Worse than that, the writers had to water down the Borg’s original concept almost immediately for dramatic interest; you just can’t have many compelling conversations with a faceless swarm announcing that resistance is futile. The Borg are great every so often, but it doesn’t take long before you want to go running back to the Klingons, Romulans, Vorta, or Cardassians—baddies with whom you can actually manage a compelling tête-à-tête about Great Power politics or competing cultural philosophies. It may have been the action-packed spectacle of “The Best of Both Worlds” that first drew me into Star Trek, but it is this—the intellectual back-and-forth, the radical project of trying to imagine yourself in the Other—that has kept me here these many years, and that I have tried to emulate in my own novel.
So why is it, then, that on those rare occasions when Secret Hideout-era Star Trek has tried to actually introduce major new threats, so many of them have tended to be in the model of the Borg—monstrous, generic, doomsday villains? Let’s consider our track record: Discovery season two introduced CONTROL, an evil AI who wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy for reasons that were never made clear, with a catchphrase that sounded like someone ran “Resistance is Futile” through a thesaurus app. Picard season one ended with a brief face-off against a similar, extragalactic AI so powerful that it could scour all organic life from the Milky Way at the drop of a hat; season two ended with an even more generic threat from… something… that randomly opened a transwarp conduit that almost devastated the Alpha Quadrant for reasons that were never explored.
And of course, the recent third season of Strange New Worlds has given us the Vezda, an enemy against whom reason and diplomacy are ontologically useless; they’re Evil, you see—“the evil that predates doing evil,” as Captain Batel memorably puts it in “New Worlds, New Civilizations.” Essentially, they’re the Devil: they desire only to wreak death and destruction across the Cosmos; the portals to their realm are kept in vast and ancient temples that seem to radiate menace; their leader, possessing the corpse of the unfortunate Ensign Gamble, goes about in a terrifying horned mask, compelling his followers to gouge out their own eyeballs for no apparent reason. And like all devils, there can be no reasoning with them; any attempts to understand their motivations or to seek peaceful coexistence are futile. They are, in other words, extremely one-note.