This may already have been discussed and debated before, but I thought I would throw my opinions out there. In TNG and FC (as well as "Emissary" from DS9), the Borg were a clear and present danger. Massive, powerful ships that carried thousands of drones, all hell bent on assimilating (almost) every species in their wake. Starfleet only defeated them by sheer luck on two separate invasions. Then along comes VOY...and it all goes to hell. The entire might of the Borg Collective in the DQ cannot destroy one insignificant ship? One ship who manages to outwit them at every turn? Really? After Seven came onboard and the Borg were the recurring Big-Bad of the series, they became a joke. Then just to rub salt in the open wound, ENT comes along and has to do a Borg episode as well, where an inept 22nd century Captain manages to defeat 24th century Borg.
Repetition made the Borg wussies, not Voyager specifically. It's hardly unique to the Borg or Star Trek - any super baddie eventually loses its fangs when our heroes survive them enough times.
Re: Voyager made the Borg weaker overall? While VOY defeated the Borg battles a few times before 7of9 became a crewmember. Her knowledge helped them. I feel VOY made the Borg scarier with the lighting, atmospheric effects (smoke & haze for ship interiors), and costumes compared to TNG. also see these threads: Why do people keep saying Voyager weakened the Borg? Voyager: Was I the only one who enjoyed the Borg appearances? Did Voyager make the Borg unscary?
yes, VOY overused them and turned them into just another enemy. You can't have a super-badass enemy if you keep defeating them over and over. The Borg weren't meant to be used so frequently.
I agree that the Borg suffered severe villain decay after being used and beaten on Voyager too many times. Another thing that I think hindered them was changing them to fit the story instead of the other way around. When they first appeared in Q Who they did not assimilate they reproduced (remember the Borg baby in the nursery?) they were also utterly uninterested in lifeforms and were only concerned with being the ultimate technology user. To add insult to injury they were changed yet again for First Contact by adding the queen. I admit that the queen made a great adversary but her addition made all the drones into nothing more than henchmen it also makes no sense given the collective concept aren't they all able to be the leader, fighter, engineer, etc.? Not to mention being unable to take down an unshielded Voyager with a tactical cube.
One might argue this isn't necessarily true, but is reflective of what Picard and his crew assumed to be true of the Borg during their first contact in "Q Who?", and that they learned more later. I think it's probably fair to say it was author intent at the time the script was written, because the Borg were only meant to be an alien of the week. But both Q and Guinan make statements that could be interpreted to support the process of assimilation, and that the Borg don't see humanoids as much more than a convenient form of living technology to be assimilated (raw material, as Guinan puts it). As for VOY, I think some valid arguments were raised in the linked threads that the Borg weren't inherently "weakened" on the show, and the ship wasn't flying around killing cubes every encounter. They only did that in the finale with futuristic technology. The Borg weren't always used to the best effect either, but nobody's perfect.
Quite, while the phase pistols were possibly a bit too effective, the Borg themselves, even in tiny numbers, were clearly bordering on capable of taking out Earth's best with an old freighter just before they were destroyed. Even a small actual Borg ship would have assimilated Earth without breaking a sweat. Plus still lethal after a century in the ice?? Pretty bad-ass!
Even though ENT made the Borg look like a bunch of wussies, I'd like to know why they them in the first place? Another continuty breakdown in the TNT series? If memory serves me coorect we meet the Borg in TNG when Q takes Enterprise to a far quadrant. Guinan then comments at some point that Q should not have done that as it was too early for them to meet the Borg. But then there were many weaknesses in the ENT series.
The Borg in "Regeneration" were survivors of the Time Sphere that blew up in "First Contact". They were unrelated to the Borg of the 22nd century.
I agree, there was a significant amount of villainous decay, especially in Endgame, but there in-series explanations for Voyager eluding the Borg apparently are: - at first, the Borg are too busy with the Undine threat. - afterwards, the Borg are for some reason uninterested in assimilating Voyager; which doesn't make sense given the Borg's mindset. In ENT, though, it was only 2 drones (IIRC), and they were quite formidable/scary in that episode. This is something I often see, but I disagree. The existence of the Queen doesn't devalue the Borg, she's just an interface. Don't think of the Queen as the Borg ruler (regardless of name), but as the embodiement of the Collective. She centralises the Borg, but isn't a weakness as she can easily be re-built from another drone (but only a female drone, apparently).
Nothing will compare in gravity to that one sole cube chasing the Enterprise... As they say, less is more.
TNG started the Borg decay itself with "I, Borg" and "Descent". VOY actually made them menacing again with "Scorpion" by doing the reasonable thing and showing another Borg-Level Threat alien species who could fight the Borg at their level. Unfortunately, no one liked the idea of there being even ONE species out there that could fight the Borg.
I do agree that the Borg lost some of the menace they had from their mysterious nature when Voyager encountered them on a regular basis, but their appearance in Voyager was much more creepy than it had been in TNG. Scorpion really stepped things up with the introduction of Species 8472 (or the Undine, as they are called in ST: Online) but their threat did not last long. Yes Voyager did defeat several vessels in the finale, but that was with the aid of technology several years ahead of their own. On the topic of the Borg Queen, I view her more as a communicator for the Collective's consciousness, similar to the role of the Mouth of Sauron in LOTR. I think that every major villian eventually reaches a point where they begin to lose some of their resistivity to their adversaries, because while the Borg were developing, so was the Federation. If the Federation didn't develop some sort of defences that could at least pack a little more punch, then what would that say about their own technological progress? Granted, one could also say that this simply means that the Borg are developing at a rate that the Federation cannot match, but doesn't that seem a little deus ex machina for the Borg? Every species has their limits, and for the Borg to develop unhindered by adversaries I think is beyond them. Did Voyager ruin the Borg? I don't think so. I still remember being thoroughly creeped out by both Scorpion and Unimatrix Zero. If anything, Voyager made the Borg creepier after the upgrade the Borg got in FC.
I do admit that visually the Borg looked far better in VOY than they did TNG, but First Contact was to thank for that. There was the point made about how in TNG they were only interested in technology and not people. If you ignore the ENT episode and the whole Raven story, then that was the first contact between the Federation and the Borg. The Borg didn't know about humans, so weren't interested in assimilating them (they then got 18 specimens to examine and deduce that humanity was worthy of entering the Collective). On the Cube, the observations made by Riker, Data and Worf were just that. They weren't trained anthropologists so they got some things wrong about the Borg. That's one explanation at least.
One could make the argument that 'Voyager' made the borg much more powerful than they were in TNG: In TNG, we only ever saw single borg cubes, and had no reason to think they are too numerous. Are the borg cubes formidable? Yes. Can the TNG borg be defeated - all of it? Sure. In Voy, the borg are established as having MILLIONS of cubes. This puts it FAR above anything the federation can handle; indeed, the borg can squash the federation as if a bug - and almost effortlessly, by its standards. Now the federation's "successes", consisting in destroying a few cubes, are so immaterial (when compared to the borg power-base) as to be laughable. And the explanation for only sending 2 cubes for the federation - the borg just doesn't care about the federation; it's so distant as to be almost beneath the borg's notice.