The world of the cyborgs has always belonged to the disabled, those of us who walk, roll, crutch, and dance our way along the line between man and machine. While Donna Hathaway, in her seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” defined cyborgs as an intensely feminist concept, transcending mundane, mid-20th-century concepts of gender (and interestingly, of sexuality), she only briefly engages with the population that are, often quite literally, a blend of man and machine. Cy Jillian Weise, disability and cyborg scholar, wrote “I count among us cyborgs nearly anyone with metal in or attached to our bodies—pacemakers, hearing aids, wheelchairs, canes, ventilators.”¹ Cyborgs could be the ultimate anti-ableist concept, showing how assistive technology can, with a little imagination, be the key to equality for disabled people. Cyborgs demonstrate how technology can enable us to do all the same things that nondisabled people do—and sometimes, to do things better. After all, in my power wheelchair, I’m not limited by the strength and speed of my biological legs. I’m only limited by my battery life and inaccessible communities. Yet it is precisely this fear of disabled people rising up and somehow transcending the abled ideal that leads to modern conceptions of the cyborg as suspicious and something to be feared. In modern media, disabled people-as-cyborgs are the continual villains, or at best, suspicious interlopers, who at any moment might fall to the whim of the machine and start attacking our flesh-and-blood compatriots. TVTropes calls this “cybernetics eat your soul,” and relates it to other tropes that cast the disabled person in an evil, or at least morally questionable, light, such as Dark Lord on Life Support. In fact, the disabled person as villain is one of the oldest tropes in the proverbial book—think Captain Hook with his hook hand or Long John Silver with his eyepatch. The augmented human/cyborg as villain is a trope that has appeared in nearly every popular science fiction franchise of the last half century. Doctor Who has had two: the Cybermen and the Daleks. In fact, the Cybermen were explicitly born out of writer Kit Pedler’s fear of where humanity might end up if healthy parts were increasingly replaced with artificial ones. The original Cybermen emphasized the partial humanity of these monsters, with a mix of human and technological parts.² In later years, after Doctor Who was rebooted, John Lumic was introduced as the fictional creator of the Cybermen in a parallel universe, who relied on a power wheelchair and life support system for survival, and who created the Cybermen out of a desperate attempt to prolong his own life. These reinvented Cybermen then sought to “upgrade” others and turn them into emotionless Cybermen, much like the Borg in Star Trek.³ Davros, the fictional creator of the Daleks introduced by writer Terry Nation, was also a wheelchair and life support user, and was seen over the many different incarnations of Doctor Who with almost equally as many incarnations of his wheelchair and prosthetics.⁴

Star Trek’s Borg, created not long after the Cybermen for another seminal science fiction franchise, are possibly one of the most well-known examples of these societal anxieties that transform technologically augmented humans—cyborgs—into a frightening cautionary tale. Originally conceived as an insectoid species and transformed into cyborgs due to budget constraints, the Borg were first introduced in season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the episode “Q Who?” At first, the Borg were a largely forgettable enemy, with nothing much to distinguish them from any other enemy the Enterprise encountered, save for their techno-organic nature. Only an ominous conversation between Captain Picard and Guinan, whose home world was destroyed by the Borg, gives any hint that the Borg will be back. At this point, it’s not clear that the Borg are a composite species, made up of sentients of all species who have been “assimilated” into the Borg collective.

The Borg don’t become truly terrifying until their appearance in the two-part Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds.” The Borg, no longer content with just poaching technology, has moved on to actually assimilating people. Seeking a liaison between humans and the Borg, the Borg assimilate Captain Picard, consuming all his knowledge and erasing his individuality. When the away team, searching for Picard on the Borg cube, spots the captain, Dr. Beverly Crusher calls out to him, only seeing him in profile. But in a terrifying bait and switch moment, the captain turns to reveal that he has been augmented by the Borg, complete with implants on his face and an exoskeleton encasing his torso and limbs. The away team manages to get beamed back to the Enterprise bridge, where they have the following exchange with first officer Commander Riker:

 

 

And with four words, Worf gets to the crux of the issue: Captain Picard has not been merely “altered.” He has been transformed. He is no longer human; instead, he is Borg. It’s important to note that at this point, Captain Picard (or Locutus, as we’ll come to know him later) has not spoken, attacked, or done anything to indicate that he is not the Captain Picard we all know and love, besides standing idly by while Worf smashes into a forcefield. The away team’s revulsion is solely based on Picard’s outward appearance. Yet, because he has been augmented, altered, as Data puts it, he is no longer considered human. (The series apparently doesn’t stop to consider the irony of having an android, someone who is entirely inorganic, deliver this news.) Whatever and whoever he was before has been overwritten, and he is now solely a Borg. These events set into motion a common theme that will continue throughout the next thirty-plus years of Star Trek, across half a dozen different series.

Even the script hammers home the idea of Picard’s monstrous alterations. It lays out the scene in stark terms: “[The biobed] begins to lower… revealing Locutus, still unconscious, stripped of clothes, his hideous mutilation clearly exposed…” (emphasis added). Again, this “hideous mutilation” is not referring to the invasion of Picard’s mind, the nonconsensual extraction of his knowledge—it is his physical appearance. It is body horror at its core. Even in the 24th century, some bodies are considered acceptable, while others are deemed hideous and mutilated. This is a running theme of the franchise, dating all the way back to the original series of Star Trek. Captain Pike, the original captain of the Enterprise, is disabled in a radiation accident. Unable to move or speak, Pike relies on a wheelchair and a simplistic communication device. This existence is apparently too much to bear for Pike, who after receiving a vision of his future in the Star Trek prequel series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, goes to extreme lengths to avoid it.

But going back to Locutus, never fear! This is Picard, after all, Captain of the Enterprise, and Star Trek won’t grasp the concept of plot arcs that last longer than two episodes until a few years later. With some creative maneuvering and assistance from both Dr. Crusher and Data, Picard is de-assimilated and almost back to his old self by the end of the episode. When Picard’s mental link to the Collective is severed, Deanna Troi asks him: “How do you feel?”

Picard, naked except for the implants studding his flesh, replies: “Almost human.” This is meant to be a humorous moment as he follows it up with “Just a bit of a headache.” But what makes the joke work is that Picard is very clearly nothuman, still. He is still augmented. He is still, in some crucial ways, Borg, even though he no longer thinks, talks, or acts like a Borg. He still looks like a Borg, and in the end, that’s what matters. At the very end of the episode, Picard has improved so that he merely looks like a human with an interesting skin condition, and by the next episode, it’s like nothing ever happened.

Not all ex-Borg are so lucky. Later on in the series, the Enterprise rescues a dying Borg drone. The crew nicknames the Borg “Hugh,” as a pun on the word you. Picard eventually baits him into asserting his newfound individuality by acting the role of Locutus and threatening to assimilate Geordi. Hugh’s individuality finally breaks all the way through as he defends his new friend. It’s worth noting that Geordi is technologically “augmented” himself, as he is visually impaired and wears a VISOR to help him see. While Geordi is still treated with some hostility and suspicion by people outside of Starfleet, his VISOR never provokes the same reaction as more extensive technological augmentations like those of the Borg. Even still, Geordi eventually receives ocular implants that allow him to look more “normal”—furthering Trek’s discomfort with visible technological augmentation of any kind.⁵ But perhaps Hugh sensed a kinship there. It’s certainly no secret that Geordi gravitates towards those who are also technologically augmented in some way—his best friend is Data, an entirely cybernetic android.

But Hugh is still kept in a holding cell and still retains all of his Borg implants, despite the series having shown with Picard that it is possible to remove Borg implants after de-assimilation with no lasting effects. The difference is clear: Picard is the hero, and so he “gets” to be human again. Hugh is a one-off character who doesn’t deserve the same fate. Though later, Hugh becomes leader of a resistance movement of ex-Borgs (or xBs), ultimately he meets an untimely end as he refuses to give up Picard’s location to a spy.

But it’s Star Trek: Voyager that solidifies the metaphor. In a two-part episode at the end of season 3 and beginning of season 4, Voyager rescues a young woman from the Collective. Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan, is consistently Othered by the crew, sometimes treated with outright hostility. Her Otherness is hammered home by the stark dichotomy of her appearance. Once again, even though Star Trek proved with Locutus and Picard that all visible Borg implants can be removed from an assimilated person without lasting effects, Seven of Nine is stripped of all visible implants except for a singular ocular implant. In other respects, her traditional, feminine beauty is emphasized to almost an absurd degree. Seven of Nine wears a skintight catsuit instead of the standard Starfleet uniform. In all dream sequences and alternate realities, she is portrayed with long, flowing blonde hair. Visible technological augmentation is incompatible with beauty. We are meant to be jarred by the contrast.

Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (and subsequent books in the series) is another piece of sci-fi media that emerged around the time Star Trek was premiering that presents augmented-humanity-as-disability-accommodation in a positive light. The series is based on the premise that severely disabled people are connected via their nervous systems to spaceships, which they then control with their brains. All “brainships” are paired with a human partner, a “brawn.” Together, the brain and the brawn complete missions ranging from exploration to humanitarian causes. Some have argued that this is an erasure of disability, but Tessa Swehla argues—and I happen to agree—that this is a misreading of the text. Swehla names Helva and her fellow shell-people as “…bodyminds whose nervous systems have been connected to a ship as an advanced form of prostheses.”⁶ In this respect, McCaffrey’s shell-people are no different than others who rely on machinery to survive and thrive—Darth Vader, Davros, and John Lumic among them—with one crucial difference: they are not universally evil. Nor are they universally good. Rather, they are, ironically, purely, and completely human, with a range of personality types and character traits. The series isn’t perfect, and certainly not immune to criticism, but in an era where much of the science fiction genre envisioned a miserable, evil existence for disabled people reliant on machinery, The Ship Who Sang stands out as painting a complex picture of what augmented humans can truly be.

In recent years, the Star Trek franchise has made some progress with Star Trek: Picard and the xBs. In addition, there are some minor characters in other new Star Trek shows that are shown as ex-Borg, without making the characters morally gray or their transformation back into a “good person” a plot point. However, it still has a long way to go to repair the damage it’s done over the last fifty-plus years. Recent novels like John Scalzi’s Lock In and Head On have also pushed back against the trope of disabled people augmented by technology as evil. Star Trek is constantly reinventing itself, and the last few years have seen an explosion in new Star Trek content. The continual rebirth of Star Trek gives me hope for justice for the Borg. I want to see ex-Borg as captains and engineers and shopkeepers in Star Trek. I want the appearance of an ex-Borg in Star Trek to someday be as commonplace as the appearance of a Vulcan. Maybe one day soon, someone augmented by technology can be the hero, not the villain.

¹           https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/special-series/cyborgs-reality-identity.html

²           https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberman#Development

³           https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/John_Lumic

⁴           https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Davros?so=search#Chair

⁵           https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Geordi_La_Forge#VISOR

⁶           https://sfrareview.org/2021/07/20/the-reclamation-of-mccaffreys-the-ship-who-sang-irony-as-resistance-to-utopian-ableist-narratives/

© 2024 Cara Liebowitz