Even if you add this and “Family”, it brings us to a grand total of eight TNG Borg episodes.
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Even if you add this and “Family”, it brings us to a grand total of eight TNG Borg episodes.
Oh, yes, "Family." I'd count that episode also; it's an underrated one at that.
But, indeed, the greatest milker was Voyager, followed by Picard.
More than four episodes, then they were shoved into a movie and into Picard. TNG and associated spin-offs cannot live without the Borg in one way or another.
Eight episodes out of 178. The later over reliance on the Borg by the franchise is not the fault of TNG.
It is like blaming TOS for SNW moving the Eugenics Wars.
Now, that's moving the goalposts. You said, "TNG," we responded to what was said in the first place. We even acknowledged the heavier reliance in the spin-offs.
You have TNG mixed up with VOY regarding the Borg.
TNG used the Borg in 6 episodes, two of them being 2-parters... "Q Who", "The Best of Both Worlds" two-parter, "I Borg", and "Descent" two-parter. I do not count the scooped up outposts from "The Neutral Zone" or the aftermath of Picard's trauma in "Family" because the Borg didn't appear in either episode, but even if I did, that's 8 episodes out of 178.
VOY, on the other hand...
"BLOOD FEVER" (Borg body)
"UNITY"
"SCORPION" two-parter
"THE RAVEN" (Seven's flashbacks)
"RETROSPECT" (Seven's flashbacks)
"LIVING WITNESS"
"HOPE AND FEAR"
"DRONE"
"INFINITE REGRESS"
"DARK FRONTIER" two-parter
"SURVIVAL INSTINCT"
"TINKER TENOR DOCTOR SPY"
"COLLECTIVE"
"CHILD'S PLAY"
"UNIMATRIX ZERO" two-parter
"IMPERFECTION"
"SHATTERED"
"Q2"
"ENDGAME" two-part finale
That's 23 episodes out of 172... nearly an entire season of Berman era production. (And being honest, this is a quick remembrance... I might be missing one or two.)
VOYAGER was definitely the one that overused the Borg, not TNG.
Then you add in Seven of Nine being in every episode of seasons four through seven. Voyager definitely overused the Borg.
@YouAreDooomed suppose instead of just deciding to reverse engineer by disassembly, the episode had centered around the aftermath of a failure of Data's, and the goal was to remove him from his responsibilities to ensure it did not happen again?
Being fair, I can't really do that, since she was not a Borg after "THE GIFT". (I suppose I could add "THE GIFT" to the total, but because she was in the process of getting de-Borged, I don't count it. Also, I know for a fact she did not appear in "NEMESIS", and possibly one other episode, but I get your point on her being in the rest of the show.) This is also why I never counted the Borg kids when they appear in episodes after "COLLECTIVE".
Otherwise, we would be counting every TNG episode after Picard was rescued, since he became a former Borg.
Outside of the eight stories mentioned, TNG didn’t make Picard’s Borg experience a running plot line with his character, due to studio resistance against serialization. Seven’s Borgness was inherent to her character and arc.
I tend to think there’s a difference between Seven and Picard. Picard was a Borg for a weekend, Seven was a Borg for most of her life.
Seven still needed to keep some of her implants in order to survive, several of them visibly, as she was a member of the Collective for much longer than Picard - the implants were more heavily integrated into her physiology, having been assimilated for so long. Picard wasn't Locutus long enough, allowing Beverly to remove all his implants - they hadn't taken full hold of his body yet. The only thing that really remained was the non-physical PTSD that Picard suffered from "Family"-onward.
Because of these two conditions, it could be legitimately argued that Seven was never not a Borg of some kind, just like the other X-B's in PIC S1, technically making every VOY episode (post-"Scorpion") a Borg episode.
Edit: Ninja'd by @BillJ.
It's possible that saucers and nacelles ARE the alien influence.
Fair points about Seven. But because she was reasserting her humanity, I can't call her a Borg in her episodes. Former, most certainly. And yes, she still had some of the implants. (They were used as a plot point several times.)
The jokes write themselves, don't they?
I wasn't even thinking about that when I typed that post. But now that you mention it... yes, I see what you mean.
Depends how much dates are important to you, but I can’t recommend highly enough the Star Trek: Spaceflight Chronology.
It was produced in the early-80’s but is a wildly creative look at the Trek universe.
Illustrated by Rick Sternbach who later worked on TNG.
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And completely defanged them.as well, making sure the Voyager crew comes out on top. While I don't agree with much of TNG'S use of the Borg, it at least gave a measure of variation, either with isolated groups or exploring individuals.
Voyager had a loan Federation ship breaking in to Borg Fort Knox.
That's not rare or random, for what the Borg ultimately represented to the main character.
If the Borg only appeared in "Q Who", I doubt they would've been shoehorned into other ST productions. They would have been a one-and-done threat (yes, even after Picard believed the Borg learned their location) similar to the Planet Killer from "The Doomsday Machine" or the parasites from "Operation--Annihilate!", but that did not happen.
Not quite the same issue. Unlike TNG with all things Borg, TOS made one and only one reference to the Eugenics Wars in a single episode (and the specific event was not even mentioned in the direct movie sequel), so the Eugenics Wars was not the "hot thing" returning over and over again in TOS, then piggybacked in future series. The Borg did return several times in TNG--they were the Big Bad (their Romulans and Klingons were not), and used to milk them as an "event" in every appearance post debut.
It looks like you are just looking for something to blame TNG for. It created the Borg, it used them a limited amount of times and fewer times than TOS used the Klingons, across twice as many episodes.
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