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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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I don't think I'll ever get over how they massacred the concept of the borg in first contact.
The whole premise of TNG was that diplomacy, finding common ground, and respect are the path to lasting peace. The normalization of relations with the Klingons. Picard (and Spock) trying to somehow normalize relations with the Romulans. O'Brian stealth teleporting to talk down his old captain from stirring things up with the Cardassians.
This is why the borg were so compelling. There is nobody to negotiate with because there is no authority. There is nothing you can threaten them with, or anything you can offer because NONE of thier lives have value. They have no concept of a deal... an agreement of any kind. Why should they?
This is why they were scary. The federation playbook, the Picard playbook very specifically, was wildly ill suited for the threat.
The... suddenly it was like "oh, wait, actually there is a command structure. You can negotiate. You can cut a deal. Also assasinating the boss is a super viable route". They just abandoned everything that made them compelling.
Anyways, it's been like... decades... and I'm STILL pissed off about it.
So, whatever, it was already fucked before voyager fucked it.
I don’t think the queen was treated as a command structure to the borg until Voyager. Her portrayal in First Contact seemed to me to be essentially the same as Locutus in best of both worlds. Not an individual, not in charge, but the avatar for communication that was the entire collective.
The one part that I will agree with you would be that she was much more willing to talk than previous portrayals which was compelling for the movie but did water down some of the aspects of the borg’s characterization you mention
I do agree that the construct of a command structure was formalized in voyager. I do think the very introduction you quoted still completely imploded the borg as a concept. Data even is directly pointing it out. The queen is just hand-waving it away without actually answering.
I think the ambiguity in explanation was designed to let the audience to just "fill in the blanks" however they wanted. I think the writers just said "who cares, it's a movie, TNG is over, we can fuck the TNG universe".
Huh, I always took that scene as being a classic hard sci-fi sort of “no, your thinking is constrained by what you have previously encountered, this is a new class of thing”, though I could see how one would read it your way
I totally agree that the lines are written to align with the trope of "my existence is beyond your comprehension". I just don't think they really followed through on that.
I feel like Occams razor here is just that you need to put THE villain on the movie poster. Sacrifices were made in order to meet that goal.