Did Voyager make the Borg unscary?

[Lucy of Nine]

Just a thought... because of the amount of Borg episodes, and how Voyager mostly came away unscathed (apart from the odd assimilation which was always somehow reversed)... the borg became very much so less 'scary'. I remember the fear they invoked in TNG and how terrifying they seemed, but they seemed to become a lot less scary as Voy went on...

If ST did another new series, would they have to forget the Borg as a main adversary since they seem to have been 'done to death'??

 

[Saumer]

Re: Did Voayger make the Borg unscary?

I don't think that Voyager made them unscary per se, but I think that it definitely took a lot of the scary mystery away from them. The Borg, to me at least, are still pretty freaky and chilling, but when you start to understand exactly how things work, the mystique fades a little.

Yeah, I think that if they did another ST series they would have to skim over the Borg, they've been tackled in three series and a film now, there's not really anywhere else to go with them.

 

[Hoshi_Mayweather]

I have to agree.

The Borg (as well as the Klingons) have definitely been overused....

 

[slappy]

I have to agree.

The Borg (as well as the Klingons) have definitely been overused....

I disagree with the Klingons. The Klingons transitioned from villains and into long-term well fleshed out characters.

The Borg went from scary mysterious villains to just villains.

 

[Dane_Whitman]

Yes, but I think First Contact is also partially responsible for this. I think the greatest factor in 'declawing' the Borg was the introduction of the Borg Queen. The Borg went from a faceless army of cybernetic zombies to a hierarchy with a flawed Queen with whom one could negotiate. Putting a face on the Borg was probably a mistake in the long run, although I think it works in FC. VOY just used that element and expanded on it.

In the end the series did do damage to the Borg, but let's not forget that it resulted in a number of good episodes.

 

[TheGodBen]

Voyager overused the Borg, and that helped to make them less scary, but it wasn't entirely Voyager's fault. The problem began with I, Borg and Decent; showing the Borg as individuals completely nullified any fear we had about their big scary collective. They were scary again in First Contact, although I do agree that the introduction of the Queen was ultimately harmful. And they were pretty terrifying in season 3 of Voyager; I jumped when Voyager came across the damaged cube in Unity, and that formation of cubes that flew past Voyager in Scorpion was as terrifying as the show ever managed to be.

Then came Seven, and seeing a Borg as an individual every week just ruined the fear everyone had about them. Even worse was the fact that Voyager had numerous encounters with the Borg and managed to survive, even though one cube managed to destroy 39 ships at Wolf 359. Plus, episodes like Unimatrix Zero didn't have an epic feel about them, they just felt like routine episodes of Voyager. The Borg were no longer big, they were no longer scary and they were no longer unstoppable. They became routine villains of the week.

The Enterprise episode Regeneration had many problems, but I am willing to overlook them because the Borg were scary again for the first time in a long while.

 

[Tom]

I would say that TNG's 'Iborg' and 'Decent' brought them down quite a bit, true they were not true Borg any more but still, Also with Iborg, the borg come to pick Hugh up but yet its NOT an emergency that the BORG are practicaly in Federation space again and then the Borg were in the neighborhood yet again when Lore found them in Decent.

 

[Mr Pointy Ears]

If u look st the first contact between the borg and the federation,they almost lost their flagship(the enterprise being a bigger and more powerful than voyager) and voyager's 1st fc with the borg ,they walk away without losing any crewmembers or any damage to the ship.in every other encounter the enterprise had they were lucky to get out alive where as voyagerçrew were able to defeat the borg at every encounter and the borg seem to get weaker and weaker in every time voyager meet up with them.

 

[Hoshi_Mayweather]

I have to agree.

The Borg (as well as the Klingons) have definitely been overused....

I disagree with the Klingons. The Klingons transitioned from villains and into long-term well fleshed out characters.

The Borg went from scary mysterious villains to just villains.

I understand where you're coming from, slappy...but it seemed like they were the default villain in the TOS films; frequently used in TNG as well as DS9 (and I'm a Romulan fan, and we didn't see much of them as I liked)...

The Klingons were just boring to me; even though there were Klingon characters I liked: Kang, Koloth, Kor, Martok...

With the Borg, it was okay the first few times...(or two times rather). However, even in TNG they were kind of overemphasized as being this mysterious power.

They--the Borg--never resonated with me personally; Voyager, of course, really made the Borg out to be non-threatening.

 

[Lynx]

The ruin of the Borg as a scary, mysterious enemy started already in TNG when Hugh showed up and later on in First Contact with The Borg Queen who was wimpering around Picard like a lovesick schoolgirl. Voyager only completed the "velourisation" of the Borg.

As for the Klingons, I think that they were better handled. They started up as an enemy to the federation but actually developed into an allied species. That happened over a long time and that story was actually worked out good. Since the Klingons were more like the humans in some aspects and not as thechnically advanced (or even scary) as the Borg, it was easier to come up with good stories about how the Klingons became friends instead of enemies.

 

[2 of 10]

If u look st the first contact between the borg and the federation,they almost lost their flagship(the enterprise being a bigger and more powerful than voyager) and voyager's 1st fc with the borg ,they walk away without losing any crewmembers or any damage to the ship.in every other encounter the enterprise had they were lucky to get out alive where as voyagerçrew were able to defeat the borg at every encounter and the borg seem to get weaker and weaker in every time voyager meet up with them.

I agree, of all the Cubes, Spheres, Unimatrix'es, and other miscellaneous BORG systems they ran into they always seemed to have the advantage on the Borg. I had heard it explained that the Borg Queen had a soft spot in her heart for Seven, and did not really try to assimilate Voyager. By Endgame when the Queen finally had enough of Janeway and Voyager it was to late.

 

[Navaros]

Voyager did make the Borg unscary. But it's a little remembered fact that TNG did it first with episodes such as "I, Borg". Both TNG and Voyager deserve major flack for this.

The teaser in the VOY episode where they encounter the Borg kids was by far the most misrepresentative-of-the-episode teaser I ever saw (I even made a thread on this board about that a couple of years ago). The teaser made it look like it was gonna be a scary, suspenseful, brilliant episode along the lines of TOS' Balance of Terror. Instead, it was about wimpy, lame, totally unscary 'Borg kids'.

 

[Lucy of Nine]

I think we can safely blame the Borg Baby for everything...






Thanks to everyone for posting in my thread!

 

[jgdst]

Voyager overused the Borg, and that helped to make them less scary, but it wasn't entirely Voyager's fault. The problem began with I, Borg and Decent; showing the Borg as individuals completely nullified any fear we had about their big scary collective. They were scary again in First Contact, although I do agree that the introduction of the Queen was ultimately harmful. And they were pretty terrifying in season 3 of Voyager; I jumped when Voyager came across the damaged cube in Unity, and that formation of cubes that flew past Voyager in Scorpion was as terrifying as the show ever managed to be.

Then came Seven, and seeing a Borg as an individual every week just ruined the fear everyone had about them. Even worse was the fact that Voyager had numerous encounters with the Borg and managed to survive, even though one cube managed to destroy 39 ships at Wolf 359. Plus, episodes like Unimatrix Zero didn't have an epic feel about them, they just felt like routine episodes of Voyager. The Borg were no longer big, they were no longer scary and they were no longer unstoppable. They became routine villains of the week.

The Enterprise episode Regeneration had many problems, but I am willing to overlook them because the Borg were scary again for the first time in a long while.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly. (And I still think Regeneration is massively underrated )

 

[Anwar]

Problem is that you really can't tell more than 2-3 stories about the Borg with them as "scary". After that they're unscary no matter what if they're the main component of the episode.

The are just fundamentally boring as a recurring threat.

Unfortunately, no one gave VOY's own new aliens a chance to develop as enemies or even characters so they had to fall back on what people liked, not what was good for the show.

 

[Saumer]

^ I'd agree with this. Personally, I loved the Kazon and the Hirogen a great deal, and it would have been good to see them fleshed out a bit more. I know that there was a decent amount of time given to them, but, for me at least, they just weren't that developed. Would have made a nice alternative to the Borg!

 

[Admiral_Young]

I don't think the overuse made them unscary...just irrelevant entirely. First Contact's introduction of a Borg Queen wasn't really that big a deal, Voyager's continual ressurection of that entity though was a problem. I would've liked to have seen the Voyager crew encounter a Borg Collection in crisis...a split caused through humanities continued interference and contact with them. The indivualization "virus" introduced in I, Hugh and then the problem dealing without a Borg Queen. The Queen program shouldn't really have survived the explosion of the cube in Sol System at the end of BOBW Part II. The Borg by themselves are a significant threat, the Queen was created to be a tempation for Data and a nemesis for Picard, an obvious observation but true.

I remember looking forward to the possibility of Voyager encountering the Borg and what might result of a single Federation starship making contact with their deadist enemies in their home space. Suffic it to say it was a let down.

 

[TheGodBen]

I don't think the overuse made them unscary...just irrelevant entirely.

It isn't entirely irrelevant. Part of what made the Borg so scary was how utterly unstoppable they seemed, and Voyager constantly surviving contact with the Borg ruined that illusion.

Galaxy class starships are Starfleet's most powerful battleships, but when the E-D encountered a Borg cube they didn't stand a chance against it and were forced to flee. One cube destroyed 39 starships and only received minor damage. Intrepid class starships are small long-range research vessels not designed for combat, yet Voyager managed to hold their own against the Borg on more occasions than I can count. They should have been destroyed in two shots, there is absolutely no way they should have been able to survive the attack on the tactical cube in Unimatrix Zero, yet somehow they did. Borg ships no longer seemed like unstoppable killing machines, their ships seemed to be no more powerful than Klingon or Romulan ships.

Even if the Borg episodes in Voyager were all as good in quality as BOBW or Scorpion then the Borg still would have seemed incompetent due to the sheer amount of times that Voyager managed to get away from them. Incompetent villains are not effective, that is why the Ferengi were made into comic relief, that is why the Klingons shown in Enterprise were so uninteresting, and it is the reason why the Cylons in nuBSG stopped being scary in season 3.

 

[Cyke101]

I stopped being scared of the Borg once Voyager:
-started routinely escaping from them. Scorpion started out pretty thrilling until Janeway managed to reason with the Borg (YOU DON'T REASON WITH THE BORG!)
-came up with ways to reverse assimilation, and pretty easily, too. Where's the threat if the Doctor can fix you up in a jiffy? Picard had two episodes, a movie, AND The Sisko to deal with his assimilation! Torres, Tuvok, and Janeway were fine by tea time, and Chakotay even willingly used his assimilation as a weapon.

I'm not thrilled with the concept of the Borg Queen, but I can forgive First Contact because Jonathan Frakes created an extraordinarily creepy atmosphere for Trek and used classic horror filming techniques for the Borg, thus preserving much of their mystery. I really was scared for Data when he was strapped into the table. Was I scared for Tuvok? Not one bit.

 

[Plecostomus]

No more Borg please. They have been done to death in TV and movies and now the novels.