See, I hate slasher movies and generally don't like villains who can't be killed. So, the whole "they can come back" basically can feel like a giant middle finger to the sacrifices made by characters.
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I don't like slasher movies either, but I do like horror movies (creature features mostly), and I do like the "unkillable villain" regardless of genre. However, there has to be good reason for the villain to survive, it can't just be "because."
Regarding the Borg Queen's multiple revivals:
Picard and Data still saved the Enterprise and the past.
Chakotay and Voyager still blasted the hell out of the Queen's ship, saving themselves and the Delta Flyer.
Admiral Janeway still took out the Unicomplex and crippled the Borg collective.
The Enterprise-D rides in to give one final smackdown on prime-Queen.
Again, logically it has merit.
Thematically it is unsatisfying. The villain coming back feels like a arrogant force who lords over the heroes their superiority.
It's not logical.
Maybe I'm just used to the unkillable System Lords from Stargate and similar villains in fiction.
I love Stargate but lots of villains don't return in that series. Ba'al being one exception and enough workarounds for them to make sense.Maybe I'm just used to the unkillable System Lords from Stargate and similar villains in fiction.
In Star Trek the episodes always end with this sense of finality to the Queen's death. It's deeply cathartic to the heroes to end the threat. And if the Queen just came back in Voyager's season finale, ok. But, she's back again and again.
I'm mostly thinking of how Apophis kept coming back from the dead many times over. Many characters did, especially Daniel Jackson, that man was unkillable.
It even became a running joke in the show. When it looked like he died for real at the end of S8, O'Neill was like: BS. I think the Borg Queen had exactly 4 on-screen deaths.
Movie: First Contact
VOY: "Dark Frontier" and "Endgame"
PIC: "The Last Generation"
I'm guessing your main objection is that she was brought back for Voyager?
What would you rather the show had done if not the Borg Queen revived?
My preferred interpretation (which I know contradicts aspects of the franchise) has been that the Queen was basically an avatar for the Collective and as such, 'killing' her on one ship was no big deal because she could just be recreated on another.
What I don't really understand is why, when she's attempting to be seductive, she doesn't choose a form that the individuals she's attempting to seduce might find more attractive...unless she knows things about Janeway and Seven that we don't.
...well, in Seven's case, we have subsequent revelations in Picard, so I guess the Queen did know things that we didn't...
What I don't really understand is why, when she's attempting to be seductive, she doesn't choose a form that the individuals she's attempting to seduce might find more attractive...unless she knows things about Janeway and Seven that we don't.
...well, in Seven's case, we have subsequent revelations in Picard, so I guess the Queen did know things that we didn't...
No. My objection is to Season 3 of Picard bringing her back.
Janeway undoes 20 some odd years of history to deal with the Borg threat and they still survive?
The whole avatar thing is basically more or less the same as what I explained, so I think we agree. There's big debate among the fans. Is there one Queen or multiple Queens? Is it the same Queen revived, or is each successive Queen a new Queen? My take is there's just the one, and it's the same character played by more than one actress. Recasting is a thing and all.My preferred interpretation (which I know contradicts aspects of the franchise) has been that the Queen was basically an avatar for the Collective and as such, 'killing' her on one ship was no big deal because she could just be recreated on another.
What I don't really understand is why, when she's attempting to be seductive, she doesn't choose a form that the individuals she's attempting to seduce might find more attractive...unless she knows things about Janeway and Seven that we don't.
...well, in Seven's case, we have subsequent revelations in Picard, so I guess the Queen did know things that we didn't...
Such linear thinking... ;P
If she is really an avatar, then I don't see there being a clear answer to that question. With Borg tech being as advanced as it is, surely multiple queens can exist at one time, as needed, with them all tying back to the greater singular Collective. It certainly feels presumptuous, to me, to assume that when Our Heroes were addressing the queen that she was the only queen in existence at that point in time, especially given how vast Borg territory was.
Besides, if there was only a single queen, wouldn't that at least temporarily cripple the Collective if her vessel accidentally fell into a spatial anomaly or such? Why put that much power in the hands of a single point of failure?
To me it's similar to the question of why the Borg only send one cube to Earth at a time: Because in the grand scheme of things, Earth and the Federation just aren't all that important to the Collective.
If she is really an avatar, then I don't see there being a clear answer to that question. With Borg tech being as advanced as it is, surely multiple queens can exist at one time, as needed, with them all tying back to the greater singular Collective. It certainly feels presumptuous, to me, to assume that when Our Heroes were addressing the queen that she was the only queen in existence at that point in time, especially given how vast Borg territory was.
Besides, if there was only a single queen, wouldn't that at least temporarily cripple the Collective if her vessel accidentally fell into a spatial anomaly or such? Why put that much power in the hands of a single point of failure?
To me it's similar to the question of why the Borg only send one cube to Earth at a time: Because in the grand scheme of things, Earth and the Federation just aren't all that important to the Collective.
Braga and Moore, who wrote First Contact conceived her as an actual person, an individual, not the "embodiment" of the Borg Collective. However, that "one person" can pull double duty as an avatar, a face for the collective. Given Braga worked on Voyager, this idea likely continued into the series. By the time we get to Picard, the character had been more or less defined.
I like to think it's one Queen who clones & rebuilds herself in the event of her "death," her consciousness stored digitally in the collective itself similar to modern day cloud storage.
True, true. I like the Queen better as an actual person, it makes the character far more interesting to me. Why do you prefer the "multiple queens" take?As I said, my preferred interpretation may be at odds with some of the data presented by the franchise.
I saw it as the opposite. We've had hints that the Borg were severely hit by the events of Endgame, but it's Picard s3 that finally says 'Janeway nearly killed them entirely and this is all that's really left'. The Borg used to be a threat to the whole galaxy, regularly assimilating whole worlds and she reduced them to this. Then Picard's crew reduced them to ash. Way more closure on these guys than I ever thought we'd get.
That's exactly how I read the Picard finale. It was a confirmation that Janeway took out the collective, and Picard and friends finished off the Queen and her last cube. There's still the Juratti-Borg, and I like to think there's still Borg remnants, the odd ship here and there that exist in isolation, and we have no idea what happened to the thousands of Borg planets. What do you think happened?
When the Collective collapsed, I suspect it was a lot like those detached vessels floating around out there. For those who were assimilated, they returned to their original selves, pre-assimilation, like the X-B's. For those born into the collective (like the infant drones in the "nursery"), I suspect they would have the hardest time of it, as they will never have had personal lives and experiences to revert back to.
Weren't the XB's only reverting to a pre-Borg state due to the removal of Borg technology and reintegration into society among Romulans on the Cube?
I'm sure that was part of it, completing the process, but once the Queen-being and Unimatrix One was destroyed, the central comms hub, command & control for all Borg collapsed. That would have started the process. IIRC, towards the end of VOY's run, they ran into de-Borgified people still flying spheres, and still wearing their Borg tech. Seven herself was severed and glimmers of her humanity were still there, coming to the surface prior to most of her implants being removed. The instant Picard was severed from the collective, he ceased being Locutus and Picard re-emerged.
Now, granted, it would have taken a longer time for someone to recover who had been assimilated for an equally long time, but I never once got the impression that the re-emerging latent personalities of the individual were in any way tied to the implants. They were simply overwhelmed and suppressed by the Borg's "signal", facilitated by the nano-tech, not because of it. Once the signal died, the person came back.
Now, granted, it would have taken a longer time for someone to recover who had been assimilated for an equally long time, but I never once got the impression that the re-emerging latent personalities of the individual were in any way tied to the implants. They were simply overwhelmed and suppressed by the Borg's "signal", facilitated by the nano-tech, not because of it. Once the signal died, the person came back.
I think you're thinking of the Borg rebellion in Unimatrix Zero. Presumably they're still cruising the galaxy with the Borg collective fallen. Maybe they will "clean up" the mess the Borg collective made over the centuries? In Prodigy, the gang found a Cube and accidentally woke up it up. I forget how the episode ended, though.
Because the whole premise of the Borg is that they remove individuality, so to be controlled by an individual just feels like hypocrisy. I like the Borg as a force of nature that can't (typically) be reasoned with, and the idea that when you speak with one of them, you're speaking with all of them. If there's a single 'leader' then it also creates a rather stupid single point of failure as well...if she was really present on the Borg ship in BoBW, then one could ask why the Collective didn't collapse when that ship was destroyed. It's also a lot more alien to have a species that you can't address as individuals than to have yet another alien race where you may have a chance of being able to negotiate with the leader of that race.
More to the point though: why would the Borg have a queen? I'm okay with the idea of them creating one to speak with humanity, but that goes back to the idea that she's subservient to the collective, not the other way around. What advantage does it give them?
It also leads to IMO awful moments like the Queen verbally issuing orders in, IIRC, "Unimatrix Zero".
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