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SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 11:16 pm
by RK_Striker_JK_5
Rather good review here

On a semi-divergence, how would you follow up on this episode?

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 11:19 pm
by Graham Kennedy
Introduce a race that the Parasites had infiltrated and succeeded in conquering. This species is roughly equal to the Federation, and when the aliens attack they're faced with a moral dilemma - how do you fight back, when you know that each time you shoot an innocent victim dies?

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 12:38 am
by Mikey
I like that. In addition, how about if - during said conflict - the parasites managed to get back into Starfleet Command, causing infighting and chaos among the strategists?

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 12:51 am
by Graham Kennedy
You could certainly do that, though it's relatively easy to spot an infected person with that little sticky out thing they have.

The big tactic would be to try and find the queen. Kill a queen and you kill her whole family and free those infected. Who knows how many each queen covers? Hundreds, perhaps. Hell, you could free some, then disguise them and they could go back to infiltrate their own side!

And why not introduce other types of parasite with different properties? No reason to think the two types we saw are the only two.

All sorts of possibilities. But we got the Borg instead.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 1:07 am
by RK_Striker_JK_5
GrahamKennedy wrote:You could certainly do that, though it's relatively easy to spot an infected person with that little sticky out thing they have.

The big tactic would be to try and find the queen. Kill a queen and you kill her whole family and free those infected. Who knows how many each queen covers? Hundreds, perhaps. Hell, you could free some, then disguise them and they could go back to infiltrate their own side!

And why not introduce other types of parasite with different properties? No reason to think the two types we saw are the only two.

All sorts of possibilities. But we got the Borg instead.
Taking only TNG into account, not exactly the worst trade off ever. ;)

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 6:49 am
by katefan
I think TNG's Borg were good bad guys up until the whole Lore debacle.

And I think Graham's idea is a good one. 'Trek is often good when characters face moral dilemmas, which is why I think I liked TOS so much because Kirk would toss the Prime Directive out the window when he felt it was immoral to stick to the letter of the law. Two civilizations are waging a war run by computers and people are willingly walking into disintigration chambers? Yeah, this is insane, time to put an end to that nonsense. Computer is brainwashing it's citizenry? Computer's gotta be shut down. Yangs defeat the Comms but forget the principles on which their civilization was built? Time to remind them.

Although I did like the TNG episode Symbiosis (I think that is what it was called) where Picard stayed withing the boundaries of the PD to fix the problem, that was a well written episode.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 12:01 pm
by Mikey
GrahamKennedy wrote:You could certainly do that, though it's relatively easy to spot an infected person with that little sticky out thing they have.

The big tactic would be to try and find the queen. Kill a queen and you kill her whole family and free those infected. Who knows how many each queen covers? Hundreds, perhaps. Hell, you could free some, then disguise them and they could go back to infiltrate their own side!

And why not introduce other types of parasite with different properties? No reason to think the two types we saw are the only two.

All sorts of possibilities. But we got the Borg instead.
I think the Borg are a great example of what happens to an idea when its founding vision is gone. Gene created the Borg - rather than something like the parasites, or a new "bad guy" organic species - because he wanted something completely outside of humanity. Earlier baddies like the Klingons, Romulans, etc., were alien but still had motivations, passions, and needs that were understandable and sometimes even sympathetic. Gene had even mentioned to at least one author before he passed that he wanted an antagonist who was less a bunch of bad guys and more an inexorable, primal force... not one that was immoral, even occasionally, but rather amoral and unable with whom to be reasoned. Sort of the counterpart, I suppose, to the running theme of "humanity" and the human condition. Unfortunately, we started to see that but then got Hugh and the Lore issues; and then the train wreck that was the Borg in VOY.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 4:25 pm
by Graham Kennedy
The problem with the Borg from a writer's point of view is that it's kinda hard to do new things with them. What should happen with the Borg is that they attack, and you either come up with some inventive way to defeat them, or they wipe you out. If you come up with an inventive way to defeat them they attack again, and we get a new iteration. You're stuck with telling the same story over and over again, which writers and audiences generally don't like.

They managed a good variation on the theme with I, Borg. After that... well what other stories are there?

Personally I'd have said that the BoBW cube was the exact one they saw at J-25, that it was the only one after them, and so once it was defeated that was it, the Borg are now just a distant threat that we don't have to deal with for another century. You could still do I, Borg, but after that I would have done nothing more with them. Think up a new set of bad guys. The fact that they kept going to dip into the well again and again was just a sign that they'd run out of new ideas.

Though we did get to see Jeri Ryan's breasts in those outfits, so there's that. (Her character was mostly stolen from a novel anyway.)

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 4:47 pm
by Tholian_Avenger
GrahamKennedy wrote:how do you fight back, when you know that each time you shoot an innocent victim dies?
They sort of did.
"Lily later cited Lynch's fate to Picard as an example of how he was letting his personal vendetta against the Borg get the better of him at the expense of his crew, but the captain insisted there was nothing that could have been done to save Lynch." from Memory-Alpha.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:44 pm
by Tyyr
GrahamKennedy wrote: (Her character was mostly stolen from a novel anyway.)
Eh?

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:57 pm
by Graham Kennedy
Well, the basis for it.

In the TNG novel Vendetta a Borg drone gets stabbed with a knife, disabling the self destruct. The TNG crew find and recover it and find that it's still alive and is a Human. The woman was a Federation citizen with her own ship who headed off into unexplored space and encountered the Borg. Crusher removes some of her implants, leaving others behind, and the crew try to rehabilitate her.

It doesn't work out too well.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 9:09 pm
by Deepcrush
Do tell GK and welcome back T_A

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 9:11 pm
by RK_Striker_JK_5
I think I remember that book, too... On the tip of my brain.

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 10:32 pm
by Graham Kennedy
In the book she wakes up basically catatonic. Geordi sort of adopts her and tries to get a response out of her, but she's little more than a zombie - until she loses an arm and has it replaced with an obvious prosthetic whilst a new one is cloned. She takes to staring at it and smiling, happy to be becoming more machine-like again.

In the end she never recovers, and she ends up being killed. I forget the details of how.

Another fun aspect of the book is that it references the Planet Killer from TOS. Apparently that was a prototype weapon designed to kill Borg ships. Picard encounters the final version, which is MUCH bigger and more powerful. The climax of the book is a pitched battle between several Borg cubes, the planet killer, and several Starships. It's pretty cool, and actually picks up on a few weapon concepts mentioned and then forgotten in TNG - like a ship which traps a Borg cube in a subspace bubble like the one Wesley was stuck in!

Re: SF Debris: COnspiracy

Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2011 3:09 pm
by Captain Seafort
GrahamKennedy wrote:In the end she never recovers, and she ends up being killed. I forget the details of how.
Killed herself IIRC. After once more demonstrating the brilliance of Starfleet security by charging onto the bridge in the middle of a battle and putting a sizeable crease in Data's head.
Another fun aspect of the book is that it references the Planet Killer from TOS. Apparently that was a prototype weapon designed to kill Borg ships. Picard encounters the final version, which is MUCH bigger and more powerful. The climax of the book is a pitched battle between several Borg cubes, the planet killer, and several Starships. It's pretty cool, and actually picks up on a few weapon concepts mentioned and then forgotten in TNG - like a ship which traps a Borg cube in a subspace bubble like the one Wesley was stuck in!
And it's written by Peter David, so it could never be accused of taking itself too seriously. :D