Why do people keep saying Voyager weakened the Borg?

[Deks]

Janeway only made a temporary alliance with the Borg, which 7 of 9 promptly broke after 8472 were driven out of the Galaxy.
Of course, it was explained in Dark Frontier that the Queen effectively gave 7 to Janeway so she could help her understand Humanity better, which is one of the reasons they left them alone and could later use to assimilate Humanity in the long run.

 

[exodus]

Actually, the Borg started to fail since their usage in TNG as well.
It started with I Borg, Descent, then went on to FC with the introduction of the queen.
Voyager actually kept in line with 'no queen' in Scorpion... but then used her in Dark Frontier.

And most of their 'incidents' with the Collective resulted in Voyager barely getting out alive or always getting help from a force that could stand up to the Borg.

TNG was no different actually.

I agree, except with the Queen.
I think after "I.Borg" & "Decent", you needed to new element added to the Borg to bring them back from wussyville. I didn't mind the Queen in "Dark Frontier" either. After "FC" being one of the highest grossing Trek films, any causal viewer tuning into Voyager would expect to see her. The producers/writers knew that, so for ratings sake they had too. They took her too far in "Unimatrix Zero" because they showed her as weak thus making the Borg look weak again.

If anything, "Unimatrix Zero" should have been a Borg origin story.
Don't show us them as weak, show us what it was that made them strong.

 

[Anwar]

They could've/should've just had the Borg be a creation of the Caretakers. Would've tied the Borg deeper to VOY and explained their contradictory nature (they call themselves a Collective, but they're more like a virus) if they were a created/tampered with species instead of something that developed naturally.

 

[Deks]

Actually, the Borg started to fail since their usage in TNG as well.
It started with I Borg, Descent, then went on to FC with the introduction of the queen.
Voyager actually kept in line with 'no queen' in Scorpion... but then used her in Dark Frontier.

And most of their 'incidents' with the Collective resulted in Voyager barely getting out alive or always getting help from a force that could stand up to the Borg.

TNG was no different actually.

I agree, except with the Queen.
I think after "I.Borg" & "Decent", you needed to new element added to the Borg to bring them back from wussyville. I didn't mind the Queen in "Dark Frontier" either. After "FC" being one of the highest grossing Trek films, any causal viewer tuning into Voyager would expect to see her. The producers/writers knew that, so for ratings sake they had too. They took her too far in "Unimatrix Zero" because they showed her as weak thus making the Borg look weak again.

If anything, "Unimatrix Zero" should have been a Borg origin story.
Don't show us them as weak, show us what it was that made them strong.

I respectfully disagree on the Queen bit.
It was an unnecessary addon to the Collective which in turn made them look idiotic.

As TNG promptly explained about the Borg: A single leader can make mistakes... in a collective, you minimize the chances of that happening.

I think the collective was rounding up the mistakes ever since the Queen appeared - even though Voyager barely got out of every encounter.

 

[Guy Gardener]

In the movie she said that she wasn't the leader in a round a bout way.

Voyager didn't understand or repeat that sentiment.

 

[Deks]

Agreed, but the Borg sure were prone to far more 'failures' since the Queen was introduced.

At least the show didn't try to bring them down to a 'standard villain' level.

I am kinda hoping that if the Borg are revisited in the pos-Voyager (canon-wise), and they survived, then the Collective eradicated the queen and returned to it's original 'force of nature' premise.

We can see SF mounting periodic resistance and the Borg simply using them for technological advancement.
Besides, the Collective could still be vast given all it's ships.
I doubt the neuorlithic pathogen was able to eradicate them all. A good portion, yes, causing 'devastating' damage that would stop the Borg in their tracks at least for a time until they rebuild.

Even if you think about it... the Destiny novels might have portrayed the Borg in a tad irrational capacity.
The Collective might come to consider the Federation as 'worthy' of future assimilation because they demonstrated they can mount a successful resistance (such as it was) while still being considered as 'raw material'... and were the only ones in the Milky Way galaxy that achieved that while still in technological 'infancy' (from the Borg's point of view).

The Collective by itself has time. They can adapt to virtually anything you throw at them.
And this might be one of the reasons why they might consider keeping the Federation around for a while longer.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Conflict promotes technology.

By attacking species with the intention of losing, the Borg forces those species to invent technology the Borg would like to assimilate, which those species, paranoid about the next Borg attack, in over their heads and out of their depth, can't properly defend or protect with any efficiency.

 

[Anwar]

Every time the Borg showed up in TNG, except for "Q Who?", they had a "Representative" one way or another:

BOBW had Locutus, "I, Borg" had Hugh and "Descent" had Lore.

Even TNG showed that the "Leaderless force of nature" thing was something they only were able to do once. And even then ("Q Who?") they needed Q and Guinan as narrators otherwise the story wouldn't have worked.

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's like battered wife syndrome.

Some women are psychologically batshit to unconditionally forgive her husband no matter how hard or often he hits her, but if some of bugger gives her a kindly pat on the rump, she'll take to his throat with a screwdriver.

Battered fanboy syndrome.

 

[Deks]

I prefer the Borg to keep their talking with other species as 'faceless' or 'disembodied'... in essence, 0 representatives.

The story can work just fine, it's up to the writers to come up with a decent way of telling it.

 

[Anwar]

Trek has only ever done such a story ONCE: "Q Who?", and the only way for that story to work was with Guinan and Q as "narrators". It can be argued that Q was the Borg Representative in that episode.

EVERY Borg story since then had a Borg Representative.

In hindsight, it's obvious that the Borg concept really does need Representatives and this "Faceless foe" thing was never going to work out.

BOBW had Locutus (he WAS a Representative, like it or not), "I, Borg" and "Descent" had Hugh and Lore, FC had the Queen, Scorpion had Seven, Unity had Riley and co, etc.

 

[Deks]

I found the Q and Guinan to be annoying to be honest.
Why hand us the info on the Borg on a silver platter?
Better to have left Q flung the Enterprise-D in front of the cube and just leave until the very end where Picard pleads him for help.

The very point of the show back in the day was to portray humans learning about these things on their own.
Some guidance is fine, but narrators not really

 

[Guy Gardener]

What would have been wonderful, is if in Times Arrow, Picard told Young Guinan that she needed to be on his ship in 2364(5?) to tell him about the Borg.

Although until seasonn 6, Gunian must have been slap happy knowing that Enteprrise was indestructible because of temporal preclusion.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

The BORG were weakened the minute TNG beat them by putting them into LaLa land with that sleep command.

Strike that.

They were weakened the minute the BORG did NOT come roaring back with another cube with the sleep command disabled. The Federation didn't defeat the BORG, the BORG just seemingly lost interest in defeating the upstart organics.

 

[Gary7]

The BORG were weakened the minute TNG beat them by putting them into LaLa land with that sleep command.

Strike that.

They were weakened the minute the BORG did NOT come roaring back with another cube with the sleep command disabled. The Federation didn't defeat the BORG, the BORG just seemingly lost interest in defeating the upstart organics.

Actually, it wasn't so much the sleep command as it was the "overload" effect. Sure, I can believe a non-primary function with less security could be decoded and utilized. Remember, Data couldn't override the shields or weapons functions. "Sleep" was simply overlooked by the Borg, as they wouldn't expect anybody to understand their codes. Access to Locutus allowed Data to figure it out.

So, Data sends the command "Sleep". This is not, "sleep x infinity" and cause an overload, just "sleep". I'm sorry, but I know how computer systems are programmed and this just wouldn't have ever happened with the sophisticated programming of the Borg.

What should have happened was that Data would keep resubmitting the "sleep" command, which would prevent the Borg ship from awakening during the attack from the Enterprise. A barrage of phasers and photon torpedoes would pummel the Borg cube, without any regenerating going on. In short order, the ship would be destroyed. THAT is how they should have been defeated.

The next time the Borg are encountered, the Sleep command is discovered to be protected like the other commands. Problem solved.

Anyway... the representation of Borg was weakened here, and then First Contact continued to erode the strength of the Borg.

They are still a "collective" with the Queen. It's just that the Queen is a regional director, to help coordinate efforts in a localized area. But the whole sexuality thing was utterly ridiculous. The Borg should be devoid of emotion, cravings, or sexual interest beyond pure reproductive purposes.

In Voyager, the Borg ships were not only smaller, but they seemed incapable of completely destroying Voyager. This was just plain ridiculous. The Galaxy Class starship was a far more formidable ship and plenty of them were decimated at the Wolf 359 encounter by a single Borg cube.

 

[Anwar]

ALL the Borg ships encountered after BOBW were smaller than the one from Q Who?/BOBW (I stand that they were the same ship). The one in FC was smaller, and VOY kept to the standard set in FC (because that one was the CGI model in the system).

The Borg couldn't destroy the ENT-D in TNG either, that massive ship somehow couldn't destroy the Ent-D in a single shot the way it did to the others at Wolf 359.

And there weren't any other Galaxy-Class ships at Wolf 359, they were mostly older vessels like Oberths, Mirandas and Excelsiors. We saw a Nebula and an Ambassador but no Galaxy-Class.

The Intrepid-Class was a post-Borg ship like the Defiant, so naturally it would have more survivability against the Borg.

I suppose if Voyager ever used a solar flare to destroy a Borg Cube, there'd be an outcry of "Voyager shouldn't be able to do that!" or "The Borg are more powerful than a star, its' power shouldn't have been able to SCRATCH them!"

 

[exodus]

Actually, the Borg started to fail since their usage in TNG as well.
It started with I Borg, Descent, then went on to FC with the introduction of the queen.
Voyager actually kept in line with 'no queen' in Scorpion... but then used her in Dark Frontier.

And most of their 'incidents' with the Collective resulted in Voyager barely getting out alive or always getting help from a force that could stand up to the Borg.

TNG was no different actually.

I agree, except with the Queen.
I think after "I.Borg" & "Decent", you needed to new element added to the Borg to bring them back from wussyville. I didn't mind the Queen in "Dark Frontier" either. After "FC" being one of the highest grossing Trek films, any causal viewer tuning into Voyager would expect to see her. The producers/writers knew that, so for ratings sake they had too. They took her too far in "Unimatrix Zero" because they showed her as weak thus making the Borg look weak again.

If anything, "Unimatrix Zero" should have been a Borg origin story.
Don't show us them as weak, show us what it was that made them strong.

I respectfully disagree on the Queen bit.
It was an unnecessary addon to the Collective which in turn made them look idiotic.

As TNG promptly explained about the Borg: A single leader can make mistakes... in a collective, you minimize the chances of that happening.

I think the collective was rounding up the mistakes ever since the Queen appeared - even though Voyager barely got out of every encounter.

I understand you're issues but this doesnt matter from a production stand point going from small screen TV to a big screen movie. You have to introduce a new bigger element into the films from the TV series or else you asking folks to pay big money for nothing more that a 2 hour TV episode. It was that type of under thinking that made "Insurrection" and "Nemesis" such lackluster.

The same writers/producer from TNG are the same ones on Voyager. Doesn't matter what was quoted in TNG about the Borg, they altered the dynamic of their own creation, just as they've done before with Klingions Trill, Cardassians, etc. We've ignored and often accepted the changes in the past, so we allowed them to continue to make creative changes in the future. We've seen Klingons go from being like pirates to honor bound Samurai. Trek has always been inconsistent in developing alien customs and cultures.

 

[Dick_Valentine]

So I watched some STV and I see a lot of comments on spacebattles.com and other sites that Voyager totaly weakened the Borg a lot. Why do people assume this?

Wow Spacebattles.com. that's a blast from the past, don't think I've been there for ten years or more....amazing.
They still putting out their animations, they used to be highlights of my geeky childhood

Then Voyager goes on to destroy entire groups of Borg ships without getting a scratch

Repeating what I said above: No - that never happened.

Outside of a small scout ship, Voyager never killed a single Borg ship on its own without outside help of some kind, much less "entire groups." "Endgame" was the only thing I'd consider overkill, but even then they were working with fancy future technology and someone who had spent years upon years dealing with and studying the Borg.

We saw a large group of Cubes just once, in "Scorpion." And the only thing Voyager did was sit there and wet its pants as they flew by.

I think the one I have a problem with is Unimatrix Zero Part 1...
The new looking cube is talked up to be a "Tactical cube" (why they'd need one of them is debatable but...there it is) and then Voyager dances around it and gets its shields down by making the Delta Flyer explode slightly near to it, or whatever their plan was.
Then Kim calls out that they have lost a Nacelle then in the NEXT effects shot the nacelle is shown to take damage (seriously, someone dropped the ball there, switched the FX around or something) and despite that they somehow jump to warp on one nacelle, something that's never been possible in Trek before that...

Yeah, then the whole "assimilation is mind-rape, its the worst thing that can ever happen to you, but we're going to voluntarily choose to do it for a laugh then forget all about it next week" thing was taking the pee a bit too.
Also the Vulcan, the one with the strongest mental discipline of the lot of them, is the one that is overwhelmed....what?

The Intrepid-Class was a post-Borg ship like the Defiant, so naturally it would have more survivability against the Borg.

When the series started (and I used to have Fact Files to back me up on this) Voyager was a science vessel with less armaments and defences than a Galaxy class vessel, obviously designed that way by the writers to make the delta quadrant situation more of a struggle for them than if they were sauntering around in a Galaxy class...

Its only real tactical advantage was a higher warp speed which it could cruise at for longer...

At some point it was retconned to be a super powerful warship with the Science vessel stuff ignored, I don't know if this was a fanboy thing or the producers change to suit the more action oriented later series...

 

[Anwar]

Yeah, then the whole "assimilation is mind-rape, its the worst thing that can ever happen to you, but we're going to voluntarily choose to do it for a laugh then forget all about it next week" thing was taking the pee a bit too.
Also the Vulcan, the one with the strongest mental discipline of the lot of them, is the one that is overwhelmed....what?

None of them were really assimilated, their minds were protected from the deeper effects of assimilation (and before you say that this shouldn't be possible, don't you think Doctor Crusher's records of Locutus, Hugh and the EMH's own studies of Seven would've given them a better understanding of Borg tech that a temporary vaccination would be possible?).

As for Tuvok, his fully alien biology might've metabolized the vaccination out of his body faster than either Janeway and Torres.

 

[Dick_Valentine]

Yeah, then the whole "assimilation is mind-rape, its the worst thing that can ever happen to you, but we're going to voluntarily choose to do it for a laugh then forget all about it next week" thing was taking the pee a bit too.
Also the Vulcan, the one with the strongest mental discipline of the lot of them, is the one that is overwhelmed....what?

None of them were really assimilated, their minds were protected from the deeper effects of assimilation (and before you say that this shouldn't be possible, don't you think Doctor Crusher's records of Locutus, Hugh and the EMH's own studies of Seven would've given them a better understanding of Borg tech that a temporary vaccination would be possible?).

I won't say that it shouldn't be possible, but the Borg to a lot more to you than just mind-rape, look at what they do to your body (poking eyes out for ocular implants, etc), no-one would voluntarily submit to that to save a CG reality...