I still think it's a great trick or treat disguise.
The BORG, and the Lost potential
- Thread starter STEPhon IT
- Start date
I still think it's a great trick or treat disguise.
Funny thing is, if you show a side-by-side of a Borg from "Q Who" versus one in Star Trek: First Contact, you could probably convince someone unfamiliar with the show that the former is a Halloween costume.
To me, the Borg are the undead of technology. They walk slowly and awkwardly, they're pale (bloodless), and they have a fixed expressionless stare. You can't get more Halloweeny than that!
Hello STEPhon IT,
I wanted to PM you but because that is not possible I will just post this here.
First of all thank you for your praise for my ideas but to be honest I am still not happy with them. If I got to make a final Borg story (one in which they are permanently) defeated I would like to do something on the level of quality of "Best of Both Worlds". Action but also drama such as this feeling that this could be the final days of the Federation. (and there not being any magical plot device that can change this outcome)
Edit: I can't help but bring in time travel again, weak I know but then I could at least use the excuse of the crew running into the last Borg in existence after the future Starfleet and allies defeated them once and for all.
I do feel that Voyager should have run into the Borg eventually as the Delta Quadrant is their home territory but I think Voyager should have done with less Borg stories if the writers could not play them to their strengths and Voyager and her crew would keep avoiding being assimilated or be destroyed because the writers and producers know the show would be over. (don't use the Borg if you don't have a good reason why the main characters are able to defeat them or escape the Collective)
I can kind of get into why the real writers found it difficult to keep using the Collective as it is really hard to keep them a credible threat if they are meant to be re occurring enemy but I do not forgive the awful storylines and ideas such as the Borg Queen they introduced.
On a sidenote; perhaps instead of the Borg Queen perhaps a different Locutus should have been used in First Contact if the Borg needed a "spokesperson". The most effective choice would have been a memorable character from the show but who would be the best choice? Especially as the movies tried to refer to the show as little as possible. (kind of a mistake IMO)
Should Data have been assimilated? If I recall TNG correctly he was considered "obsolete" by the Collective.
I wanted to PM you but because that is not possible I will just post this here.
First of all thank you for your praise for my ideas but to be honest I am still not happy with them. If I got to make a final Borg story (one in which they are permanently) defeated I would like to do something on the level of quality of "Best of Both Worlds". Action but also drama such as this feeling that this could be the final days of the Federation. (and there not being any magical plot device that can change this outcome)
Edit: I can't help but bring in time travel again, weak I know but then I could at least use the excuse of the crew running into the last Borg in existence after the future Starfleet and allies defeated them once and for all.
I do feel that Voyager should have run into the Borg eventually as the Delta Quadrant is their home territory but I think Voyager should have done with less Borg stories if the writers could not play them to their strengths and Voyager and her crew would keep avoiding being assimilated or be destroyed because the writers and producers know the show would be over. (don't use the Borg if you don't have a good reason why the main characters are able to defeat them or escape the Collective)
I can kind of get into why the real writers found it difficult to keep using the Collective as it is really hard to keep them a credible threat if they are meant to be re occurring enemy but I do not forgive the awful storylines and ideas such as the Borg Queen they introduced.
On a sidenote; perhaps instead of the Borg Queen perhaps a different Locutus should have been used in First Contact if the Borg needed a "spokesperson". The most effective choice would have been a memorable character from the show but who would be the best choice? Especially as the movies tried to refer to the show as little as possible. (kind of a mistake IMO)
Should Data have been assimilated? If I recall TNG correctly he was considered "obsolete" by the Collective.
I never buy the Borg are too powerful argument. For every problem, there is a solution. That’s the writers’ challenge with the Borg, and why they’re paid the big bucks. You don’t need to do the Borg more than a handful of stories, and that’s doable. Hell, Q is omnipotent and they managed to use him on TNG how many times?
He was kinda ruined on VOY too, come to think of it — although “Deathwish” was really good. Again, I blame it on the writers more than the characters/races.
He was kinda ruined on VOY too, come to think of it — although “Deathwish” was really good. Again, I blame it on the writers more than the characters/races.
Yeah, sorry about that. The PM's I'd received were either sexually motivated or members who had some very very VERY strong opinions about my posts. After the 20th B-word and C-word I was over it.
And you shouldn't be pleased with it, you're an artist, and more than likely you're never be pleased with it, but writing is like oil paintings you can add layers and layers and layers. One of the best discipline is to remember who's story it is, how does these events effect the lead character from start to middle to finish of the tale. And what I meant by final Borg story would only center on TNG cast, but doesn't have to mean the last Borg story ever. When you write let the characters drive the story; allow them to take you where the story needs to go?
The Voyager writers, spearheaded by the producers wanted Janeway to be the poster child for political correctness; a superwoman who had no faults or weaknesses all driven by their very idiotic stories, forgetting this was her first command as Captain and never had much strategic knowledge. This was a wonderful opportunity to actually see this character become a great character; she could gain valuable knowledge from an experienced first officer who was battle tested from both sides of the fence and as Janeway would stumble from time to time she would grow. That was not the Captain they wanted so on day 1 she was better than the experienced first officer,Chakotay, she somehow can talk treknobabble with the chief engineer, Torres, who apparently is a technological genius and I must add Janeway's expertise was supposed to be science. WTF??? By the time the Borg came around the producers and writers placed themselves in a corner because anything which could humanize the character would be considered weak for my gender. So this was why we get ridiculous scenes where Janeway was always right over the experienced Chakotay, and of course making deals with the Borg.
I'd preferred the concept done on TNG series but with a bigger budget; Alice Krige is a good actress but too many times when these talents go into a Star Trek film they immediately try to jump over the bar of the great Ricardo Montalban. Thinking that's how Star Trek villains are supposed to be... like something out of a James Bond movie. I would love to see a Star Trek movie villain more in the vein of Gul Dukat in the first 3 seasons of DS9; a 3 dimensional character who was charming, controlled, and manipulative who can be so bold to give hints on his dirty deeds down the line through subtext. I would crave for an intelligent character like that*, I think it would be a thrilling movie.
*By Season 4, Dukat was a shell of himself, kissing the asses of everyone on DS9 especially Kira, and later becoming a 1 dimensional demento; the truest template of a Star Trek movie villain.
I think that's an interesting take on it, but it doesn't sound to me like that was motivated by political correctness so much as different writers having different visions for the character and a lack of creative authority to preserve the inherent dramatic tension from the show's initial premise that was wasted as the series went on. It's not so much that Janeway shouldn't have been a strong captain -- in order to get home she had to be -- but the problem is that she shouldn't have started that way. Her metal should have been forged by constant conflict from within and without. There wasn't enough overall, long-term creative vision to give her a strong character arc, so we end up with a character that oscillates between mother-of-the-crew and a sort of accidental authoritarian psychopath, and the only reason it works at all is because it's held together by the overwhelming force of Kate Mulgrew's acting talent. (It didn't help that Kate was REALLY GOOD at playing a psychopathic version of Janeway. Evil Janeway should have been it's own spinoff show.)
I think part of the issue might have been the fact that the show was more episodic when it needed to be more serialized. However, those were the days before serialized shows were in vogue.
Question for everyone: If the were to do a complete reboot of TNG, ignoring all existing canon, what would be your pitch for rebooting the Borg?
If they wanted to do the Borg, but do them from scratch and just with regards to VOY (which I guess isn't exactly what you're asking), I'd love for VOY to meet them pre-Borg as a peaceful race who they could be allied with early in the show. Think a benevolent Kazon with an interest in cybernetics. They're an idealistic race who are willing to help Our Heroes where they can, believing that helping others leads to enlightenment.
And then things go to hell with their cybernetics experimentation, and their idealism is corrupted into wanting to bring perfection to others whether they want it or not. Their first few encounters with Our Heroes may even be resolved relatively peacefully, but the Borg increasingly lose themselves to what they've become, and as they assimilate other races their technology and expansionism only become more difficult for Our Heroes to ignore.
Heck, the Borg Queen could even be the former leader of their world whom Our Heroes had first met under much better cirumstances.
Make "Endgame" not about destroying the Borg but about finding a way to restore them.
And then things go to hell with their cybernetics experimentation, and their idealism is corrupted into wanting to bring perfection to others whether they want it or not. Their first few encounters with Our Heroes may even be resolved relatively peacefully, but the Borg increasingly lose themselves to what they've become, and as they assimilate other races their technology and expansionism only become more difficult for Our Heroes to ignore.
Heck, the Borg Queen could even be the former leader of their world whom Our Heroes had first met under much better cirumstances.
Make "Endgame" not about destroying the Borg but about finding a way to restore them.
They had an opportunity to do three-ten episode arcs on different empires they were rushing past. Might have been cool
Agreed. They could have done what ENTERPRISE did in season 4... a bunch of mini arcs.
And it would have consolidated their budget, too.
And it would have consolidated their budget, too.
I thought Voyager had the perfect stomping ground to at least soft reboot the Borg; I would've had Borg territory far greater in mass in the Delta Quadrant. Some races are not as strong as the Borg we know of from TNG and because of this they were ignored by the storm of collectives. I would've had Voyager explore and understand the Borg was broader in technology and meaning; at one point the matrix of the Borg couldn't understand sound, procreation, light, speed and forge this construct to collect what things were. Dissecting it the only way they knew how and started branching it off through a collective to digest what they discovered through out the known Galaxy. This was the Borg's way of exploration; some had build communities on planets and others did other things to the point where the species appeared more human or humanoid in appearance than bio-noid. Voyager could've opened our eyes to many different perspectives to the Borg but wasted it on Seven and her very boring backstory.
We saw some of the signs of it in Seasons 4 with the Hirogen (definitely wish we had seen more of them), the message from Starfleet, and with the Malon before it was cut shot again.
I think mini arcs should have been implemented much sooner in Star Trek. If they could not do season long arcs than at least this would be a good substitute.
I understand. I have had the fortunate of not experiencing any bad PMs myself.
Okay then I had quite misunderstood you earlier, thinking you wanted to see a story in which the Borg appear for the final time (they get defeated/destroyed in this one story).
So far I had treated all my Borg ideas as action style stories with the characters coming second but trying to do a character driven story intermixed with the appearance of the Borg would be quite something else.
In this case I could even drop the whole "The Borg seek to assimilate Earth/The Federation" type of plot again. They might still be around because they want to assimilate something but perhaps instead the ship and the crew should be the ones mostly in jeopardy.
One fanfic idea I once had for an own created crew storyline which took elements from a story concept not used for a game was that the Borg sent a fleet to the Alpha/Beta Quadrant to look for something.
This something would revealed to be a Borg-Iconian hybrid created by a scientist who wanted to use to to travel to the Delta Quadrant and Borg homeworld to find and extract his assimilated daughter from the Borg Collective.
My own crew after discovering the hybrid realized that they could not allow the Borg to incorporate it into the Collective as otherwise the Borg would gain the ability to travel wherever they wanted in the galaxy and beyond instantaneously, but some of them end up being forced to travel with the scientist to the Borg homeworld where the scientist learns that his daughter was killed/terminated when she and other drones tried to assimilate a race with a high resistance factor.
One of my main characters who paid attention during when the nature of the Borg Collective was explained asks if copies of the memories, the personality of the dead daughter (she would be revealed to be a Starfleet officer who was assimilated during a Borg incursion) was still stored in the Collective and have those copied to the Borg-Iconian hybrid, making it into a duplicate of the daughter.
The drone now having a personality helps the characters to return to the Alpha/Beta Quadrant but the Borg ships there are now closing in on their location.
The drone once again uses its Iconian gate ability and sends the cubes far away.
With the Borg gone for now there is now a new problem, the Borg-Iconian hybrid is to powerful. The major governments will fight over its technology and the Borg will eventually return to claim her.
Seeing no other solution the daughter/drone decides to remove her own presence from the galaxy, taking her father with her as she goes wherever the surviving Iconians went to after Iconia was destroyed.
I would not use all of that story but it might be interesting of doing something with the plot concept of the Borg looking for something, hence why they are ignoring planets and ships.
But it is going to take quite a while before I come up with something that I am really happy with.
That was a major problem with a lot of the later movies, almost all sought to do "Wrath of Khan" all over again.
You mean like how the Borg were treated on TNG and that type of story telling? I think that would be much better than another big Hollywood style action flick as the television show (before Discovery) at least ran at a more calmer suspenseful pace and the focus was not alone on action.
Perhaps a television special/two episodes connected to another like VOY's "Dark Frontier" and "Flesh and Blood".
No, I think the Borg would be better off in a motion picture than something on CBSAccess. TNG is the most successful Star Trek series ever on first run television and spawned a whole new era for merchandising and creating new properties within their universe. TOS made 6 films but made the Klingons relevant in every one of them because they were the big baddie from their era. The huge mistake was using the Borg for one film, and degrading the Borg on Voyager just for a ratings boost if the show even got that. Voyager was a terrible Star Trek show, just as bad as Enterprise and Disco, the Borg deserved better than anything on Voyager and that crap done on ENT where their Doctor found a way to not be Borg when the top scientific minds 200 years in the future can't figure out??? ??? Unbelievable.
As for First Contact, although the first 20 minutes of the movie was grand and felt like as epic moment, the rest of picture wasn't at all. Picard was playing the Noonien Singh role and acting all weird, but it's not the Picard I remembered from the TV series. I wanted the Picard after the events from "All Good Things..." face off against the Borg with a huge budget and explore a strange new world where he would have to defend them. There's nothing from any of those TNG movies including FC which could compete with the Borg I knew on TNG tv series. Use that same concept with a huge budget, I'm sure people will go see it. Heck, FC made a lot of money and that movie sucked!
While I agree with a lot of your points I am going to have to disagree on Voyager being crap. I liked that show or at least Season 4 and 5 a lot (and some episodes of Seasons 6 and 7)
Enterprise is also for me the weakest Star Trek (I don't watch Disco so I cannot judge on that). Season 4 is tolerable but a lot of fan fic IMO, partly done to fix the damage of the previous three seasons.
I have a bit of a soft spot for Season 2 "Regeneration" because it has the Borg in it and I like the Assimilated Transport but the episode should not have been made as it does not belong in this period and is a lot of fan wank (and no, we did not need a "prequel" to explain why the Enterprise D crew met the Borg in "Q Who". Q put them in place of a nearby cube vessel, the ship was not on its way to the Federation. I dislike these kind of fan excuses but that apparently "absolves" an episode for bad writing)
And the whole Phlox thing with radiation is good indicator that the writer had kind of run into a wall with this story. They wanted to have assimilation in this but did not want one of the main characters be permanently removed.
Again I don't think you can escape having the Borg appear when you have a show set in the Delta Quadrant but I understand that you feel that this was done in order to boost the ratings of Voyager.
I only found a couple of Voyager-Borg episodes good and when Dark Frontier aired it kind of indicated what kind of stories we would get with them from that point on.
But the subject of this thread is not our opinions on the quality of Voyager and Enterprise and its writing.
Okay perhaps not a television special/made for TV movie, but I meant more handling the tone of the TNG series instead of the tone that the TNG movies handled.
I still think it is probably the best TNG movie as Generations before it was rather flawed (mostly an unnecessary prequel to "The Undiscovered Country" and a way to get rid of the Enterprise D), and Insurrection and Nemesis after it were completely forgettable.
But regarding what kind of story you would like to see I get what you mean. Picard not a man obsessed with the destroying Borg because he wants revenge for what they did to him in "Best of Both Worlds" (having come to peace with it during the series in such episodes as "I, Borg") and not another plot in which the Borg seek to assimilate the people on Earth/The Federation or engage in time travel etc.
Would be cool to have another opening like "First Contact" with a very impressive space battle but then you would have to do something with it to turn it into a 120 minute or longer movie.
Really cracking my mind here now. Usually when I have a good plot device or focus I can think of a plot around it but right now nothing wants to come to mind. (already told you why I am not happy with the idea of "Starfleet goes to war against the Borg". Not much character stuff can be told with it and it is more the plot for a video game)
I could see the Borg in more movies. We had only one with them in it and it was fantastic. Imagine today's budget what they could do...
I never felt they lost their potential in TNG. 6 episodes over 7 seasons was not overplaying their hand. They remained a threat because of their sparring use. They were overused in Voyager and became less of a threat for that very reason.
The Borg should be like Star Wars movies. One episode every 2 years should keep us fed but still hungry.
I never felt they lost their potential in TNG. 6 episodes over 7 seasons was not overplaying their hand. They remained a threat because of their sparring use. They were overused in Voyager and became less of a threat for that very reason.
The Borg should be like Star Wars movies. One episode every 2 years should keep us fed but still hungry.
I don't know. I'd rather see something new. Like there are so many Asimov Novels that would look fantastic with the new CGI!!! I mean when is someone going to do the Foundation series??? What are they waiting for?
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