I, Borg and Descent

[Rageforthemachine]

Anwar wrote:

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I think Hugh was supposed to be one of the Borg babies, as in he was meant to be one that was never an individual to begin with. It's why he turned more easily and developed emotions and stuff better than Seven. With her she DID have a life before the Borg and thus they would have inhibited her ability to feel emotions more to ensure control.

That's a good explanation. It would explain why Hugh was more child-like after he was cut off from the Borg. Seven would have both her Borg personality and Annika personality fighting against each other. Plus the fact that the Annika personality was severely violated in childhood would make her kind of a head case.

[DGCatAniSiri]

I, Borg was an interesting take and a nice look at what exactly it was to be in the Collective. Granted, its attitude of the Borg was pushed aside by the later development of the Borg as being assimilated from other races, but at the time, it was a different view, and I liked it, especially given that it was intended as a more thoughtful episode than the previous ones, and had a facinating moral decision - where is the line drawn, do you wipe out an entire race just to protect your own?

Descent Part I was a 'hold on to your seats' ride. Opening with the Borg massacre, an open and running phaser fight between violent and malicious Borg and the Enterprise crew, including Data feeling emotion, and violent emotion at that, up to the point of admitting to being willing to kill Geordi in order to feel it again... It had great potential.

And then they bring in Lore and Part II happens. It reduces the Borg to nothing but a handful of Mooks and focuses entirely on Lore, and while I like seeing Brent Spiner play someone other than the eternal straight man, I hate the whole evil twin thing. Maybe it wasn't as played back when they introduced Lore in '88, but now? Cliched as HELL and epically played out and tiresome. And Lore is the important part of the story, that's the villain of the piece. The only things I enjoy watching in the second part are the Beverly in command pieces, especially when she brings up the metaphasic shields from her own prior focus episode. It's nice to see her used in a command situation, showing she can take command if the need arises.

[Anika Hanson]

I borg win, descent fail.

[Myasishchev]

Nerys Dukat wrote:

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But, I thought I'd put it to the test and see what you guys think...what DO you think of I, Borg and Descent? (I'm afraid "neutral" is not an option because it would result in WAY too many permutations.) Please vote, and tell me why.

A shame, because I kinda liked Descent, but didn't think it was all that great. I'd give it something like a 7. I voted fail because it was leading into fail...

I, Borg, by contrast, I rather enjoyed. I thought they hit the right notes, especially in that Hugh, despite his burgeoning sense of individuality, wanted to go home. I liked the B-plot about the fractal virus thing and Picard considering but refusing the path of genocide. We saw what Starfleet was really about in I, Borg (generally nice guys, but capable of contemplating utter evil in the name of self-defense).

I would also be curious, though I would not put it in the poll, when you make your replies--what did you think of FC's handling of the Borg, and of VOY's?

Absolutely awful, in FC, and doing their best, which was still quite bad, with the awful legacy FC left, in Voyager.

Edit: it seems I'm in line with the general consensus. How can this possibly be?

Btw, I like the rank.

[Pemmer Harge]

Not seen I, Borg for ages, but I dislike Descent. Although I do like Lore, the Borg in that episode were just a bunch of mooks and the whole thing was fundamentally not very exiting. Maybe it could have been OK as a single episode, but as a two-parter? No.

[Hober Mallow]

My feelings about the Borg from all the Borg episodes--

"Q Who?" -- Great.

"BOBW" -- Great.

"I, Borg" -- Not bad. At this point the Borg are still unstoppable in combat. Picard avoids conflict with Borg. The Borg still have their balls.

DS9's "Emissary" -- Unstoppable Borg flashback. Good stuff.

"Descent" -- Meh. Crusher defeating the Borg takes some of their balls away, even if these aren't normal Borg.

"First Contact" -- Complete pile of monkey poo. What made the Borg interesting and frightening was that they were a collective, with no single voice, no personality. Moore and Braga ruin that with a sexy Borg queen. Now the Borg are a "hive," one of the oldest cliches in b-movie history.

Voyager episodes -- Never watched them, never will.

Enterprise episode -- the last episode of the series I ever bothered watching. Crap.

[Unicron]

What exactly is the difference between the collective and the hive? I've never really seen much of a difference, and I'm not sure how the drones can somehow create their own collective will if they're to be treated as assimilation zombies so to speak. There has to be something more than just the concept of "we" versus "I" binding them together and making them so dangerous.

* shrugs * I do agree the collective nature of the Borg is partly what makes them frightening and effective, but there's more to it than that. Another part is that the Borg are highly advanced and adaptable, and have the means to crush most forms of resistance. They're not invincible, as they shouldn't be, but merely powerful. Not unlike how the Dominion was portrayed as being powerful through its superior resources and use of fear during the war.

[Hober Mallow]

Re: assimilation, the Borg didn't assimilate people at first. They weren't interested in people at all, only their technology. That was another thing that made them scary. The just didn't give a crap about you. You could study them, shoot at them, beam over to their ship, but they didn't care, because you were little more than an insect.

An enemy that is completely indifferent to your suffering is far more frightening than an enemy who passionately hates you.

[Unicron]

I agree. However, the problem with that is, Q's comments in "Q Who?" could easily be interpreted as supporting the view that assimilation was already a common practice. Nowhere does Q say that the Borg only care about absorbing literal technology, and weren't willing to treat individuals as just raw materials (as Guinan put it). The assumption that they didn't assimilate people prior to "Q Who?" is just an alternate interpretation.

[Nerys Ghemor]

Hober Mallow wrote:

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"Descent" -- Meh. Crusher defeating the Borg takes some of their balls away, even if these aren't normal Borg.

See, I disagree there--their technology didn't seem normal, as far as the ship went (none of the self-regeneration powers seemed evident), and their judgment and ability to work as a crew was potentially quite dodgy, so a defeat makes sense and to me says nothing whatsoever about the combat abilities of the Collective.

[Anwar]

And also, they didn't defeat them with their weapon strength or technobabble contrived weaponry or anything. Crusher just used a raw force of nature even the Borg couldn't defeat.

It's no more silly than how Crichton destroyed that Scarren Dreadnought in Farscape.

[Kev]

Hi, new to the forum here but as I was recently discussing this a little bit on another Trek forum thought I might commence here.

My personal take is that 'I, Borg' is quite superior to 'Descent, Parts I and II'. Micheal Piller had the right notion that after the events of 'Best of Both World's' and the general epic-ness of that show that there was very little way to 'top' it.

Unless you take it right back to a single drone.

It allowed for a much more emotional storyline with further follow-up from Picard's assimilation which hadn't been covered really since 'Family' and introduced the idea of a Borg given individuality.

The argument over the merits of genocide were pretty well covered as well before the final decision to introduce the program.

So, 'Descent' was quite well primed to then extend that and progress the story further. The problem, IMO, was the very bad decision to include Lore and a 'Federation Takeover' plot. I feel there were two separate stories worth telling - the Borg continuation and the Data/Lore story but they did not work well together as a single two-parter.

The Lore part is just too cartoonish in the end.

As for FC - I don't mind the Borg Queen. I can appreciate technically it's not 'out-the-box' thinking to devise a physical opponent for Picard to go up against - but then 'out-of-the-box' thinking is, I believe, not a comment that can often be stated about 1990s Star Trek. She has a function in the film and although it probably (along with 'Descent' marks the point at which the Borg began to lose their impact, they remained sufficiently threatening to that point.

VOY however, really and very badly eroded them into a completely unthreatening enemy who were never really a huge problem for the ship and crew.

The over-use of them in that series did destroy them.

[Anwar]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

[RyuRoots]

Anwar wrote:

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Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds.

Look, that's not true, and you KNOW it's not true. For god's sake, they went up against the Borg in Scorpion and came out on top, but nothing felt like a deus ex machina or cheap writing. You can face the Borg and make a good story of it. The problem is that if you use the same enemy enough times while not taking special care to preserve what originally made them interesting, they'll have to start losing some of their ferocity.

For this reason, I'm glad TNG used the Borg a number of times you can count on one hand. Or if you count BOBW as 2 eps and include FC, that's 7 times. And most of them did a pretty good job at maintaining that threat level, I think. And in Descent's case, they're not part of the collective anyway, so I don't count it as a knock against them.

[Kev]

Anwar wrote:

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Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

Then the writers collectively failed on two counts - creating 'new' enemies or antagonists and preserving an 'existing' one as the danger they had been established to be.

Perhaps the mistake was in trying to have 'enemies' in the first place instead of making more out of the journey of discovery through a massive uncharted region of space.