BT 20: The Thing and Regeneration

BackTrekking returns again to look back at the real-world inspirations of classic Trek episodes!

Is Star Trek scary? A future with no paychecks, fake booze, and the ever-present fear you may be in a simulation is scary. Trek rarely gets to do horror because face it: in one hand you have a device that tells you exactly where Michael Myers is and in the other, a device that can phaser him right to the ground. The rationality and advanced technology of the Federation means superstitions are scarce and death is (mostly) curable. But when that technology goes awry, or when it's alien technology we don't understand, the fear factor can become pleasantly elevated.

That's where the Borg come in. They're robot zombies whose guns are often bigger than the Federations. They don't feel pity or remorse or fear, and they absolutely will not stop until something something. They're probably the closest that Trek gets to a matinee monster and they're scary for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the infection-slash-possession they represent. Get a little Borg on you and you could BECOME a Borg and suddenly be really interested in getting your former friends to join the club. The Borg are so popular an adversary on Star Trek, they even found a way to have them on Enterprise, which is set 200 years before their first appearance in the franchise, and to do it the Masters of Trek turned to one of the masters of modern horror, John Carpenter.

Uncle John is a versatile filmmaker who has written and directed films with a variety of settings and character types. If there's a unifying thread in his films, it's probably the emotion of paranoia of the unknown and none of his films embody that emotion better than 1982's "The Thing", a film which was mostly panned on its release but is now rightly heralded as one of the most fraught and disturbing sci-fi horror flicks of the 20th century. When searching for a way to bring the Borg to Enterprise, what could be better than to have hapless Federation scientists find something buried in the Arctic ice, waiting to revive and begin transforming the world in its image? Someone get Wilford Brimley on the phone!

On this episode, we talk about John Carpenter's masterpiece and Trek's college try at homaging it. We also discuss the way the film's many characters distinguish themselves with minimal dialogue, the simple construction of Carpenter films, yelling cool things at monsters, what's up with Copper's nose ring, the Outrageous Jack Burton, finding new elements in familiar antagonists, posting Zefram cringe, the vampire-zombie spectrum, Borg racism, Old Man Worf, and the show's most necessary Technological Exchange!

Nobody trusts anybody now and we're all very tired.

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