Going strictly by Canon won't help here. Roddenberry himself once said [citation needed] the machine planet was the Borg homeworld, he could be joking or not, ymmv. But the concept is intriguing. I read some not-half-bad fanfic theorizing the machines were in contact with V'ger until the fusion with Decker -- when they lost contact they were intrigued by the disappearance and assimilated their first organic species -- until then they didnt do that-- trying to understand whet Vger had done with the human(s) - thus inventing and eventually becoming the Borg as we know it. What's in your "personal canon", if such a thing exists?
No. Not everything has to be connected to everything else. V'Ger was found by a race of beings on a machine planet after traveling through a quantum singularity. Everything about V'Ger's journey back to Federation space gives the impression that this race was different from the Borg. Otherwise, the writers would have found a way to connect the two after the Borg showed up in TNG. That Shatner decided they were one and the same doesn't matter because his books aren't canon. --Sran
TMP is the only Trek film I've never seen so can't comment on how appropriate it would be. But everything else in the universe is humans' fault, I refuse to accept that the Borg are the humans fault too. Not everything in the galaxy has to revolve around humans.
No...no...no..nooooooooooo! Why won't this theory die already? As has been said, not everything needs to be connected. My god, V'ger was upgraded by the Transformers... ...what makes as much sense as V'ger get a upgrade from the Borg version of the Geek Squad.
A Voyager probe, designed in the 1970's, would have seemed about as sophisticated as a toaster to a planet full of intelligent machines. Why they would have "adopted" it and built a massive ship to send it back home never made any sense to me. Anyway, I don't see any connection between Vger and the Borg. The human adventure is just beginning.
Voyager 6 wouldn't have been advanced enough for the Borg to care about in the first place. Q Who established that the Borg are a combination of organic and artificial life that's been developing over thousands of centuries. They also state that the Borg assimilated the El-Aurians a century earlier which would pre-date the events of TMP.
Isn't the biggest issue with this theory that the time lines do not match? Which is why with V'Ger time traveling is often invoked? And from what TNG/VOY told us of the Borg, the time line of the origins just do not match at all. One complaint that I personally have is I feel the Trek universe is shrinking. It's been a while since I watched Trek and felt like the unknown truly exists just beyond that one star. Everything does not have to connect (even if it can be fun to sometimes do cross overs or have one thing influence the other). But in this case...it seems pointless. Is anything added to the Trek mythos by merging the two?
Though V'Ger's home world does look very like Cybertron, and the vocalisation effect done on the Illia Probe's voice is very like that done to the actors playing the Transformers (I wouldn't be surprised if both had an influence on the cartoon five years later). With IDW having the licence to both properties, let the mad comic crossover begin!
Regarding V'Ger, I have heard an interesting theory that the singularity that Voyager 6 passed through deposited it not just in a different part of the universe, but back in time, possibly thousands or millions of years. This would account for how V'Ger was able to explore the entire universe in so short a span of time since leaving Earth. As for the idea that the machine planet in TMP was the Borg homeworld......I don't think it was the Borg that discovered Voyager 6, but there is an intriguing line in the Nero comic mini-series, where Nero, having encountered V'Ger, remarks that it and the Borg are both the offspring of this machine civilization (This is what draws the Narada to V'Ger, as the ship includes Borg technology, and thus regards V'Ger as a kind of "cousin"). I figure some renegade machine intelligences left the planet at some point in the distant past (whether it was before or after Voyager's rebirth as V'Ger, I can't say now) and journeyed to the Delta Quadrant, where they bonded themselves to organic lifeforms, thus eventually giving rise to the Borg.
At the end of Destiny: Lost Souls, we learn that the first two Borg drones were... Spoiler: ... Candian.
Does anyone really believe it's in character for the Borg to take a primitive satellite which shows up in orbit of their homeworld, give it an AI with a god complex, task it with seeking its creator and build for it a huge ship which doesn't match anything in their design lineage and can generate its own nebula? Is this seriously how we think the Borg behave?