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

[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...