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duhragonball · 4 years

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I was writing a battle scene, and I needed some cannon fodder for the bad guy side, so I went with “necro-cyborgs”, which I first saw in Avengers v.3 #21. The original idea was that Ultron wiped out all life in the Eastern European nation of Slorenia, claimed the country for himself, and then rebuilt the dead civilians with robot parts to guard its borders from a U.N. counterattack. I always thought this was a cool concept, because it highlighted Ultron’s utter lack of humanity. He’s not just a supervillain like Dr. Doom or the Red Skull. Even they would probably balk at the idea of using corpses as weapons, but Ultron doesn’t mind at all.

So that forced me to second-guess my decision to steal that idea. As I thought back on that Avengers comic, I recalled how effectively Kurt Busiek scripted it. I mean, look at the panel above. Fifty-seven words to get the horror and tragedy across. And the next page has some awesome dialogue from Thor and Iron Man, as they express how deeply disturbed at Ultron’s handiwork. I was just using it as a throwaway concept, which is kind of a waste. Really, I should probably go for something more like the cyborgs in the “Universal Soldier” movies, or maybe stick to full-fledged robots or full-fledged zombies.

This got me thinking about how powerful ideas can lose their impact over time. This Avengers comic was from 1999, and it’s been rattling around in my braid for over 20 years now. When I first read it, it was a big deal, a fresh new take. To me, at least. I’m betting this isn’t the first time a mechanized cadaver showed up in a comic book, but it was presented in a really poweful, effective way, and I’ve never seen it used since, so it’s never really had a chance to become cliche. If the Avengers fought armies of these things every few months, it would lose all meaning. Sooner or later, human bad guys like Dr. Doom and the Red Skull would start using this sort of thing, because it would become commonplace. It’s like how Archie Bunker’s toilet flushing was revolutionary at the time, but I’ve never understood the importance of it, because Al Bundy would flush his toilet in every episode of Married with Children.

This got me thinking about the Borg, and how they sort of lost their luster over the course of the 90′s and 2000′s. I’ve been getting some Star Trek clips recommended to me on YouTube, and I’ve been watching some Borg stuff from across TNG and Voyager, in nothing close to chronological order. In their first appearance, they were presented as this powerful, unfathomable enemy. They wanted to take control of the Enterprise, but it wasn’t clear what they wanted to do with it. Everyone remembers when they assimilated Captain Picard, and at the time that was presented as this horrible, earth-shattering thing, like the very worst possible thing a bad guy could do. From there, assimilation was pretty much what the Borg became all about. They assimilated Picard so he would help them assimilate Earth, and Star Trek has never looked back. They just want to assimilate everyone and everything.

So, in this Voyager clip I just watched, it was from an episode where Janeway leads a team onto a Borg ship and gets assimilated on purpose, for the sake of infiltrating the Borg for some mission, I think to rescue Seven of Nine, but I forget. I always found this odd, because Picard’s assimilation was depicted as this traumatic experience that he never fully recovered from, and then you have Voyager characters doing it as casually as a G.I. Joe dressing up in a Cobra uniform to sneak into their base. Without really meaning to, they made it so mundane that it lost some of its dramatic potency.

Some of that I blame on Star Trek: First Contact, where the Borg in that movie had the power to inject nanoprobes into their victims and assimilate them on contact, instead of the hours-long process they used on Picard. It worked well in that movie, because the Borg were trapped on board the Enterprise, and their only way to stay in the game was to convert the ship to their side as quickly as possible. Same deal as the Borg Queen. They invented her because they needed a character for the good guys to talk to and interact with.

The trouble with all of that was that Voyager had to use all those ideas too, and it seemed a little weird that you have all these thousands of Borg ships with tens of thousands of cyborgs on each one, and they all have those nanoprobe injectors, and they have huge “transwarp hubs” that let them go anywhere in the galaxy, and yet they only sent one ship to assimilate one guy when they first invaded the Federation. If they’re so brutally efficient about assimilation, and they’re such a big operation already, then why haven’t they already taken over the whole galaxy?

Besides, what do they need all those bodies for, anyway? The official line is that they want to add other culture’s “distinctiveness” to their own, but they never seem to actually use any of that. They just make all thse aliens look exactly the same, and they make them stand around in a big box all day. There’s never a big idea behind any of it. They would show Borg Planets and Borg space stations or whatever, and they always looked like the same dark-grey crap their ships are made out of, only bigger. What’s any of it for? They’re presented as this cosmic-level threat, like Galactus, except they never explain that he’s hungry.

I guess what I’m saying is that each Borg story sort of works better in isolation. Once you start thinking about all of them as a single arc, there are inconsistencies that creep in. Taken as a whole, they become less potent as a villain. I always wanted to see the Borg get nerfed a bit, so that we could get into what they’re really about behind all of their power, but it seems like there’s not a lot to them once you take away their air of invincibility. And that only works for so long.

There’s other examples of this, of course. One of the reasons I fell out of reading comics was that it seemed like the only stories they ever wanted to tell were about multiverses and different versions of the same character meeting each other to stop some bad guy from destroying the multiverse. No one can just fight crime anymore, it has to be an epic battle that will rock the very foundations of the [x] Universe. The shaky-cam effect in movies probably seemed like a good idea once upon a time, but everyone’s sick of it now. I read something once about how you never see quicksand in fiction anymore, when it used to show up all the time. Somewhere along the way it just stopped being novel and audiences stopped taking it seriously.

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