Ever since Picard ran into them The Borg have been one of the most feared and iconic race in the Star Trek universe.
The franchise’s latest success Discovery just gave us all a look at what’s in store for Michael Burnham and co. in the upcoming second season (due early next year).
It’s given us all an untold number of questions, including a fair few about Spock, but there are other things that have been niggling us all collectively.
Chief amongst those is just who the heck that shadowy figure is?!
You know, the one striding towards Burnham while explosions ripple out around her.
One interesting theory that’s surfaced is that slightly menacing figure is the Borg Queen, and it springboards off comments made by Discovery’s creature designer Neville Page and makeup designer Glenn Hetrick.
Speaking in a Facebook Live not so long ago in May, the duo revealed they’ve already been sizing up the Borg for the CBS/Netflix series.
‘It’s got to look like a Borg, and that was established,’ Page said. ‘There’s a particular aesthetic choice that was made by I believe Mr. Westmore, but for me, I think the coolest challenge, because I like to do this with any design that I do, is to make sense of those choices.
‘It’s kind of reverse engineering why there’s tubes and stuff going in and out of things. It would be to try and make sense of that and then contemporize that aesthetic with what audiences demand today and expect.’
Hetrick added his own thoughts, saying: ‘I also think that there’s, again, it’s me, so there’s got to be a little room for a little steampunk in there. A little antediluvian something. So not too retro, and not a gear, but there is a biomech feel to the whole thing, so to go to Geiger and steampunk and find a new way to combine it and maybe play with the colours and bring the palette out of the greys and the blacks and find some rusty and cool metallic tones, then also start defining the flesh in a different way. If some of those limbs are necrotic, is the tube pumping life back into them? Do they change colour depending on how long they’ve been in the collective? How does the body stay alive?
‘There are so many things to play with. It’s sort of just taking what’s there and playing with it. Michael Westmore Jr. did all the lasers and lights inside of all the little LED components. That’s something today with 3D printing we can push infinitely further. We can do a lot more lighting and more moving parts.’
Sounds like people have been trying to figure out a way to bring a certain old-school nemesis into the running.
Launching off of this Reddit user, R97R asks, ‘Why go into so much detail about how you’d design them if you weren’t going to use them’?
Indeed why?!
They then launch into their theory regarding the shadowy figure being a Borg: ‘Furthermore, the entity appears to be female, and at least partially cybernetic (the “wings” in particular don’t look organic), hence the idea about it being the Queen.’
Now for all those out there screaming about canon timelines, this also gets addressed as ‘the Borg might not have been completely unknown to the Federation,’ and ‘furthermore, while they were never explicitly identified, Archer did encounter them’.
So while the federation may not be in the know that ‘the cyborgs which Archer encountered, and the species which wiped out the El-Aurians are the same entity, nor the threat that the Borg actually pose’ they may be aware of their existence to some degree.
Sounds fair right?
Well, here we go with the home run…
‘Federation ships seemingly run into entities which are weird, dangerous, obscenely powerful, or all of the above on a regular basis, so one more wouldn’t really stand out all that much.’
Fair point. And if you wanted more they go on to say that as a whole we know Section 31 will appear in season two in some capacity
For those not in the know, Section 31 is an autonomous secret organisation which claims to protect the security interests of the United Federation of Planets – think SHIELD but in space.
So, given that, it’s not hard to believe that ‘if the Discovery crew encounter the Borg, they may be sworn to secrecy by S31, and all evidence of the event may be hidden’.
Boom!
At the end of the day this is a far-reaching guess, but one that we really enjoyed… so, fingers crossed!
Star Trek: Discovery season one is available to stream in its entirety on Netflix, while season two is expected to premiere early in 2019.
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