On television in 1978, no robot was more frightening than a Cylon. Eleven years later, they read like merchandise.
That embarrassment sits at the heart of one of the longest-running feuds in science fiction, and Battlestar Galactica needed more than ten years to even the score.
Consider the order of arrival. As the genre’s first genuinely iconic robotic species bent on erasing humanity beneath a tide of cold, unfeeling steel, the Cybermen went years without a serious rival. Battlestar Galactica and its Cylons showed up twelve years after those creatures clanked through the era of a worn-down First Doctor.
The show that made man vs. machine the whole point
What set it apart was structural. The show was built from the ground up around a running war between flesh-and-blood humans and those clunky Cylons, which made it one of the earliest series to place man vs. machine at the very center. A technologically superior, unstoppable army of emotionless machines, stalking human survivors across a galaxy.
Today that setup is a baseline. Terminator used it. The Matrix (official site) used it. Battlestar Galactica was first in the queue.
Star Trek, despite everything it reached for in the 1960s, never pulled that off. Captain Kirk and his crew tended to encounter robotic foes that amounted to bulky gray cabinets with blinking lights and tinny voices, computers that had malfunctioned or been given the wrong orders. The franchise’s true antagonists, the Klingons and the Romulans and the Gorn, were made of flesh and blood. That difference counted for something.
Then “Q Who” happened
The ground moved in 1989. Following a first season that was genuinely underwhelming, Star Trek: The Next Generation dropped the Borg into the middle of season 2, and science fiction got a new chapter regardless of whether it wanted one.
The Borg went on to assimilate pop culture with real force, defining Star Trek for decades across Voyager, Picard and a strong run in cinemas. Overstating their impact on the genre is hard. Overlooking how much they echoed the 1978 Cylons is just as hard.
Some of that comes down to timing. “Q Who” arrived as robots became a Hollywood fixture, showing up everywhere from Los Angeles in 2019 to the crime-soaked streets of a future Detroit. The stories were thickening as well, layering in questions about existence, sentience and legal ethics.
The Borg, though, were no philosophy seminar. They were a race of machines that loathed the living, wielded overwhelming firepower and would pursue a ship to the galaxy’s edge purely to kill everyone aboard. Try reading that back without picturing the Cylons.
Cylons, but with the fear turned up
Think of the Borg as Cylons with the dial pushed all the way over. Battlestar Galactica’s villains leaned cartoonish; the Borg carried real dread, pale and ghoulish, and The Next Generation leaned harder into horror when it revealed that captured humans were repurposed into hosts.
Their vessels were grimy and coldly efficient. Their voices were calm and horrible. And once Jean-Luc Picard himself was hauled off to the assimilation spa, Star Trek began dismantling the question of what makes a human human.
Set beside all that, the Cylons seemed obsolete, shelved alongside black-and-white sets and vinyl. The very villains that distinguished Battlestar Galactica from Star Trek in the 1970s were lapped by Star Trek in the 1980s.
2003, and the overhaul nobody saw coming
By then, twenty-three years had gone by since Galactica 1980 finished. The Next Generation had been gone from television for close to ten years, Enterprise wasn’t plugging the gap, and its prequel status prevented it from engaging with the Borg in any substantial way.
Ronald D. Moore, meanwhile, was reconstructing Battlestar Galactica for a new millennium, and “reboot” is too small a word for what he did. He rebuilt the thing down to the chassis, and nothing changed more than the Cylons.
They had human faces now. Those 1978 chrome machines were reduced to footsoldiers within a bigger and more frightening empire, complete with imposing otherworldly ships, a hive-like consciousness and a sweeping philosophy about what life across the universe ought to be.
Oddly enough, that made them kin to The Next Generation’s Borg rather than to their own 1970s ancestors. And the twist cut deepest of all: instead of assimilating humans, these Cylons turned into humans. Or humans turned into them. Or both simultaneously.
Hiding in plain sight beat assimilation
If the original Cylons to the Borg was a leap, the Borg to the rebooted Cylons was a canyon. A villain you cannot pick out is worse than one you can see coming, and the moral murkiness handed the show a complexity Star Trek had only hinted at by way of Hugh and Seven of Nine.
There’s a practical angle too. The Borg were never designed to shoulder The Next Generation week in and week out. The Cylons shouldered Battlestar Galactica across its whole run, and the series never bothered adding a second villainous species.
The reboot closed in 2009, and nothing has knocked the Cylons off their perch as science fiction’s foremost robotic villains. Modern Star Trek projects have brought the Borg back to mixed effect, always hovering near the ’90s template. Several further attempts at another Battlestar Galactica reboot have gone nowhere, which may well be the gentlest possible result.
Over on Doctor Who, the Cybermen carry on being the Cybermen. Nowhere in the genre has a new robotic race climbed above the Cylons.
Real-world technology catching up may account for part of it, since that progress has only made both the Cylons and the Borg look more believable. The same advances have pushed depictions of AI toward greater nuance, so armies of metal marching on humanity might simply read as dated in 2026.
Battlestar Galactica’s future isn’t moving. No new Star Trek series is in sight. In the business of cyborgs conquering the galaxy, the Cylons have the final word. For now.