“The hall is rented, the orchestra engaged. It’s now time to see if you can dance.”
What is there left to say about “Q Who,” that hasn’t already been said? It’s a great fuckin’ episode. It deserves its place in the pantheon of the very best that Star Trek: The Next Generation ever had to offer. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s easy to lose the detail and quality of the actual product in the mythology that has grown up around it, but on reexamination, the episode is unassailably well-conceived and well-delivered. It would be hard to argue that “Q Who” wasn’t the best-produced episode of television in all of 1989.
“Q Who” is certainly Rob Bowman’s masterpiece with Star Trek: The Next Generation; the director would go on to helm a few more episodes before jumping over to The X-Files, where he really made his name, but there is such a slick confidence to his staging of “Q Who” that it remains an intense visual standout of the series. The real genius of “Q Who,” though, is screenwriter Maurice Hurley, who boils down scads of cyberpunk sci-fi and creates the Borg out of whole cloth with such unshakeable conceptual detail that it’s no wonder they became TNG’s defining contribution to the Star Trek rogue’s gallery – a contribution so monumental, in fact, that they essentially ended the conversation forever on new villain races. There was everything that came before the Borg, and then there was the Borg; there was nothing after. For alien menace, this is Star Trek’s highest water mark.
Even the Borg themselves could scarcely live up to their own initial, chilling exactitude. The problem with creating a villain this formidable is, of course, that very formidability; one can hardly send the Enterprise up against them weekly and expect their level of perceived menace to hold out. There are only three great Borg stories in all of Star Trek – “Q Who” and “The Best of Both Worlds” on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Peter David’s non-canon Star Trek novel, Vendetta. Everything else, including First Contact and the entirety of the race’s appearance on Voyager, harshly compromise the crystal perfection of Hurley’s concept here. The Borg, circa “Q Who,” are the stuff of nightmares: relentless, indefatigable, noncommunicative, and endless. They are a hurricane.
I fetishize the components of the Borg’s presentation here; they are my favourites. I greatly prefer this character design, for starters; the more Gigersque biomechanoids that would populate First Contact and Voyager are less effective in my eyes than these spandex-suited clones with their stick-on gizmos and circuit boards. Other details that would eventually fall by the wayside are the Borg tendency to pluck system components out of their fallen comrades’ bodies before turning those comrades into a pile of ash; the species’ seemingly limitless ability to physically regenerate themselves following damage; and of course, the Borg Babies. Perhaps it’s best that this last thread was left untied, moving the Borg instead to full tilt zombie – they procreate by infecting – rather than suggesting that there are ever any natural-born Borg children. But for creepy moments, Riker’s time in the Borg nursery is no slouch.
The Borg cube is a conceptual magnificence. It is such a single, stalwart visual; such an enervating précis of the whole concept. Guinan and Q warn Picard that the Borg’s only interest is in pieces of the Enterprise’s technology that the aliens can use, and this is all brought home in the mallet-like unornamentation of the cube, which has no bridge, no engineering, no crew quarters. It’s a block of cybernetic evil, flying through space. When it takes to carving the Enterprise up “like a roast,” we are given one of the series’ defining gruesome moments – all the more so for its absolute bloodlessness. The Borg tractor beam pulling a tube of fresh-cut Enterprise decks out of the saucer section is horrifying all on its own, without any of the gratuitous bodies being blown into space that would certainly be a requirement of staging such a scene nowadays.
Ron Jones takes it to the nines in the musical score, a grand, threatening thrum that settles with one hell of a “to be continued” as the episode wends towards its conclusion. One can almost hear him establishing the leitmotifs that he would expand exponentially in his sequel score for “The Best of Both Worlds.” In all regards, “Q Who” sets up the greatest grudge match in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the Borg return at the height of their game at the end of the following year. Until then, we are left as Bowman, Hurley, and Q himself intend: frightened, cowed, and less certain of our footing in a vast, terrifying cosmos.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season 2 is available now.