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Julia Houston Is Borged To Death

By Christian
July 31, 2000 - 11:50 PM

Julia Houston at About.com's Star Trek Fans has put up her new weekly feature article, entitled 'Borged To Death'. As the title suggests, the article deals with the Borg, and why they're not holding up well to all the use they're getting:

There's absolutely no question about it: the Borg are one of the best things Star Trek ever came up with. About a year and a half ago, I wrote an article that praised them as "perfect villains for the end of the Twentieth Century," because they represent dangerous and narrow-minded uniformity of thought, the drone-like influences of corporate America, loss of cultural identity, the increasing homogeny of the American (and the world-wide) landscape, and the distrust of female (or any, really) authority.

And this is all still true. They're fabulous bad guys.

But, rather like the end of the Twentieth Century itself, the Borg are showing their age. Frankly, they're getting a little less terrifying and a little more tedious every time we see them.

The problem lies in the very thing that makes the Borg so much fun when you first see them: that uniform cube, the mindless-seeming drones, the overwhelming sameness of the hive mind, and -- here's the trouble -- the lack of individuals to develop as characters. Every time we meet the Borg, it's the same character, over and over. It has to be the same character by definition. And we've been meeting this character since the 80s.

You can read out by following this link to the full article.

Also new at Star Trek fans is a reader review of Voyager's 'The Fight'.

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