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.

[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.

[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.