ST:TNG - The Best of Both Worlds

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
_____________________________________

Seriesdate: 3.26 & 4.01
The Best of Both Worlds

a.k.a. that one episode everyone remembers.

Hey, no point in posting yet another screen-cap of a Borg-ified Patrick Stewart shining his red targeting laser at the camera. The internet's full of 'em. As a rarely well-executed season ending cliffhanger, this two-parter not only cemented the Borg's primacy among pop culture SF tropes but TNG's success for the next seasons. Thirty years later, if anyone remembers anything from the show it's likely Stewart monotoning "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile." Given that it falls almost precisely in the middle of the series, many automatically think of it as the high point between fumbling aimlessly in seasons 1-2 and losing the thread in seasons 6-7.

But here's the thing: I don't think this was actually such a great episode. Oh, I enjoyed it then and still do now, sure, and it does quite a few things right. As an unusually dramatic high point it nonetheless ensured a sense of balance by keeping the strategic discussions with Starfleet calm and low-key. It could easily have overplayed the dramatic angle of the attack on Earth as well (scenes of terrified populace preparing to be assimilated, etc.) yet chose not to. It did, laudably, continue to play up the Borg's alien mindset in the scene above, their unnatural indifference to individual intruders aboard their ship. Their aesthetic was designed to drive home the point that this isn't just another spaceship, that it works by different rules, from its shape to its social life.

But the blonde in that image is also one of the episode's problems. She eats up screen time like she's meant to become a major cast member (which thankfully did not happen) but like Tasha Yar she's too much of a feminist icon to make an interesting, contextualized character. In Yar's case it was a matter of overblown physicality. Here it's a different "strong woman" archetype, a cut-throat bitch whom we're expected to find sympathetic for being born the correct, entitled (and adorable) sex. If she'd been male her bluster would have drawn Branniganesque levels of scorn. It didn't help that her sub-plot was tied to what had already become a tired recurring theme: Riker being offered command of his own ship yet nobly refusing. I do have some minor quibbles as well, like hearing a command to load forward torpedo bays as the Enterprise is running away from the enemy. The enemy that's behind it. The main issue, however, was rushing the development of the Borg as antagonists.

It's hard to think, watching the series now in order, that this was only their second appearance. They were unwisely written into the over-arching plot as introduced by act of Q and thus never had a chance at a gradual reveal, at building an air of mystery and menacing the fringes of known space. Now, for an encore, they're already getting intimate with the main cast and diving headlong toward Earth. TNG, overall, had a terrible habit of trying to dazzle the audience with exceptions to the norm before it had even defined its norms. The Borg, by themselves, would have made an excellent season capper. Locutus could have waited another couple of appearances. An attack on Earth even more so.

But their aesthetic was a stroke of genius. At their core, nothing new. Puppet Masters had drifted in and out of popularity for several decades, and TNG's initial, failed attempt at fabricating an assimilating alien menace was in fact so Heinlein-inspired as to beg royalties. But this was 1990. The counterculture music scene was drifting more and more away from punk rage and paranoia to industrial despair and nihilism. Neuromancer was several years old and the cyberpunk genre had already established itself. The Crow was still a few years away, but The Sandman was just kicking off. All in all, the Borg in their bleached make-up and black neoprene glory stuck a perfect landing into the rise of the '90s "goth" subculture, even if they're not generally cited as one of its centerpieces. Even their catchphrase "resistance is futile" could've rolled off the tongue of Trent Reznor himself.