“Resistance is futile.” Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective Is the Perfect Monster for Our Time - Reactor

What makes a perfect monster? We need look no further than the Borg in Star Trek: TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds” double episode, which first aired on June 18 and September 24, 1990. With their deathly pallor, prosthetics, and hive mind, the cyborgs of the Borg Collective are the perfect screen monster. But for all their uncanny appearance and juggernaut-like technology, the ultimate terror they pose is that they monstrify those whom they assimilate.

On the surface, “The Best of Both Worlds” charts a battle with the Federation’s greatest foe to date. But the story’s timeless power lies in how it plays with the Star Trek universe, echoes monster archetypes, and makes us think about what it means to be human today.

A new foe

“The Best of Both Worlds” opens with the Enterprise called to investigate after a distress signal is received from New Providence, a colony at the edge of Federation space. Upon arrival, the crew find that all that remains of the colony is a giant crater. Trace evidence suggests that the culprits were the Borg, a species they had encountered briefly in the distant reaches of the galaxy. Soon a distress signal from a ship near another Federation outpost confirms that the Borg are in Federation space. The Enterprise races to intercept, and engages the Borg.

The Borg ship’s design suggests to viewers that they will be stranger and more menacing than your garden-variety Federation foe or rival. Unlike regular antagonists’ curved, graceful ships—the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, for example, or the slightly more alarming, coiled-snake-like Romulan ships glowing a warm blue-green—Borg vessels are charcoal-colored cubes resembling post-apocalyptic junkyard scrap, their yellowish-green glow magnifying their bleakness.

The Borg open communications by demanding that Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart; now Sir Patrick Stewart), whom they identify by name, prepare to be transported to their ship. In the ensuing space battle and chase, Borg drones eventually beam onto the Enterprise and abduct him. They set a course straight for Earth.

The Borg Collective—known simply as the Borg—is a bipedal, composite species whose ships troll the galaxy. When they encounter a species with distinctive knowledge and technology, they assimilate it. They inject captured individuals with nanoprobes (microscopic robotic devices) and attach cybernetic implants: a prosthetic arm extension; an ocular device over one eye. These enhancements give drones extraordinary strength, built-in tools, and a way to communicate instantly across the collective.

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” In the wake of a Borg visitation a species is assimilated into the collective. This is not just a worst-case-scenario for a first-contact situation; it’s also an unsettling allegory for what societies might become once “efficiency,” defined too narrowly, runs amok.

Battling such an epic foe requires expert leadership skills and tactical acumen. Partway through Part I of “The Best of Both Worlds,” command of the Enterprise falls to Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes). But seeds of doubt have already been sown: viewers have learned that Riker was offered the captain’s chair on several ships but turned them down, a choice that has begun to raise eyebrows. He butted heads with the ambitious, risk-taking Lt. Commander Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy), Starfleet’s expert on the Borg, who had joined the ship for this mission. Shelby had gotten wind of Riker’s latest job offer and was angling to become his successor as first officer on the Enterprise.

Shelby is a compelling foil to Riker, mirroring his younger, risk-taking self. Her victory over him in a hand of poker—a Riker specialty—is symbolic. A disagreement on anti-Borg strategy prompts a claustrophobic scene in a turbo-lift in which Shelby questions his judgement. And is there a better line to encapsulate an up-and-coming, Type A personality than Shelby’s frank, blunt “You’re in my way”?

On the eve of the Enterprise’s confrontation with the Borg, Riker wonders: has he become too comfortable? Did he turn down offers to command his own ship because he was scared of the big chair? Could he make the tough decisions and take risks where necessary?

Once the captain is kidnapped, a failed rescue attempt reveals that Picard has been assimilated. The Borg cube annihilates a fleet sent to intercept them en route to Earth, and Riker is granted a battlefield promotion to captain. Questions about how good a leader Riker might be are no longer hypothetical, as he faces a trial by fire.

Monster archetypes

The Borg still resonate today, partly because of their effectiveness as a mashup of enduring monster archetypes. Their physique triggers fears about the boundary between human and machine. Weighted down with implants, their movements are jerky and robotic. They sleep standing up, plugged into alcoves in their ships. For today’s viewers they are the twenty-fourth-century version of Frankenstein’s creature, that uncanny child of science and dead flesh.

The Borg share their ash-grey skin with a creepy constellation of undead monsters from folklore, literature, and cinema. While their physical strength recalls Frankenstein’s creature, their mindless groupthink is zombie-like. In a process mirroring vampire replication, the Borg assimilation process begins when a drone inserts the injection tubules attached to their fingers into a victim’s neck. Nanoprobes flow in, enveloping blood cells and re-configuring DNA. When Picard is injected with nanoprobes his skin turns grey. Immobilized for the procedure, his face betrays the horror of the moment through the presence of a single tear.

Like Frankenstein’s creature and zombies, the Borg are uncanny. Neither identical to us nor completely different, they are just similar enough to profoundly weird us out. At the turn of the twentieth century, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jensch proposed that things could be both ordinary and creepy (unheimlich, literally unhomely); for example, a lifelike mechanical doll. Uncanny monsters introduce a sense of unease, making us wonder where they end and “normal” humans begin.

In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori plotted people’s feelings of comfort (affinity) against human likeness for various humanoid things like robots, stuffed animals, and puppets. People’s feelings of affinity went up when they encountered things that resembled a healthy human, but dropped sharply for things that were most similar or near-human, but not actually representing or part of a healthy human (he wrote about corpses and realistic prosthetic limbs when discussing this aspect of his work). Mori also determined that when humanoid objects were in motion, the affinity dip for things that most resembled us—and the rise in the weirded-out feeling—was much greater. Uncanny objects become creepier when moving, their apparent vitality shrinking the distance between “scary inanimate things out there” and “living people like me.” This dip in the graph—the “valley of uneasiness” in Japanese, often translated as the “uncanny valley” —is exactly the space in which Frankenstein’s monster, zombies, and the Borg lurk.

Despite their technological prowess, the Borg’s mechanical gait and robotic movements also brings to mind a pre-industrial monster. Like the Borg, the figure of the zombie plays upon our fear of being controlled, of becoming so disconnected from or disempowered by powerful individuals or systems that we are but puppets whose strings we can’t see.

The connection goes deeper than appearances. During the age of transatlantic slavery, white plantation owners observing West African religious and medical practices in the Caribbean misunderstood and misconstrued the spiritual practice known as Vodún, reductively caricaturing it as a diabolical ritual in which shamans created zombies, individuals who were halfway undead. White settlers, hugely outnumbered, feared what they understood as otherworldly, potentially diabolical powers among enslaved Africans. White colonists’ dread of rebellions fuelled stereotypes and fearmongering involving dark magic and zombies.

The ultimate threat of the uncanny is that there is no defensible line between the self and a frightening other. When the uncanny monster is the Borg, this threat is made real.

Mirror, mirror

The cinematic power of the Borg is channeled through a story arc framed by a fascinating and disturbing question: what does it take to defeat a monstrous foe who is also, somehow, yourself?

The Borg want Picard to “facilitate our introduction into your societies.” He will be the “human voice [that] will speak for us in all communications.” By assimilating him, they internalize his knowledge of the Federation’s defensive capabilities and the Enterprise crew’s tactical preparations. Halfway through the story the crew realize that everything that Picard was and everything he knew is known to the Borg. Defeating him will also require defeating all that was Jean-Luc Picard.

On the Enterprise’s next encounter with the Borg, the assimilated Picard in a deathly charcoal body suit and prosthetic eyepiece greets them on the view-screen: “I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile.”

“Locutus” is Latin for “one who speaks/has spoken.” (For viewers who know that Stewart was once a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and played a villain in I, Claudius, a critically acclaimed BBC TV series set in ancient Rome, both his delivery and the lines are as thrilling as they are creepy.)

As Picard’s speech unfolds, the Borg’s terms and conditions become clear: “Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward you will service us.” As the episode moves to its cliff-hanger, Picard’s transformation sinks in when Locutus addresses Riker by Picard’s nickname for him: “Your resistance is hopeless, Number One.”

As Part II of “The Best of Both Worlds” opens, it’s clear that there will need to be a drastic re-thinking of tactics. The crew abandon hope (for now) of rescuing the captain. A successful defense would have to be sufficiently unorthodox that the Borg could not anticipate it from Picard’s time and experiences on the Enterprise. As the ship’s bartender Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) puts it, Riker must “let go of Picard” and tear up the book on how to run this ship.

The multi-pronged solution will eventually involve rescuing Locutus/Picard and disconnecting him from the hive mind after using that very connection to neutralize the Borg cube. But can a monstrified person become fully human again? Perhaps not. As Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) declared after the mission that revealed that the captain has been assimilated, “He is a Borg!” The concluding episode takes the reader through Picard’s first steps on a journey back to humanity. As he puts it once the cube is defeated, he feels “almost human.”

The story ends with a mostly physically recovered Picard back in command of the Enterprise, albeit with a Borg implant-shaped bandage shadowing his face for the moment. The rest of the season is mostly business as usual. But faced with a new threat—monstrification via assimilation—the question of whether the boundary between human and Borg, once breached, can ever truly be completely sealed, remains. Its timelessness makes it a generative dilemma, reverberating through multiple future Star Trek franchises.

Is there a best of both worlds—a way of learning something, anything, worthwhile from the Borg and integrating it into the Federation? The suggestion in the title “The Best of Both Worlds” would become a recurring question

Despite the spectacular, horrifying visual effect of the Borg and their powers of assimilation, the most uncanny thing about them may be societal. They are the Federation’s doppelgänger or unrelated evil twin, offering what Naomi Klein, referring to forms of doubling in contemporary politics and internet culture in her 2023 book Doppelganger, calls “the mirror world.” For Klein, “all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other….”

But a society and its avowed opposite may not remain light-years apart. Sometimes a society may flip itself in the mirror. The Borg is a doppelgänger for today’s (increasingly beleaguered) liberal Western democracies, too. The Borg’s technofascist colonialism is unsettling because viewers recognize the parallels with historic settler-colonialism. And now, several decades onward, the landscape of digital privacy is beginning to resemble the authoritarian surveillance state of the Borg.

The Federation prides itself on its enlightened, democratic, egalitarian governance that recognizes and celebrates the individuality of species and persons. They are a collective of planets by the free will of their citizens. In “The Best of Both Worlds” and later in episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, declarations like “My culture is based on freedom and self-determination!” are common in those brief moments of dialogue between the Borg and Starfleet before the shooting and assimilating begins.

By contrast, the Borg assimilates by force and homogenizes individuals into cyborg shadows of their former selves. Borg drones have no privacy and no individuality, hearing the thoughts of all other drones. They speak as one, in one booming voice. To the Federation’s benevolent Dr Jekyll, the Borg Collective is Mr Hyde, the fearsome mirror self, the route not taken.

The Borg are the ultimate monster: they turn those they hunt into monsters, metabolizing their distinctiveness in order to hunt and monstrify with even greater “efficiency,” in search of a “perfection” that is, to those around them, a hollow horror-show imitation.

Yet Starfleet’s mission is one of exploration, science—and defense. Its engineers are as adept at using phasers as they are at fixing a ship’s warp drive. While the Federation views itself as benevolent, the dissident movement known as the Maquis will soon tear the veil to reveal the realpolitik practiced by the real, fallible individuals behind the scenes and at the negotiating table.

Moreover, the benchmarks to qualify for Federation membership have a homogenizing effect. For small polities like the Bajoran planetary system around which Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is set, the consequences of becoming part of a larger collective may mean that the choice of whether or not to seek membership isn’t a genuine choice at all.

Timeless monsters offer timely lessons that can be tailored for any age. The Borg aren’t just a doppelgänger of the Federation; they’re also a doppelgänger of the real world, and our current culture. Considering the Borg in 2025, the monster at the heart of the story prefigures what data journalist Professor Meredith Broussard recently termed “technochauvinism”: the myth that the best solution for any problem must be a technological one.

One real-world consequence of technochauvinism has been the trampling of individual human will over the use of their own creative works. In terms eerily similar to that used in discussions of AI, the Borg took, by force, the distinctive, ineffable essence, knowledge, talents, and experience of individuals while claiming that this served a greater good that everybody should want. To adapt and paraphrase a popular line about LLM-based genAI, the Borg offers something nobody asked for and everybody hates.

The world of the Borg, with drones lacking free will and visiting death and destruction on individuals who do, is a potential endgame that awaits humanity if we entirely relinquish our individuality through a diet of fakes: simulacra and falsehoods fashioned from human-created knowledge and art metabolized and excreted by LLM-based systems. We may become drones incapable of thinking outside the box (or cube), our minds and their contents controlled by whoever programs the system.  

Thirty-five years after “The Best of Both Worlds” first aired, it feels like we’re heading into the exact opposite of the utopian vision of Star Trek: TNG. Far from enjoying the end of war and hunger on earth, hundreds of millions live in war zones, financial precarity, and hunger, while billionaires amass more wealth that they could spend in a millennium. Instead of having the time and resources to reach their full potential, most people and their minds, bodies, and intellectual property are, to giant corporations and tech CEOs, little more than extractive resources, their needs viewed as an inconvenience to corporate profits. If humanity is to survive the current moment of monstrification, a good place to start would be to face it head-on, and recognize the danger we’re courting.

The better, brighter side of the mirror is reachable. While the Borg insist that “resistance is futile” and it seems that Silicon Valley would have us believe the same, the future isn’t written in stone—or on microchips. The perfection (ha!) of the Borg as a screen monster lies in how they combine monster archetypes while resting on a foundation of Trek lore; on how they are undeniably awful, but also represent a doppelgänger of the Federation and a warning for us; and on how a story braiding human courage and frailty can come to a satisfying close while still trailing threads to tug loose in the future.