“They said to me, ‘This is going to be the new bad guy of the universe’,” she recalled years later. Something uniqueĭesigning the first Borg costumes presented Star Trek‘s resident costume designer, Durinda Rice Wood, with a challenge: these half-machine, half-human creatures were supposed to look like nothing the TV viewer had ever seen before. Giger and the cybernetic, laser-eyed Lord Dread from the 1987 series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future - all contributed to the Borg ascending to the heights of Star Trek villainy, exactly as Hurley had intended. In addition, the Borg’s unique cube-shaped ship and their eerie appearance - reminiscent of both the biomechanism designs of H.
But the hive concept he introduced survived to become the Borg Collective. Their presence had been hinted at in the final episode of the first season, “The Neutral Zone,” and later revelations in the series suggested they were responsible for the disappearance of Romulan outposts mentioned at the time.īudget restraints prevented the Borg from being depicted as insectoids, which is what Maurice Hurley, the writer of “Q Who?”, originally had in mind. It introduced some of the nastiest villains in science fiction: the Borg.ĭerived from the word “cyborg,” the Borg were meant to give The Next Generation what the Ferengi could not: a deadly, remorseless enemy. “Q Who?” turned out to be one of the most influential episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.