Movies & TV

I do feel like both in themes and narrative, the federation is moving to a full on confrontation with the borg. It's hard not to see some parallels between the two. And since that's exactly the sort of thing Paramount executives are not interested in (That's nice, but how does it relate to brand icon Spock™ ?), it's never actually gonna happen.

But if it did... I think I'd want to emphasis the humanoid nature of both the Borg and the Fedderation. For the perfectly fine constraint that our actors are human people, most of the aliens we've seen are... not very alien really. It's even been given a Lore reason. I think it would be fun to play off that -- what if the borg aren't just assimilating everything in their path, but only the humanoid species, descended from the precursor aliens seeding the galaxy. Everything else is just spare parts and nutrient paste for drones. Like, really, do you see the borg assimilating one of the dolphin crew? I'm not suggesting that they couldn't, but that they wouldn't -- flat out doesn't register to them. This also now gives us a reason for Changelings to form the Dominion; normal humanoids should not pose enough of a threat to a shapeshifter that they feel the need to start corralling them. But an expanding Borg collective, one that seems incapable of recognizing anything too different as a person? That's the kind of threat that would warrant establishing Dominion. After the war, maybe changlings see the potential of cooperative collaboration with "solids", but they're hesitant. After all, the Federation looks to be doing it's own weird cultural assimilation of humanoids.

I'd want a show that tries to center the more alien aspects of both new aliens and the one's we've already seen. Like, just because a people have been in the federation for decades/centuries, doesn't actually mean they're all that known. Say the Vulcans have a massive library of cultural, historical, and scientific work. Ostensibly, it's open to all members of the Federation, but the user interface was made to a Vulcan standard -- barely a step removed from looking through chunks of computer memory for the data you want. "What do you mean you can not find the document? All content is arranged in the most logical manner possible." Maybe an episode that plays up the shortcomings in relying on a Universal Translation algorithm. Star Trek IV establishes that humpback whales are aliens (or at least are in contact with aliens), there's narrative potential there.

Also no more borg queen. Boring and dumb, undermines what makes the borg interesting. Hand wave it away with a single line of dialog; In the past We designated a single drone to be a loci of tactical coordination. This approach was deemed inadequate and has been terminated.