Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x08 - "Mercy"

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"Destined?" No. But it's almost inevitable that they would eventually do that, because continuing to write the Borg as irredeemable villains was always going to become boring. There is a point where writers will simply refuse to keep doing the same thing over and over again, because it is creatively unfulfilling and because it will alienate an audience that has seen the same basic story before.

Sure, they could keep doing what they did before, but realistically the pressures of not wanting to keep repeating the same story over and over again would prompt them to start looking for ways to tell a story about reconciliation with the Borg.
Yes, in that case the other alternative is to kill the Queen for good, free her drones, and call it a day (see: "Endgame"). Shelve the Borg, which to be honest, is probably what will happen when/if Jurati changes them anyway, just like the Dominion after Odo.
 
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At least in ENT they changed the Borg a little by not having a drone we could sympathize with, a spokesperson for the Collective and they even avoided having the drones call themselves Borg. They were cold, menacing and the scariest they've been since "Dark Frontier(VOY)" and arguably FC. Some people still complain that B&B pulled the "don't have them mention who they are" ploy to fit the Borg into continuity and still leave humans unaware of their identity but it...sorta worked. It's a solid episode of that series and a creepy one.
 
Contrived as it was, on that enterprise episode the borg were probably as scary as in early TNG and far from how lame they had become on voyager. While doing something that should have failed on every account (see the ferengi episode…) they managed to do everything quite right and produce a little masterpiece.
 
At least in ENT they changed the Borg a little by not having a drone we could sympathize with, a spokesperson for the Collective and they even avoided having the drones call themselves Borg. They were cold, menacing and the scariest they've been since "Dark Frontier(VOY)" and arguably FC. Some people still complain that B&B pulled the "don't have them mention who they are" ploy to fit the Borg into continuity and still leave humans unaware of their identity but it...sorta worked. It's a solid episode of that series and a creepy one.
The Borg didn't identify themselves by name in Q Who either. Guinan told the crew what they're called.
 
At least in ENT they changed the Borg a little by not having a drone we could sympathize with, a spokesperson for the Collective and they even avoided having the drones call themselves Borg. They were cold, menacing and the scariest they've been since "Dark Frontier(VOY)" and arguably FC. Some people still complain that B&B pulled the "don't have them mention who they are" ploy to fit the Borg into continuity and still leave humans unaware of their identity but it...sorta worked. It's a solid episode of that series and a creepy one.
The only thing that bothered me was that they took like 9 shots from primitive phase pistols until they adapted, and that everything about the Borg was totally to the TNG crew - but maybe a random fire at the classified data storage building destroyed all these records :D

No worries. Just watch how you frame things.

At least for me, I never said the first several episodes were "best ever." I don't recall if anyone on this BBS did or not, I don't think so, but it could be. Even if someone did, it's not really surprising that their opinions could change as the quality changed.

I liked the first several. I think rated them as 8s. I almost never give 10s (classics--a few per entire series for a good series), and rarely 9s (near classics). And 8 for me is a above average, thoroughly entertaining and no real strong complaints or weaknesses--but it's not in the classic or near classic territory.

From there, it did drop to filler territory and my ratings dipped down to a minimum of 6 (sub par but not a total failure). The most recent episode was back up to a 7 (average) despite some misgiving about fillers and focusing on non-related topics because it was still entertaining in a light way.

So, that's not quite the swing you're describing. You're exaggerating the intensity of the swing for most people. Maybe someone on this BBS had such a large swing, but that wasn't typical as far as I can tell.

At any rate, I look forward to the newest episode later tonight! Hoping for the best! I feel like it should be picking up again because we're nearing the finale! :techman:
It's how regular people usually talk, especially online. This is the best coffee I've ever had!! I LOVE this song/actor/food/video/etc.!!! I HATE that other one! It's usually not a permanent, or even very long-lasting opinion. And how many things people say they LOVE are actually of strong romantic/erotic/emotional interest to them, and how many things people say they HATE would they seriously wanna see brutally destroyed? People with opinions in between, finding stuff just average, mediocre, don't even feel the need to post a lot about it. You can write walls of love text or walls of hate text, but it's hard to come up with walls of shrugging I-don't-really-care text ;)

One should also keep in mind there was that throwaway scene from the far-future in Season 1 of Lower Decks where we saw a Borg child in a classroom. This indicates that the Federation eventually makes peace with the Borg, if not having the Borg join the Federation outright.
Could've been a rescued Borg baby, Boims was practicing that :D
 
Yeah, they did resist 22nd century phase pistol blasts too easily. I guess in-universe you could conjecture that the drones were cut off from the wider Collective and thus slower to respond to external weapons.
 
Contrived as it was, on that enterprise episode the borg were probably as scary as in early TNG and far from how lame they had become on voyager. While doing something that should have failed on every account (see the ferengi episode…) they managed to do everything quite right and produce a little masterpiece.
The Borg honestly never felt all that intimidating to me until their revamp in First Contact.
 
Still stupid, inane, imprecise and poor language. Basically lying.
Speaking of hyperboles!
The Borg honestly never felt all that intimidating to me until their revamp in First Contact.
to me the scariest they were was in the first two episodes (Q Who and BoBW), then they went downhill. Sure, they looked much better in First Contact, but the Queen removed a lot of the scariness.
 
Speaking of hyperboles!
Calling something "best ever" because internet is lying. But I suppose we wouldn't have such dynamic conversations with the dramatic statements.
Speaking of hyperboles!
to me the scariest they were was in the first two episodes (Q Who and BoBW), then they went downhill. Sure, they looked much better in First Contact, but the Queen removed a lot of the scariness.
Pretty much.
 
At least in ENT they changed the Borg a little by not having a drone we could sympathize with, a spokesperson for the Collective and they even avoided having the drones call themselves Borg. They were cold, menacing and the scariest they've been since "Dark Frontier(VOY)" and arguably FC. Some people still complain that B&B pulled the "don't have them mention who they are" ploy to fit the Borg into continuity and still leave humans unaware of their identity but it...sorta worked. It's a solid episode of that series and a creepy one.

I think I got pulled out of that feeling of creepiness by the idea of Phlox, a doctor two hundred years less advanced than Crusher, being able to figure out the existence and function of nanoprobes and then destroy them all and stop his own assimilation. That idea makes sense as an escalation of the Doctor's research from VOY, that the next step in combating the Borg would be finding a way to stop assimilation as it's happening -- but to have it come from a 22nd Century doctor instead of a 24th Century doctor just felt contrived to me.
 
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