The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek First Contact

5. The Queen Gambit

Star Trek: First Contact
Paramount

The original horror of the Borg was that they were an implacable foe that you couldn’t communicate or reason with any more than you could with a marauding colony of army ants. This was amended to add the body horror of assimilation. The Borg didn’t merely want to consume your technology, but consume you by mutilating your body and stripping you of your mind and individuality, making you another interconnected part of their vast unholy whole.

But this movie undoes that with the invention of the Queen, who, despite her half-hearted claims to the contrary, comes across as a distinct individual who controls the Collective. So, the terror of the vast impersonal entity gets twisted into an army of mindless zombies given a face and a voice by a Republic serial villain.

The choice demonstrates a lack of imagination in order to play things conventionally. It’s an especially odd choice given the horror movie vibe of the Borg infestation of the Enterprise, and given that the killers in many horror films are, not unlike the Borg of old, relentless killing machines that you can’t converse or reason with.

 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Maurice is one of the founders of FACT TREK (www.facttrek.com), a project dedicated to untangling 50+ years of mythology about the original Star Trek and its place in TV history. He's also a screenwriter, writer, and videogame industry vet with scars to show for it. In that latter capacity he game designer/writer on the Sega Genesis/SNES "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time" game, as well as Dreamcast "Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future" where Tom Baker performed words he wrote.