Sunday, July 3, 2016

Resistance is Futile

I received a shipment a couple of weeks ago, admitting that because I've been enjoying researching the subject, too much.

The theme is "Simply Irresistible", and the Mean Girl in this one is.... The Borg Queen from Star Trek. Well, let me qualify that a little bit. The Star Trek that we knew from 1987 until about 2005. The most recent movies are rewriting what we knew before, so we'll have to see what the Borg are up in a new alternate universe.

She first appears in the movie Star Trek: Next Generation First Contact. The plot was that Captain Picard and crew follow Borg through a time shift and end up at earth, in their past, just prior to Zefram Cochrane making first contact with alien visitors to earth. Borg take over the engineering department of Enterprise-E, and as Picard and Data make their way into that area, a fleshy torso is lowered from the ceiling and connected with a cyber, robotic body, or cyborg.

She's never actually given a name in the movie's dialog. Common with the apiary theme previously given to this menace, like 'the Hive' or 'Drone', she may have been dubbed in the credits the Borg Queen continuing that in a similar vein. It's thought that when the Borg encounters call for a one-on-one confrontations, she was brought out to communicate on behalf of the Borg.

Portrayed by Alice Krige who's had her share of Mean Girls roles, such as Bathsheba in 1995 King David, Mary Shelley (authoress of Frankenstein) in 1988 Haunted Summer, the mean mother of Natalie Wood in 2004 The Mystery of Natalie Wood, and Joan Collins in 2005 Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure. Just those few roles gives me an easy idea that she knows how to portray a domineering, seductress of the aggressively manipulative variety.

Alice Krige as the Borg Queen
And manipulate she did. She detains Data in the engineering department, offering him a chance at humanity (how completely un-Borg-like of her! Isn't it usually the other way around, taking fleshy beings and making them machines?) if he would join the Borg. In one scene, she gives him a patch of skin on his right forearm, which at first seems unimpressive, but when she purses her lips and blows across that bit of skin, the sensation is.... well, 'orgasmic' for someone who's never experienced it before. Very seductive.

Borg Queen: Are you familiar with physical forms of pleasure?
Lieutenant Commander Data: If you are referring to sexuality, I am... fully functional, programmed in... multiple techniques.
Borg Queen: How long since you've used them?
Lieutenant Commander Data: Eight years, seven months, sixteen days, four minutes, twenty-two...
Borg Queen: Far too long.

Apparently, she was not as 'HOT' as she thought she was, as he was the one that was instrumental in destroying her and the bit of humanity she'd given him, by flooding engineering with plasma, destroying all the Borg remaining on the Starship.

Susana Thompson appeared
as the Borg Queen in the
Star Trek Voyager series.
The Borg Queen appears again, in Star Trek: Voyager, although portrayed by another actress Susanna Thompson (who is currently a regular cast member on The Arrow). Then another Borg Queen portrayed by Alice Krige returns in the final episodes of Star Trek Voyager. In an interview with The Trek Nation, Ms. Krige said about the Voyager finale episodes. 'a couple of nights before we started filming, it suddenly dawned on me that First Contact had been the Borg Queen with two men, that she used sexuality as a means of manipulation, and I called the producer and I said, 'This is two women. It's going to change, it's going to shift the energy, will it work?' And he said, 'Think of her as omnisexual.' And I thought, 'Oh! Okay!'

Like a lot of Mean Girls, The Borg Queen uses her sexuality, her femininity, to manipulate, which doesn't, in the end, help her except to add her to our special list of honorees. So, knit away, members of the Mean Girls Yarn Club, commemorate the Sexy Borg, seemingly all powerful and deadly as a disturbed hive of bees.

The colors of the skein we received is a black and bronze mixture, with a deep blood red thrown in. When I look at this mixture, the darkness and coldness of space and maybe the silence. The red, the way it's mixed into the darkness, reminds me of the iron that mixes with our soil on earth, the determined mineral that as a metal has an unbending will and has been used to reshape destinies. I can only imagine that a project knit with it will be Simply Irresistible.

Installment contents:

 Mean Girls Yarn Club Episode VII: The Final Frontier "Simply Irresistible"
100% Merino Wool Superwash Sock, approx. 560 yards/512 meters
4 oz./115 gm 2 ply, Gauge: 6-8 spi on US #1-3

Care Instructions: Machine Washable, Lay Flat to Dry

This shipment included Wildflower honey Sticks that closely resemble how a Borg might receive nutritional supplements, stitch stoppers with and the Borg insignia 'Claw' created by Jelby (jelby.etsy.com) and a color coordinated stitch marker with metallic red & olive beads that may represent the Human and Cyborg fluids and a jet black faceted to represent the metallic workings.

Pattern Recommendations: (Links to Ravelry)

 Knitting:
Crochet:
~Written very late at night, pardon the blurry edges, by Tammy Burke, a nobody you may recognize as a terrible giggler from the Fiber Hooligan podcast that ended last year, currently assisting the Yarn Thing podcast with Marly Bird, and sharing every funny and interesting thing she can about knitting, crochet or just yarn in general in her own Facebook Group, Pursuit of Happy Knits. Once upon a time she was interviewed for being herself by the Knotty Girls. She considers herself just a fan of Dizzy Blonde Studios and loves getting to show her appreciation with properly spelled adjectives and way too many commas. The above article was written with love and ability to do research, without much knowledge but with aim toward that which is fun.
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