Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone..

After Q Who?

I thought the use of them there, and the context was brilliant.

They were literally an unstoppable force, shown by Q to show the humans what was out there, a reminder basically of how vunerable humanity was.

After that i thought they really weakened with every appearance, eventually becoming cannon-fodder for god-ger

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I think they ruined the Borg adding the Queen. They were much more menacing without a single mind behind, but as a pure hive. Now it's just a slave race with some ambitious lady at the helm. Without her they would be more of a mystery and harder to understand.

And 7of9 gave too much info, making them dull in the end. All terrifying mystery gone

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I think without the queen(s) they wouldn't be able to function. They do all the negotiations and stuff like that.... Think of the Borg as a single collective (one being) and the queen is just a central nervous system. I don't think they intelligent enough to adapt to something they don't know. They have to scan you or assimilate you or the information about you in order to adapt. Species 8472 can't be assimilate, so the best they can do is kill them and that was because Janeway was helping them to learn more about them.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I think that after "Best of Both Worlds," that should have been it for the Borg. But they were too good a bad guy to be left alone by the writers and producers, so downhill was the only way to go. "First Contact" made the Borg scary again, but it also gave us the Borg Queen.

I won't even talk about Hugh, The Friendly Borg in TNG's "I, Borg." I simply refuse to do that...

The less you know about a monster, the more dangerous it is. Once you get to know them and learn how to counter and manipulate them, they lose their power and become more or less a typical moustache-twirling villain to be defeated every time they appear.

Ideally, the Borg were the ultimate Star Trek enemy. A force that should logically have destroyed the Federation in their next encounter after "Best of Both Worlds" by sending multiple Borg cubes towards Earth. But since that would have pretty much ended the story of Star Trek--or worse, turn it into a Battlestar Galactica clone--the Borg had to be neutered in such a way that their full potential could never be unleashed against our heroes...even in their own home turf in the Delta Quadrant.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I think what makes them scary is that you know in the end they will assimilate you no matter what. There are no if's or but's. They don't have individuality like other alien cultures do.... They are like bacterias or viruses. They will keep coming and assimilate you, destroying everything in their path.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Best of Both Worlds, though good, was a mistake. I forgot the metaphor, but once you bring out the monster, you can't put it back in (still can't remember it ) Anyway, once the writers had the Borg attacking Earth there was no turning back.

If they had left it in Q's hands left the Borg somewhere out THERE, Q could come back every once in a while with the Borg THREAT or the imagined threat.

The story lines are possible but too late. If they did it all right, in Voyager, Janway would have taken the longway AROUND Borg space out of fear (heck, Q could even drop the Borg threat if she got bold) and they would run in to other things. There might still be a way to run into "38 of D".

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I think the Borg were handled mostly well, for a while. TNG did good with them (Descent notwithstanding, but as they weren't part of the collective, I don't really think it's villain decay or anything). First Contact did a good job with them, but unfortunately introduced the Borg Queen, a horrible idea if there ever was one. Scorpion was amazing, too. It wasn't until after that things went downhill, I think

The Borg were a great foe, and I think it was good they reused them, and they did more good than bad with them for a good while.


By the way, I'm calling it now. This is gonna become one of those threads, since Voyager and The Borg will doubtlessly come up again.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

That's what makes the Queen boring. The whole 'need a mouthpiece' thing worked once with Locutus, but what do the Borg need to negotiate for?

And besides...if there was a Queen all along, why did they need Locutus anyway?

The Borg, as a villain, are perfectly constructed to become less interesting every single time they are used.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Pandora's box?

I think the Borg collective as more vast number of enslaved races, with the queens in the role of the slave master. BoBW and Unimatrix zero showed that the drones retain their internal personality, their simply aren't in control of their bodies actions. It's a never ending horror show.

One of the thing TPTB really got right in FC was the overt fear on the part of the Enterprise's crew at the thought of facing the Borg and being assimilated.

Assimilation equal enslavement.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Pretty much agree, although I liked "I, Borg," because that's really more of a story about Picard's morality than anything else. Anyway, that would've been my cutoff.

There was literally no way for them to have been interesting as an ongoing threat, given their conception: a force of nature with no real personality. And giving them a personality really ruined them--of course, giving them the personality of Snidely Whiplash made it even worse.

To have been consistently interesting, they'd have had to have posed an ideological threat as well as a physical one, and they never posed an ideological threat, because they were conceived as abhorrent. If the Borg way of life had been tempting--if the Borg Collective had been less of a slave pen and more of participatory Matrix--then an indefinite number of stories could have been told about them.

As it stood, all you really had was a zombie story, and zombie stories are fundamentally limited creatures.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Essentially, space zombies was the approach that was taken with the Borg in First Contact--the Enterprise was effectively turned into "Night of the Living Dead" for that story--but the Borg Queen gave the zombies a voice and an opportunity for civilized conversation about their motives and plans for the future.

Most zombie stories don't go that far--and with good reason, IMO...

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Borg are very hit and miss IMO. I enjoyed the first part of BOBW, but the second part, particularly the ending, was utterly ridiculous. I, Borg presented an interesting ethical dilemma but then devolved into moralistic finger-wagging of the worst sort and ended was a decision by Picard that, in a rational world, should have ended his career with a court martial. I thought Scorpion was fairly well done, and I loved First Contact.

Interestingly I also thought that Regeneration, which was excoriated by the fans at the time, was among the very best of all the Borg episodes - a very taut, tightly-plotted thriller in which the Borg were actually frightening again. It was also frustrating in the sense that it demonstrated that the Enterprise staff had the ability to produce very well-written episodes, and yet the majority of shows in that second season were terribly written.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

The Borg were done as an enemy after BOBW, if you ask me. Once an enemy has been shown to be THAT powerful and comes THAT close to victory, there's nowhere to go but down.

If they HAD to use them again then "Scorpion" should've killed them all (and all the 8472 as well). Any other Borg stories after that should've been about the Feds running into folks who're trying to use leftover Borg technology, and the Feds trying to stop them because the tech will assimilate the raiders and re-create the Borg.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I dunno, I think both First Contact and Scorpion did a good job as presenting them as a frighteningly powerful foe.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Not really, FC could've been about any enemy using time-travel as a weapon. And it needed the Queen as an easy out of killing off the Collective (kill her, the Collective on the ENT-E all died)

"Scorpion" did work, but it also highlights how limited the Borg are: They needed to introduce ANOTHER overpowered foe to do anything with the Borg. AND folks still complain that VOY had too big an impact on the storyline.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

Even though I've often thought it would be cool to have had 8472 wipe out the Borg and become the VOY, and I guess, the Trek big bad after that, the idea of both wiping each other out would've been intriguing.

I think the Borg's menace declined each episode they were on VOY, I still enjoyed them on TNG. At least with Hugh and the Lore-Borg the very name Borg meant something, and the writers tried to do something different with them, with varying results of success. I agreed with a previous poster that the Borg Queen was truly the beginning of the defanging, though I liked Alice Krige's performance. The idea of the Queen and such a human acting one at that robbed the Borg of that machine-like quality that made them such interesting and scary villains. It made the Borg more conventional. That continued on VOY, with 7 of 9 and her constant mention of Borg nanoprobes this and that, it made the Borg too ordinary and of course the Borg children.

That being said, I would've probably left the Borg behind after Scorpion. I thought the VOY episode Unity still retained the menace of the Borg.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

It was a bad idea to make the Borg emotionless and robotic in the first place. If the Collective was truly made up of trillions of lifeforms with their minds all linked together as one then the Collective should possess the combined/amplified rages/neuroses/mental problems of all the Collective folks as well with the Collective amplifying them. It should've been just as capable of incredibly insane actions as well as totally logical ones.

If not, then the Borg were never a Collective but a sort of technorganic virus.

The Borg only can be the super-duper-menace they were about once or twice. First encounter and then full-on invasion. If the invasion is repulsed then that's that.

And if constant mentions of an enemy is all it takes to ruin their reputation, they were a lamely made enemy. You don't see the Romulans/Klingons/Cardassians/Dominion being ruined by constant mentions of them do you?

Another problem was that the Borg were made into too much of an enemy and too overpowered to just "Leave behind". You want to leave them behind, then destroy them all and REALLY leave them "Behind".

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I doubt that the Borg wanted Picard as a "mouthpiece" at all.

Think about events from the Borg's point of view.

The see the Enterprise at J-25, learn it is the most powerful ship in the Federation. Picard is the captain, so obviously someone of great importance. As far as the Borg are concerned, Picard is the poster boy for the federation.

Then, apparently the enterprise has technology more advanced than the Borg! it just disappears, hurtling back towards federation space! of course, that's Q's doing, but the Borg don't know that.

The Borg Queen is as paradon said. The Collective is one single organism (Picard even says so in I Borg, and he would know), and the Queen is like the conscious mind. Think of the drones as being like brain cells, and the Queen is the mind formed by all the brain cells working together.

Now, the Borg Queen has the power to get what she wants, when she wants it, and no one is going to stop her. In short, she is a spoiled brat.

So she hops a Cube to the Federation, and decides to go after Starfleet's poster boy. After all, Picard represents the Federation. he's the captain of the frigging FLAGSHIP! get him, and it's certainly going to send the rest of the Federation a message.

So assimilate him. Not as a mouthpiece, or a voice to speak for the Borg. I mean really, what do the Borg have to say that is better coming from locutus? Not much.

But assimilating Picard is a rape. And rape is about power. Assimilating Picard, therefore, wasn't about the Borg getting a mouthpiece. it was about them saying, "This is what we can do. We are more powerful than you. You are now my bitch."

And don't forget what Picard said in First Contact. That the queen wanted him to give himself freely. As Garak said, the greatest victory you can win is one where you make your enemy realise that he was wrong. That's exactly what the Borg were trying to do to Picard.

And that's why they assimilated Picard.

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I'm one of the many who feel that the Borg were at their collective (Pun intended) best during their sporadic appearances in TNG, the only complaint I have is during "Q-Who" the Borg say to the Enterprise

"If you Resist, you will be Punished"

Which just sounds totally silly, I don't think VOY ruined the Borg as such, I just think they were overused, sure, we can look at it as "Since they were in the Delta Quadrant, they were bound to encounter the Borg more than once" but I think that Voyager encountering the Borg and suffering no real lasting damage each time, is pretty unrealistic

I also think they should have left the Borg Queen out, especially in FC, sure they wanted to personify a villian, but it really went against the whole "Collective Threat" which we had come to understand from where the Borg were concerned

 

Re: Anyone else think they should have left the Borg well enough alone

I don't think the comparison is completely fair. Those races are humanoids with their cultures, customs and such, which are interesting to explore.

The Borg were mysterious menace, not fully understood, hovering over the Federation and scaring shit out of everyone. We fear most what we don't know and mysterious, enigmatic Borg was interesting. VOY revealed a lot of things, gave them "dreams" (the need to achieve perfection), the Queen had very human feelings toward Janeway personally and... the Borg were stripped of what was the best in them. They are now just another race...

All of the above is, of course, my personal impression and opinion and I don't expect anyone to share it, but that's how I feel about it. Telling us too much they wasted a great potential of a shadowy collective of drones.