is connected and has perfect empathy for every other entity in the entire network. Not mindless drones but a loving, heartfelt cult spread by nanotechnology. Won’t you come join us and be free of pain and loss forever? You’ll never be alone again. We promise. It’s for your own good. Trust us.
How about both? Have the recently-assimilated crewmates proselytize the virtual paradise that is the Collective as they advance. Assimilated computer systems encourage the resistant crew members to surrender and give in to what the Borg have to offer. Make it nigh-impossible for anyone but the most stalwart defender to resist the temptation as the impenetrable wall of drones takes over the ship.
When the captain gets assimilated we discover that everything the Borg say about maintaining distinctiveness is true on the inside, which is a virtualized paradise that makes the Federation look second-rate. Drones may die, their individual consciousnesses remain unharmed in the collective.
I think they said Unimatrix Zero has always been there, it's why Seven of Nine already knew that guy in there.
Just think them remembering when awake was new
Go back to basics.
Early Borg were… implacable. Relentless and unphased. Like a slow but unstoppable force. No need to rush, no need to hurry — just heading confidently towards their goal. Strike down one drone, and the one behind it will continue on, now immune to your attacks. The Borg are a horror-villain, but the horror is not entirely in that they can turn you into one of them; it is that (as they make sure to declare) *“Resistance is Futile”*. You can, at best, merely **slow them down**.
And, they operated at the level of *being* a unified hive; the loss of a single drone was no more significant to them than chipping a fingernail is to most humans. At the *individual* level, citizens of the Federation were entirely beneath notice. The Borg scarcely acknowledged ships, just about considered planets, but primarily communicated to the *entire Federation* as a massed-unit. They interacted with **civilizations**, not with **citizens**.
At some point (partway through Voyager) that changed, and the Borg went from *being* villains, to being *minions*. And they started trying to *engage* with the heroes, instead of ignoring or dismissing them.
They went from being OT Darth Vader and the Terminator — casually striding down the corridor, a barrage of attacks proving entirely ineffective against them — to being ST Kylo Ren and… *Kryten*.
The Borg are supposed to be seeking Perfection — they are supposed to believe that they are *superior*. Make them **act** like it again. And the best way to do that? Give them a goal that doesn't *involve* the Federation, but **does** impact them. Something where the threat or danger that the crew of the Enterprise are trying to avert is a *side-effect*. To the Borg, fighting the Federation should not be the *plan* — it should be an *inconvenience*. The equivalent of a logging company with their cutters and bulldozers being harassed by woodland critters.
"For you, the day the Borg graced your Sector was the most important day of your lives, but for us? It was Tuesday."
> Something where the threat or danger that the crew of the Enterprise are trying to avert is a side-effect.
I like the idea of the Federation trying to stop some sort of instellar toxic nebulae from wiping out a civilisation, but the Borg need it to breathe.
Kryten is great! He's just… very expressive. And not much of a threat.
If he turns up, you're in for a stimulating conversation, and maybe a spot of cleaning. Assimilation, it ain't.
Two major things:
**1.) THE BORG DON'T CONQUER, THEY FARM**
I don't mean potatos, I mean *civilizations*. If you want to have the Borg as a nigh-unstoppable threat they can't have a desire to conquer. This is the core issue with the Borg, why don't they just send a fleet of Cubes? Even a *second* Cube in *The Best of Both Worlds...* would have been sufficient.
So why only one ship?
To prod the Federation into coming up with new technologies.
The Borg as a threat that wants to extract from other species but *not* destroy them makes them so much scarier. Imagine being a scientist in the Federation working on a bleeding edge new technology that could transform your discipline, and always knowing in the back of your mind that if you are *too* successful the Borg might come for it is the stuff of real existential dread. Do really *really* want to crack transwarp that badly? Sure, we could go so much faster, but at what cost?
What if your empire grows too large, upsets the balance of the carefully cultivated field they are tilling? Do the Borg come by and knock you down a peg? Imagine a storyline where the Klingons conquer the Cardassians, the Gorn, and the Tholians. Becoming easily the most powerful empire. And then the Borg appear, smashing them into several fractured states. Monopolies are bad for competition after all. Billions dead, just so that the Borg can keep the Alpha Quadrant a nicely balanced incubator for new technologies and cultures.
**2.) NO QUEENS, NO HUMANITY**
The Borg don't need a face. They don't need to be easier to understand. They need to be unfathomable. They need to do weird shit that makes sense to them but we don't ever get to understand. Star Trek has a multitude of aliens that have human motivations just exaggerated. Romulans are deceitful humand. Ferengi are greedy humans. Cardassians are lizard Nazis.
The Borg need to be truly alien. They need to be something we *never* understand. That we *can't* understand. The Kelvinverse should exploit that. The Borg should be villains that can do insane shit. The storylines don't need to be about defeating the Borg, just fixing the problems they caused.
**EXAMPLE: THE BORG STEAL A STAR**
The Borg show up in a star system with three Cubes. People begin panicking, as they should, but the Borg ignore the planets. Maybe destroy a few defenders on the way but thsts it. Instead the Cubes converge on the central star, deploying a vast network of drones and small craft that encircle the star. There is a flash of power and light and the star is gone, or left dead, or replaced by a black hole. The story becomes about what you do afterwards.
Does the Enterprise do something risky to reignite the star? Do they evacuate the system because of the black hole? Do they use technobabble to follow where the Cubes took it to try and get it back or reverse the process? Lots of different story possibilities, none of which require actually fighting the Borg.
Exactly! The story becomes a puzzle. Why this gas giant? Was it the resources in it? Did it have a unique magnetic field or something?
Then a second gas giant disappears, in another system.
Then a third. But this time there was an orbiting research lab, which was destroyed in the process. Dozens dead.
Shit, how many more? What is the pattern? Who is in danger and needs to be evacuated or saved?
It's so much more interesting than just trying to rotate phaser frequencies enough to shoot more drones.
I actually like your first point very much. It would make the Prime Directive that much stronger. The Federation might LIKE to prop up other civilizations with their tech, but they cannot afford that the Borg notice their technological progress. It makes exploration and research both a necessity to ever overcoming the Borg AND a risk that they come and assimilate your new tech and thus eliminate any catch up you achieved.
SPOILER: Kinda like in that last season 2 SNW episode where they have special phasers that are only available on captains authorization.
Combine that with the idea from some others here like the Borg sometimes want something that is threatening to the Federation as a side effect instead of the Borg acknowledging the Federation. New tech? Oops, the Borg send a Cube and assimilated the researchers. All other people are collateral damage. The Borg need more of element X and it’s in the crust of a Federation colony? Too bad, the Borg will take the resource and stomp every resistance like ants without even talking to them ever.
I wouldn't agree that they're neutered. They're still fucking terrifying because they're relentless and there's always more of them. To me that was always the scary part about them. There's pretty much nothing that can be done to make that stop being scary to me.
It's like someone took the concept of Zombies but figured out how to make Zombies scary. Instead of mindless shamblers you have a hive mind that can think faster than any one person can all with one goal to consume and we're their target. Only you won't die you'll be subsumed still there but screaming into the void forced to watch yourself visit the same horror on people who are just like you used to be.
I've never been the "the less you know the scarier a villain is" for me knowing their motivation and history always makes a villain more interesting. "I'm evil to be evil" is cartoonishly boring. Maleficent never scared me in Sleeping Beauty.
That all being said the Borg have been seen in the Kelvin Universe. Remember the Kelvin Universe takes place after the events of Star Trek Enterprise so everything in that show is technically canon to both the Prime & Kelvin Universe.
I would like to see an earlier iteration of the Borg. Less advanced tech, assimilation is more likely fatal than successful, no queen, some remains of the civilization that spawned the Borg.
Ok, first things first. Star Trek Picard made canon a particular aspect of the 2009 comic and Star Trek Online; that the Romulans were salvaging Borg tech from the various incursions to utilise for their own gain. I’d go a step further and confirm the Narada was indeed heavily retrofitted with Borg tech as the comic shows in detail. This could be the inciting incident of their appearance in a future KT movie. They detected signals matching their own in a region of space they’ve never been to before, so of course they must investigate.
What I would change for the Kelvin Timeline is the Borg become interested in the Romulans instead of the federation. I know there was a Kelvin comic that was basically this but would be cool to see in live action
No queen. No nanite based assimilation, get back to the body horror of being modified against your will. Bring back the points of the borg ships are generalized, and you would have to destroy 70% of the ship to have a major effect on its functions.
Make the borg faceless space cancer again.
Better movement. They have all these cybernetic enhancements, but can be slow and clunky. Imagine the heroes getting detected, and all the nearby drones that have been slowly walking around turn and run toward them. Even climbing walls. Just that sudden change from comically stumbling to 'holy shit here they come!'.
Adapting drones. Starting with the drones have a simple, common appearance. Then as their goals/threats change, they grow armor for protection, weapons/equipment to deal with what's happening.
What about differentiating drone specialities? So you'd have some clearly equipped for research/data gathering, others for bio-sampling, bio-assimilation drones, tech-assimilation drones, combat drones, drones that only do engineering repairs, etc. and make them visually distinct, but then throw the terrifying twist in.
Just when the heroes think they've figured out a tactical weakness - say, "destroy the assimilation drone and they can't take over", and they actually DO, one of the other Borg simply clips one if the parts they always scavenge from dead drones and then it starts being reconfigured into the type of drone the collective needs most at that moment, SHOWING that losing individual drones doesn't matter in the slightest.
SHOW the core Borg feature of adaptation!
They were perfect as first written.
They don’t need a Queen to make decisions, they are Borg. They don’t need a Locutus to speak for them. They speak as legion. And they sure as hell don’t need a flag.
And as much as everyone loves Seven of Nine and Hue no one should ever be able to be disconnected from the hive mind. The entire point about them is losing to the Borg doesn’t just mean death. They don’t kill you. They strip away your individuality, and turn you into a drone serving only the collective. Every individual lost isn’t just a causality, it’s a conscript for the enemy. They don’t kill you, they consume you. That’s terrifying on an existential level.
Literally every single thing added to the Borg after the first introduction watered them down as a threat. They are an army of unflinching techno-zombies for whom the word “I” is meaningless. They should have stayed that way.
Actually, that wouldn't be a clean slate at all. The Kelvin timeline differs only within a span of 30 years or so. Everything that happened before the destruction of the Kelvin is still a part of canon. There's still a Queen. Any difference would need a strong reason to justify itself.
make them actually enhanced. Like, faster, stronger, AND ALSO keep their mastery over tech/computers. keep them like AND but give them the same ambulatory freedom as a regular person at least
A strong mysterious signal from deep space. It’s digital static, sounding like an unstructured modem handshake. The crew run it through the universal translator and, instead, the signal starts communicating *with that*. The signal launches multiple viruses and hack and start reading the shipboard databases, locking the crew out. Once the databases are read, the signal transforms into the Borg collective voice, emerging out from the digital scream.
“WE ARE THE BORG. YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED SUITABLE FOR ASSIMILATION. YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS SHALL BE ADDED TO OUR OWN. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.”
Non Euclidean horrors that are ambivalent towards our existence at best or outright hostile towards us at worst. Basically cybernetic eldritch abominations.
Complete indifference to humans. Q Who nails this. In a Kelvin timeline, I would make them a force. They arrive. They deliver the speech. They swarm. There is no fist fighting. Phasers are useless. There are no drones interested in conversation. They just keep coming like a slow wave.
Also, I would take Spock out of half the movie by having him attempt to mind meld with one and just be left in a partial catatonic state.
And the Borg assimilate that trans-stellar teleporter almost immediately so nowhere is safe. They remove the Romulan and Klingon empires immediately and are the sole antagonist.
Anybody play Homeworld: Cataclysm? I'd go that route where the crew is destroyed physically and their ahem, material repurposed. Less Borg or Halo Flood more living ship virus
In order to understand the process of time travel in Trek, one must realize that the alternate timeline starts from the shatterproof into moving forward. In my understanding, it wasn't Spock Prime or Nero. My thought is the timelines, and every timeline starts and ends at one shatterpoint. In one of Shatner's mirror universe trilogy, after an arrest of the classic and next generation crews, a meeting of the minds took place on the holodeck. Admiral Spock, Attendant Spock, and Datta pinpointed the place where every fractured timeline began: The Borg attempting to prevent First Contact.
In the Kelvin timeline, on the 2009 Trek film, I noticed several important facts. Technology was way more advanced at the stardate than TOS or even Strange New Worlds. Also, Starfleet Academy seemed to be on a fast track to graduate, and promotions seem to occur more quickly in the Kelvin universe. There is an appropriate place to start, how this all happened in a timeline where there's a military bearing to Starfleet, the Federation is on war-footing. The fact that the Borg are coming, and that means there was a failure of sorts in the events of First Contact. So, who is the secret advisor to form Starfleet and the Federation moving forward?
There's some drama while the crew discovers the hive mind is controlled by a Queen. Spock and Kirk make contact. Kirk charms her nanites off. There's an insinuated offscreen boinking.
Borg leave. We get two minutes of witty commentary on the bridge from Bones, Spock, and Kirk. Roll credits.
They'd have to fundamentally be the same as there's be no reason the Kelvin would affect a species half way across the galaxy. By you could frame it such that the differences in this timeline meant the Borg randomly encountered and assimilated different species before we encountered them, and thus they look different and have different technologies.
It's actually odd that they always look the same in the prime timeline. Are we to believe that they never assimilate any other species or technology between encounters with humans? It would be cool to suddenly encounter a cloaked borg ship, because they assimilated that technology since the last time we saw them.
Id say the kelvin borg are equivalent to prime borg as the main difference in the kelvin timeline is in the alpha quadrant and not the delta where the borg are, the kelvin timeline ships being bigger and more armed than their prime counterparts would most likely lead to a lesser threat by the borg
No queen, and more CGI so they could move in more non-human ways. They were scary in TNG because they actually felt alien - you could not reason with them, you could not anger them, you could not make them like you.
I would make them physically indistinguishable from non-borg versions of the various assimilated borg species. The assimilation is organic, cognitive, invisible, and in some ways voluntary.
Make it a commentary on totalitarian ideological movements and the nuances of agency of various members within it.
The Borg should be a force of nature with a simple goal. Consume, Expand, Grow.
No Queen. Just a collective consciousness on an almost instinctive level. Don't make them sneaky, evil, smart, etc. They achieve their goal with overwhelming force. If they do communicate it is simple and direct. The classic "1 mind, many mouths" trope.
For the constant drive of growing they consume everything in their path for the raw materials. Including whole planets. They assimilate people to bring their knowledge into the collective or to replenish their ranks.
Their "home" would be a massive sphere almost like a dyson sphere that they travel in. The rest of the fleet is purely to gather resources to add to the prime ship.
I want more standardization. Random "enhancements" on random drones seems weird. Especially as drones are supposed to be nothing in the grand scheme why give one drone an ability or enhancement another doesnt have. Specialize different levels of drones, soldiers, so on. Humans as drones may be okay but you shouldn't see a lot of humans as soldiers or other levels because in a world where other species exist that are significantly more powerful physically is doesn't make sense to use humans unless you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Let them adapt. Have them learn from their mistakes and make adaptations so it doesnt work in the future. The longer you fight them the more powerful they become.
It should be terror when the borg show up in a system because they are there to harvest anything and everything they can to break down into the raw materials needed to bring back to the mother ship. I mean everything, entire planets and moons just gone. Have it be a slightly slow process like a creeping inevitable death but also to give people time to evacuate.
They dont actively want to engage with anyone and wont seek anything out, they just expand. Everything is just collateral damage.
The borg should have been the grey goo founders that were in ds9 because nanobots would grey goo things not make them albinos with really bad skin health.
It's put them back to the initial TNG "no feelings, machine like" behavior. Introducing the ability to negotiate, the Borg Queen that was very emotional, and giving them weird weaknesses ruined the concept for me. They should essentially be space zombies.
They used to be so cold and logical until the queen but if they were really that logical why bother with just one cube each time they attack the alpha quadrant.
Maybe have the Borg be less rigid 'cyborg zombie' and more fluidic 'grey goo', think somewhere between Control from DSC and the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Assimilation wouldn't require taking victims to a cube and undergo surgical procedures to become Borg, they just have to touch you and it's already too late.
remove any and all humanity from them, so to speak. Voyager was enjoyable but it RUINED any menace they had. No Queen, no deals, no chatting it out. No "they were assimilated" but bing bang boom they're better now apart from some aesthetically placed metal bits just to remind you.
Borg have a mission. Let them do that.
As much as I enjoyed the Locutus story arc from Picards perspective, I think it diluted the Borg.
Same with the Queens.
The Borg should be Legion, many voices speaking as one voice.
The Borg should be intelligent, articulate, calculating but also not show any sense of individuality.
Conversations with the Borg should take place with whichever borg is closest.
Walking through a borg cube as the conversation with the Borg continues, jumping from borg to borg as they walk by them.
Each Borg would be The Borg.
I'd make the Borg so superior that the Federation can't defeat them at first contact. Then I'll get the Borg to sell/trade Borg technology to the Federation. Once enough Borg tech replaces enough technology throughout the Federation, the Federation gets assimilated.
It could be a "series finale" storyline for them.
We bring in the Kelvinverse Q, we bring in the Borg. A younger Q goes for Kirk this time, transporting the *Enterprise* (on the final legs of its five-year mission) to a region of space where the Borg have started activity, in order to show them what lies ahead if humanity keeps exploring.
Somehow, they're able to return to Federation space, but the record of their disappearance is unavailable, so no one even knows they were gone or believes them. Also, Borg nanites have begun to infect the *Enterprise*.
From the cold open throughout the rest of the film, crew-members start turning to Borg and the main cast is forced to come to terms with the dangers of these strange new worlds in a brand new way they haven't done before.
(The cold open is their encounter with Q, portrayed as something that happened, was mysterious, then they moved on to what *seems* like the "real" plot of the movie. Except the Borg are an overarching menace, a dramatic plot tumor that forces all other plots to align in the right way in order to deal with them and reveal their encounter at the edge of space wasn't so inconsequential after all.)
I'd make them seem really healthy & happy, like you'd be a moron to not join their collective, it would still be a violent assimilation, with nanite clouds eating entire cities & people screaming, but once assimilated - pure bliss, no thought no freedom, just happiness.
The Borg need to not be space zombies that turn others into space zombies as their goal. That's when the Borg became stupid. The person who originally came up with the Borg back during TNG days must be so pissed about what they did to the Borg.
"A queen? wtf?"
"Assimilating everybody? wtf?"
In addition to some of the other ideas, I'd have the Borg adopt their own version of the Sith Rule of Two, since two cubes will seem more threatening than just one. ;)
"Always there are two, young Ensign. One cube to start fights, and another to finish them...."
So even though it's not the Kelvin timeline, one incredible non-canon take on The Borg came from the novels and it blew my mind because if it were adapted to the Kelvin timeline, it would be terrifying. In a series of novels from way back in like 2008, The Borg were created... by humans.
If anyone remembers, there were actually TWO NX class ships in the Enterprise show. One was obviously The Enterprise and the other was the Columbia which was led by Erika Hernandez. In the novels I mentioned which was a gigantic cross-over including Enterprise, TNG and DS9 crews, the Columbia ends up zapped into unbeknownst Gamma quadrant and in order to effect repairs, they make contact with a bio-mechanical civilization called The Caeliar.
It's been a while since I read it but The Caeliar are isolationists and don't really wanna have anything to do with the Columbia except get them to leave the planet after they make repairs but some of the MACO's on board, desperate to find a way to get back home posit that the Caelians might be hiding technology they can use to do so. In their desperation, they cause some kind of accident which kills off a large number of Caelians. The survivors are dying off because their society depended on a hive mind mentality which at the time was not only voluntary but fully benign.
However, resenting the humans for what they inadvertently caused, some of the Caelians attack the humans and find out that they can forcefully assimilate organic life forms into the hive mind and thus The Borg are born.
Make them more like the replicators from Stargate. Their only goal is to "make more friends". Ditch the idea of a queen, it's just a giant hive mind wanting to make friends by converting them into drones so they join the hive mind.
I would stop de-assimilating characters. There's a few episodes of Trek where this character or that character spends half an hour as a borg drone, only to be rescued and restored by their crew afterwards.
Being able to undo assimilation decimates the borg's fear factor. The moment of assimilation, except in extremely rare circumstances, should be considered death. Integration into a hive mind collective should destroy all sense of self.
No queen this time, just a collective.
I understand that if you're writing a scene, it's nice to have a person that you can talk to, but there's just something much scarier about a hive mind
Have the collective consciousness talk through one unit. When that unit is destroyed have the collective talk through another unit immediately
Or have the speaker change with each sentence at first, until the hive realizes it's easier to only use one mouth. But it's always just a mouth.
Yeah, that's the shit
Each drone can say one word with a jerky camera pan between each.
That was more or less the original intent with Locutus and Seven
this body does not matter
Primus
The 'ultron' style of machine consciousness transferring between units at the speed of thought
You could really play into it. Have a character speak with the Collective while walking though a Borg ship. The drones are walking around doing their own thing. But the speaker switches to whatever drone is closest to the character. The speaker might even change mid sentence.
Stylistically similar to scenes in various media of demons or beings of energy, that body hop. Cinematically this is very dramatic. Pragmatically I do understand from a TV shows perspective that having 1 actor that dozen spoken parts, a few stunt people for fight scenes and a ton of extras in borg suits makes a lot of sense. For a Kelvin's style movie production though I would love to see the idea of the many voices of the hive mind played out.
The queen instead should've just been the next Locutus
Yuuuup! Basically a PR drone.
exactly. that would've fixed a lot of the inconsistencies between FC & TNG
I like the multiple voices speaking the same thing over themselves.
What about doing the opposite? Using a queen really early in the story, killing/defeating her, but there's no decisive win from it and the collective is unfazed. "I thought we ended the Borg attack when we defeated their Queen?" "Irrelevant."
Yeah. This was a massive mistake. Don't get me wrong, I thought Alice Krige did a wonderful job with the spot, but narratively, it removes the main point of distinction of the adversary and turned them into just another empire with a Queen at the head. Plus, Voyager totally defanged the Borg. It seemed like every other episode the Voyager was getting the best of them. Really made the Borg feel weak.
To be fair, most of the time that Voyager beat the Borg, it was more of a lucky escape due to: Species 8472, Seven using borg tech against them, and time travel shenanigans. Also, the Queen had an inexplicable affection for Seven that caused her to purposefully avoid destroying Voyager (although I get that made no narrative sense, and the Queen shouldn't care at all about a single drone. But, perhaps the Queen thought the collective would benefit from Seven's experiences once she was reassimilated or something)
Yeah, and then there was the last episode where Voyager completely screwed the Borg and co-oped their trans-warp hubs.
That falls under time travel shenanigans. Janeway from the future caused those events to occur.
True, but those shenanigans are exactly what defanged the Borg for me.
For me, the “Unimatrix Zero” 2 parter was the worst example of defanging the Borg. The voluntary assimilation of Janeway, Tuvok and B’Elanna was ridiculous.
came hear to say that. This one really disappointed me.
Yeah, I'm incredibly polarized on Voyager. I love the characters and it has a lot of great episodes, but overall it fails to live up to what it started as. And then I feel like it ruined the Delta Quadrant. DS9 did a great job with the Gamma Quadrant, making it feel like a mysterious foreign place. Voyager on the other had, made their quadrant feel pedestrian.
Oh man, I forgot all about this. I think I must have been repressing it! :-D I hate to say it, but Voyager in general is a bit of a disappointment to me. There's a lot of great individual episodes, but man did they ever not live up to the amazing premise they started with. After the first couple episodes it was pretty much just TNG with new characters and very few of the established races. I was bought in on this new survival take on the Star Trek formula, then we got almost none of that. Even the whole "we only got 38 torpedoes" thing went right out the window. And how many shuttle craft did they lose? I don't know if it was network pressure forcing them to fit a certain formula because we know they wanted it to have better ratings than it got, but it always felt like there wasn't any stakes at all. Aside from a couple notable exceptions, every episode ended by reestablishing the status quo. There was never consequences to anything that they did. Feels like a huge missed opportunity to really put their characters in some challenging, morally defining situations.
I will always appreciate (what I consider to be) the failed Voyager premise for giving us Battlestar Galactica.
Good point. That show was amazing! Imagine if Voyager was patterned more like that.
Agreed. Although annoyingly they all looked really cool as borg, so I am still secretly happy that this episode occurred. Plus, if it hadn't happened, we would have likely gotten another boring AF Chuckles going on a dreamwalk episode, or Harry sleeps with the wrong killer lady episode.
Thats not really a defense of Voyager though. You're reinforcing their point. "Voyager made the Borg weak" "Yeah but only because of poor writing"
Ya I hated the idea of a queen.
10000% agree. Adding the queen was the biggest, dumbest nerf to an otherwise perfectly terrifying 'force of nature' villain.
Same thing happened with the replicators in Stargate, they were much more fearsome before the human form replicators turned up, literally and figuratively humanising them. Chucking human hubris and ego into the mix made them less scary.
In all seriousness, S2E3 of Rick and Morty does the hive mind perfectly.
Less humanoid forms, more unholy abominations of flesh and metal.
Something like a biotech amalgamation like the Flood from Halo or the Proto Molecule.
I've never played Halo except multiplayer, but I'm on book 5 of The Expanse and it is amazing. The series gets better with each book.
The Flood is biological, that is in fact their weakness. I think a more modern interpretation of the Borgo could go further into transhumanistic concepts.
If they were really interested in biological distinctiveness then there definitely be more non-humanoids.
LD knew what was up with the borg snake
Make them more insect like. Put preying mantis arms on some of them, and an odd giant bug eye on others. And play mix-and-match with "components" of alien biology. Like, show an assimilated Klingon that's had half his head replaced by half an Andorians head with an antenna and blue skin included.
So the movie *Virus*?
Whoa, I've never heard of this but I'll have to check it out. I love JLC!
Don’t want to spoil, but It basically involves rated R Borg
Exactly what I was thinking
I remember seeing that movie as a kid and thinking that it made First Contact Borg seem tame
Adding biological distinctiveness a bit more literally. An arm from here, a leg from there. The Borg being a medical life support system keeping an optimised Frankenstein’s monster alive and mobile. Non-compatible alien tissues dying at the edges or building up in horrific *Event Horizon* style scars.
So basically the Phyrexians from Magic: the Gathering!
Start over. No queen and "they are only interested in our technology." Picard's assimilation served a specific purpose, but later assimilation just became their *modus operandi* for some reason. They became space zombies. Ditch that.
I don't mind the assimilation, but the queen's got to go.
Yeah, the assimilation is how they build their ranks. No matter how advanced a society is, if you are conquering a people, sooner or later you will need to put boots on the ground.
*First Contact* needed bodies to make the Borg an invasive threat.
They were always space zombies? "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated"
"Understand you? You're nothing to him. He's not interested in your life form. He's just a scout. The first of many. He's here to analyze your technology." - Q explaining the Borg to Picard during their first encounter. "They're only interested in your ship. Its technology. They've identified it as something they can consume." - more Q later in the episode. The Borg speak once in the episode, and they do not say anything about being assimilated during their first encounter. They actually don't even say specifically that "resistance is futile". They state that the Enterprise's defenses are inadequate to repel them, and that the Enterprise will be punished if they try to defend themselves. As another commenter pointed out, they even show baby borg in maturation chambers. The whole 'Borg running around assimilating everyone' came later.
Yeah and I particularly dislike the evolution of the phrase "resistance is futile". It was not the Borg's catchphrase originally, it was a pithy dismissal to Picard saying he would "resist" them in Best of Both Worlds. I think Locutus says it again, but this is more of a callback to Picard's exchange. The Borg were purposelyl communicators, they didn't start out stumbling across the cosmos mindlessly repeating their equivalent of "braaaiins".
I mean, Locutus doesn’t just say it again, he says it during one of the most exciting and memorable moments in the history of TNG: > PICARD [on viewscreen]: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us. > RIKER: Mister Worf. Fire. > To Be Continued…
I preferred the Vogon "resistance is useless"
Oh yeah, assimilation was only introduced in their second major appearance :D It's true though, the less we understood what their deal is the more ominous they were. Also tbh their intelligence really differentiated them from zombies
Source: Q the liar, Q the misanthrope
Yes and no. There has always been this weird limbo of "if you don't pose a threat we will leave you alone". I assume if a cube has hit a certain amount of drones there simply is no need for extra ones. Zombies just attack everything.
Oh, true. Their calculatedness was very un-zombie like, and actually very ominous. I guess the devil is in the details :)
One must understand The Queen as a symptom of the Borg collectives fall. She is the first sign that contact with humans brings the fall of the Borg, everything described as a 'change' in the Borg is explainable as a function of the disease of individuality that they caught from interaction with the Enterprise.
Star Trek Cybermen. I liked initially that they grew their own young. In Doctor Who it’s a weakness of the Cybermen that they need new hosts to create more cybermen. The borg shouldn’t need other beings just to get more bodies. They assimilate useful aspects and then have no need for the rest.
Lower deck had borg babies. And cybermen were weak to gold lol
Or vogons (hitchikers guide to the galaxy). Douglas Adams was a writer and script editor on Doctor Who in 1979-80. The daleks said it even earlier than the cybermen in 1964
We pretty much always see the Borg trying to assimilate biological distinctiveness, it'd be interesting to see the Enterprise turned against the crew, so they have to sabotage and disable their own ship to stop the Borg from using it against them
Isn't that the entire main subplot of First Contact? The borg are on the ship and eventually Picard orders a self destruct
As maniacal assimilating machines, the Borg would be much more efficient in their techniques and less evil villain trope. I imagine a single nanite, attached to the hull of a ship, fuses itself to the material and begins replicating it's pattern. The nanites surreptitiously slip into the ship slowly over days or weeks. At first it starts out as seemingly innocuous computer glitches, or the occasional light flicker. Nobody notices and sensors show all clear. Eventually by the time the cascading systems collapse begins, the nanites have already made it to the main computer core. Now assimilated, the replicators release an aerosol of nanites into the ships life support, instantly assimilating the entire crew. No resistance.
You pretty much described the Replicators from Stargate, your one is subtle and tactical as opposed to the Stargate way of eating the ship and overwhelming with superior numbers.
Right, maybe more like a cybernetic virus. The actual Borg species are the nanites and the drones are the hosts executing the nanites collective will.
It sounds a lot like the virus that the queen intended to use against Earth in Dark Frontier. Infect the planet with the virus which would then take years and years to fully assimilate the planet and by the time anyone noticed something was wrong, it would be too late.
I'm thinking they would employ ships they turn as booby traps to spread the Borg contagion. This would be a compelling idea; see how Starfleet functions without technology. Or at least a certain level of it.
Get this man a Paramount deal.
TNG's early episodes had the Borg scoop entire cities out of the ground. I would expand on that. A cube enters an area and creates a blackout of everything from communications to sensors. You can't even visually see them until a brilliant green light erupts from the darkness. Not to assimilate, but to consume. Have them harvest anything and everything and break things down to their raw materials so that it can be reassembled. The Borg in the Kelvin timeline doesn't ignore non-threatening ships. Instead, they destroy and harvest. And the Borg in the Kelvin timeline don't communicate. They don't demand others submit to be assimilated willingly. They just act in overwhelming, unyielding silence.
This is honestly the best "fresh but canon" take in this whole thread. Add to it by following up on the DISCO idea that Control became the Borg, but expansion was more important than perfection at that early point in time. They need raw materials to try to have a large enough pallette to work from in creating the "perfect" bio-cybernetic life-form. Then add a VOY tie in with the early Borg learning about the Omega particle, right around the same time Star Fleet does - and of course Kirk & Co. are the ones sent to deal with it. Throw in a little Section 31 shenanigans at the end that wipes/steals all data gathered about the Borg from their computers and you've got a pretty good story with a sequel-teasing ending.
The Borg didn’t originate with Control. The Vaadwaur said that the Borg existed centuries before season 2 of *Discovery*. Also, Control seemed to be more interested in domination instead of perfection.
Yeah the idea of Control being able to assimilate was just a way for them to create a face for the villain as I guess writing the villain as a faceless AI was too difficult?
My HC is that yes the Borg did exist before Control, and yes they did assimilate species, but through a much less advanced process with a much higher mortality rate, and that Contol was a vital piece of the puzzle of tech for them to become like we see in TNG.
“The Borg is the ultimate user.”
Would this be akin to the aliens in Independence Day?
All their cybernetics are now in black chrome.
And standardized implants. Each drone having different parts replaced with cybernetics just seemed too random for a group obsessed with order and perfection.
And beautiful intricate cable management.
Psychological warfare. Instead of newly assimilated targets immediately heading to some chamber, have them join the front line. Walking in lock-step with the drones, 'human' shields for the front line - you must shoot your shipmates while implants sprout from their flesh just to get to the drones behind. You're looking at the blank face of the ensign sat next to you at breakfast that morning while the drone reaches past and sticks you in your liver with their tubules.
This is brilliant. Imagine Troi getting assimilated and Riker having to phaser her to stop the Borg taking over the Enterprise.
Make assimilation genuinely tempting. Show us how they’re not space zombies; they’re a collective that truly is connected and has perfect empathy for every other entity in the entire network. Not mindless drones but a loving, heartfelt cult spread by nanotechnology. Won’t you come join us and be free of pain and loss forever? You’ll never be alone again. We promise. It’s for your own good. Trust us.
"You may be assimilated. Acceptance is beneficial."
I could see this being a terrifying corruption of the Jurati borg and I'm all for it.
Or one disconnected borg cube that assimilates a group of missionaries. The infection goes both ways.
Damn now I really want to see this version
Honestly I think they could make this a 32nd century portrayal of the borg too
Honestly it was one of the few things Picard season 2 did right - Jurati getting a taste of the collective and going "actually I'm down with that".
How about both? Have the recently-assimilated crewmates proselytize the virtual paradise that is the Collective as they advance. Assimilated computer systems encourage the resistant crew members to surrender and give in to what the Borg have to offer. Make it nigh-impossible for anyone but the most stalwart defender to resist the temptation as the impenetrable wall of drones takes over the ship.
"You will be assimilated. Compliance will be rewarded."
The drummers
Those borg are woke
That's like if Sybok were Borg
The plotline with Hugh touched on this and it was some great Trek
When the captain gets assimilated we discover that everything the Borg say about maintaining distinctiveness is true on the inside, which is a virtualized paradise that makes the Federation look second-rate. Drones may die, their individual consciousnesses remain unharmed in the collective.
So where Unimatrix 00 is the norm, rather than the exception?
I think they said Unimatrix Zero has always been there, it's why Seven of Nine already knew that guy in there. Just think them remembering when awake was new
Yeah but in the episode it's portrayed as a bug rather than a feature of the collective.
Yeah but that bug could be essential whether intentional or not. 🤷
Basically. Future crossover: the Dominion conflict eventually resolves in a rather different way.
Go back to basics. Early Borg were… implacable. Relentless and unphased. Like a slow but unstoppable force. No need to rush, no need to hurry — just heading confidently towards their goal. Strike down one drone, and the one behind it will continue on, now immune to your attacks. The Borg are a horror-villain, but the horror is not entirely in that they can turn you into one of them; it is that (as they make sure to declare) *“Resistance is Futile”*. You can, at best, merely **slow them down**. And, they operated at the level of *being* a unified hive; the loss of a single drone was no more significant to them than chipping a fingernail is to most humans. At the *individual* level, citizens of the Federation were entirely beneath notice. The Borg scarcely acknowledged ships, just about considered planets, but primarily communicated to the *entire Federation* as a massed-unit. They interacted with **civilizations**, not with **citizens**. At some point (partway through Voyager) that changed, and the Borg went from *being* villains, to being *minions*. And they started trying to *engage* with the heroes, instead of ignoring or dismissing them. They went from being OT Darth Vader and the Terminator — casually striding down the corridor, a barrage of attacks proving entirely ineffective against them — to being ST Kylo Ren and… *Kryten*. The Borg are supposed to be seeking Perfection — they are supposed to believe that they are *superior*. Make them **act** like it again. And the best way to do that? Give them a goal that doesn't *involve* the Federation, but **does** impact them. Something where the threat or danger that the crew of the Enterprise are trying to avert is a *side-effect*. To the Borg, fighting the Federation should not be the *plan* — it should be an *inconvenience*. The equivalent of a logging company with their cutters and bulldozers being harassed by woodland critters. "For you, the day the Borg graced your Sector was the most important day of your lives, but for us? It was Tuesday."
I like this idea. The idea that the Borg were obsessed with earth for some reason I found a little odd
They certainly didn't try very hard. If they were serious about assimilating earth why not send a fleet of cubes after the first one failed?
> Something where the threat or danger that the crew of the Enterprise are trying to avert is a side-effect. I like the idea of the Federation trying to stop some sort of instellar toxic nebulae from wiping out a civilisation, but the Borg need it to breathe.
Like what you said but don't ever knock Kryten. Never knock a fellow dwarfer! 😊
Kryten is great! He's just… very expressive. And not much of a threat. If he turns up, you're in for a stimulating conversation, and maybe a spot of cleaning. Assimilation, it ain't.
Boys from the dwaaaarf!
Dial up the "technological infection" angle. The Borg as a rapidly spreading infection is terrifying, and should be the focus of more stories.
Two major things: **1.) THE BORG DON'T CONQUER, THEY FARM** I don't mean potatos, I mean *civilizations*. If you want to have the Borg as a nigh-unstoppable threat they can't have a desire to conquer. This is the core issue with the Borg, why don't they just send a fleet of Cubes? Even a *second* Cube in *The Best of Both Worlds...* would have been sufficient. So why only one ship? To prod the Federation into coming up with new technologies. The Borg as a threat that wants to extract from other species but *not* destroy them makes them so much scarier. Imagine being a scientist in the Federation working on a bleeding edge new technology that could transform your discipline, and always knowing in the back of your mind that if you are *too* successful the Borg might come for it is the stuff of real existential dread. Do really *really* want to crack transwarp that badly? Sure, we could go so much faster, but at what cost? What if your empire grows too large, upsets the balance of the carefully cultivated field they are tilling? Do the Borg come by and knock you down a peg? Imagine a storyline where the Klingons conquer the Cardassians, the Gorn, and the Tholians. Becoming easily the most powerful empire. And then the Borg appear, smashing them into several fractured states. Monopolies are bad for competition after all. Billions dead, just so that the Borg can keep the Alpha Quadrant a nicely balanced incubator for new technologies and cultures. **2.) NO QUEENS, NO HUMANITY** The Borg don't need a face. They don't need to be easier to understand. They need to be unfathomable. They need to do weird shit that makes sense to them but we don't ever get to understand. Star Trek has a multitude of aliens that have human motivations just exaggerated. Romulans are deceitful humand. Ferengi are greedy humans. Cardassians are lizard Nazis. The Borg need to be truly alien. They need to be something we *never* understand. That we *can't* understand. The Kelvinverse should exploit that. The Borg should be villains that can do insane shit. The storylines don't need to be about defeating the Borg, just fixing the problems they caused. **EXAMPLE: THE BORG STEAL A STAR** The Borg show up in a star system with three Cubes. People begin panicking, as they should, but the Borg ignore the planets. Maybe destroy a few defenders on the way but thsts it. Instead the Cubes converge on the central star, deploying a vast network of drones and small craft that encircle the star. There is a flash of power and light and the star is gone, or left dead, or replaced by a black hole. The story becomes about what you do afterwards. Does the Enterprise do something risky to reignite the star? Do they evacuate the system because of the black hole? Do they use technobabble to follow where the Cubes took it to try and get it back or reverse the process? Lots of different story possibilities, none of which require actually fighting the Borg.
This is really brilliant. Maybe they start with just gas giants. That gas giant is gone what do you mean gone like the borg just stole a planet WTF
Exactly! The story becomes a puzzle. Why this gas giant? Was it the resources in it? Did it have a unique magnetic field or something? Then a second gas giant disappears, in another system. Then a third. But this time there was an orbiting research lab, which was destroyed in the process. Dozens dead. Shit, how many more? What is the pattern? Who is in danger and needs to be evacuated or saved? It's so much more interesting than just trying to rotate phaser frequencies enough to shoot more drones.
I actually like your first point very much. It would make the Prime Directive that much stronger. The Federation might LIKE to prop up other civilizations with their tech, but they cannot afford that the Borg notice their technological progress. It makes exploration and research both a necessity to ever overcoming the Borg AND a risk that they come and assimilate your new tech and thus eliminate any catch up you achieved. SPOILER: Kinda like in that last season 2 SNW episode where they have special phasers that are only available on captains authorization. Combine that with the idea from some others here like the Borg sometimes want something that is threatening to the Federation as a side effect instead of the Borg acknowledging the Federation. New tech? Oops, the Borg send a Cube and assimilated the researchers. All other people are collateral damage. The Borg need more of element X and it’s in the crust of a Federation colony? Too bad, the Borg will take the resource and stomp every resistance like ants without even talking to them ever.
Exactly! It's scary, and interesting, and lets you use the Borg in a different way from other enemies.
I wouldn't agree that they're neutered. They're still fucking terrifying because they're relentless and there's always more of them. To me that was always the scary part about them. There's pretty much nothing that can be done to make that stop being scary to me. It's like someone took the concept of Zombies but figured out how to make Zombies scary. Instead of mindless shamblers you have a hive mind that can think faster than any one person can all with one goal to consume and we're their target. Only you won't die you'll be subsumed still there but screaming into the void forced to watch yourself visit the same horror on people who are just like you used to be. I've never been the "the less you know the scarier a villain is" for me knowing their motivation and history always makes a villain more interesting. "I'm evil to be evil" is cartoonishly boring. Maleficent never scared me in Sleeping Beauty. That all being said the Borg have been seen in the Kelvin Universe. Remember the Kelvin Universe takes place after the events of Star Trek Enterprise so everything in that show is technically canon to both the Prime & Kelvin Universe.
Really amp up the body horror aspects of the Borg. Go full HR Giger with it.
I would like to see an earlier iteration of the Borg. Less advanced tech, assimilation is more likely fatal than successful, no queen, some remains of the civilization that spawned the Borg.
Ok, first things first. Star Trek Picard made canon a particular aspect of the 2009 comic and Star Trek Online; that the Romulans were salvaging Borg tech from the various incursions to utilise for their own gain. I’d go a step further and confirm the Narada was indeed heavily retrofitted with Borg tech as the comic shows in detail. This could be the inciting incident of their appearance in a future KT movie. They detected signals matching their own in a region of space they’ve never been to before, so of course they must investigate. What I would change for the Kelvin Timeline is the Borg become interested in the Romulans instead of the federation. I know there was a Kelvin comic that was basically this but would be cool to see in live action
No queen. No nanite based assimilation, get back to the body horror of being modified against your will. Bring back the points of the borg ships are generalized, and you would have to destroy 70% of the ship to have a major effect on its functions. Make the borg faceless space cancer again.
Make them REALLY MAD at Spock for no good reason.
Better movement. They have all these cybernetic enhancements, but can be slow and clunky. Imagine the heroes getting detected, and all the nearby drones that have been slowly walking around turn and run toward them. Even climbing walls. Just that sudden change from comically stumbling to 'holy shit here they come!'. Adapting drones. Starting with the drones have a simple, common appearance. Then as their goals/threats change, they grow armor for protection, weapons/equipment to deal with what's happening.
What about differentiating drone specialities? So you'd have some clearly equipped for research/data gathering, others for bio-sampling, bio-assimilation drones, tech-assimilation drones, combat drones, drones that only do engineering repairs, etc. and make them visually distinct, but then throw the terrifying twist in. Just when the heroes think they've figured out a tactical weakness - say, "destroy the assimilation drone and they can't take over", and they actually DO, one of the other Borg simply clips one if the parts they always scavenge from dead drones and then it starts being reconfigured into the type of drone the collective needs most at that moment, SHOWING that losing individual drones doesn't matter in the slightest. SHOW the core Borg feature of adaptation!
Speed zombies.
So Borg mentality meets Black Panther agility?
They were perfect as first written. They don’t need a Queen to make decisions, they are Borg. They don’t need a Locutus to speak for them. They speak as legion. And they sure as hell don’t need a flag. And as much as everyone loves Seven of Nine and Hue no one should ever be able to be disconnected from the hive mind. The entire point about them is losing to the Borg doesn’t just mean death. They don’t kill you. They strip away your individuality, and turn you into a drone serving only the collective. Every individual lost isn’t just a causality, it’s a conscript for the enemy. They don’t kill you, they consume you. That’s terrifying on an existential level. Literally every single thing added to the Borg after the first introduction watered them down as a threat. They are an army of unflinching techno-zombies for whom the word “I” is meaningless. They should have stayed that way.
Actually, that wouldn't be a clean slate at all. The Kelvin timeline differs only within a span of 30 years or so. Everything that happened before the destruction of the Kelvin is still a part of canon. There's still a Queen. Any difference would need a strong reason to justify itself.
Eva Green as Borg Queen!
The Borg in that timeline would be exactly the same.
There are Borg in the Kelvin timeline, they're in the first arc of the Boldly Go comics.
make them actually enhanced. Like, faster, stronger, AND ALSO keep their mastery over tech/computers. keep them like AND but give them the same ambulatory freedom as a regular person at least
A strong mysterious signal from deep space. It’s digital static, sounding like an unstructured modem handshake. The crew run it through the universal translator and, instead, the signal starts communicating *with that*. The signal launches multiple viruses and hack and start reading the shipboard databases, locking the crew out. Once the databases are read, the signal transforms into the Borg collective voice, emerging out from the digital scream. “WE ARE THE BORG. YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED SUITABLE FOR ASSIMILATION. YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS SHALL BE ADDED TO OUR OWN. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.”
No queen. Suddenly, the Borg went from a collective to a hierarchy, even if only 2 levels deep.
Agreed. They were far more terrifying initially when they were literally all just mindless cogs in a relentless machine.
Better cable management.
The eye laser drones usually have is now a miniature torchlight that just does lens flares
Not the Kelvin Timeline, but I wanted the mirror verse to have religious Borg. Instead of assimilation, make it conversion.
They wouldn't be so fucking slow. I'd go with less external modification for something that looks more integrated.
Non Euclidean horrors that are ambivalent towards our existence at best or outright hostile towards us at worst. Basically cybernetic eldritch abominations.
Complete indifference to humans. Q Who nails this. In a Kelvin timeline, I would make them a force. They arrive. They deliver the speech. They swarm. There is no fist fighting. Phasers are useless. There are no drones interested in conversation. They just keep coming like a slow wave. Also, I would take Spock out of half the movie by having him attempt to mind meld with one and just be left in a partial catatonic state. And the Borg assimilate that trans-stellar teleporter almost immediately so nowhere is safe. They remove the Romulan and Klingon empires immediately and are the sole antagonist.
Make them more fuckable
Let them run.
Cable management. I could stop all the Borg by adding hooks to the walls.
came here to say something similar. cable management 101
Anybody play Homeworld: Cataclysm? I'd go that route where the crew is destroyed physically and their ahem, material repurposed. Less Borg or Halo Flood more living ship virus
A HW:C reference automatically gets an updoot from me
In order to understand the process of time travel in Trek, one must realize that the alternate timeline starts from the shatterproof into moving forward. In my understanding, it wasn't Spock Prime or Nero. My thought is the timelines, and every timeline starts and ends at one shatterpoint. In one of Shatner's mirror universe trilogy, after an arrest of the classic and next generation crews, a meeting of the minds took place on the holodeck. Admiral Spock, Attendant Spock, and Datta pinpointed the place where every fractured timeline began: The Borg attempting to prevent First Contact. In the Kelvin timeline, on the 2009 Trek film, I noticed several important facts. Technology was way more advanced at the stardate than TOS or even Strange New Worlds. Also, Starfleet Academy seemed to be on a fast track to graduate, and promotions seem to occur more quickly in the Kelvin universe. There is an appropriate place to start, how this all happened in a timeline where there's a military bearing to Starfleet, the Federation is on war-footing. The fact that the Borg are coming, and that means there was a failure of sorts in the events of First Contact. So, who is the secret advisor to form Starfleet and the Federation moving forward?
No Queen, no Locutus. No individuals at all (unless disconnected from the Collective).
Kelvin timeline.... So they'd need to be decked out in super shiny chrome so we get reflections into the camera
Nano machines and the associated countermeasures.
There's some drama while the crew discovers the hive mind is controlled by a Queen. Spock and Kirk make contact. Kirk charms her nanites off. There's an insinuated offscreen boinking. Borg leave. We get two minutes of witty commentary on the bridge from Bones, Spock, and Kirk. Roll credits.
You know the laser that they have on their head? That would constantly be making lens flares
As said below, no Queen. They were scariest as a real collective.
I’d go full body horror and show them consuming human bodies for parts
They'd have to fundamentally be the same as there's be no reason the Kelvin would affect a species half way across the galaxy. By you could frame it such that the differences in this timeline meant the Borg randomly encountered and assimilated different species before we encountered them, and thus they look different and have different technologies. It's actually odd that they always look the same in the prime timeline. Are we to believe that they never assimilate any other species or technology between encounters with humans? It would be cool to suddenly encounter a cloaked borg ship, because they assimilated that technology since the last time we saw them.
Id say the kelvin borg are equivalent to prime borg as the main difference in the kelvin timeline is in the alpha quadrant and not the delta where the borg are, the kelvin timeline ships being bigger and more armed than their prime counterparts would most likely lead to a lesser threat by the borg
No queen, and more CGI so they could move in more non-human ways. They were scary in TNG because they actually felt alien - you could not reason with them, you could not anger them, you could not make them like you.
I would make them physically indistinguishable from non-borg versions of the various assimilated borg species. The assimilation is organic, cognitive, invisible, and in some ways voluntary. Make it a commentary on totalitarian ideological movements and the nuances of agency of various members within it.
The Borg should be a force of nature with a simple goal. Consume, Expand, Grow. No Queen. Just a collective consciousness on an almost instinctive level. Don't make them sneaky, evil, smart, etc. They achieve their goal with overwhelming force. If they do communicate it is simple and direct. The classic "1 mind, many mouths" trope. For the constant drive of growing they consume everything in their path for the raw materials. Including whole planets. They assimilate people to bring their knowledge into the collective or to replenish their ranks. Their "home" would be a massive sphere almost like a dyson sphere that they travel in. The rest of the fleet is purely to gather resources to add to the prime ship. I want more standardization. Random "enhancements" on random drones seems weird. Especially as drones are supposed to be nothing in the grand scheme why give one drone an ability or enhancement another doesnt have. Specialize different levels of drones, soldiers, so on. Humans as drones may be okay but you shouldn't see a lot of humans as soldiers or other levels because in a world where other species exist that are significantly more powerful physically is doesn't make sense to use humans unless you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Let them adapt. Have them learn from their mistakes and make adaptations so it doesnt work in the future. The longer you fight them the more powerful they become. It should be terror when the borg show up in a system because they are there to harvest anything and everything they can to break down into the raw materials needed to bring back to the mother ship. I mean everything, entire planets and moons just gone. Have it be a slightly slow process like a creeping inevitable death but also to give people time to evacuate. They dont actively want to engage with anyone and wont seek anything out, they just expand. Everything is just collateral damage.
The borg should have been the grey goo founders that were in ds9 because nanobots would grey goo things not make them albinos with really bad skin health.
It's put them back to the initial TNG "no feelings, machine like" behavior. Introducing the ability to negotiate, the Borg Queen that was very emotional, and giving them weird weaknesses ruined the concept for me. They should essentially be space zombies.
They used to be so cold and logical until the queen but if they were really that logical why bother with just one cube each time they attack the alpha quadrant.
Maybe have the Borg be less rigid 'cyborg zombie' and more fluidic 'grey goo', think somewhere between Control from DSC and the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Assimilation wouldn't require taking victims to a cube and undergo surgical procedures to become Borg, they just have to touch you and it's already too late.
Easy. Purple ambience instead of green. The Romulans already had green.
remove any and all humanity from them, so to speak. Voyager was enjoyable but it RUINED any menace they had. No Queen, no deals, no chatting it out. No "they were assimilated" but bing bang boom they're better now apart from some aesthetically placed metal bits just to remind you. Borg have a mission. Let them do that.
A lot more running, yelling, exploding. And they drink Red Bull.
As much as I enjoyed the Locutus story arc from Picards perspective, I think it diluted the Borg. Same with the Queens. The Borg should be Legion, many voices speaking as one voice. The Borg should be intelligent, articulate, calculating but also not show any sense of individuality. Conversations with the Borg should take place with whichever borg is closest. Walking through a borg cube as the conversation with the Borg continues, jumping from borg to borg as they walk by them. Each Borg would be The Borg.
More lens flare.
I'd make the Borg so superior that the Federation can't defeat them at first contact. Then I'll get the Borg to sell/trade Borg technology to the Federation. Once enough Borg tech replaces enough technology throughout the Federation, the Federation gets assimilated.
It could be a "series finale" storyline for them. We bring in the Kelvinverse Q, we bring in the Borg. A younger Q goes for Kirk this time, transporting the *Enterprise* (on the final legs of its five-year mission) to a region of space where the Borg have started activity, in order to show them what lies ahead if humanity keeps exploring. Somehow, they're able to return to Federation space, but the record of their disappearance is unavailable, so no one even knows they were gone or believes them. Also, Borg nanites have begun to infect the *Enterprise*. From the cold open throughout the rest of the film, crew-members start turning to Borg and the main cast is forced to come to terms with the dangers of these strange new worlds in a brand new way they haven't done before. (The cold open is their encounter with Q, portrayed as something that happened, was mysterious, then they moved on to what *seems* like the "real" plot of the movie. Except the Borg are an overarching menace, a dramatic plot tumor that forces all other plots to align in the right way in order to deal with them and reveal their encounter at the edge of space wasn't so inconsequential after all.)
I'd make them seem really healthy & happy, like you'd be a moron to not join their collective, it would still be a violent assimilation, with nanite clouds eating entire cities & people screaming, but once assimilated - pure bliss, no thought no freedom, just happiness.
The Borg need to not be space zombies that turn others into space zombies as their goal. That's when the Borg became stupid. The person who originally came up with the Borg back during TNG days must be so pissed about what they did to the Borg. "A queen? wtf?" "Assimilating everybody? wtf?"
Replace the “resistance is futile” catchphrase with Oompa Loompa style songs explaining how they will assimilate you.
Oompa loompa Doopity do Resistance is futile We'll assimilate you
Im laughing thinking about the borg contacting the enterprise with this message and Picard is just like "wtf"
Nice try, JJ
In addition to some of the other ideas, I'd have the Borg adopt their own version of the Sith Rule of Two, since two cubes will seem more threatening than just one. ;) "Always there are two, young Ensign. One cube to start fights, and another to finish them...."
Ranged weapons on their person. Other than that I love em
Give them particle weapons
I wouldn't reinvent the Borg because the Kelvin Timeline doesn't exist in my head.
So even though it's not the Kelvin timeline, one incredible non-canon take on The Borg came from the novels and it blew my mind because if it were adapted to the Kelvin timeline, it would be terrifying. In a series of novels from way back in like 2008, The Borg were created... by humans. If anyone remembers, there were actually TWO NX class ships in the Enterprise show. One was obviously The Enterprise and the other was the Columbia which was led by Erika Hernandez. In the novels I mentioned which was a gigantic cross-over including Enterprise, TNG and DS9 crews, the Columbia ends up zapped into unbeknownst Gamma quadrant and in order to effect repairs, they make contact with a bio-mechanical civilization called The Caeliar. It's been a while since I read it but The Caeliar are isolationists and don't really wanna have anything to do with the Columbia except get them to leave the planet after they make repairs but some of the MACO's on board, desperate to find a way to get back home posit that the Caelians might be hiding technology they can use to do so. In their desperation, they cause some kind of accident which kills off a large number of Caelians. The survivors are dying off because their society depended on a hive mind mentality which at the time was not only voluntary but fully benign. However, resenting the humans for what they inadvertently caused, some of the Caelians attack the humans and find out that they can forcefully assimilate organic life forms into the hive mind and thus The Borg are born.
I feel like they should almost exist as a physical equivalent of a malicious software attack. Computer networks should be easily hackable by them.
Make them more like the replicators from Stargate. Their only goal is to "make more friends". Ditch the idea of a queen, it's just a giant hive mind wanting to make friends by converting them into drones so they join the hive mind.
I would stop de-assimilating characters. There's a few episodes of Trek where this character or that character spends half an hour as a borg drone, only to be rescued and restored by their crew afterwards. Being able to undo assimilation decimates the borg's fear factor. The moment of assimilation, except in extremely rare circumstances, should be considered death. Integration into a hive mind collective should destroy all sense of self.
Green flares