Janeways Ownage on the Borg

[James T Kirk]

Apparently the Borg in the Delta quadrant are weak and inferior to the Ones in the Alpha Quadrant, as Janeway pretty much owns them on many occasions. Also gotta love Harry Kim's plan to beam torpedoes onto the Cube and then detonate them, as if its some revolutionary concept that noone had ever thought of. Not only that but how did they actually transport torpedos through the Borg shields? Quite a feat indeed.

At least in the last episode it is somewhat understandable since Admiral Janeway brought weaponry from the future.

But Voyagers ability to deal with the Borg without ever being brutalized beyond repair is laughable and one of the weaker points of the series, as far as being purely preposterous.

And now that we are on this topic lets discuss how in the world this ship self sustains and repairs with limited crue and no ability to ever dock at a starbase. How do they still have photon torpedos? Of course there will be some explanation that defies logic but lets be real, this is very shaky.

(Yes, I know its a show, but a little bit of realism once in a while would be welcome imo).

 

[Tracy Trek]

One question that stands out to me, if the Borg are so powerful. Why isn't the entire galaxy assimilated?

 

[JanewayRulz!]

Harry had to come up with a that silly torpedo plan because TNG had already used the just "put them to sleep" plan.

The beauty of having Seven on board, is she can give Janeway intell with regards to where to fire in order to disable the Borg shields. Even if only temporary it was more than enough time to beam the torpedo on board.

From Dark Frontier's teaser.

BORG [OC]: Regenerate primary shield matrix. Remodulate weapons.
(A photon torpedo is beamed inside the Borg vessel.)
BORG [OC]: Security breach. Starfleet photon torpedo. Disarm weapon.
(A drone opens the casing. KaBOOM!)

 

[hux]

Voyager did not weaken the Borg, TNG did. TNG fanboys take comfort in believing that the Borg were awesome, invulnerable badasses in TNG but then pussycats in Voyager. Nonsense. The Borg were badass for about five minutes in TNG then the Enterprise (and Starfleet in general) quickly learnt to deal with them. At one point, they even had an opportunity to infect them all and wipe them out but Picard said no to that. By the end of TNG, the Borg were just another reasonably powerful enemy... not a terrifying, all-powerful race.

TNG made that happen, not Voyager.

However, I will agree that Voyager in general (not just with the Borg) had far too easy a ride in the Delta quadrant.

 

[Lance]

It comes down to one of the age old dilemmas of television: once you establish that a threat is so big that it can't be stopped, then you're essentially dooming the heroes to failure at every turn. So, instead, writers often go too far to the other extreme, "nerfing" the villains to the point where it makes the heroes look vaguely stupid for ever considering these guys a threat in the first place.

The trouble with the Borg is that they're a one-shot villain, maybe two-shot at best. You show them defeating the heroes, and then you show the heroes rising against the odds to defeat them. Ideally, that's their whole story right there. But unfortunately, they were too popular an enemy not to bring them back again and again, to ever decreasing returns each time.

In retrospect, the Borg were done as an credible adversary after 'Best of Both Worlds'. TNG itself tended to acknowledge this, and devoted the rest of its TV run to doing 'other things' with the Borg, via the whole Hugh subplot. But then the movie First Contact re-established them as a genuine threat again, meaning their credibility could only go downwards from there. Voyager couldn't afford to ignore the Borg (the Delta Quadrant being their home territory, and the TV ratings potential being too good), but neither could they make them an unstoppable threat that could end Voyager's fabled journey home with the stroke of a pen. To this end they turned them into generic cannon fodder that could be defeated if Janeway sneezed at them, but pretended they were a 'psychological' threat, and that the Borg Queen was doing a this-time-its-personal thing with Captain Kate.

It never quite worked. It was cool to watch, though. For 5 minutes.

 

[TheGoodStuff]

Voyager did not weaken the Borg, TNG did. TNG fanboys take comfort in believing that the Borg were awesome, invulnerable badasses in TNG but then pussycats in Voyager. Nonsense. The Borg were badass for about five minutes in TNG then the Enterprise (and Starfleet in general) quickly learnt to deal with them. At one point, they even had an opportunity to infect them all and wipe them out but Picard said no to that. By the end of TNG, the Borg were just another reasonably powerful enemy... not a terrifying, all-powerful race.

TNG made that happen, not Voyager.

However, I will agree that Voyager in general (not just with the Borg) had far too easy a ride in the Delta quadrant.

I came here to post something like this and I agree with you completely.

As a fan of Voyager, I get quite fed up with the cliche "Voyager ruined the Borg!" stuff that many fans spout. The Borg are always awesome but they have one huge flaw:

1. As soon as you introduce a super-powerful-cool-awesome villain...you know...eventually...they have to lose. Which in turn inevitably dents their mystique. It is simply the way these types of villains and it began in TNG with Hugh and so forth.

I have always thought the Borg were actually BETTER in Voyager than they are in TNG. In TNG they are not much more than space zombies whereas the introduction of the Queen and greater exploration of the hive mind in Voyager, I think, makes them more interesting.

 

[Paradise City]

Best of Both Worlds both made the borg and ruined them at the same time. That two parter was too successful so they kept bringing them back again, again again, again....etc. Result was a completely emasculated lot that could be felled if you found the off switch/kill switch, which usually served as a device to fish out some drone to cuddle so to explore their "individuality" or some such. It's amazing the amount of mileage they got from retelling the Hugh episode again and again.

The borg were never portrayed as badly in Voyager as they were in TNG, courtesy of that horrifically bad Descent two parter.

 

[hux]

In TNG, the Borg were two-dimensional clown people. Voyager fleshed em out a little which might have lulled some people into thinking they had been weakened. But they weren't.

Now species 8472... that's a different matter entirely.

 

[stardream]

Any time you have a long term villain they are going to eventually become less and less scary. If the audience doesn't gain more knowledge about them they become static and cartoonish. The way the Borg were portrayed in Voyager never bothered me but then I was never that attached to the TNG version either.

 

[Lance]

It's kind of the ley-of-the-land, isn't it?

It's like Doctor Who (Hey!! Doctor Who!!) and the Daleks. It's increasingly improbable that the universe's most unstoppable and dangerous life-form is *really* all that unstoppable and dangerous when we keep seeing one bloke in a transdimensional telephone box defeating them again and again and again.

Conversely, because the Daleks are never *really* defeated and keep coming back again, it makes the Doctor look like a moron for never being able to fully defeat them.

Such is the dilemma of writing an ongoing TV drama. There can never truly be any consequences, and the world exists within a status quo. Voyager and it's mythic 'Reset Button' be damned, that's what all TV shows are like when we really get down to the nub of it. Unless you're writing a soap opera and can afford to murder two-thirds of the regular cast by conveniently dropping a plane on them, or something.

 

[Triskelion]

Except when they "destroy" the enemy for sweeps or finales, knowing full well they can make a reappearance any time a new story calls for it. Just pull some out of cosmic cold storage - a cell or nanoprobe, a cryogenics chamber, an isolated community, etc.

How many times were the Borg left for dead, for all in tents and porpoises?

TNG
Hugh
Descent

VOY
Scorpion
Unimatrix Zero
Endgame

 

[Drone]

Except when they "destroy" the enemy for sweeps or finales, knowing full well they can make a reappearance any time a new story calls for it. Just pull some out of cosmic cold storage - a cell or nanoprobe, a cryogenics chamber, an isolated community, etc.

How many times were the Borg left for dead, for all in tents and porpoises?

TNG
Hugh
Descent

VOY
Scorpion
Unimatrix Zero
Endgame

VOY
Scorpion- You can't really know that at the end of the episode as the Undine might have believed that Voyager supplied the Borg with the weapon technology and so decided to go back home and wait another thousand years until someone else bothered them again.
Unimatrix Zero- No, a very slowly cascading threat, just maybe, but no real danger to do substantial harm to the Collective IMO
Endgame- Very damaging, massive casualties, Queen dead. Yet, it's only this Queen if you care to go down that road and IIRC only one of 8 conduits. So, hurt? Absolutely. Dead, I don't think so. Look at it this way. Admiral Janeway had 16 more years to figure out more stratagems to kick their ass, most of those (I think is the suggestion) with Seven's expertise at her disposal. Then 10 more years to refine the techniques with the best Fed technology available. Don't you think that in all that time, what you suggest would've pretty much occurred? Yet I don' think that is stated or inferred in our peek at the future, is it?

 

[Lance]

Yeah, I agree there's a problem with any story that tries to 'definitively' end an adversary like that.

Even Doctor Who tried to kill off the Daleks in 1966, calling it "the final end", but ultimately they caved into pressure and found some more down the back of the couch in time for a comeback in 1972.

It's like juggling a hot potato. Are they dead or are they alive? Truth is that they're only ever as dead as the writers want them to be.

First Contact was like a 'year zero' for the Borg. It hit that big ol' reset button on all that character "development" they went through near the end of TNG. Ding ding ding. And then Voyager just kind of followed FC's lead. Mostly.

 

[Jedi_Master]

The Borg were slowly and steadily weakened, but it took so long that it felt more natural and understandable. There is no way that the Federation would be able to exist if it wasn't strong enough to deal with its enemies, even especially powerful ones.
I was disappointed at how quickly the Voyager writers nerfed the Hirogen.

 

[Shikarnov]

I concur with the idea of the Borg being weakened prior to Voyager -- but I don't think it was TNG so much. Yeah, there's i-Borg, and then Descent, both of which are pretty bad episodes, but they don't really deal with the Collective. (Also, I refuse to accept the idea that the Borg could have been brought down by a shape; I think Geordi was just plain wrong. )

For me, the Borg were finished in First Contact (1996). Here the Collective is back, they're in their trademark cube-shaped vessel, and in the opening scene they're getting ripped to shreds by phasers and torpedoes.

We saw the same thing happening in Q-Who, but they adapted pretty quickly such that by the end of the episode, Captain Picard had to beg Q to rescue the ship. Are we to imagine that they couldn't adapt during a fleet assault that started in the Typhon sector and was waged all the way to Earth?

Okay, it took a lot of phaser and torpedo hits -- and Picard's knowledge of their most vulnerable spot -- to take them down, but still, it was a very conventional approach.

And then there was the introduction of the Borg Queen -- who took all the mystery of a "collective" of minds away, and replaced it with a very strangely perverse personality to personify the Borg.

Anyway, my point is that, by the time Voyager met the Borg in May of '97, the Borg had already stopped being a force of nature, and were just another twisted villain. A very powerful one, but still.

 

[hux]

The whole point of "First Contact" though is that the Borg aren't strong enough to destroy Earth so they travel to the past to do it. It is therefore firmly established by this point that the Borg are not a major 24th century threat. They can be dealt with. Sure, it can get messy but they're not the invincible force they were in their very first episode. That first appearance was literally the first AND last time they were ever that scary.

Nothing to do with Voyager.

Voyager just played with them as characters in the same way TNG played with the Romulans who in TOS were also powerful and mysterious.

 

[STEPhon IT]

Apparently the Borg in the Delta quadrant are weak and inferior to the Ones in the Alpha Quadrant, as Janeway pretty much owns them on many occasions. Also gotta love Harry Kim's plan to beam torpedoes onto the Cube and then detonate them, as if its some revolutionary concept that noone had ever thought of. Not only that but how did they actually transport torpedos through the Borg shields? Quite a feat indeed.

At least in the last episode it is somewhat understandable since Admiral Janeway brought weaponry from the future.

But Voyagers ability to deal with the Borg without ever being brutalized beyond repair is laughable and one of the weaker points of the series, as far as being purely preposterous.

And now that we are on this topic lets discuss how in the world this ship self sustains and repairs with limited crue and no ability to ever dock at a starbase. How do they still have photon torpedos? Of course there will be some explanation that defies logic but lets be real, this is very shaky.

(Yes, I know its a show, but a little bit of realism once in a while would be welcome imo).

That pretty much sums up another laughable tale of the infallible character. Political Correctness dictating the female must be all knowing and supremely better than the male character. It's just as terrible as Kate Austin from LOST can do all those fantastical things on that show while the men bleed, & stumble like idiots in a similar situation.
Or better yet Rey Skywalker touching a lightsaber and all of a sudden she possesses powers no male TRAINED Jedi has ever had, and she can perform Jedi mind tricks and defeating dark lords with a lightsaber without ever being taught.

Is it so bad for Hollywood to have a woman earn her achievements than be entitled to it? How easy it could've been for Ellen Ripley to defeat the Alien if she was created in the 1990's? Honestly, it wouldn't be bad for these crony writers to look at Ridley Scott's first Alien movie and watch a strong woman make mistakes, and learn from them, and actually EARN a challenge from an lethal, alien monster who took out her entire crew.

 

[Drone]

Are you responding to the previous post, or just venting about a perceived cultural paradigm shift that you find fault with? It just seems ther's pretty much a total disconnect between your comments and the contents of the post you're allegedly addressing.

 

[hux]

That pretty much sums up another laughable tale of the infallible character. Political Correctness dictating the female must be all knowing and supremely better than the male character. It's just as terrible as Kate Austin from LOST can do all those fantastical things on that show while the men bleed, & stumble like idiots in a similar situation.
Or better yet Rey Skywalker touching a lightsaber and all of a sudden she possesses powers no male TRAINED Jedi has ever had, and she can perform Jedi mind tricks and defeating dark lords with a lightsaber without ever being taught.

Is it so bad for Hollywood to have a woman earn her achievements than be entitled to it? How easy it could've been for Ellen Ripley to defeat the Alien if she was created in the 1990's? Honestly, it wouldn't be bad for these crony writers to look at Ridley Scott's first Alien movie and watch a strong woman make mistakes, and learn from them, and actually EARN a challenge from an lethal, alien monster who took out her entire crew.

No-one enjoys dropping moist, clammy turds on the head of hysterical political correctness and the bloated fart-culture of "I'm offended by that" which creeps about social media desperately looking for the right side of history so that it can disingenuously claim it as property with an intellectually stunted baboon grimace... more than moi.

BUT

What you're talking about isn't that. What you're talking about is simply redressing the balance. Janeway's interactions with the Borg certainly don't qualify as an example of making a woman unrealistically powerful. They simply make her realistically competent. As has already been pointed out on this thread, Picard and his man-penis weakened the Borg. Janeway simply maintained the established status quo.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Technically First Contact is what weakened the Borg.

What was odd about post-Borg Queen handling of the Borg is that they suddenly lost their ability to adapt to new technologies. They took away their primary advantage.

I know there are some cases in fiction where they make women really strong and men dumb and helpless, but your examples are not any of them. Kate Austen was not any more competent than Jack, Sawyer, or Sayid. Captain Janeway was not more powerful than the male captains. I guess there weren't a lot of particularly strong males in that show, but the other Trek show on at the same time had plenty of strong males.

Rey was a bit too powerful but not at the expense of the males. Just she was the lead.

I totally agree, in general, with the idea that TV shows often emasculate males. But the existence of assertive women in leadership roles is not emasculation. And pointing out examples of shows that do have more strong women than men is pointless because the majority of shows still have more strong men. It's only emasculation in cases like Home Improvement where male bravado leads to injury and the stupid male is always having to apologize for being who he is.