'Star Trek: Discovery' Star Comments on Control and Borg Comparisons

Recent development in the second of Star Trek: Discovery led to speculation that the show may be revealing the secret origin of the Borg. The Borg is the cyborg race first introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though they remained prominent villains in the film Star Trek: First Contact and throughout Star Trek: Voyager, their origin story is unknown. But before taking control fo Capt. Leland's body, the AI known as control spoke the line, "Struggle is pointless." This reminded some fans of the famous Borg threat "Resistance is futile." Now Alan van Sprang, the actor who plays Leland and delivered that line as Control, has weighed in on the similarities to the Borg.

Speaking to StarTrek.com, van Sprang revealed that he is a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation and that Control's arc reminded him of the Borg as well. "I think it's very intriguing," Van Sprang said. "When I first read the script I thought, 'Oh, is this the making of the Borg? Is that how it happens?' We're as much in the dark as anybody else, but as soon as I saw that, I thought, 'This is like The Borg.' The Next Generation's Borg episode just blew my mind [when I watched it originally], let alone when Picard became Locutus. That's the first thing I thought of, which kind of tickled me to no end. 'Wow, I'm just going to milk this for all it's worth.'"

Van Sprang may not know if Control leads to the Borg by the end of Discovery's second season. It seems Control has begun taking on other hosts and van Sprang wasn't let in on the show's secrets ahead of time.

"They didn't tell me anything," Van Sprang says. "Anything... I mean it. It went from script to script and I wasn't allowed to know anything. Nobody was. At one point, Alex was on set in Toronto and he said to me, 'Leland's going in a direction that you might be a little surprised by,' and this was before episode 11. This was around, I think, episode seven or eight or nine. That's when they approached me and said, 'Yeah, he might become a bit of an AI.'

"There were a lot of directions that they thought about going in, in terms of what I might look like as an AI. In the end, it was just a more human-looking Leland because I think the AI was smart enough, Control was smart enough to realize that once Leland became that, that it wanted to fool the rest of the crew, Section 31 and Discovery."

Do you think Control becomes the Borg? Let us know in the comments. New Star Trek: Discovery episodes become available to stream Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS All Access.

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