102 replies to this topic

[Aatrek]

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

Edited by Aatrek, Feb 19, 2005 @ 7:16 PM.

[TimeMonkey]

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

[Elenita]

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 hated that the Defiant was supposedly built to fight the Borg but never got a chance during the series. Sure it had a few seconds in First Contact but that's just not enough.  --TimeMonkey

I actually loved that they never brought the Borg in on DS9. It must have been pretty tempting, "Sisko must face the enemy that murdered his wife!"  --MysticalGirl

As far as I was concerned, if VOY wanted the Borg so much, they could keep them.  --Elenita (i.e., me)

I disagree. The Borg sucked on Voyager because it was a bad show. Conversely, if they'd been in the hands of better writers, with less network interference, I can imagine it would have kicked ass as much as as it did in TNG (where all the Borg episodes were good, and most of them are classics). I would have loved to see a Borg episode on DS9, and I'm disappointed that there will never be one.  --BanjoSteve

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

Edited by Elenita, Feb 21, 2005 @ 9:25 PM.

[belsum]

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

[Elenita]

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.

[TimeMonkey]

Bumping for the blind.

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.

[Kev]

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

[BanjoSteve]

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?

[SVNBob]

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.

[BanjoSteve]

Another Borg-related episode that I thought was great was "Collective" which (IIRC) took place before Scorpion, where they meet a splinter-group of ex-Borg - will they or won't they revert to totalitarian politics if they link back up again?

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

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.

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

[tothemax]

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.

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.

[BanjoSteve]

But the problem is the Borg were supposed to be zombies - zombies with the decidedly narrow minded goal of assimilating everything in sight.

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.

Edited by BanjoSteve, Mar 4, 2005 @ 12:23 PM.

[tothemax]

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?

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.

[WannaBeBad2]

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?

[BanjoSteve]

Whatever happened to the Borg baby found with the rest of the children?

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.

[Cleo256]

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.

[Curare]

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.

[BanjoSteve]

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

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

[Kev]

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.

[BanjoSteve]

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

[Elenita]

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.

[Jeebus Shuttlesworth]

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

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.

Edited by Jeebus Shuttlesworth, Mar 21, 2005 @ 12:31 AM.

[tothemax]

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.

[Curare]

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?

[Sheap]

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.

[nelamm]

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

[Sheap]

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.