Halfway through Season 2 a panicky peon trembles before the producers. Peon- "Sirs, ratings are plummeting. We're hemorrhaging viewers." Producers- "We'll think of something." 50 bad ideas later. " A producer- "Let's bring back the Borg. Everyone likes the Borg." All the other producers- "Brilliant! Make it so." Laugh at their own joke.
VOY being in the Delta Quadrant it makes sense to include The Borg. I am sure they new this from the get go.
To be sure, they would have been featured in a few episode here and there and maybe a 2-3 episode arc but, I suspect, they were utilized so heavily and early to function as triage.
The Borg would have been very interested in the appearance of a ship and people never seen in the DQ before. Their little nano-bot ears would have perked right up. Too bad they didn't assimilate those stupid messiah Klingons though, could have spared us all the baby drama in Treklit.
The good ones are extremely good. Great books even. My favorite is Jame Swallow's Terok Nor. But there's lots of blahdeblah too.
Thanks for the recommendation. There are so many ST novels, I'm afraid of reading a lot of blahdeblah before I get to the Rokeg Blood Pie.
I kinda liked how they led into the Borg in season 3, with them finding that one corpse, then the abandoned cube and the cult that sorta tried to assimilate Chakotay, then finally running into them in "Scorpion". It was a nice buildup and payoff, and it resulted in the series' finest hour. It was around the time that the Borg kids showed up, followed shortly by the boredom that was Unimatrix Zero, that the Borg started getting really annoying. But they worked in the short term, at least.
OH yeah you need a guide for sure. If you like DS9 Terok Nor, Day of the Vipers is the first of a trilogy each written by a different author. Swallow's was my favorite, it takes place as Cardassia is beginning it's insidious occupation of Bajor. Follows the young Dukat and boy does Swallow get inside his head. Very good book.
Then after Voyager encounter the Borg in their own quadrant, they defeat them so many times as to make the Borg a totally useless foe.
Nope. The Borg were always planned for Voyager. Their location was established vaguely in their very first appearance, "Q Who", and then definitively as the Delta Quadrant in "Descent". Read A Vision of the Future: The Making of Voyager and you'll see. From the very first episode, I was counting down until Voyager finally reached Borg space.
Ditto every Trek villain, ever. They always lose. I think it's kind of silly to expect otherwise. The Borg's repeated losses are nothing compared to the Daleks or Borgalikes The Cybermen on Doctor Who.
I thought the Borg hadn't been established as being from the DQ until First Contact, which came out only a little before Unity did. They probably made that decision to include the Borg and then threw that line into First Contact.
There was an image on a screen in "Descent" that said "Point of Origin, Delta Quadrant" or something for the Renegade Borg. Frankly, the only reason it seems worse for the Borg to lose to VOY is because they overpowered them too much and made them out to be a bigger threat than they really were. Honestly, these guys were just Cybermen level baddies who were made out to be something worse. Having everyone think of them as some "Unstoppable force of nature" instead of just a new enemy is what screwed them.
That's sort of an easy mistake to make though, when one Borg cube can defeat thirty-nine Federation starships.
It's not just that. If it's a military difference you can just say, Voyager had new weapons installed that made it stand up against the Borg more. The Borg were established to never be susceptible to the same weapon more than once or twice, and completely unwilling to talk or bargain. Voyager gave the Borg a face with humanesque motivations that was willing to talk and bargain, and made it so weapons could work repeatedly against them. In Endgame when they had the special future armor, TNG Borg would have broken it with the third or fourth shot.