In the hour-long second “season” of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian–Making of Season 2, executive producer/director Jon Favreau says he hoped to bring all the kinds of Star Wars fans together for a special moment, and he seems to have done that in this year’s superb second season of The Mandalorian, although it’s difficult to compare Disney Gallery‘s eight-episode first season of behind the scenes glimpses to the single, albeit packed, episode fans got from Disney+ this year, released on Christmas Day. As far as making all the groups of fans happy, expect that fans of the last episode’s special climactic scene won’t get to see a “making of” feature on that component yet.
It’s been three months since the last preview for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released as part of the Disney convention in Anaheim, California, with no trailers or significant presence at San Diego Comic-Con. Again bypassing one of the two major comic book and pop culture conventions, Disney passed over New York Comic Con this past weekend to release the next trailer for the eagerly awaited Episode IX late Monday. Disney included far more visuals and significant story elements in this preview, which tells a story of a young Padawan who is reaching out for someone to help her forge her path ahead. Who will help her? Luke Skywalker? Kylo Ren? Snoke?
Her future looks bleak. This definitely carries the hallmarks of a Dark Side-heavy story like that hinted at with the early looks at The Empire Strikes Back, 37 years ago. Frankly, we’re backing the team with Chewbacca and his Porg co-pilot.
Implied in the trailer are plenty of spoilers, including at least one key character’s death. Or are they just tricks meant to tease us? As Luke says, “This is not going to go the way you think.” Check out the great detail on Luke’s borg hand–Luke was the first character of any major franchise to use the term “borg” for cyborgs, in the original Star Wars 1970s comic book series:
Disney also released another poster for the film Monday (above). Check out this new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi:
Yesterday thousands of sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero fans began to converge on Kansas City as Kansas City Comic Con returned to Bartle Hall for Kansas City Comic Con 2016. The show is featuring the very best comic book and fiction writers and artists in the U.S. as well as some great movie and TV guests. We had a great time on day one chatting with Nichelle Nichols, well known for her groundbreaking role as Uhura in three seasons of Star Trek and six major motion pictures, Billy Dee Williams, best known as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the original Bo and Luke of Dukes of Hazzard, John Schneider and Tom Wopat.
And Comic-Con also means cosplay time.
Sporting my “old Luke Skywalker” garb from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with my cloak created by intrepid borg.com contributor Elizabeth C. Bunce, we had many attendees ask the question: Where was Luke all that time leading up to his discovery by Rey at the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens?
You remember, old Jedi Master Luke was only in two scenes. The first in a flashback with R2-D2:
… and then at the end when Rey attempted to give him back his lightsaber?
After climbing over our 1.4 millionth site visit at borg.com this month, it’s time to update the borg.com Hall of Fame, with borg in genre fiction from past, present, and future, and from all media. Click here for our “About” page if you need a refresher on what makes a borg a borg.
These new inductees are primarily new additions to the world of fiction this year, but many were borgs we overlooked in prior years. A few may or may not be borg, depending on your point of view. Robots or androids that look perfectly human, for example, that have organic looking material but may not have actual living tissue are not technically cyborgs.
So here is Round 3, the 2015 borg.com Hall of Fame honorees, in no particular order:
Alicia Vikander’s Ava and Sonoya Mizumo’s Kyoko from this year’s critically acclaimed movie Ex Machina were stunning additions to the world of borg. Clearly robots with artificial intelligence but they make our list with what appeared to us to be some kind of replicated organic skin.
AMC’s new TV series Humans introduced the “synths,” robotic servants that permeated the modern world. Five of these had something more than the others, the best of these being Gemma Chan’s synth Anita, and whether you count only these five or all of them as borg, we think they fit right into our Hall of Fame.
Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the year’s biggest hits, with Furiosa on many critic’s lists of kick-ass heroines in 2015. Her mechanical prosthetic arm provides her entry ticket into our list of 2015 borgs.
In this year’s Disney adventure movie Tomorrowland, the girl Athena (Raffey Cassidy)reveals herself o be an “audio-animatronic robot,” but she looks entirely borg to us. Plenty more borg are featured in the film, including the proprietors of the toy shop who are out to keep the secrets of Tomorrowland from humanity.
We highlight them all the time here at borg.com. But some of them don’t naturally come to mind when you think of cybernetically enhanced organisms–cyborgs, or borgs for short. What makes a borg? An organism, human, alien, or animal, who has been modified by technology or uses technology as part of or in place of another biological function. We use this broadly, encompassing not only a long-accepted group of borgs that are more metal than man, but also robots or androids modified with biology or biomatter, although taken to the extreme this would seem to include the bioneural starship USS Voyager from Star Trek Voyager.
Regardless of how you define it, meet our borg.com Hall of Fame, always ready for new honorees…
With Marvel’s big premiere of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, we’ll begin with Tony Stark’s Iron Man. Tony Stark is not advertised as a borg, but if your power source involves techno-gadgetry via an arc reactor and you have his fully integrated armor, we think that makes you a borg. Whedon is very familiar with borgs, having created the character Adam, the nasty, almost unstoppable foe of the Scooby Gang in Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
If Iron Man is a borg, should one of the oldest creatures of science fiction be considered a borg as well–Frankenstein’s monster? How integral are those bolts and attachments to his survival anyway? Does an external power source make a borg? Did he ever have to regenerate?
And if Frankenstein’s monster makes the cut, maybe this spin-off fellow should, too:
Yes, Frankenberry, the only cereal mascot borg? Are those pressure gauges on his head? What functions do they serve? Before we move forward very far in time, we also think we need to at least consider Maria’s doppelganger from Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film classic Metropolis as a possible borg.com honoree–a robot admittedly, but somehow transformed into a humanoid creation with flesh, used to replace the real Maria and wreak havoc across Metropolis:
From one of the biggest science fantasy franchises, Star Wars, Darth Vader began as Anakin Skywalker, but through his own rise to evil and subsequent downfall he became more machine than man:
He even caused his son to require borg technology by slicing off his arm and hand with his lightsaber, making Luke Skywalker a borg as well:
With Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, we met an interesting new villain, General Grievous, a four-lightsaber wielding almost lobster-like biological creature made up of techno-armor and, in close-up are those reptilian eyes? His apparent disfigurement and breathing problems hint at a back story that must be not unlike Vader’s.
In The Empire Strikes Back we also briefly met Lando Calrissian’s majordomo who possessed some type of brain adapter technology–we learn from action figures, trading cards and comics his name is Lobot:
And probably the very first cyborg to be referred to specifically as a “borg” (by Luke Skywalker, even), Valance was a cyborg bounty hunter in the early pages of Star Wars, the Marvel Comics series:
Some borgs are more cybernetic than organism, at least at first appearance. This would include Doctor Who’s Cybermen:
and we’d learn even the Daleks were cybernetic organisms:
and the Terminators from the Terminator movie and Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, very much more machine with a bit of organics (and even Arnold’s character called himself a “cybernetic organism”):
In Star Trek: First Contact the Borg Queen alters the android Lieutenant Commander Data in such a way so as to make Pinocchio a real boy:
giving real organic material to Data, (like Maria’s double above from Metropolis?) bringing him briefly into the realm of borg status, like Isaac Asimov’s Bicentennial Man:
and this even suggests the Tin Man from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz may be a rudimentary variant borg being along the lines of Frankenstein’s monster:
All humanoids or aliens modified to become The Borg of the Star Trek franchise clearly are good examples of cyborg beings, the most famous of which are probably Patrick Stewart’s Locutus:
the seemingly innocent Hugh:
and Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager:
On Earth we encounter humans all the time with bodies improved by borg technology. Because of the OSI Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers were rescued from near death with enhanced biology and appendages to become the Bionic Man and Bionic Woman:
The British agent James Bond had to take on Doctor No, an evil scientist who took on his own technological enhancements because of medical maladies, bringing James Bond into the fold of genre franchises investigating a borg character:
Featured in a 1980s movie series and soon to be the subject of a new movie, Robocop:
showed us a variant on Austin and Sommers, and a bit like Iron Man, we have the government creating technology to make super-humans, and here, a superhuman police officer. This is taken even further, making three animals into borgs for military use in the Eisner-nominated comic book mini-series WE3:
…a far darker take on the classic cartoon character Dynomutt from Scooby Doo:
Inspector Gadget:
and Doctor Octopus (Doc Ock) in Spider-man 2:
both were borgs that made it into big-screen films.
In the DC Comics universe we have a newer Justice League featured member Cyborg, a football player/student who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, when his father’s lab goes up in flames and his father uses his own research to save his son from death:
Before that, Frank Miller envisioned a disfigured future world Green Arrow who would need his own prosthetic cybernetic arm in The Dark Knight Returns:
Mr. Freeze was an early borg villain in the Batman series:
In Marvel Comics Rich Buckler created Deathlok the Demolisher, another cyborg creation, and one of the earliest borgs in comics:
Add to that Marvel characters like Ultron, the “living” automaton:
Ultron’s own creation, named Vision, the “synthezoid”–
and the borg called Cable:
In the 1990s Jim Lee created the Russian borg in the pages of X-Men called Omega Red:
Long before these Marvel characters the cyborgs Robotman and Robotdog graced the pages of DC Comics in the 1940s, and yes, they were not just robots:
The modern Cylons from the reboot Battlestar Galactica TV series are borgs in the Terminator sense, robots made to look and pass for human. And there were a bunch, not just background, but named characters, the most famous of which was the seductive Number Six:
Years before, Philip K. Dick would create more than one borg character in his novels and short stories, revealed to us the best as the Replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner:
Several replicants appeared in the film:
…all indistinguishable from humans to the naked eye.
In the horror realm we have Ash, from Evil Dead and Army of Darkness, his arm a functioning chainsaw, and at least in the comic book, like the Star Trek borgs he has an interchangeable arm like a mega Swiss Army knife:
If we include Ash do we also need to include Cherry Darling from Planet Terror, since she has a rifle as a leg like Ash’s arm attachment?
Heck, even horrific camp troller Jason became a borg eventually in Jason X:
Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn comics had both the borg assassin Overtkill:
and the cybernetic gorilla Cy-Gor:
Speaking of borg beasties, even Japanese monster movies embraced borgs, having their hero Godzilla encounter Mechagodzilla:
and Gigan:
In the world of manga and anime we have Ghost in the Machine’s own borg girl Motoko Kusanagi:
leader of a group of borgs, and the villain Cell from Dragon Ball:
Cowboy Bebop had the borg character Jet Black, which seems influenced by the design of Seven of Nine:
Akira had Tetsuo Shima:
And we have a new one to add to the list because of the film Prometheus, the creepy borg, David 8:
But he’s certainly not the first in Ridley Scott’s Alien universe. Don’t forget Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien:
Lance Henrikson’s Bishop from Aliens:
and Winona Ryder’s Annalee Call from Alien: Resurrection:
But these are just the biggest examples of borgs in popular genre works. Countless books, comics and short stories have introduced other borg beings, not to mention every other new video game. What will be the next borg to enter the mainstream, with a new TV show or movie?
Should we add an Honorable Mention list to the borg.com Borg Hall of Fame, for beings resulting from the merging of humans with cyberspace? Think of characters like Tron and Flynn from Tron and Tron: Legacy? Or Neo and Trinity & Co. from the Matrix movies? You can argue some of the above in or out of the list, but we’ll be visiting most of them here now and then.
Editor note: We’ll update this list from time to time and feature it as its own page on the borg.com home page. Just click on “Know your borg” at the top of this page now for a full update!
Yesterday we started in on what makes a great character, and who and how we determine our favorites, mentioning dozens of favorites from different genres and different media. The challenge? Come up with your top 5 favorite fictional characters from anything. When I was finished selecting them, I was surprised what they all have in common: a desire to protect others and defend the good against the bad. I went through a ton of characters to whittle it down to five. Most of my favorites I see as having some trait I want for myself, or guys I want to be like. Along the way I carved away Boba Fett, the obscure but coolest of the “men with no name” anti-hero Western archetypes, and opted instead for another Star Wars character. I lost Steve McQueen’s too cool cop Lieutenant Frank Bullitt for another cop that made the list and had to cut the other coolest guy (other than The Fonz), the no-named drifter from They Live. I lost Thomas Magnum, the TV show private investigator, that, along with Batman, is up there at the top of my Sherlock Holmes influenced characters. I cut big life-long heroes like the Six Million Dollar Man, Luke Skywalker, Tron, and even the awesome A.A. Milne creation Eeyore. No room for Will Riker and Captain Dathon from Star Trek. I love Dana Andrews’ noir detective Mark McPherson in Otto Preminger’s Laura. Fred Gailey, who defended Santa Claus (successfully!) in court in Miracle on 34th Street, hung to the list almost to the end. A top 10 list would have been far easier!
After a lot of soul searching–and this is not an easy exercise (try it for yourself!)–here is where I finally ended up.
When we first meet Uncle Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi, played by Sir Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars, he was an old man. A miser living out beyond the Dune Sea. Luke thought he was long dead. Then he comes out of nowhere in the desert at just the right time to barely save our story’s hero. Ben doesn’t remember the droids he supposedly owned a few decades ago. Is he a bit absent minded? Has the desert gotten to him? Without Uncle Ben, Luke Skywalker would be dead, and he saves Luke’s life six times: first, from the Tusken Raiders in the desert, second, from an alien in the cantina’s hive of scum and villainy, third, from the Empire by getting Luke out of Mos Eisley, fourth, by releasing the Millenium Falcon in the Death Star, fifth, by guiding Luke from afar to destroy the Death Star in his X-Wing Fighter, and sixth, by keeping him alive after he is mugged by a snow beast on the frozen planet of Hoth. Kenobi was part samurai warrior, part medieval wizard, part mystic, a monk, a veteran of the last battle of the Jedi. And later we’d learn he was the reason Luke and his sister survived at all: he’d saved Luke as an infant by bringing him to the remote planet with twin suns. He doesn’t have much time to mentor Luke, but what he does counts for a lot. Kenobi proves nothing is more powerful than wisdom and experience. Ultimately he sacrifices everything to save the galaxy by using his knowledge of the force to convert into a spirit, the only time this ever happens in the original Star Wars trilogy, so he can assist Luke along the rest of his journey. Later on Ewan McGregor put a very nice spin on the character for the prequels, but the original played by Guinness can never be beaten and Guinness received the only acting nod from the Academy for all the great actors of the series.
DCI Gene Hunt was a cop, a cop played by actor Philip Glenister. A good cop that blurred some of the rules of British law enforcement, but who was a product of his times, which was 1973 in the BBC TV series Life on Mars, and 1982 in the series Ashes to Ashes. He is brash, rude, and mouthy. He is kind. He is crude and speaks in local colloquialisms that make non-natives have to rewind and view the closed captioning to understand what the heck he just said, and sometimes you still can’t tell. He protects his team. More than anything, this guy has angst. Yet he wants to help others. He wants to do the right thing. He believes in justice. He believes that sometimes a cop has to break the rules to get to the right result. To find the criminal. To protect the innocent. He’s willing to stop and help a woman having an emergency birth. He falls for a co-worker who herself is a mess and desperately lost. He tolerates his bizarre group of subordinates, as he prefers them to everyone else, and he’ll join them for a drink at any time of day. And he always drives a cool car. He’s like a British version of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, but with more layers and a lot more problems. He becomes so involved in everyone else’s affairs that he ultimately forgets who he is. I have seen Philip Glenister in little else, and wonder whether I like Gene, or I like Gene because Glenister played him. Either way, nothing is as it seems in Manchester and Salford police departments. And that leaves Gene to rise above it all and become the best cop in the best cop series ever made.
In the western movie Silverado, at the beginning of the film, Paden is dead. At least he is left for dead, like real-life Beck Weathers in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Paden is played by Kevin Kline. You can’t start much worse off than Paden, prior to being rescued by Scott Glenn’s character, Emmett. All Paden has to his name is his 1800s long underwear. He was trusting, befriended some cowboys who turned on him, stole his horse, his saddle, his hat, his ivory-handled Colt. The whole rig. But he really missed the bay horse the most. They were laughing when they left him. Thought it was real funny. He walked for a little while but there was no use, so he gave it up. Figured it was just bad luck. He lies down to die. And he gets a second chance. But he’s not so much about revenge as looking out for the little dog one of his fellow riders mistreats. He’s trying to find his place in the world, which just so happens to be managing the affairs of a saloon. And you never know what Paden will care about. Even if that means he must stop looking the other way. He is a hero so he must act. If that means risking his footing in a new town to defend a man against a racist saloon operator, so be it. And if that means killing the men who run Silverado and the sheriff himself, his old friend, well then so be it. Kline plays Paden as funny, serious, smart. Sometimes warm, as when he is taking care of new friends, sometimes cold, as when he has to shoot a man. Sometimes puzzling, like when he flirts with a woman the night her husband is shot dead. Sheriff Cobb is using Stella to get to Paden. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Paden says. Stella responds: “He can’t hurt me… if he’s dead.” Paden is a complex guy who changes his luck in a time when getting by was good enough.
I’ve read everything I could get my hands on related to Oliver Queen, aka Green Arrow, as re-developed in DC Comics’ silver age, from 1971 forward. Queen was a billionaire who lost it all. He became “everyman.” He ended up fighting crime as a vigilante and donned the outfit of Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood and took his bow and arrow as well to fight crime. He’s a bit like Batman, a sleuth in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. He became a force for social change and fell in love with a beautiful woman, Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, and they ended up together in Seattle running a floral shop. They were members of the Justice League and rubbed elbows with the best superheroes around. Oliver always was outspoken, sometimes offending everyone around him, yet everyone around him always respected what he had to say and they often took his lead. He always fought for the underdog. My favorite incarnation is my first revisit to comic books, Green Arrow written and drawn by Mike Grell, but O’Neil and Adams’ version is a close second. In his first scene of the modern era, he must convince Green Lantern that he needs to stop protecting a slumlord and instead protect the tenants. With his on-again/off-again, fiery relationship with Dinah, he became part of the only crime-fighting superhero couple, together ridding the streets of every kind of baddie.
The only one of the five of my favorite characters listed here that never veered from my #1 spot is Captain Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce. As the leading character in the TV series M*A*S*H over the course of eleven seasons, Alan Alda became the best actor on any TV series, and soldier/doctor Pierce became my favorite character. He is defined by triage. Triage in his job as he must discriminate between who has a chance to live and who won’t live. Triage is his circumstance as he must decide to make the best or worst of being stuck in a place no one, even the local Korean refugees, wants to be. His tools consist of scalpels, forceps, alcohol, and humor. He takes the most depressing of dramatic situations and makes everyone laugh, and when the brilliant writing team gives us a serious story, he leaves us silent. He gives us gut-wrenching performances, via a simple salute to Radar O’Reilly as he leaves for home to take care of the farm, to his reaction to the death of Colonel Henry Blake, to his interview responses for Movietone news. He makes us laugh at his unending supply of practical jokes, against Hot Lips, Frank, Winchester, or B.J. He is a hero, he’ll save the life of a North Korean soldier without flinching, and at his worst he freaks-out, asking those questions everyone wants to ask in the middle of a war, but doesn’t. Why can’t we all just get along, as bunkmates, as co-workers, as Americans, as humans? And he is calm when he needs to be. Even when he is being bombed while trying to save lives after hours without rest. With more than a dose of inspiration from Groucho Marx, Alan Alda conducted a one-man band of chaos in the middle of a stellar cast of characters. It’s hard to believe M*A*S*H was a 30-minute show. Never before or since has anyone come close to packing so much emotion, drama, comedy, and energy in such a small period of time, for so many years. Although the writing of his character bottomed out in the last episode, what came before is what matters, and it explains why the series finale was the most-watched show ever.
Editor’s note: Tomorrow… we will take a day away from our favorite characters and Jason McClain will run down his recommendations to the Academy for the Ten Best Picture nominees, who will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Tuesday, January 24. Come on back Tuesday bright and early for Jason McClain’s top five favorite characters, followed by Art Schmidt on Wednesday and Elizabeth C. Bunce on Thursday.
As you might already know, borg is the short version of cyborg, itself a shortened combination of the term “cybernetic organism.” At its core a cybernetic organism is the juxtaposition between the present and the future—the evolved organic meets future technology, usually technology meant to enhance, improve or replace a biological function. Today people with loss of limbs or other functions benefit from cybernetic improvements that didn’t exist just decades ago. The seemingly unlimited boundaries and implications of these technologies have been pursued throughout popular fiction for years.
My first encounter with the concept of a cybernetic organism is like many peoples’—Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. In fact, the original working title of SMDM was “Cyborg.” Back in the 1970s one of my favorite toys and the first of many large action figures was this astronaut from the TV series. He was the perfect archetype and a great introduction to the borg concept for kids back then. He explored both the good and the bad of mixing technology with biology, usually through the struggle he and his friend Jaime Sommers “The Bionic Woman” experienced adapting to these new enhancements. Ultimately in science fiction a lot of time is spent focused on the pitfalls of this mix—Terminators dehumanize us. Robocop and Darth Vader ultimately lose their human selves. But let’s face it, the benefits can be amazing.
When I was ten years old I got my first pair of eyeglasses. I remember reading my first comic books and thinking about the old “what if?” question: If you could have any special power, what would it be? The ability to fly like Superman? The ability to move fast like the Flash? To climb walls like Spiderman? For me the answer was easy—I wanted perfect vision. Steve Austin, the astronaut played by Lee Majors, crashed in a test flight, and because “we can rebuild him” because “we have the technology,” Steve got not only superior vision but superior physical strength and other powers, too. Through my Six Million Dollar Man action figure I could literally see (through a window in the back of his head) Steve’s super vision. But this was science fiction, right? And who has six million bucks anyway?
Flash forward to the 21st century. Science fiction meets reality, and not for six million dollars but more like six thousand dollars comes LASIK. I found myself in an eye doctor’s laboratory with eye tests that looked like something out of 1950s sci fi TV serials—with flashing lights and lasers measuring the surface of my eye to the actual (gulp) restructuring of my eyes with a real-life laser beam. Back in the 1970s I would have thought it possible, just not likely, that I could have my wish come true. And the days of lesser technologies…eyeglasses and contact lenses…were a thing of the past for me. Did I get to benefit from actual cybernetic technologies? You bet! Do I consider myself a bit of a borg? I’m not telling, but I’ve been known to refer to my new sight as laser vision—a concept straight out of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics.
I also just like “borg” over “cyborg” and “cybernetic organism”. It’s less formal and I hope to drop all formality with this website. My own first encounter with the word “borg” was in my favorite comic book series as a kid—the Star Wars adaptation and Marvel’s ongoing original comic series that started as a retelling of the Seven Samurai. In issue 16 we were introduced to the menacing bounty hunter Valance, who hunts robots, only to be revealed to us in the last panel that half of his body was replaced with cybernetic parts—he was a borg. Who knew one day I would have a website called the same thing?
I also have to mention other borg: Doctor Who’s Cybermen and even the Daleks, General Grievous and Luke Skywalker, the human Cylons from the Battlestar Gallactica reboot series, Philip K. Dick’s replicants we saw on the big screen in Blade Runner, and last but not least the species in Star Trek that assimilates all species and cultures, “The Borg”—I hope here, too, to pull together all science fiction, fantasy, entertainment–all pop culture–in one place.
