Imaginary Worlds - Fear of The Borg

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Patrick Stewart is reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard in the new TV series “Picard,” where the writers have promised a very different storyline on his arch nemesis The Borg. In our final installment on villains, we discuss why The Borg are a unique existential threat to the Star Trek ethos with the help of three academics who combine science fiction with philosophy in their courses. Featuring Kevin Decker and Christina Valeo of Eastern Washington University and Shawn Taylor of San Francisco State University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. This month, Patrick Stewart is going to reprise his role as Jean-Luc Picard in the new series Picard on CBS All Access. We have an obligation to investigate. There is no we, Jean-Luc. Admiral, I am standing up for the Federation, for what it should still represent. This is no longer your house, Jean-Luc. Go home. I am very excited. As I've mentioned before, The Next Generation is my favorite Star Trek series,

although only a few of the actors from The Next Generation will be in Picard. But the show will feature Picard's arch-nemesis, the Borg. And the writers have promised this is going to be a storyline about the Borg we have not seen before. The Borg were the closest thing that Star Trek had to pure villains. They want to assimilate every species into the Borg collective. And you do not want to be a Borg. They're like Frankenstein monsters,

where all their body parts are stitched together, either from robotic limbs or pieces of other Star Trek species. And they fly through the galaxy in these giant cube ships and tell everybody, you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. And I will resist you with my last ounce of strength.

Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. So with the Borg returning to pop culture, I wanted to explore why they're so memorable, so durable, and so haunting. So, I decided to assemble a roundtable discussion with three academics who combine science fiction with philosophy. Cristina Vallejo, that goes by

Chris, and Kevin Decker both teach at Eastern Washington University. And I started by asking Chris if she thought the Borg were scary when she first saw them on television. I think they're still terrifying. I was using our meeting today as a chance to brush up, and there's something about that, especially the shape of the ship and the fact that it shouldn't fly based on physics that we understand. Did you rewatch First Contact, Chris? I did a highlight of First Contact.

That's where they're super scary. Yeah. And played for scares. They're really sort of inscrutable and uncanny. And yeah, I think they're still super unsettling. Yeah. I always thought that they were like malignant and not malicious.

And that is Sean Taylor. He teaches at San Francisco State. And it was just like, this is cancer. Yeah. Like there's just nothing you can, I mean,

there's nothing you can really do about this. I'm thinking like if it was a real world situation, you would just have to like, all right, what do you want to assimilate first? My neck or real world situation you would just have to like all right what do you want to assimilate first my neck or my face like i just have to give in there's not much more that i can do there's something about that just something that is relentless yeah yeah they're like a fort they're like cancer or a force of nature and of course

they they turn the the power of the federation uh on its head by basically saying, look, you guys sometimes assimilate cultures as well, and now we're going to do that to you, and you have no choice about it. Yeah, it really forced me to think about the Federation as colonizers. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because the word assimilation used to have a very positive connotation in American culture. It was, you know, this part of the immigrant experience. And now there's a lot of anxiety, obviously, on the right with xenophobia, but also in the left

in terms of losing cultural identity and what he was assimilating to exactly. Do you think the Borg taps into those anxieties? I think especially in terms of the power differential, the notion that you have no control over what's taken, how it's taken, how it's going to be deployed. And re-watching that really poignant episode of Family where Jean-Luc goes back to Earth after his trauma, after he's been attacked and violated and used and he's so aware that he's been weaponized it's heartbreaking she is referring to a series of episodes where picard is assimilated by the borg and the borg use him to try and destroy the federation i am locutus of borg resistance Sam Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile.

Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us. Eventually, the crew of the Enterprise is able to capture Picard and restore him, but he never gets over the trauma of having been assimilated into the Borg. Again, Kevin Decker. I think the earliest Borg episodes make it very clear that it taps into a kind of body anxiety, right, of taking over somebody else's body. They introduce the nanites, the Borg nanites that do the work from the inside. So I think apart from the cultural dimension, which we should talk about, which is really

important, there is also this kind of visceral dimension of the Borg using bodies for their own purposes, regardless of the owners, if you will, intentions. And it's just like the homogeneity of it. It's just, you were these once vibrant, beautiful things, and now you're just this. You know, and as a son of immigrants, I mean, assimilation was always like this battle in our household. You know, change the accent. Don't use certain words.

Be under the radar. Change your last name. Absolutely. Just the erasure of autonomy. You are part of this one collective single mission, which on the surface looks pretty interesting. Okay, we're all geared towards this one thing, this one goal, when that one goal

is just basically accumulation. Yeah. That seems to me, that is something that really, to this day, I mean, when I teach a couple episodes to my students, and they're just like, this is, I mean, just because we have students now who are so hyper individualized within our social media profiles and the rest, to even like consider what does it mean to lose what you think is special, is just horrifying to a lot of people, especially to I think, people who pride themselves on individuality.

It's funny. So you're talking about the body and merging technology with the body. I was thinking of the philosophy of transhumanism, which a lot of sort of Silicon Valley moguls like to present as this wonderful future. Well, I mean, our bodies are already merging with technology anyway with bionic limbs. But eventually, we'll have implants in our brains where you can search Google with your mind and upload your memories to the cloud

and hyperlink with each other. And I'm surprised more people don't say, oh, you mean like the Borg? Yeah. Well, maybe they will after your program. Yeah, maybe they will. Or maybe the Borg, yeah, maybe they've been too normalized. I don't know.

But does that tap into transhumanism as well? Those, because that philosophy was certainly very much around in the nineties. Yeah, sure. Sean, you've done stuff on Afrofuturism. What's the,

what's the overlap there? I mean, for me, what's, what's interesting with Afrofuturism and this discussion is that it's never about the merging of technology and the body. A lot of the times it's about how to make technology more like the natural world. So there's more of a unison there as opposed to, here's this giant hunk of machinery,

let's get to this where it's actually, there some type of you know technological and biological parody and i think transhumanism is also really interesting and it makes me wonder why these silicon valley people you know purport that because it seems like if you don't it seems like they're trying to build a culture that they may be missing now because they seem very it seems like a very disconnected type of thing. But what's missing now that you'd want to have that happen? I think for Afrofuturism, since Black people had so many things stripped from them, language and culture and everything else.

So it's not about merging with, but it's about using technology as a reparative, not as a substitute. Our conversation will continue just after the break. Make 2020 a year where you explore new skills and get lost in creativity with Skillshare's online classes. The classes are designed for real life. They're short, so you can fit them into your busy schedule. And it's affordable. An annual subscription is less than $10 a month. Believe it or not, the class that I've been enjoying is called How to Make a Podcast. Plan, record, and launch with success. I mean, obviously, I already have a podcast, but there's always so much more for me to learn.

And I found myself riveted as I was watching how the instructor edits his work, checking out what software he uses, and I enjoyed reading the feedback in the discussion section. Skillshare is a proud sponsor of Imaginary Worlds. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash imaginary and get two free months of premium membership. That's two whole months of unlimited access to thousands of classes for free. Get started and join today by heading to Skillshare.com slash imaginary. That's Skillshare.com slash imaginary. Let's return to our philosophy roundtable about the Borg. The most famous storyline around the Borg is Picard's capture and assimilation. But the second most popular storyline on The Next Generation came from a single episode called I, Borg, where the Enterprise crew

finds a wounded Borg and decides to take him on board for humanitarian reasons, which is a very controversial decision among the crew. In this Borg, the single Borg begins to change because he is disconnected from the collective and is interacting with humans. What is your designation? Designation? Third of five. You mean our names.

We don't have designations. We have names. I'm Beverly. This is Geordie. Do I have a name? Do you want one? A name. I'm Beverly.

He's Geordie. And you? You. You. I don't know. Wait a minute. That's it. I'm Beverly, he's Geordie, and you? Hugh. You? I don't know, wait a minute. That's it. Hugh. Not everybody is won over by Hugh the Borg.

The character of Guinan, who is played by Whoopi Goldberg, is still traumatized by the fact that the Borg assimilated most of the people on her home planet. But when she meets Hugh, she realizes that the Borg assimilated most of the people on her home planet. But when she meets Hugh, she realizes that the Borg are capable of change. Picard is not convinced. In fact, he wants to implant a deadly virus in Hugh and send him back to the Borg collective like a Trojan horse. But when you talk to him face to face, can you honestly say you don't have any doubt? But when you talk to him face to face, can you honestly say you don't have any doubt?

I haven't talked to it. Why not? I saw no need. If you're going to use this person... It's not a person, damn it! It's a Borg! If you are going to use this person to destroy his race, you should at least look him in the eye once before you do it. Because I am not sure he is still a Borg. Hugh is actually going to be in the new

Picard series. Although we don't know what he's been up to since The Next Generation. I asked Sean, Kevin, and Chris why they think that character resonated so deeply with the fans. The Hugh things remind me almost like how when someone's being deprogrammed from a cult,

while they're in the cult, you may have certain ideas about it. But once they get removed and having to re-assimilate into, there's that word again, into their regular society, it's kind of like, oh, wow, you realize just what was done to them and how it was done. And then I think that's where the sympathy arises, the post-assimilation as opposed to while they're part of the body of things. Yeah. And so Picard comes up with this idea of using Hugh to infect the rest of the Borg with a deadly virus. Would you say that that plan is genocide? Or is it a justifiable act of self-defense or a sort of preemptive strike against an enemy that you can't negotiate with? I don't know that I would have been able to stop myself from enacting the plan.

I'm shifting my chair a little further away. Yeah, she's moving away. I mean, I know my limitations. And being a pragmatist, there is a problem to be solved in that circumstance. And the actual status as individuals or as personalities of the Borg that would be affected or killed, if you like, is in dispute. That's part of what makes the dramatic tension in iBorg happen. With Hugh, he's clearly a person. He's been rehabilitated or re-assimilated, at least temporarily. But with the rest of the Borg, I don't know.

I mean, it depends on how expansively we want to define genocide. Obviously, we don't want to define away the possibility of genocide. It's important to keep that concept. Or how much do you want to bring into account Starfleet's own principles? Yeah. Certain people, you have the Admiral who's ready to go for it, but then you wonder, what do the Vulcans think about it? Right. What do

Andor, I mean, whoever else is part of the Federation, how are they going to think that? I mean, yeah, I mean, are any genocides necessary? I mean, I think it might have been a necessary action, but it's still, I mean, you're taking out an entire species of people or maybe former people. Now, I guess then you have to ask the question, you know, I mean, you're taking out an entire species of people or maybe former people.

Now, I guess then you have to ask the question, you know, I guess in Federation, all life is, all sentient life is life, whether it's organic or whether it's mechanical. But then you have to probably weigh those interesting moral costs. Like, if we get rid of these, you know, I don't think we ever have an idea of how many Borg there actually are. But if we get rid of them, like, how much better will the rest of us be? It's almost like a triage issue. Now, the biggest change to the Borg mythology was the introduction of the Borg queen in the 1996 movie Star Trek First Contact. First Contact was the first film to focus exclusively on the Next Generation cast. And until that point, we only understood the Borg as a collective hive. But in kind of pushing that insect metaphor further,

we learned that the Borg drones were actually controlled by a Borg queen, played by Alice Krieger. We were very close, you and I. You can still hear our song. Yes, I remember you. You were there all the time. But that ship... and all the bog on it were destroyed.

You think in such three-dimensional terms. She was a more traditional villain for the Enterprise crew to fight. An evildoer that they could focus all their attention on. But the consensus among the group was that the Borg queen actually made the Borg seem a little less scary. She is almost an anti-Borg. She's not just like a prime Borg. She's an anti-Borg. She's not just like a prime Borg. She's an anti-Borg. She's so sensual.

She's so individual. She has so much interiority. She manipulates data's interiority beautifully, almost successfully, one point. And then when you reread the Borg in retrospect, everything you've known about them before 1996, does she explain things or just totally undermine things?

It just seemed like there was, it was like, for me, it was just like, I get it. It was interesting. But part of me was wondering, you know, like the seduction of data and that entire thing. I think it was cool to have him question himself, but also it felt really kind of male gaze-y. Guys were like, ah, let's make something sexy right now for Star Trek, because it has been sexy for a little bit. And then they just made this where I think it kind of like took away the integrity of the board to me for that reason alone is because it seems more of a

sci-fi nerd's fantasy of a sexy supervillain than it did to seem like to advance the story any real way for me. I think what makes First Contact so interesting is that it is the culmination of Picard's angst over having been abducted and violated by the Borg. And the story in the movie is that the Borg have gone back to the 21st century to stop humanity when we were at an earlier stage of development. And in chasing the Borg back to the 21st century, Picard meets a character named Lily Sloan. He was played by Alfre Woodard.

And Lily can see something pretty clearly that the rest of the Enterprise crew cannot. clearly that the rest of the Enterprise crew cannot. Picard has not processed his trauma. But she's not sympathetic at first. She worries that he's reckless, obsessed to the point of self-destruction. And not being a member of his crew, she can confront him directly about it. Get out!

Off what? You'll kill me? Like you killed Ensign Lynch? There was no way to save him. You didn't even try. Where was your evolved sensibility then? I don't have time for this. Oh, hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your little quest. Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale.

Her reference to Moby Dick eventually brings Picard to his senses. Although she admits she actually never read the book, but she can recognize a Captain Ahab when she sees one. And Chris Vallejo always loved that scene. So it's six years since Picard was taken by the time this is in the show time, because I was just revisiting that scene this morning. And that movie starts with Enterprise being dispatched to patrol the neutral zone because the Admiral's pretty sure that Picard's a liability. Once the Borg are in Federation space, he's not allowed to engage, he's not allowed to bring their Enterprise into the battle. And so that notion that people are right about the fact that Picard is still vulnerable. And then I can't help but think, Sean, that Lily's the opposite of the queen,

right? As much as I hear you say like, oh, here we go, sexy enterprise. One, she's still so mechanistic, the queen, the way she can look at the drones and they can do what she says and the way that her body is pieced together that way. It's really, it's sort of disgusting and like the opposite of sexy. And Lily is so much the opposite of the queen. She's unafraid, she swears like a sailor. She's Alfre Woodard, which of course helps. She's someone who can hold the screen with Patrick Stewart. And she hasn't even read the book. Her authority comes from someplace entirely different than the Queen, than Picard, than some kind of really experiential wisdom and insight that that character has. And so how are we influential?, on the new TV show, there is going to be another former Borg character that will be having an influence on Picard. Seven of Nine, played by Jerry Ryan.

Now, interestingly, she has not interacted with Picard before. She was introduced on a different TV series called Voyager, where Captain Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew, was much more open to the idea of rehabilitating a Borg and making her part of the crew. Wouldn't you prefer to be called by your given name? Annika. I have been Seven of Nine for as long as I can remember. All right. But maybe we could streamline it a little. How would you feel about Seven? Imprecise, but acceptable. I asked the group what Seven of Nine added to the mythology of the Borg, but Chris responded with a different question I hadn't thought about.

Did we see other Borg who were female besides the queen? None of us could remember. I looked it up and turns out Seven was introduced a year after the Borg queen. Either way, Chris thought that was significant. There's some interesting constellations around our early reactions to the Borg. And one is Guinan, who has experienced the same thing. 709 has experienced, right, her people have been annihilated. She tries to warn Picard.

And then you have Beverly sort of seeing their, insisting on their, if not humanity, at least beingness. So I've been interested to sort of see what the relation is between femaleness and the Borg. I think the most fascinating thing about what you said is that the range of reactions to the Borg is more strongly represented by females in the various series than males. Huh. That's interesting. It's true that the men, I mean, except maybe Geordi, most of the men, their reaction is just to fight the Borg. Right.

Is there anything else in science fiction we could compare the Borg to? I mean, the one that comes to mind for me is the Cybermen on Doctor Who, but are there any others or are they just really unique in sci-fi? Maybe a slant parallel could be the Body Snatchers, the pod people from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Yeah, that could be because one of the things, don't they like to do this? I think they did it in First Contact and maybe in a couple other episodes is one of the most horrific things about the Borg is to find somebody who had been serving on your ship, who has been assimilated and has been fighting on the other side now. And that's always a very poignant scene.

So yeah, that's a Body body snatchers sort of moment there. I have to say that as a big Doctor Who fan, the Cybermen are a great comparison, but they're relatively underdeveloped, I think, in relationship to the Borg. And more recently, they've just been played up for the kind of body horror of knowing that if you're cyberized or whatever they call it, your brain is taken out of your body and put into a metal skeleton. And they've been riding on that since the mid 80s basically. That's the most horrifying thing about the Cybermen. But they haven't developed any personalities or any politics around the Cybermen. It's kind of unfortunate.

Yeah. Most sci-fi really has a villain problem where most of the villains aren't like scary they're maniacal but a lot of times they aren't really scary the borg is is scary i mean when we think about like yes you know as um kevin was saying that was ensign johnson a week ago and now i probably have to kill him so i can stay i mean those type of like those type of the you know the moral questions the board brings up they're just malignant they're you know you can't even touch them i mean and the thing is you know what's even scarier is your fight or flight response is directly linked to how you react to the board and if you fight they're gonna get you

there's something about that that is i mean scarier than most sci-fi villains. I guess I would wonder, I'm a little stuck in our Moby Dick world right now, but there's something about their inscrutability, both as a block and as individuals who just look like machines whose interiors you can no longer detect, that I think invites us to project

our fears onto them. And anytime we're doing that, that's a chance for human error and misstep. So the immensity, the inscrutability, that's why they're like the whale, right? That Picard can heap upon them everything that he's been not dealing with for six years. And at some point, it's past any kind of actual reckoning or weighing of insults, right? He's become something through this experience and through his inability to process the experience that has changed him in dangerous ways. It's a little bit of like the Kobayashi Maru, right? Like, what do we do with an unbeatable threat?

And what do we become in our interactions with them? Because the unbeatable threat's always going to be out there in the human experience. And in some ways, we are more dangerous to ourselves and what we become than the threat is to us. Last month, I did a two-part episode on villains. And I think the Borg are perfect villains for Star Trek because they directly challenge the ethos of the show. So the heroes in Star Trek often try to see the humanity, or what we humans would call humanity, in every species.

But how do you deal with a species like the Borg? Do you tolerate their existence, even though they are intolerant of everything that you value? Or do you fight them? And if you do, where do you draw the line? The Borg have the power to turn you into a monster. But if you resort to the most extreme tactics to stop them, if you lose your sense of humanity in the process, then they will have turned you into a different kind of monster. And it raises the importance of what Star Trek incites so well, which is a moral imagination, right? If it's what do we do if we don't, what are we willing to do if we do, then moral imagination, I think, is really required to figure out where the middle ground

is between those two points. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Kevin Decker, Sean Taylor, and Christina Vallejo. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.