I agree, the Borg might actually believe that they are helping the people they assimilate, but they are ultimately doing it to improve the Collective. What of the people that are deemed unworthy of assimilation, and those who are destroyed? Why not assimilate them too, if the ultimate goal is to make everyone perfect?
Exactly. "Mortal Coil" established that the Borg will designate entire species as unworthy of assimilation (including, apparently, the Kazon). Obviously they aren't motivated by any sense of altruism, however twisted. They're a purely self-interested force.
Not really. We tend to use the term "they" to refer to the Collective consciousness, but we ought to be referring to the Collective as "it." (Or, depending on how one interprets the relationship between the Collective and the Queen, possibly also "she.") Picard made it clear in "Family:" The individual mind of the victim still exists, imprisoned within its own body. The drones do not have these thoughts -- the drones just want to escape. It is the Collective/Queen that has these goals, not its/her victims.
I do mean the Queen. And the oft-mentioned plot contrivance of somehow needing to blast through the Federation in order to go back in time.
BINGO..The Borg are now, thanks to the great writing of First Contact and Voyager, the DORKIEST Star Trek race. Go up to your fellow scifi fans and say "THE BORG ARE BADASSES" and they will laugh at you and kick your butt.... Rob
Easy, they tried to assimilate Earth the normal way with an invasion and when they saw that the Feds had advanced and a conventional invasion wouldn't work they thought up Time-travel on the spot.
Ah, but all drones contribute equally to the Collective. That contribution just happens to be very small, because there are so many of them. A single dissenting mind tends to get drowned when trillions of ballots are cast. Hugh and the ruckus that he causes makes it clear that Borg drones really don't understand the concept of individuality. They're a part of a single whole, merely controlled by it, but comprising it, and a change in a single drone can alter the thoughts of an entire cube. Picard was a unique case, because they intentionally did not entirely assimilate him. They needed him to retain some aspect of himself outside of the hive mind in order to act as an emissary for them.
She was put in the movie for no other reason than to arouse the 14 year olds. I remember reading RDM saying that somewhere. But the fact is? She, the Queen, ruined the 'zombie' like nature of the Borg. It gave them a voice for Picard, and later Janeway, to talk to so as to spew liberal Federation no-sense they love to spew... Rob
A conventional invasion would work, that's the problem. Imagine an ant. Imagine that ant is crawling along the ground. And next to that ant is the state of Texas. That ant is the Federation. Texas is the Borg. Savvy? To have assimilated numerous species by force and have spread out over such a large area would have required an immense fleet. We're talking much bigger than the Dominion here. And they're all apparently equipped with transwarp drive. The Borg need only divert a few hundered ships to end the Federation. One cube was enough to deliver a probe ship to Earth... hundereds would be enough to crush the core worlds and the rest of the Federation in one fell swoop. The Borg adapt quickly. Starfleet's weaponry advancements, which took over half a decade, would be quickly nullified. The Borg seem to assimilate species as they come by them though, usually not by large distances. My guess is that they projected the Federation and her allies may pose an actual threat by the time the Borg get to that portion of the galaxy, so the Borg decide to get them out of the picture, rather than going through the effort of assimilating them. Other than that, they of course would regularly send small forces to probe technological and strategical development.
In the specially crafted chronosphere? Even so, they'd be silly for sending one cube when dozens or thousands are available.
We have no evidence of that. Picard's description of assimilation makes it clear that a new drone's mind's info is downloaded, but the actual consciousness of the person is essentially trapped. That's because Hugh was never raised outside of the Collective; he grew up inside of it. His consciousness was as trapped as that of an assimilated adult from another society, but because he had never not been a drone, he didn't have a frame of reference for understanding that he was the Collective's/Queen's prisoner and slave, too. There is no evidence of that.
It wasn't specially crafted, it was just an escape sphere when the main ship blew up. They can do time-traveling without specially created spacecraft. The Ent-E was able to return to the future without major modifications. As for sending more than one Cube, the Feds on the other end of the Galaxy while most Borg forces are back in the DQ assimilating the races there. The "send one at a time" thing is just to show how the Borg think of the Feds.
There's lots of good pros and cons here, but one limitation to the differing views is that 'the Borg' creatively changed from 'Q Who' to 'First Contact'. Evil is a term I could see applied to the Borg Queen, she has personality and emotion, and the intelligence to be aware of her decisions, but way back in 'Q Who' the Borg were ants, or a physical manefestation of a computer program that just wants to grow. For the original Borg it was about assimilating technology, conquering was just a side effect of the process. By 'BOBW' this had already changed. The Borg we see in ST:FC are different still, and only just like the originals in that their look is somewhat similar, but they are far removed from their concept, and probably by this stage, 'evil' (before they were no more evil than a spider eating a fly)
^^^An example---despite Picard's version cited above, in Unity the Cooperative is composed of all the minds. The way the voices blend to make the usual Collective voice demonstrates that. The difference between the Cooperative and the Collective is that the members of the Cooperative spent time as individuals. Trek never showed a Borg planet. A similar situation could apply on every one of them, but the drones aboard a cube are no more typical of daily Borg life than a Starfleet member's daily routine resembles the ordinary Federation citizens'. The Kazon may not be assimilated but they aren't being killed. The way the Kazon were written, this seems very generous of the Borg, doesn't it? Also, given the confusion between assmilation and death, it is by no means clear that anyone is killed by the Borg other than in combat. There is no reason to think that combat deaths of civilians are a problem for any other posters here. Certainly, the vehement desire of the majority to exterminate all the Commies, er, Borg, shows no distinction between combatants and civilians in the Collective. The Picard version may be all horror show but it makes no sense for a computer program to go to the trouble of suppressing organic minds to use the bodies. Robots would be much more sensible. The sentimental attachment to such nonsense is puzzling. The Voyager episode Child's Play was directly inspired by the Elian Gonzalez case, with the Borg playing the role of Cuba. The episode cleverly condemned the mother for risking the boy's life yet still saving him from the evil Fidelistas, and fictionally kicking their asses for good measure. Oh, yes, the Collective was indeed usually a symbol of Communism. Beating the Cold War drums was one of the ways Berman Trek really was stick in the mud trash. But no one here complains about that. Given the known intention for the Kazon to represent Bloods and Crips, i.e., Blacks, the wisecrack about not assimilating the Kazon had distinctly unpleasant overtones.