When Good Villains Go Bad

When I was reading comics as a kid, one of my favourite set of characters were the Sentinels who first showed up in X-Men # 14 back in the mid-1960s (I encountered them first in a reprint of that debut). These were thirty foot tall purple robots that were designed to hunt down and capture any and all mutants, who even way back then were feared and hated by the general public (or at least by those scientists with the resources and intellect to build giant robots to go after them!)

While I certainly liked the scary aspect of the Sentinels - imagine the shock of the roof of your house being ripped off and a giant purple hand reaching in to grab you! - what I loved about them was the fact that they analyzed every weapon or superpower used against them, sharing the information between all Sentinels, meaning that however you defeated one this time would never work again! That notion was absolutely thrilling to me, because of the implication that you needed to come up with new ways to overcome a Sentinel each time one found you!

Now, if that concept sounds familiar to you and yet you've never heard of the Sentinels, it may be because you're a Star Trek fan and are thinking "Borg." I consider the two groups to be brothers under the skin - although let's be clear as to who inspired whom! - in terms of storytelling potential delivered by that adaptive-defense aspect. And in fact, when the Collective-loving alien cyborgs first showed up in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who?", I thought, "Hey, they're like humanoid Sentinels!" Even their team slogan of, "Resistance is futile." seems faintly robotic, and reminiscent of their purple Marvel Comics antecedents. And futility was an apt description of how Picard, Ryker and the rest of the Enterprise fared against the Borg in that initial encounter, saved only by omnipotent Q's capricious nature, flinging the Trek ship back to their own quadrant of the universe. In their second appearance, as the villains of the ST:TNG 3rd season finale/4th season premiere, "Best of Both Worlds", the terror of their threat was accentuated even more, and they clearly became the premiere arch foes of the Trek universe.

Which bring us to where both the Borg and the Sentinels have gone off the rails, over the years. Unlike most villains, these two are necessarily going to be harder to defeat every time they appear, simply by their nature. As a writer of fiction involving either of them, you have to be aware of this limitation at every turn. What I've seen, in both the comics and the Trek appearances, is that there's a tendency to instead water down or de-fang the villains, so as not to have to deal with this escalating ante. In both mediums, instances of each group have actually shown up as "good guys", with Marvel publishing Sentinel, a few years ago, featuring a boy and his 'pet Sentinel', as well as the popular - and sexy - Borg character known as Seven of Nine who was a regular on Star Trek: Voyager for several years. And those were simply two examples of where the once-terrifying concepts were transformed into blah versions (no offense to Jeri Ryan or her legion of fans!).

I think it's fine to take characters in new directions, but just wish in the case of the Sentinels and the Borg, that Marvel and Paramount had instead respectively used them less often, and more effectively. Both started off incredibly strongly, and then soon were diminished with each subsequent appearance. Writing them well is clearly a challenge; it just seems that not that many writers were up to it!

And speaking of challenges, how about this one: who'd win if a bunch of Sentinels fought an expedition of Borg? (Fan Geek-Out # 2,539!)