Saturday Night Seminar: Looking at The Borg Queen and James Kirk’s best quotes

With James Kirk and The Borg Queen now representing the best of the heroes and villains, let’s take a look at the best lines of dialogue from both.

The March Madness finals are among us. Since the middle of March, fans from all over have cast thousands of votes to determine who would represent Starfleet and Starfleet’s greatest villains. There were several upsets along the way, like Seven of Nine’s march to the Final Four, or Gal Dukat not even making the finals. Or even the ever-popular Q losing out in the finals of the villain’s bracket. Now it’s the Borg Queen and James T. Kirk who now are gonna battle it out for the rest of the week.

No two more different characters could’ve ended up in the finals. The Borg Queen is cold, lifeless, and undaunting. Kirk is the embodiment of living life to the fullest. He’s full of love (or lust, sure), energy and a desire to explore. They are the antithesis of one another. One only needs to look at how the Queen views existence.

"Human! We used to be exactly like them. Flawed. Weak. Organic. But we evolved to include the synthetic. Now we use both to attain perfection. Your goal should be the same as ours."

Then, of course, there’s how she views herself. A body with a billion voices all speaking at once. Look at her quotes from Star Trek: First Contact.

"I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg."

Not Kirk though, not him. He understands the human complexities. In Requiem for Methuselah, he spoke of the complexity of humanity, a stark contrast from the Borg’s monosyllabic thought process of conquer and assimilate.

"To be human is to be complex. You can’t avoid a little ugliness — from within — and from without."

Then there’s the idea of creativity and freedom, as spoken about in Return of the Archons.

"Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity."

It also wasn’t something that only existed with the William Shatner version of Kirk. The Chris Pine version also embraced the idea of human instinct overall, as shown in Star Trek: Into Darkness.

"What I am about to do, it doesn’t make sense, it’s not logical, it is a gut feeling! I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do."

So as we look at the upcoming few days of voting, remember the true epicness of this encounter and remember that Kirk represents the best of humanity, while the Borg Queen the best of conformity.