Hypothetical: You are a writer in 1990. ‘The Best Of Both Worlds’ 2-parter has just finished airing. You have been tapped to be the “Borg Person” in the Star Trek writing room. You are tasked with writing the next Borg episode as well as given the opportunity to create a story bible for future Trek writers to adhere to for the Borg.

Your episode is to be ready for some time through the end of season 4 to the middle of season 5. What do you do with the episode and the Borg? You are not constrained by Borg canon that has been written after BOBW.

Some rules:

You can’t not use the Borg. I know some people just want them to be mysterious and not show up again, but to engage with the question you have to write something.

You can’t just kill off all the Borg. They must be usable for future writers. If you make them disappear, know it will be undone.

The ideas must be plausibly filmable with the resources of TNG production.

This is 90s TV, so you can do a 2 or maybe even 3-parter but your Borg ideas can’t eat the entire show. TNG must still be able to support non-Borg episodes.

  • @[email protected]English
    10•2 months ago

    This is probably controversial, but i always disliked how the Borg seemed to assimilate for the sake of assimilation? It was sometimes explained as their way of growth or achieving perfection, but that always rang a bit hollow as a motivation.

    If I could write a longer term direction, it would be interesting as a quasi-justifiable thing; have the Borg be the boogeyman in the dark of space, until we find out its collective drive to assimilate is a way to insulate itself against some greater evil.

    I’ve always liked stories of eldritch horrors lurking in the depths of space, so one way you could do this, is for there to be something lurking in subspace; warp drive weakens the fabric of space holding it back, which explains the Borg using transwarp conduite instead. This horror would be able to easily subvert individual minds to its needs, but the collective acting as a whole could resist it.

    A “bad guy” doing bad things for an understandable reason is much more interesting that them just being straight-up evil. So in general I would aim for something like that.