What are some plain stupid things from Season One?

Fair enough. I forgot to mention "Child's Play", another "Voyager spanks the Borg" episode.

 

Indeed.

Honestly, there are only two times where the Borg being beaten by Voyager felt like legitimate wins: the destroyed cube in "UNITY" and the sphere in "DRONE", and that's because in neither scenario did they have any impact on those ships. (The new Cooperative self-destructed the cube, and the 29th century drone got the sphere crushed.)

 

Justified to some extent though: Voyager was a lot closer to Borg home territory than the Federation.

Not that I think it was a good idea to use them that much.

 

Encounter rate wasn't the main problem. Them constantly defeating the Borg was.

 

^ I agree to that.

But how would frequently being defeated by them have looked?

Realistically, against the Borg, even escaping without being assimilated already would count as a remarkable success.

 

Exactly. Leave it just escaping with your skin intact.

Not blowing up their ships.
Not stealing their transwarp coils.
Not invading their Unicomplex.
Not engaging a tactical cube.
Not purposefully getting assimilated and unassimilated.

 

You could handwave the "purposefully assimilated" bit by saying they actually weren't - no suppression of their individuality occurred (except for Tuvok who is better placed to recover from such). Yes, they were surgically altered, but we've seen Sisko and company have THAT done to masquerade as Klingons, and Seska was certainly willing to do so.

IF the plan works, then getting converted cybernetically is no different to what Sisko's team did. The level of trust you would have to have in the "neural suppressant" to ensure the actually horrific bit of assimilation (losing your mind) didn't happen would have to be incredible, though.

 

They could have handled it differently though. After First Contact and especially on Voyager the Borg were portrayed as constantly reaching outward to assimilate.
Wouldn't it have been interesting if once the Voyager had crossed that outward "front" of Borg ships going forward to assimilate...they had found the space behind them abandoned? An eerie, empty region with only discarded borgships, abandoned planets and maybe some hardy survivors?

It plays into the other problem I have with the Borg...what do they do all day when they aren't assimilating? What does the Borg Queen do all day? They don't seem to have a "peacetime" mode.

 

I suppose they play Tetris in that case.

But only with grey blocks.

Other than that, I think your idea of a 'scorched earth' zone (or whatever you'd like to call it) would be perfectly plausible.

 

Sisko and his team in 'APOCALYPSE RISING" were cosmetically altered to look like Klingons... same with Seska to look Bajoran.

What Janeway, Tuvok, and Torres went was far more invasive. They had technology and vocal subprocessors added inside them. The Borg Queen even saud she felt them added to the Collective, so it definitely was not a fake assimilation.

Completely different things.

 

Sometimes they tried too hard to be SO more advanced than the 20th century. There's a certain level in fiction that needs to be grounded for us.

Hypothetically, things could be very different then, but 24th century audiences aren't watching them.

 

The decision to film planet scenes on sets barely advanced from the 60s. They had the ability to do better even then. Also, see season 3!

 

Not only is the USS Voyager in Borg space after season three but the Borg also know that they are there. So it does seem natural that they would appear often so they could assimilate them into the Collective and learn all they need about the Federation, the only group that has thwarted them over the years and series until the arrival of the 8472 at least!
JB

 

I read that a lot of problems of this episodes stems from the Writers strike, still I am puzzled by how much nonsense got into the first script, revisions or not.

 

Another problem I have with the Borg as presented in both TNG and VOY is of course their appearance! In TNG they are talcum faced sleep walkers wearing black outfits which the costume designers forgot to complete somewhat whilst in First Contact and Voyager we meet emaciated zombies encased in bio-mechanical, cybernetic support suits!
Now it's obviously done for the effect but it does somewhat make the TNG originals look somewhat weaker and haphazard!
A bit like how the original Daleks in Doctor Who pale compared to those made in the seventies!
Are we to assume that the Borg keep getting updates and that is the reason, if so the episode The Raven would argue that point as the zombie look was prevalent thirty years ago when Annika's family were assimilated!
JB

 

I'm not sure I understand the issue here..

TOS had brown paste scraped onto actors faces, and those were Klingons. In TMP, we had totally new, reptilian makeups.

Bigger budgets+more time=superior aliens.

Same here

 

Yes I get that, but are we supposed to just accept that they were always the same instead of being updated every now and then and if so then how come a flashback episode of thirty years back shows them as they are now?
Plus the Klingon look has been debated for years and eventually given an explanation which happened over a period of two centuries as such!
JB

 

I just always assume superior $ and time mean superior production. To me the newer stuff supersedes the old in my head Canon, whether it's actually true or not. Same goes for the newer shows.

It's an: "oh that's how they really look! " situation. Ever experienced that?

 

I know what you're getting at, yes. But for myself the older stuff has always been the personal favourite!
JB

 

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I get it. Once something is established people want to stick to it, it's very understandable, especially over 50+ years.

I think reinventing itself makes a franchise healthy. Dr Who for example could have been stale, dead and buried ages ago, but reinventing kept it fresh. This was basically done with 2 series.

Trek has a dozen, so it accomplishes it in a different way.

Of course superseding something older isn't perfect, the rare Andorian in TNG are awful.