Axiom's Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

(Continuing our Summer of Star Trek series)

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Stars (Give Your Rating)

Immediately after the release of Star Trek: Generations it was decided that another film, this one centering exclusively on the cast of the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, should be made to coincide with the 30th Anniversary of the franchise as a whole. It was also decided that the creative team behind Generations, producer Rick Berman and writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, would be placed in charge of the new film. Berman wanted a time travel story, Moore and Braga favored a new encounter with the Borg, a collective of cyborgs whose “race” is expanded through assimilation of unwary individuals of any species. It was eventually decided that both ideas would be combined. Berman’s thought was that the Borg would travel to the past to short-circuit the European Renaissance and would be replete with sword fights and tights (which Patrick Stewart refused to wear) but it was decided that might fall too easily into camp. Braga and Moore had the idea that the Borg would try and interfere with the first warp flight by Zephram Cochrane, thereby preventing humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans, and that was pretty much the idea that would eventually see film (there were many details that would change from the original idea to the finished product). A few well-known directors such as Ridley Scott, among others, were considered to direct but between their saying no and the feeling that some of them just didn’t know Star Trek it was finally settled that Jonathan Frakes would direct. So the stage was set.

The story: Captain Jean-Luc Picard awakes on the Enterprise-E from a nightmare involving his assimilation by the Borg. He is then told by an admiral that a Borg ship has been spotted heading to Earth, and the Enterprise is ordered to patrol the Neutral Zone rather than help defend Earth due to Picard’s perceived emotional distress with the Borg. The Enterprise, of course, hears that the battle is going badly and disobeys orders, saving the crew of the Defiant, which includes old crewmate Worf, on their way to Sector 001 (Earth). They arrive and Picard directs the remnants of the fleet to fire upon a seemingly insignificant section of the Borg Cube, which then explodes, a spherical ship escaping the conflagration at the last moment. The sphere opens a temporal rift and disappears into it, leaving behind an Earth populated entirely by Borg (the Enterprise is theorized to have survived the changes due to their proximity to the rift). The Enterprise follows the sphere into the rift and the crew find themselves in 2063, one day before the first recorded warp flight by humans. They destroy the sphere only to find that the Borg have gotten a toehold on the Enterprise itself. Shenanigans ensue.

This film was the first major use of the Borg since Picard’s assimilation in the fourth season ep, “The Best of Both Worlds”. The decision not to use them was borne of budget constraints on the show and the feeling that they might lose their fearsomeness due to overexposure (a thought that was apparently overcome by the fourth season of Star Trek: Voyager). It was also decided to make the conflict with the Borg a little more personal by giving them a “hive queen” who would be known only as the Borg Queen and be given a personality and a sense of individual identity. I still think this was a real mistake, despite the fact that the Queen is such a good villain. If they had had her there to usurp the role of leader for the Borg, in the same manner as Lore from the fifth season TNG ep “Descent”, that would have been better. The whole point of the Borg is that they were supposed to be a perfect, complete collective consciousness wherein every individual was nothing more than a cell in a much larger “single entity”. And that entity’s sole purpose was to find and assimilate technologies it did not already possess. Having a “queen” gives that entity a personification that it did not need, in my opinion, although I do understand it from a narrative standpoint, I guess; it certainly made the story more appealing to the masses.

Besides that, my only real problem with the film is why the Borg came to Earth in the first place. I’ve never understood the Borg’s fascination with humanity. They’ve assimilated people from the Federation before, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, humans, and they didn’t feel the need to rush to Romulus or Qo’noS or Vulcan, or any of a thousand other worlds between Earth and Borg space. But even that’s not really the problem I have: I don’t understand why the Borg came all the way to Earth in the first place before going into the past. They could have gone back three hundred years in the Delta Quadrant and then come to Earth in the 21st Century completely unopposed. (And that’s without my considering that they could keep going back into the past and updating the Borg of previous time periods so that the Borg of previous centuries would be completely unstoppable and would have expanded naturally all the way to the Alpha Quadrant. This, given the way they “evolve” and “discover” new technologies, would create a completely new and strange kind of “societal” Mobius strip, in which they would have to assimilate technologies they already have in order to have had it in the first place.)

I do have other problems with the film, but it was made to, one, show that the Next Gen cast of characters could carry a feature film on its own, and, two, to make a profit for the studio. It performed both of these functions very well. It was filmed on a budget of $46 million and made a total of $146 million worldwide. It was also very well received by the critics.

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