I liked the Borg more before the Borg Queen and Q before Voyager.

[exodus]

I see the Borg more as a philisophical debate.

On this point I agree - the Borg are a comparison philosophy. However, on the rest...

If the collective are of one mind, who's one mind is dominate over the collective? So like in a Bee hive, the Queens one mind rules the collective by sending out commands thru frequency. Just like the Borg.

The idea that one person dominates the others goes against the original intent of them being a collective mind. It's not that one dominates, it's that they are all joined together. Their minds are linked into one giant mind that can do greater things. Like networking computers into a big supercomputer. More on the Queen in a moment...

I see what you mean but the Borg pick and choose what species is worthy of assimilation & who isn't. They also decide what information, once that species is assimilated, is useful & what isn't. If left to a true collective mind, how would there ever be consensus of agreement amoung them of what is worthy and what isn't? Wouldn't it take one dominate mind to make that choice for all? The Borg would still require a mind to organize them, right?

We've seen even in "BOBW" that the Borg run on autopilot until certain command words are given. Ex: Assimilate, Regenerate, etc. If they need command words given by the Queen & function on auto-pilot, then doesn't both a dominate & collect mind exist?

 

[Praetor]

I don't know, I think we basically agree, and it's just a question of phrasing and semantics.

Maybe it's easier to think of the Queen as 'coordinator' and she's still beholden to the will of the minds? Surely they have some type of 'instantaneous democracy' that lets them decide what to do, who to assimilate, and so forth.

 

[exodus]

I don't know, I think we basically agree, and it's just a question of phrasing and semantics.

Yeah, you're probably right.

 

[Myasishchev]

I think though the Borg were never really ever going to work if they appeared all the time. Even TNG's Borg stories got stale and they only had about five of them.

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

Turn the Borg into an ideological enemy--even a temptation. A fictional analogue for communism, not a gross stereotype of it. They went the easy way from BoBW on--conceptualizing the life of a Borg as horrid in every conceivable way, a fate worse than death, to be avoided even at the extent of extinction. Turn the contest between the Federation and the Borg into a debate between possibilities for humanity--individualistic dignity at the cost of mortality and pain versus posthuman collectivism at the cost of freedom. Then you've got a concept that doesn't immediately degenerate into space zombies slowwwly advancing on you.

Also, I'd knock off the silly "they don't perceive us as a threat thing" after BoBW. They blew up your cube, idiots. They present a threat.

 

[Praetor]

I think though the Borg were never really ever going to work if they appeared all the time. Even TNG's Borg stories got stale and they only had about five of them.

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

Turn the Borg into an ideological enemy--even a temptation. A fictional analogue for communism, not a gross stereotype of it. They went the easy way from BoBW on--conceptualizing the life of a Borg as horrid in every conceivable way, a fate worse than death, to be avoided even at the extent of extinction. Turn the contest between the Federation and the Borg into a debate between possibilities for humanity--individualistic dignity at the cost of mortality and pain versus posthuman collectivism at the cost of freedom. Then you've got a concept that doesn't immediately degenerate into space zombies slowwwly advancing on you.

Also, I'd knock off the silly "they don't perceive us as a threat thing" after BoBW. They blew up your cube, idiots. They present a threat.

Dude, that's brilliant and I agree. I'd expect no less from you, of course.

 

[cultcross]

I think though the Borg were never really ever going to work if they appeared all the time. Even TNG's Borg stories got stale and they only had about five of them.

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

Turn the Borg into an ideological enemy--even a temptation. A fictional analogue for communism, not a gross stereotype of it. They went the easy way from BoBW on--conceptualizing the life of a Borg as horrid in every conceivable way, a fate worse than death, to be avoided even at the extent of extinction. Turn the contest between the Federation and the Borg into a debate between possibilities for humanity--individualistic dignity at the cost of mortality and pain versus posthuman collectivism at the cost of freedom. Then you've got a concept that doesn't immediately degenerate into space zombies slowwwly advancing on you.

Also, I'd knock off the silly "they don't perceive us as a threat thing" after BoBW. They blew up your cube, idiots. They present a threat.

Dude, that's brilliant and I agree. I'd expect no less from you, of course.

Very interesting take on the whole thing, I agree. Btw, your avatar freaks me out Praetor!

I also agree with what Gotham Central said earlier - the Borg had to be unbeatable by Voyager and her crew - you could pull off a victory over the Borg by clever thinking or something once maybe twice, and have them still scary, but they should have shown episodes where they got well and truly decimated by the Borg - have them a bit like the Cylons in nuBSG's first season - they show up: it's not a case of stand and fight like good Starfleet officers, it's a case of fire everything you can while you get the hell out of there.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

the Borg more & the Borg Queen

Re: Borg Queen

she started appearing in every Borg episode in later Voyager, and suddenly it wasn't the Borg themselves that were the threat, it was just the queen, and her drones were basically mindless footsoldiers

Anwar wrote

the Borg are fundamentally boring as a recurring evil. They work better as the occasional threat seen every few seasons

I do agree.
The collective is a large concept but to dramatize it for television (or for feature film for that matter) you have to have individual characters to deliver dialogue and make the plot happen. The borg Queen was a character to do that but then it became so much about HER and with Janeway talking TO her. Negotiating WITH her to get 7of9 back.
The Borg do NOT negotiate. It ruins the large concept idea.

Damask wrote

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

It is pretty hard to keep it in canon but could be possible.
I would be also interested in hearing how they could be a semi-regular character in a new series.
I would also like to see what if CGI borg would be more scary.
A borg CGI character model WAS created for the ENT episode Regeneration when the two are forced out of the airlock. I wonder how they would hold up for CGI closeups since they are not quite human especially with the color the skin turns once they become Borg.

 

[JustKate]

I never saw a Q episode that I didn't like, so I disagree with part B of this question.

But I heartily agree with part A. The Borg started out so creepy and ominous but they became...well, not exactly ordinary, but too much of a known quantity. Some of Voyager's earlier Borg episodes were good ones, but TPTB milked that cow for all it's worth, and I think they done milked it dry well before Voyager ended.

 

[kissthestar]

I found Q amusing sometimes. His advances to Janeway made me laugh. The Borg began as scary and got scarier because the tubules allowed for easier assimilation.

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

Q was okay with the episode VOY episode "Death Wish."

The Borg were definitely worse with the Queen. The idea of Voyager making an alliance with the Borg was far-fetched, as was the Queen's personal vendetta against Janeway. I liked Seven initially, but she kind of stole the spotlight from the rest of the crew, and the Borg kids -- that was just too far for me.

 

[LeadHead]

Q always has some amusing moment to win me over during his appearances, but lets face it Q was never better than when he was squaring off with Jean-Luc Picard.

As for the Borg, they went from being a villan that destroyed 39 ships with just one of theirs to not being able to take down the USS Voyager. Yeah, they went wimpy to keep them in Voyager, not a great move. Scorpion was a fantastic episode well fantastic 2 episodes, Part 1 better than part 2 due to no Seven of Nine. They had their Borg episodes very well done, when Kes threw Voyager out of Borg Space, they should have actually been out of Borg Space. The fact that their Primary Unimatrix was over 10,000 light years from their territory just makes them sound stupid. Which in and of itself is stupid because the Borg are supposed to have the knowledge of thousands of worlds running through them. Nobody on any of those planets got the good idea to NOT place your Headquarters, where your Queen who, if compromised can lead to the destruction of your Entire Collective somewhere other than your most protected interior system in your own territory?

The Queen aspect was good in First Contact, Alice Krige did a great job. It's to bad they took that and decided to try to use that success to remake Voyager adding Seven, having them face off with the Borg Queen, etc. Making the Borg a regular part of the series, no. Just no.

 

[Praetor]

I'd argue with some of that, LeadHead. I think it was a mistake to give VGR a makeover to capitalize on the success of FC, and that it ended up cheapening the Borg to 'villain of the week.' However, I don't think this was inherently the fault of the Seven character, as much as it was the way she was handled, and, overall, the way the Borg were handled.

 

[Myasishchev]

^Wholeheartedly agree. Although what else Voyager was going to do for season after season, I have no idea. I guess you're on point that it was just an execution thing--it usually is.

I mean, in theory, even the Kazon could have been interesting...

 

[Sci]

I think though the Borg were never really ever going to work if they appeared all the time. Even TNG's Borg stories got stale and they only had about five of them.

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

Turn the Borg into an ideological enemy--even a temptation. A fictional analogue for communism, not a gross stereotype of it. They went the easy way from BoBW on--conceptualizing the life of a Borg as horrid in every conceivable way, a fate worse than death, to be avoided even at the extent of extinction. Turn the contest between the Federation and the Borg into a debate between possibilities for humanity--individualistic dignity at the cost of mortality and pain versus posthuman collectivism at the cost of freedom. Then you've got a concept that doesn't immediately degenerate into space zombies slowwwly advancing on you.

Also, I'd knock off the silly "they don't perceive us as a threat thing" after BoBW. They blew up your cube, idiots. They present a threat.

Dude, that's brilliant and I agree. I'd expect no less from you, of course.

I suspect you guys would like the recent trilogy of novels, Star Trek: Destiny and its follow-up, A Singular Destiny.

Destiny's essential premise: The Borg stop dicking around. They launch a full-scale invasion of the Federation with the intent of exterminating every planet in the UFP.

A Singular Destiny is set in the wake of the Borg invasion, which devastated entire worlds and drove entire species to extinction, and features a new, ideological enemy for the Federation that is not just another conquest-driven empire.

 

[rramarr]

I agree with the Q but I thought Alice Krige was pretty hot and eerily seductive in her role.

 

[plynch]

I see the Borg more as a philisophical debate.

If the collective are of one mind, who's one mind is dominate over the collective? So like in a Bee hive, the Queens one mind rules the collective by sending out commands thru frequency. Just like the Borg.

If it is a collective, there wouldn't BE one mind to dominate. "It" would be a mind. I have 100 billion neurons. Together they make a mind, but no one neuron dominates. Trek is written for a very individualistic culture. Think of Picard saying one of his We-work-not-for-gain-but-to-develop-our-talents-and-individuality speeches. Very 70's Humanist-Maslow-Rogers derived: I for myself, maybe my family, don't think of the greater community. Most humans who have lived on earth were integral parts of communities who lived, worked, ate, died together as a band/village/community with its own life and properties. Now we much more live separate lives in separate homes pursuing separate careers. So the Borg has to be shown as evil with a dominator, as the queen evolved into, especially in the recent Destiny fiction trilogy. GR didn't see a next, collective step as a necessarily bad thing; see my previous post.

A Borg vessel is a metaphor for a sweat shop, I believe that's was the implication in "First Contact" of why a Borg Cube is so hot.

That's great! Also, when we're cramped and don't feel like we have enough PERSONAL space, it feels hot and stuffy. Reinforcing the "evil" of losing separate identity.

Odd that so many new spiritualists (Tolle foremost in the public's mind) emphasize losing or putting aside one's separateness in order to sense one's true, total, "real" being. This is close to the Borg IFF Borg had not evolved from a true collective into slaves as the shows went on. It was SO cooler in the beginning.

I think the Queen works best if you show her to be not just the one to whom the collective is enslaved, but that the queen is also the slave of the collective. The collective will of the Borg is what drives her entire mind, and the actions of the Borg are driven by the queen. She is the center of the hive mind, not the leader of it. She would not exist with a body except as a Locutus-like mouthpiece.

Again with the slave idea. My neurons are not slaves to my mind. They ARE it. She is the voice or executive function OF the mind. She is of it, not ruling it. (At least that's how she SHOULD be in a perfect world. In the recent books, she IS definitely an enslaver.)

(Does ANY cool concept in Trek ever survive unadulterated?? Mind meld, Klingons, Prime Directive, ad nauseum.)

 

[Sci]

So the Borg has to be shown as evil with a dominator, as the queen evolved into, especially in the recent Destiny fiction trilogy. GR didn't see a next, collective step as a necessarily bad thing; see my previous post.

<SNIP>

Again with the slave idea. My neurons are not slaves to my mind. They ARE it. She is the voice or executive function OF the mind. She is of it, not ruling it. (At least that's how she SHOULD be in a perfect world. In the recent books, she IS definitely an enslaver.)

I'd like to point out a few things here:

1. Destiny and its immediate predecessors, Great Than the Sum and Before Dishonor, established that when a person is assimilated, his or her mind is altered by the Borg to become a supporter of the Collective, agreeing with its goals and objectives and willingly sublimating the self to the whole -- even while a smaller, isolated part of your mind remains intact. (The mind control occurs after a horrific psychic attack on the individual mind in which all of your memories are corrupted -- your favorite uncle molested you, your first love tried to murder you -- to prevent you from being able to retreat to a safe mental place while you're being assimilated.) In other words, they did what they could to save the communalist aspect that the canon, especially under Braga, had largely disregarded, and to reconcile the apparently contradictory depictions of the Collective pre- and post-Queen creation.

2. While you may not like the idea of Queen-as-enslaver, it's important to keep in mind that that's not an idea that originated in the novels. The Queen was depicted as directly controlling the drones, and the drones as being her slaves, throughout her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager. It might have been nice if the Queen had been depicted more as an embodiment of the Collective than a controller/slave mistress, but that's how VOY, especially "Unimatrix Zero" and "Endgame," depicted her. The novels are obligated to be consistent with the canon.

3. For my money, the Big Secret about the Collective that Mack reveals goes a long way towards rehabilitating the idea of Queen-as-enslaver, giving new depth to what had been, frankly, a comic book supervillian-type paradigm on VOY.

 

[plynch]

So the Borg has to be shown as evil with a dominator, as the queen evolved into, especially in the recent Destiny fiction trilogy. GR didn't see a next, collective step as a necessarily bad thing; see my previous post.

<SNIP>

Again with the slave idea. My neurons are not slaves to my mind. They ARE it. She is the voice or executive function OF the mind. She is of it, not ruling it. (At least that's how she SHOULD be in a perfect world. In the recent books, she IS definitely an enslaver.)

I'd like to point out a few things here:

1. Destiny and its immediate predecessors, Great Than the Sum and Before Dishonor, established that when a person is assimilated, his or her mind is altered by the Borg to become a supporter of the Collective, agreeing with its goals and objectives and willingly sublimating the self to the whole -- even while a smaller, isolated part of your mind remains intact. (The mind control occurs after a horrific psychic attack on the individual mind in which all of your memories are corrupted -- your favorite uncle molested you, your first love tried to murder you -- to prevent you from being able to retreat to a safe mental place while you're being assimilated.) In other words, they did what they could to save the communalist aspect that the canon, especially under Braga, had largely disregarded, and to reconcile the apparently contradictory depictions of the Collective pre- and post-Queen creation.

2. While you may not like the idea of Queen-as-enslaver, it's important to keep in mind that that's not an idea that originated in the novels. The Queen was depicted as directly controlling the drones, and the drones as being her slaves, throughout her appearances on Star Trek: Voyager. It might have been nice if the Queen had been depicted more as an embodiment of the Collective than a controller/slave mistress, but that's how VOY, especially "Unimatrix Zero" and "Endgame," depicted her. The novels are obligated to be consistent with the canon.

3. For my money, the Big Secret about the Collective that Mack reveals goes a long way towards rehabilitating the idea of Queen-as-enslaver, giving new depth to what had been, frankly, a comic book supervillian-type paradigm on VOY.

I agree that the Destiny tril did not invent queen-as-enslaver. It does reinforce it with the backstory of who she is/was, which I shall not "spoiler" in this space. My point was just that one of the posters seemed to be implying that a queen was necessarily an enslaver for a collective, and that need not be, as other posters have pointed out.

I kind of like the original Borg. Pursuing perfection, "helping" you attain it along with them. Sort of like the US pursuing global free trade and capitalism, and helping nations see the light and become like us. I jest. Be well!

 

[Sci]

I agree that the Destiny tril did not invent queen-as-enslaver. It does reinforce it with the backstory of who she is/was, which I shall not "spoiler" in this space. My point was just that one of the posters seemed to be implying that a queen was necessarily an enslaver for a collective, and that need not be, as other posters have pointed out.

Well, it didn't need to be the case before her appearances in VOY, but her depiction in those necessitates it now.

I kind of like the original Borg. Pursuing perfection, "helping" you attain it along with them. Sort of like the US pursuing global free trade and capitalism, and helping nations see the light and become like us. I jest. Be well!

I do, too, and I always thought that the Queen undermined the scariness of the original depiction of the Collective. Destiny is really the first time since the introduction of the Queen that I found the Borg genuinely scary again

 

[Dayton3]

I think though the Borg were never really ever going to work if they appeared all the time. Even TNG's Borg stories got stale and they only had about five of them.

I'd be interested to hear how people would make the Borg a reoccurring enemy but not Voyagerize them.

Not too hard.

Have the Borg return.

But at PRECISE intervals of television series time.

For example, there were 31 episodes between Q-Who and BOBW.

Why not have the Borg appear again in force exactly 31 episodes after BOBW?

And so on and so on.

The ominous part is the "countdown" where fans know the Borg will return (and eventually the crew sees the pattern as well) and we see tension rise as we wonder just what new way the crew would come up with to defeat them this time.