Remember when Tuvok, Janeway, and Torres decided to go and get themselves assimilated ON PURPOSE? Boy, that was some smart thinking, huh?

Oh yeah, I was in suspense for months. Damn Space deciding to restart the series.

Ironically, a discussion about the Borg is taking place on the DS9 board--the series that had them the least, except TOS. Given its multi-series nature, I thought I'd start a thread here. I've copied all relevant quotes so anyone can jump in and participate without searching first.






I'm still composing my reply to that last bit, but I thought I'd open the floor in the meantime. Have at it!

Bumping for the blind.

There's actually an ancient Borg thread still over in the Bad Guys and Space Travellers section of the Enterprise forum.

.

Ooooh, I knew I forgot to check somewhere. Would it be a big deal for a mod to merge the two threads? Sorry for the inconvenience.

My reply's still coming. I wasn't getting anywhere last night, so I'm going try again later.

Which would be me. Many appologies, I can't believe I forgot about this thread.



I kind of wish that the other Borg kids had stayed around longer.

Voyager: the series that neutered the Borg, once the mightiest foe the Federation had ever faced.

I had a question about the nature of the Borg after watching Descent. That episode said that the reason all those drones became autonomous was because Hugh "infected" them with individuality; but why didn't the same thing happen when they assimilated Picard or any other human with probably a greater sense of individuality than Hugh? What was so special about Hugh's individuality?

Just a fanwank here, but the Borg would be expecting individuality from new species that they're assimilating, so they have some sort of barrier or other non-futile resistance. But Hugh's individuaility was born while he was part of the Collective already. It was an unexpected source, and thus could actually penetrate into the Collective.

That was Unity, actually. Collective was the one where they met all the Borg children for the first time.



Well a fanwank is the best we're ever going to get, and as such things go, yours is pretty good.

While I agree that the Borg were less interesting after Voyager, I don't think it was necessarily the result of anything they did with them, but rather the result of too much use. They were cool in Q Who?, BOBW, and Scorpion, but when you think about it they're really just zombies. Zombies don't have depth. The queen, Unimatrix Zero, the Survival Instinct gang, et al. were all ways of giving the Borg depth so they wouldn't just be zombies. I suppose there was another option, namely, don't use the Borg, but given Voyager and UPN's ratings problems and the fact that the Borg did actually help ratings, that wasn't really a possibility

But the problem is the Borg were supposed to be zombies - zombies with the decidedly narrow minded goal of assimilating everything in sight. That is why they were terrifying. I liked the Queen in First Contact, but what depth did they add to her in Voyager? She was the same scheming,duplicitous, batshit crazy control freak on Voyager that she was in the movie.

I try to avoid thinking of Unimatrix Zero when possible. The stupidity of the crew's plan to be assimilated on purpose still confounds me.

Yes, but this would have been even more tiresome after four seasons as the Borg with personality. The Borg worked well on TNG because they were used sparingly, so every appearance was an event. But how many times could we have watched Voyager get menaced by a cube and narrowly escape assimilation, if that's all that was going on in the episode? Not many. And certainly not as many as UPN would have liked.

This is all that happened with the Borg on Voyager anyway. Hell, in Endgame the Janeways even managed to destroyed most, if not all, of the Borg.

Whatever happened to the Borg baby found with the rest of the children? They took it off the Borg vessel into sickbay and then........ it was gone.

Fanwanks?

My guess is the same thing that happened to the rest of the children, but offscreen. That is, they found her home planet and returned her.

That or Neelix ate her.

Much like Samantha Wildman and Joe Carey, the Borg Baby fell into the eternal pit of "characters the writers forgot they didn't kill". Only Carey managed to claw his way out of that pit, so he could appear in the episode where they really did kill him.

I never forgave the show for what they did to the Borg. I hated Species 8472 and I know the Queen was a TNG thing but VOY did not make her interesting to me at least. I hated Axel story and the whole mini-Borg civil war.

HA! I love it!

Just like TNG neutered the Klingons, once the mightiest foe the Federation had ever faced.

I didn't have a problem with the way TNG handled the Klingons. The Federation/Klingon relationship was always analogous to the US/Soviet relationship during the Cold War. When TNG premiered the Cold War was winding down and Roddenberry decided to mirror that with the Feds/Klingons.

Isn't this thread redundant? I remember addressing the "Voyager made the Borg suck" argument in a different Borg thread.

BanjoSteve, I think you and I started that discussion, in all places in the Defiant thread of the DS9 board. But it petered out when said thread got back on topic.

Like Kev said, the Fed/Klingon treatment in TNG was meant to mirror the thawing of the Cold War. Plus, the Klingons got much more interesting when we learned about their warrior code of honor and bat'leths and Kahless and all that good stuff. Voyager just made the Borg boring and ineffective, and didn't really add anything cool about them, other than Unimatrix Zero.

So what you're saying is Voyager didn't add anything cool about the Borg.

There will always be a special place in my heart for the Borg at least the ones from Q, Who?. I liked them before the introduction of the Queen. I always felt uncomfortable with the idea of the Queen. I liked the idea of the Borg just being the Borg. I never thought of the Borg as evil but like a force of nature. They didn't care about anything other than assimilating what they could. I was okay with Borg prespective of view the UFP and everyone else as resources to be assimilated. Not to defend VOY but every now and then they did add something interesting to the Borg story. 7 tells us that the Borg didn't assimilate the Kazan (sp) because they didn't meet the Borg IQ test and hence were left alone. VOY missed an oppertunity to explore the more in any meaningful and interesting way. How did the Borg finally assimilate the people of Arturis from Hope and Fear? I did like that there were consequences to the deal Janeway made with the Borg. I think I'm alone but I didn't care for Unimatrix Zero because it meant dealing with the Queen and I hated the Queen. What I never understood is why the Borg didn't just keep sending ships into the Alapha and Beta Quads and take the UFP, Klingons, Romulans, etc. out. I disliked Endgame so much because it looked like the Borg had access to the whole galaxy at will. Why didn't they assimaliate/attack the Dominion since they controlled such a large portion of the Gamma Quadrent? More importantly if they had a conduit right next to Earth why the hell hadn't the Borg assimilated Earth already?

The only problem I had with the existence of the Borg Queen is that having one seems to eliminate the need for Locutus. Now, it's possible that the Borg didn't actually HAVE Queens until after the events in "Best of Both Worlds." After that, if they need someone to speak for them, they decided that maybe it would be better to have that ability already on hand, instead of borrowing someone who instead manages to blow up your ship and set your assimilation plans back about ten years by posting in run-on sentences.

Really, to explore the Borg as a "culture," there's got to be a Queen. The Queen, by herself, doesn't neuter the Borg, who were just as menacing in "First Contact" as they were in the TNG episodes. It's just that they appeared too often, and were dealt with in ways that undercut their menacing-ness.

So once they had a Queen, why did they need Locutus?

They didn't. My point is that the Queen made Locutus useless, which could be seen as an inconsistency. I speculated that the Queen did not exist until after BOBW, possibly due to the bad experience the Borg had with him.

I meant, why did she try to turn Picard and/or Data in First Contact?

Except that a flashback and supporting dialogue clearly show Picard and the Queen being together during BOBW.

I actually like the idea of a Borg Queen but it also introduces too many continuity errors.

Does the Dominion control the Gamma Quadrent outright? Wasn't there an ep of DS9 when ppl came through the warm whole who were feeling them and it seemed like they weren't too sure who the Dominion was. Am I not remembering that ep correctly? I'm asking about how big the Dominon is because I found it hard to believe the Borg didn't know about them considering they had one of their hub in the Gamma Quadrent.

ETA: I hope this is the right thread because I had originally posted in the 101 thread but what I'm trying to address is basically why the Borg hadn't encountered the Dominion since they covered a large section of the galaxy.

I thought the Borg had their "home space" in the Delta Quadrant. Isn't that why they were on VOY so damn often?

But VOY establishes those transwarp hubs or whatever that make the Borg pop up in all the Quadrents of Space. I was also under the impression during that awful story arc of the dreaming Borg that they had ships in the Gamma Quadrent.

Quadrants are big places. It's perfectly conceivable that the Dominion could control a lot of the Gamma Quadrant, but not all of it. Although I find it odd that the Borg and the Dominion don't cross paths more often. It seems like the Dominion would be a bigger threat/assimilation prize to the Borg than the Federation.

Come to think of it, why don't the Borg ever make a play for Cardassia or the Romulans or the Klingons? Why do they always pick on the Federation? It's not like it's the only good target out there. The Romulans and the Dominion would both be better assimilation candidates.

We certainly saw Klingon Borg, and I think Romulans and the like as well.

No kidding, Banjo Steve. Can you imagine assimilated Jem'Hadar? Scaaaa-ry.

But do we know that they don't? Is it ever mentioned? Because I'm thinking it's possible that the Dominion has run-ins with the Borg every now and again, in the same way that the Federation does, but it just never comes up in relation to the Federation war. I don't remember anyone mentioning the Borg to the female changeling, and her saying, "What is this Borg of which you speak?" - although I may be wrong on that point.

Personally I am just giving thanks that the Borg were confined to Voyager, because I think sticking the Borg Queen in DS9 would have been going too far.

I think the Borg on DS9 would have been a mistake since so much of that show was about the war and the build up. I have to go with BanjoSteve on it being odd the Borg don't go after the Romulans or the Klingons. What I also find odd in Borg thinking is why they always sent one cube to go up against the UFP. I remember there being an ep of VOY when we saw the Borg ssimilating a planet and they had three cubes in orbit. A force like the one we saw at the start of Scorpion could completely have decimated the UFP. I never got why the Borg never just sent a massive force anyway.

The Borg wouldn't like the dependence on white. And I wonder if they'd think it worth their while to change that.

Here's the thing: the force in Scorpion was overkill - I didn't buy in to the threat. In BOBW, the numbers were reversed, yet the threat seemed more believable. Of course, the real reason was budget, but that's a bit of a cop-out for the later episodes.

I think they'd fix the white dependency with some nanites or something. I really don't think it would be a problem.

Part of what makes the Jem'Hadar so scary is that they are so dedicated to their cause - not only willing to die, but expecting to, in the accomplishment of their goals. As Borg, they'd be exactly the same as any other Borg - nigh-invulnerable drones.

Maybe the Borg did encounter the Dominion, and decided to hold off assimilation of the quadrant until they could figure out how to assimilate the Founders... :)

I wonder if it would make much difference if the Borg assimilated the Jem'Hadar. For all the talk of the Borg adding each species' technical and biological distinctiveness to its own, it seemed by the time of Voyager that the Borg were assimilating species just to abduct warm bodies to crew their cubeships.

The Borg's voracious appetite and the threat of disfiguring slavery was still frightening. However, it lost the science fiction premise that the Borg were on a mission to constantly improve -- and were targeting specific species to acquire their special qualities. Why would the Borg come after Earth if all they needed to do is harvest clones from the Dominion?

I think it's inevitable that the Borg and Dominion would have crossed paths, given the Borg's long reach. We just don't see it or hear about it. Maybe the Dominion successfully deflected them. Maybe the Jem'Hadar can't be assimilated for whatever reason (good genetic design by the Founders). Given that the Founders probably also can't be assimilated and the Vorta aren't very extraordinary physically, I can't help wondering if the Borg just don't see the Dominion as being worth their while. The Dominion no doubt puts up a better fight against the Borg than the Federation does. They have superior military forces, and the only reason they didn't beat the Federation is because Sisko controlled the wormhole (via mines and divine intervention), preventing them from bringing a huge fleet into the Alpha Quadrant.

I definitely think we can't assume the Borg and Dominion have never crossed paths just because we haven't heard about them.

Cleo, ITA with your whole post.

If they'd done that, First Contact would have been a very short film. I mean, I agree with the point, because the Borg always seemed to make rather half-hearted efforts to assimilate Earth, but from a dramatic point of view the writers had backed themselves into a corner: there's no way the Federation could have defeated a Borg armada, whereas they could win against just one or two vessels. If a flotilla of Borg ships had been sent into Federation space, it would mean Starfleet finding a surefire way to defeat them, and bang goes the scariest villain in Trek.

Thanks, EM, I was worried I'd gone a little too stream-of-consciousness there, since I was just tossing out ideas rather than forming a coherent thesis.
For "Best of Both Worlds", one cube was decided to be enough. And it very nearly was. It easily destroyed the Federation's military forces, and was only beaten because the Enterprise crew was especially clever.

So for First Contact, they again send one cube. Presumably they've adapted so they can't be beaten the same way. And again, their attack is nearly successful, and only Picard's specific knowledge allows the Federation to destroy the cube. But even then, the Borg had their time-travel plan. Was that always their plan and they just sent the one cube to execute it, and provide the distraction that might let the Borg Sphere slip back in time unnoticed? Maybe.

I've heard the argument lots of times, and I'm not sure I buy it. I think that, given the way the Federation beat the Borg both times, overwhelming numbers wouldn't have mattered. The Federation winds because its heroes are clever, not because they have a tactical advantage.

I also agree with EM's point that it was the writers holding back. You allow the good guys to beat too many Borg cubes and suddenly it's Voyager: and the Borg aren't nearly as scary as they used to be.

If you'll recall the beginning of FC, the Borg actually did succeed in assimilating Earth. It's just that the Enterprise was able to change history.

Then again, if they'd sent the cube back in time in Borg space and had it travel to Earth in the 21st Century, they probably would have succeeded in all timelines, and without sacrificing a cube.

If the Borg never conquered the Dominion because it wasn't worth their while, maybe they haven't pursued the Federation with any seriousness for the same reason. Every so often, they send a cube towards UFP Headquarters on Earth, on the off-chance that they might take a planet, but we're just not a big enough deal for them to expend any more effort than that...

When the Borg were first introduced, their driving obsession was technology. They scooped cities whole from the ground and studied the Enterprise without any interest in her crew until her crew pushed back. While I enjoy "The Best of Both Worlds" overall, particularly for the Picard drama that followed, I do think that it was the beginning of the end for the Borg by putting the focus on assimilation. Conquering Earth (or the Dominion) would have been out of character for the Borg of "Q Who" because they weren't interested in conquering, they merely sought to acquire knowledge (with no regard for the biological beings in their path, sure, but precisely that... no regard). By giving them the motivation "Your biological and technological distinctivenss will be added to our own", they went from being soulless technology incarnate to merely a high-tech '90s version of the '60s Klingons.