[Morgan]

Here's easily one of the coolest figures of 7th season release, Hugh Borg on a Canadian card. This is one of the rarer figures from this release, which itself was full of rare figures, and it's a very detailed figure that didn't stick around on the shelves all that long unlike some of the others from that release that were on shelves for ages. I've never seen one for sale new in a store, believe it or not. I bought a loose copy from a friend, minus some accessories. That was it.

The Borg figures were always a little off in terms of screen accuracy, but the details always made up for that, and that's true of this figure as well. This one has some cool accessories that are, for once, in a plausible color -- this almost never happens, but it happened with this figure. There's a replacement arm with what seems like a vacuum cleaner attachment on the end that telescopes out (very cool), a giant 1980s cell phone, and some other stuff. All of it is gray metallic, which is arguably the best color for Borg peripherals.

"I, Borg" is one of the few TNG episodes that I've never actually seen in its entirety, not even five minutes of it. Same thing for the episode with Thomas Riker. It always seemed like one of those episodes that was never on, even though it's one of the fan favorites just because it is one of the few episodes that actually dealt with the Borg. For every one time they reran "I, Borg," they reran "Code of Honor" like thirty times. Even though I've never seen this episode I've read the encyclopedia so many times that I know tons of trivia from it, including all the guest actors' names.

For being a cool villain associated with TNG, the Borg were actually seen in a remarkably small number of episodes. I was recently reading about the plans that writer Maurice Hurley had for the Borg in the first season, early on, and they were quite impressive. Of course, the writers strike happened and Hurley moved on from the series, but the plans for the Borg would have been pretty epic if they had materialized: Romulus was supposed to be destroyed and the Romulan civilization wiped out, but before the Borg would have been able to accomplish this they could have destroyed one of the Borg cubes. And Picard was supposed to figure out how they did that, it was supposed to be a mystery.

Needless to say, those were pretty breathtaking plans for the series which did not, at the time, have multi-episode plot arcs, or really any kind of accumulation of consequences (aside from Tasha's death). And from the beginning Q was envisioned as playing a role in the Borg's introduction -- the episode "Q Who" was sketched out early on, and it ended up being scripted as planned, with Q playing an "unreliable god" and Picard being forced to seek his help when he couldn't deal with encountering the Borg.

It's pretty remarkable the reputation that the Borg had acquired as a TNG villain in proportion to the number of times they were seen on screen -- the series certainly would have turned out differently if Hurley had stayed on and a complex plot arc involving the Borg came to fruition.