How the Borg Were Ruined

Does anyone else remember how, when the Borg were first introduced in “Q Who,” they didn’t “assimilate” people? You see a baby Borg in a dresser drawer, implying that the Borg produce their own offspring (viewed through the lens of modern Borg lore, it makes no sense for them to assimilate an infant).

According to Riker, “From the look of it the Borg are born as biological life form. It seems that almost immediately after birth they begin artificial implants. Apparently the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain.”

Q describes them as “the ultimate user. They're unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced. They're not interested in political conquest, wealth, or power as you know it. They're simply interested in your ship, its technology. They've identified it as something they can consume.”

In “The Best of Both Worlds,” Commander Shelby says, “I thought they weren't interested in human life forms, only our technology,” and Picard remarks, “Their priorities seem to have changed.”

So it’s established in “Q Who” and “The Best of Both Worlds” that the Borg only assimilate technology, they are generally indifferent to organic races (they repeatedly ignore away teams that beam aboard their ships), and their sudden interest in humanity is a change in their standard MO. The creation of Locutus, a human absorbed into the collective to allow the Borg to better communicate with other races, seemed to be a first-time thing. Locutus starts talking about how the Borg will assimilate the Klingons and the Federation and improve everyone’s quality of life, but the previous dialogue about the Borg’s priorities indicates that this new mission, to assimilate organic life, is something the Borg haven’t done before.

So how do we get from that to the modern conception of the Borg, which are literally just techno-zombies who infect anyone they come in contact with with a “virus” that transforms them into a drone and have been doing this to other races, including humans, for decades?

I want to say that this is all from First Contact dumbing down the concept for a mass-appeal horror/action movie, but “I, Borg” had already muddied the waters a little bit. I don’t think Hugh was intended to be an individual who had been previously assimilated by the Borg and regained his identity when brought aboard the Enterprise; rather he was born a Borg, because the Borg were originally introduced as an actual literal species, and the episode dealt with him experiencing the concepts of identity and individuality for the first time. But Guinan also says that the Borg tried to assimilate her species. In “Q Who” she said that the Borg attacked her people and destroyed their cities, forcing them into exile and scattering them across the galaxy, so this is a retcon and also seems to contradict “The Best of Both Worlds.”

So although it’s a good episode and the Borg were still a credible threat, it seems like “I, Borg” was actually the start of their rapid decline, as it’s the source of the idea that the Borg’s defining MO is just going around assimilating other races, when that was previously described as a new change in tactics.

I have no memory of anything that happened in “Descent,” but then after that of course you had First Contact take the Borg-as-plague idea to the absurd extreme and depict them as literal zombies, not to mention ruining the idea of the collective by introducing the Borg Queen.

So take post-“Best of Both Worlds” TNG’s idea that the Borg have always been assimilating people, First Contact’s ideas that the collective is paradoxically controlled by an individual and the Borg apparently don’t exist as a sexually reproducing species but an assortment of assimilated individuals from various species, and the natural villain decay of a long-running antagonist and you can begin to understand how Voyager drove whatever menace they had left into the ground.

That said, Seven of Nine’s family’s assimilation years before Locutus was supposed to mark the start of the Borg’s interest in organic races may have been the final nail in the coffin of early-TNG Borg lore, but at least she was a great character whose Borg heritage provided several interesting storylines. The Borg weren’t completely ruined until Picard had an entire cube stop working and its crew go into a coma because they assimilated a lady who was really sad.