Today is a good day to overthink things.

[zustifer]

We've been watching ST:TNG episodes lately, and, since we broke through the first season and it started getting good, we've been inhaling a lot of them (it's been a while since I've seen some of these, especially in order). We just finished with the two first Locutus episodes, and they made me wonder a bit about a couple of things.

First, the creation of a 'speaker' by the Borg, as an intermediary between them and a soon-to-be-Borged race, makes vague sense on the surface. This wiki says that the role was (at least) retconned in an in-universe Shatner novel (shudder) to be for the purpose of 'less waste' in the assimilation. This is cute, but I don't really think we see any evidence of this from Locutus. He doesn't exactly appeal to the Enterprise on any particularly human basis; he pretty much just hits the 'resistance is futile' button. The most personal he gets is to name people, and to speak directly to Riker. So I'm not really seeing the benefit for the Borg here. Maybe they just have a really bad sense of what people need in order to feel convinced. Maybe Shatner is just not a very good writer.

Second, he has a name. Supposedly this is normal for a speaker (and there is a Romulan in Shatner's book who has the same role, but that means exactly nothing). The funny thing is, 'Locutus' is clearly Latin-derived. Did Picard name himself? He'd know enough Latin to do this, probably, whereas the Borg sure shouldn't. This is a cute idea, that he was their first speaker and therefore they took ideas about how this should be done from his brain. However, the Shatner-book ruins it again by mentioning that the Borg had made a speaker for the Romulan worlds, named 'Vox.' This is just annoying, because what do Romulans care for Latin? Unless the stupid progenitor-race that made all the Star Trek sentient species humanoid also seeded a latinate root-language, but, honestly, that's even too stupid for me to consider. So, again, I must conclude that Shatner ruins everything. But in a hilarious way.

Comments

[jwgh]

When I first saw the episodes I made some kind of connection between 'Locutus' and 'Jean Luc' -- I assume 'Luc' is the French version of the Biblical name 'Luke' though and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with talking. (But I don't know a lot about what I'm speaking of.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

He did a great job with Pulp's "Common People". So there.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Man, don't get me wrong, I listen to his cover of 'Rocketman' on purpose. I love him, but I also think he's a bad writer. I think this because I read three of his 'Tek' universe books.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Did you ever watch the Tek TV show?

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

I saw the, um, TV movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111385/)? I had it on tape back in high school. There was a Warren Zevon song (not one of his best) over the end credits.
It's still my strongest referent for dermally-applied future-drugs.

I need a better term than 'irony' for stuff like this. I love it, but I love it in a way that means it can also be really bad.

[jwgh]

A while ago I decided to just accept that how good a thing is doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to do with how much I like it.

[mrvelocipede.livejournal.com]

If there was a word for the concept of "I genuinely love [this thing], even though I know perfectly well it's genuinely bad," I would be very glad of it. Somehow it's a tough idea to express without making it sound like tedious hipster irony.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it. English is SO LIMITED!

[optic-options.livejournal.com]

Oh man, those Tek War movies were awesomely bad and as anything with a low enough budget they tried to set everything in a location that was remotely "futuristic" -- to comical effect for locals. Like the bank building in BCE Place acting as future police headquarters and the amusement park "Ontario Place" acting as some kind of high-tek drug research centre or something (it's been so long). Shows like that make me weep for the quality of CanCon.

[jwgh]

I think in some episode or other it is revealed that the Ferengi never invented slavery. Take that, smug human jerkstoves!

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, it's so true. Picard's all, 'I don't trust you Ferengi' whenever he has a chance.
Unfortunately, Ferengi are all liars who smell bad.

(NO! Says the man in engineering.
NO! Says the head of security.)

^^ This is a Bioshock joke. Please ignore.

[bismuthobsidian.livejournal.com]

Well, Latin is a root language, but Vox is stupid even then. It is bizarre how every race ends up being obsessed with humans. They are always hinting that humanity will evolve into some uber-species like the Q but with morals. Egocentrism is all over ST.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

What I was getting at was that, since humans & Romulans didn't have contact until after the time of Latin, what this must imply is that they were either both given it by the progenitors (can't remember their name, if they ever had one) or given a common root for it instead. This is way obnoxious.

Freaking humans as Best Race Ever! How lame. It was worse in Original Trek though, what with the 'emotions are what make us special' every third episode.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That was a tension that showed up all the time--all this "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" stuff alternating with godlike aliens pontificating about the specialness of the human species, even though we also see that there are aliens who are practically identical to humans all over the place.

Don't mind me, says Mr. Spock, just pretend I'm not standing right here on the bridge...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The development of the Borg over the course of the various Star Trek series (and one of the movies) never made much sense. They eventually decided they needed Borg characters with somewhat individual personalities (aside from semi-reformed Borg like Seven of Nine), so those Borg Queens showed up. Why do the Borg need Queens? The only answers ever given were kind of vague.

The Borg as introduced in their very first appearance were pretty scary, though they would also have been hard to write for long--they were basically an unbeatable menace.

As for the Romulans, I always got a weird sense from the original series that they were vaguely imagined as having parallel-Earth-Roman-Empire aspects. In Old Star Trek's galaxy, there were parallel Earths and funhouse-distorted parallel Earths lying around all over the place, so that scenes there could be filmed easily with existing sets and costumes. For these Vulcan-related aliens to have inexplicable cultural and linguistic similarities to Earth's Roman Empire would not have been too far out of line. TNG and later series mostly retconned that stuff away without comment.