So, they're doing a Doctor Who/Star Trek: The Next
Generation crossover comic.
Given that IDW holds comic licenses for both franchises,
this was perhaps inevitable. True, the two universes go together about as well
as a lightning bolt and a cuckoo clock, but I'm reasonably sure that no writer
will be daft enough to just say that the Doctor exists in the Star Trek
universe – or rather, given the area of the universe covered by Doctor Who
compared to Star Trek, that Starfleet et al exist in the same continuity as the
Daleks, Cybermen, Ogrons, Axons, Sensorites, Sontarans, Menoptra, Nestine
Consciousness, Gods of Ragnarok and Jim the Fish. It's probably going to be a
quick jump sideways for the TARDIS or a multiversal voyage for the
Enterprise-D.
Which is all fine and dandy and the franchises are at least
marginally more compatible than Star Trek and the X-Men. And hey: I once worked
out exactly how you could get the Cybermen and UNIT into the Stargate universe
with minimal problems and maximum entertainment value, so I'm not about to
begrudge some writers having fun with an iconic sci-fi mash up. By rights, this
comic should be a ton of fun.
Except…
Except I read on IGN that the story outline for this
escapade is the Borg and the Cybermen joining forces to threaten the entire
universe. And being a confirmed Cyber-geek, not to mention a big fan of the
Borg, I fear it is my solemn duty to rip this premise into itty-bitty bits,
jump up and down on it until it’s flat and torch it with the nearest convenient
flamethrower. So, fortified with a glass of orange juice and a couple of the
Co-op’s finest almond fingers (why I always get the ones the almonds have
fallen off, I have no idea), that is exactly what I’m going to do.
If nothing else, it gives me an excuse the do that compare
and contrast of TV’s most famous cyborg races I’ve always meant to do…
We have to start with backstory, I’m afraid. Not the entire
backstories of Doctor Who and Star Trek, which would be silly and rather
pointless. No, I’m talking specifically the in-universe backstories for the
Cybermen and the Borg. I’ll cover the Cybermen first, I think. Age before
beauty. Well, age before...um...techno-punk fetish outfits...?
The Cybermen were invented by Dr Kit Pedler and Mr Gerry
Davis as the villains of the last story staring the First Doctor, William
Hartnell. They were designed to play on fears about transplant and
organ-replacement surgery, specifically on the fear that artificial organs
would dehumanise the recipients. The concept is related to the ‘Theseus’ Ship’
paradox: is it the same ship once every little bit has been replaced with a
newer, stronger component? Similarly, is a human still a human once every
little organ has been replaced with a newer, stronger version?
The backstory Pedler and Davis came up with runs like this:
Earth once had a twin planet called Mondas – literally a twin, identical
conditions, even a virtually identical dominant species. A very long time ago
however, Mondas’ orbit was disrupted and the whole planet got flung clean out
of the solar system. With their world suffering a grimmer version of the plot
of Space: 1999, the Mondasian civilisation collapsed. Trapped an
ever-increasing distance from the life-giving sun, they began to sicken and
die. Being somewhat more advanced than humanity, they managed to prolong their
existence by resorting to extensive spare-part surgery. Limbs and hearts and
lungs and skin were all gradually replaced. Eventually, either because they
thought it would help them survive or because they simply couldn’t cope with
what they were doing to their bodies, they operated on their brains too,
merging them with computers and eliminating certain ‘weaknesses’. The result
was a race of massively strong, tremendously resilient and utterly emotionless beings:
the Cybermen.
In their first story, the Cybermen pilot Mondas back into
the vicinity of Earth, intent on draining our world’s life force to rejuvenate
their own. This goes wrong, resulting in Mondas’ obliteration, but the Cybermen
manage to survive the catastrophe and go on to scavenge an existence in the
space-ways, preying on humanity, constantly seeking to make us just like them.
With no other means of reproduction, the Cybermen are dependent on converting
captured humans and make several attempts to conquer the Earth in an effort to
transform the inhabitants en mass. Their only goal is survival. They have no
other aim – they cannot even say why
they should survive. Moreover, they genuinely think that their existence is the
better choice, that the things we believe give life its meaning are irrelevant
when compared to the durability and strength that Cyber-conversion offers. You
cannot argue with them, it’s near impossible to out-logic them and if they get
hold of you, you will become like them.
They must be fought, and as time goes on, humanity at large
manages to do just that, driving the Cybermen back into the dark corners of the
universe, leaving them scattered and nomadic, only intermittently rising up as
a true galactic power. There was also that bunch of clod-hopping tin-plated
nitwits that Trigger out of Only Fools and Horses created in an alternate
universe but that story line culminated in a giant steam-punk robot built by
the cast of Oliver! so I suggest we
move on quickly.
The Borg are a suspiciously similar looking kettle of fish,
being as they are an emotionless race of cyborgs with a knack for converting
captured humans. They were conceived as a new ‘Big Bad’ for the second season
of The Next Generation, when it became clear that friendly Klingons, invisible
Romulans and dumb Ferengi had left the Enterprise D crew woefully short of
threatening enemies. They were originally supposed to be an actual hive, a race
of bio-mechanical insects intent on ‘assimilating’ every technology they came
across. This proved too costly to realise with the existing effects, so they
were made humanoid instead (this or a lighting effect being Star Trek’s usual
answer to budget short comings). Their modus operandi, however, was kept. First
introduced properly in the episode Q Who?,
they are described by the titular omnipotent being as neither male nor female
and appear as pale humanoids augmented with ugly, asymmetric technological
implants (the first Borg drone the crew meet is not particularly hermaphroditic
but the intent is there).
The Borg have a hive mind – or, rather, they have a
collective mind, the two not being identical. Rather than operating within a
clear hierarchy, the Borg exist as a composite entity, thinking and acting as
one. The implication is that there is no clear divide between the biology and
the technology: Borg children are incubated within cabinets, implants already
in place, and when the Borg speak, it is the entire Collective that does so.
This can best be summed up by the ‘onscreen’ image of a city of machinery
proclaiming in a single, resonating voice, “Strength is irrelevant. Resistance
is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and
technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service
ours.”
While the initial concept was that the Borg would ravage
worlds solely in the pursuit of new ‘technological distinctiveness’, this
rapidly developed to include the assimilation of the biological as well. In The Best of Both Worlds, Captain Picard
is incorporated into the Collective as ‘Locutus’ – literally ‘the voice’ –
through whom the Borg chose to speak, figuring that humanity requires some sort
of focal point for communication. More importantly, this gives them access to
Picard's tactical knowledge, which the Borg use to demolish Star Fleet.
Interestingly, this is the single instance of a non-Borg being assimilated in
the entire run of TNG. It was only in Star Trek: Voyager and the movie First Contact that the idea of the Borg
being an amalgam of different species took hold. Before that, the implication
had been that the Borg were a single race, existing in unison with their
technology, the assimilation of Picard merely a one-off strategy to destroy the
Federation’s defences.
Put simply, the Borg are the most powerful, non-transcended
race in the Star Trek universe, or at least the most powerful encountered
on-screen. While they got reduced to run-of-the-mill threats-of-the-week in Voyager
(one of the many flaws with that
show), in The Next Generation they were depicted as being practically
unstoppable, only luck and quick thinking preventing them from steamrollering
their way over everyone and everything in the Alpha Quadrant. Only the Dominion
would ever present the Federation with a greater threat and it is little
surprise that so many expanded universe novel-writers have favoured Apocalypse
Borg as their no-win scenario (to the point that it got extremely boring; but
again, an argument for another time).
It’s easy to see why the Borg and the Cybermen get compared
so often. Yet the similarities are surprisingly superficial – and I don’t just
mean that their respective appearances are so dissimilar. At a conceptual
level, almost all they have in common is the idea that they fuse the organic and
the technological.
The Cybermen were envisioned as the necessary end of a
desire to survive in the cold and dark of deep space. Moreover, as Phillip
Sandifer points out in his TARDIS Eruditorum post on The Tenth Planet, they also offer a twisted vision of
enlightenment: they are star monks who have succeeded in freeing themselves
from the tyranny of the emotional self. In their computerised detachment, they
have found peace from both physical pain and mental anguish. It is this state
of supreme soullessness that they offer humanity. The horror they bring is the
destruction of dreams and desires and ultimately of consciousness as we
understand it. There is no going back from Cyber-conversion.
The Borg, by contrast, represent the horror of being
subsumed into the workings of a vast machine. Someone who is assimilated still
exists – and can be recovered – but their biological and mental distinctiveness
is slaved to the Collective’s will. The individual is made a part of the whole,
reduced to a tiny component in an immeasurably bigger system. Where the
prospect of Cyber conversion is terrifying because it destroys the self,
assimilation is terrifying because the self becomes lost in the crowd. If
Captain Picard is to be believed, you remain aware of your individuality but
are powerless to assert it. Drones are no longer functional individuals; they are instead appendages of
decentralised consciousness. This is the nightmare of true mob rule: your lone
voice, drowned by the thunder of many thousands speaking as one. The tyranny of
the many crushes the needs of the few.
This is, I admit, clouded by the introduction of the Borg
Queen as a central authority figure (in complete contradiction of earlier
depictions). I'm going to steer clear of that, though, since I'm not really
here to complain about Star Trek's inconsistencies. The Queen serves a
narrative function rather than a conceptual one, and let's leave it at that.
Besides representing different horrors, the Cybermen and the
Borg also differ in their motivations. This can be traced back to their
fundamentally dissimilar origins. The Collective is not the result of a
desperate struggle for survival (as far as we know, that is. It’s never been
canonically confirmed how they began) but instead seems to stem from the
realisation that unimpeded cooperation yields the greatest results, be it
between individuals or between people and their technology. While this is not
an inherently evil concept, finer feelings do not survive this particular
realisation of it. They are instead pushed aside by the weight of the
Collective’s base imperatives, a billion souls out-weighed by desire and greed
echoed a billion times over.
Because let’s make no mistake about this, the driving force
behind the Borg is greed. Not for profit. They are not the reducto ad absurdum
capitalists the Ferengi are. No, the Borg’s greed is for material things. They
are the ultimate realisation of the “gotta catch ‘em all” spirit. It’s right
there in their battle cry: “we will add your technological and biological
distinctiveness to our own.” The Collective has decided that the only way to
grow and expand is to incorporate every last technological and biological form
in the universe into itself.
In First Contact,
the Queen states that the Borg are attempting to reach perfection, that their
campaign to assimilate everything is a quest to perfect themselves. This is a
pretty damn solid motivation for their expansion. If a collective mind reaches
the limit of its development within its own technological niche, what else
should it do but reach outside its borders for new toys. Evolution by
parasitism and theft, in the name of perfection.
The Cybermen, on the other hand, have already perfected
themselves. They practically say as much in Tenth
Planet. They have removed all weakness and are at peace as a result, free
of pain or hunger or disease or conflict. There is nothing left for them to
pursue except their continued survival and the eventual ‘enlightenment’ of the
whole human race (which are pretty much the same goal anyway, since the former
depends on the latter).
Obviously, this is an extremely narrow perspective. The
Cybermen are very narrow and restricted creatures though. They change, sure,
developing new ways to control and conquer and convert and kill, but they do
not truly innovate. It is not that they have a horror of evolution in the
manner of the Daleks, who hate the unknown and unalike because they fear it.
The Cybermen do not fear change, they simply do not consider it necessary. They
are satisfied with what they are. The Borg are not. The Collective roams the
universe restlessly because it wants
to evolve, because it desires
perfection, because it can imagine
being better that it is. But if the Cybermen had an endless supply of spare
parts and was free from the threat of extinction by war or disaster, they would
never walk out of the door ever again.
I seem to have gotten all philosophical, probably more so
than any Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover comic ever will. The comparison is
interesting though and leaves our two sets of man/machines with very different
goals. One seeks to perfect its existence, the other merely to prolong itself.
More practically – if I can use such a term when talking about make-believe
aliens – they exist in distinctly different fashions. The Cybermen, after all,
do not have a collective mind. One normal Cyberman is exactly like every other
normal Cyberman (and even if this is not strictly true physically, due to
variation in the organic components, it is certainly true mentally) but they do
not share in a single mind. They are, if you like, identically individual. And
authority is invested not in the many but in a specially augmented few, in a
Controller, a Planner, a Leader. Cybermen build their own authority figures, investing
them with the history of the Cyber-race and an expanded intellect. Put simply,
if tongue-twistingly, multiple Borg drones are distinct hands attached to the
same body, directed by a single mind, while multiple Cybermen are the same
hands attached to distinct bodies, all directed by a separate voice.
The problem this poses for anyone wanting to have the two
races work together in a way that makes sense given their canonical natures
(and surely that's the most satisfying part of crossing them over) is that
these two ways of working are naturally in opposition. You cannot just place
the Cybermen and the Collective next to each other and expect them to work
together. They simply don't work like that. The Collective does not issue
orders outside of itself, the Cybermen do not act as a single entity. The only
way in which they could ‘cooperate’ would be if the Borg assimilated the
Cybermen.
Which is the real kicker, by the way. This is the reason why
the Borg and the Cybermen ‘teaming up’ is so inherently daft. No one ‘teams up’
with the Borg. Ever. ‘Team up’ implies separate entities working towards a
common goal. The Collective functions only by integrating separate entities
into a common whole. It does not need allies because it can just improve itself
by absorbing anything they could offer on contact. In this case, that would
mean making the Cybermen into Borg. As in, they would cease to be Cybermen and
be integrated as drones servicing the needs of the Collective. The only
alternative is that the Cybermen destroy the Borg and take their technology to
augment the Cyber conversion process. Because, you see, assimilation would be
perceived as a threat to the Cyber race’s survival. That’s the problem with
logic. Extremely narrow definitions. A Cyberman that became a Borg drone would
cease to be a Cyberman. So the Cybermen’s only choice would be to fight back.
And they would lose.
I am more of a Doctor Who fan than I am a Star Trek fan.
This does not mean I think the Cybermen would have a hope in Hades of beating
off the might of the Borg Collective. If it had been the Daleks, then there
would be no question that the Borg would be reduced to space dust, but the
Cybermen have never been the powerhouses of the Doctor Who universe. One on
one, they are extremely fearsome, but their collective might (insert groan
here) has always been below par. That's why they fight by stealth so often. In
the end, they simply lack the imagination and the raw determination that makes
monsters like the Daleks into feasible universe conquerors. The Cybermen will
forever be a bunch of tin soldiers skulking round the universe in clapped out
spaceships. The Borg, meanwhile, never stop growing and evolving. The Borg
dominate huge swathes of space with ease, their ships a match for pretty much
everything they come across, excepting lost starships that the writers need to
survive into next week’s episode. I doubt even the dreaded Cyberbombs could
make them pause for long. They adapt. They continue. They persist.
They would beat the Cybermen. They would assimilate them.
What would they gain from the attempt? There's the rub. What could the Cybermen
possibly offer the Borg that would allow them to conquer the universe in one
fell swoop? In the long run, the Borg threaten everything, everywhere anyway.
That's part of their appeal as unstoppable monsters. Crucially, it is in the long run. Their advance is
inexorable but slow. Adding the sum total of Cyber-technology as seen on screen
would probably speed that process up but not by that much. The ability to pilot
planets would be useful, of course, as would the mind control technology. But
the Cybermen have always been intently focused on conquering and controlling one species – us – and one species
alone. Their technology is tailored to humanity and they have never reached the
apocalyptic heights of Reality Bombs and Time Destructors. Why would they? So
yes, the Borg would take what the Cybermen have to offer. Gotta catch ‘em all,
right? I just don't see it being the game changer that IDW's concept writers
seem to think it would be.
All this must seem a bit sour. I am thinking this through
too deeply, I know – but that’s because I find both the Cybermen and the Borg
to be fascinating concepts and I think they work brilliantly as antagonists for
heroes who thrive on emotionality and wanderlust. I'm all in favour of throwing
the Doctor into the Star Trek universe and watching him merrily turn it
upside-down, or chucking the Enterprise (A, B, C, D, E or XI) into the Doctor
Who universe and watch it run for its frickin' life. As I say, it should be fun. Thing is, it would also
be nice if the threat that necessitates the eventual EPIC TEAM-UP was credible
and based on the canonical natures of the baddies involved. A Borg/Cyberman
alliance, as I hope I've proved by now, simply isn't.
Besides which, a Borg/Cyberman team-up? That's the best they could come up with? There must be a thousand
and one ideas that would have been a lot more fun! I mean, just think. Zygons
and Rutans in the Federation Council! Sontarans and Klingons in a no holds
barred rugby match! Romulans and Dominators competing to see who has the most
over-the-top shoulder pads! Adric versus Wesley Crusher on the holodeck! K-9 vs
the Starfleet Computer! Q vs the Celestial Toymaker! The Daleks vs everyone!
Daleks vs everyone. See there’s a crossover comic I’d like
to see. The Daleks are just the kind of larger-than-life, completely
unstoppable menace who’d be at home in a comicbook crossover. Putting Picard
and the Doctor in the same room is like having Hornblower show up at 221b Baker
Street or having Mal Reynolds run into Han Solo on a smuggling trip. You need a
bigger-badder-bolder threat to justify needing the combined forces of two sets
of heroes who've done amazing things on their own.
Ultimately, not only does it not really make sense for the
Borg and Cybermen to merge into some universe-conquering, all-powerful allied
force, they're just not enough to justify the presence of both the Federation’s
finest and the Oncoming Storm. In both universes, discounting higher powers
like Q and the Eternals, I’m fairly sure only the Daleks really pose such a
colossal threat. And they do have an Expanded Universe record of tampering with
alternative universes…
I could be wrong. It’s entirely possible it will all work
out for the best. Comicbooks have a habit of taking daft premises and making
them into good, wholesome entertainment. I am, when all is said and done, using
a three sentence press-release to peddle my personal perspectives on two great science
fiction concepts and to take a couple of cheap shots at what I consider to be
an unimaginative idea. More details might make this little rant redundant. I
hope so.
But if not, if this all ends up going as badly as my cynical
side suspects it will, let's at least be thankful that we live in a world in
which Doctor Who is well regarded enough that a major publisher is willing to
cross it over with the most well-known sci-fi franchise ever created.
