Why do people keep saying Voyager weakened the Borg?

[Anwar]

...Which WAS the immediate threat. That was the entire invasion they sent.

Which doesn't match up with the "Swarm" Guinan mentioned.

We were given no reason to believe they HAD another invasion, let alone were capable of having one reach Earth.

Guinan said "Swarm", not "single ship". Nothing in Q Who? implied that one Cube was their total force, otherwise the end of BOBW would have them mentioning that they've destroyed the Borg's totality and not just one ship.

Core trait, you mean. It's only your lack of imagination that makes it a flaw.

If the only core trait an enemy has is that they've been stupidly overpowered, they're still a lamely thought out enemy.

What do you mean, "either way"? Only one "way" was being discussed. The opposite, "other way", would have been that it turns out the Borg had raped millions of planets instead of just one. In which case, no, I would not be dissatisfied. So please Anwar, for the love of Kolk'r. Stop. Putting. Words. In. My. Mouth.

You said you'd be dissatisfied if you either had them run into a world they ruled or a world they raped. So both choices dissatisfy you.

No. Stop.

History vindicates me saying what they'd expect.

]Your "no-win" is easily solved by not having them completely overrunning the entire quadrant in the first place.

Which doesn't fit how they were portrayed in TNG as an unstoppable force with an insatiable hunger to conquer and assimilate everything around them. How can they be taken seriously if they couldn't even conquer their homeland?

You just can't win.

 

[zar]

You said you'd be dissatisfied if you either had them run into a world they ruled or a world they raped. So both choices dissatisfy you.

No I didn't. You reworded the question again. There is an ENORMOUS difference between revealing that they only HAVE one, and having Voyager RUN INTO only one.

I answered both questions, and the second one (the one you're quoting here) is the one I said I would have been fine with. It would NOT dissatisfy me.

Stop putting words in my mouth. Especially after I literally just finished saying the exact opposite.


Everything else in your post has already been addressed. I'm getting off this merry-go-round.

 

[exodus]

Starfleet alternates their shield and phaser frequencies, when fighting the Borg. This was stated on screen. There's no way that we could ever be equal to the Borg. It just doesn't work that way. It's like saying that one day, we're going to make germs go away. No, we're not. It just doesn't work that way.

The reason they kept finding loopholes is because the writers decided that they should find loopholes. Nothing more.

What is this, Deadpool?
The crew of Trek knows they're finding loop holes due to the writing staff?
Are we arguing Trek Universe facts or real world writer facts because I've lost track?

Well, whatta you know, I'm a writer, too. Small world/big Internet. They didn't have to sabotage anything. When creating an enemy that's outrageously overpowered, the best thing to do is (a) keep their appearances to a minimum and (b) all encounters with them must lead to HEAVY repercussions/casualties. Anything less than this is incompetence.

It happened with Doomsday. It happened with Venom. And it happened with the Borg.

As a producer, one of my main priorities is to my audience. They are what draws in sponsors to create revenue for my show. The Borg, like Venom and Doomsday proved to drawn in viewers/readers/money. TV is a business just like any other. So if my audience is telling me they really like the Borg, Venom & Doomsday by increased sales/viewership, then it's incompetence on my part for not filling the supply of that demand.

The Borg are fan favorites.
Every time they showed up, viewership increased.
Voyager was a show that needed to keep up it's ratings, so as a writer/producer you do what is best to keep the show on the air. If that means showing the Borg every season to get folks to watch, you do it. If the fans don't like it in hindsight, it's too late. While the show was on, feed back for the Borg was positive.

 

[exodus]

Hence the title of this thread. Voyager weakened the Borg. There was a tranwarp conduit 1-light year from Earth, with multiple cubes on the other end. What exactly was stopping the Queen from sending those cubes through to assimilate Earth? That's right, writer incompetence.

It isn't writer incompetence.
As a writer and producer, why would you sabotage the future of the Trek universe and you're own job by assimilating Earth and ending any future of Trek?

No, writer incompetence put the transwarp conduit 1-light year from Earth in the first place. They put themselves in a situation that has no reasonable explanation as to why it wouldn't lead to ending the future of Trek.

Maybe it's a hint to us generally speaking that if they don't take it that seriously, maybe we shouldn't either?

 

[Gary7]

If there's one thing I find annoying to see, it's "the Borg were boring" in TNG. I do not find that at all. They were intriguing upon introduction. They made mince-meat out of the fleet at Wolf359. But then there was this ambiguity about the "stuck in sleep" trick that Data employed. Since Data knew their frequencies, wouldn't he be able to build a transmitter to put a freshly encountered Borg cube to sleep? It wasn't explored, which was disappointing. Then there was Hugh. I thought that was a great episode, exploring the Borg condition. And then in "Descent" we learn of the Borg faction that was created as a result. Unfortunately, that was it for the Borg in TNG. Given how determined the Borg are, I would have expected more confrontations with the Federation. But, they could have become preoccupied with another species or were improving their security protocols for future Federation encounters.

It's true, without a "face" they aren't as interesting. But then, they are also more mysterious. I had some issues with the introduction of the Queen... but if anything, her emotional behavior just seemed so out of place for what the Borg represent.

 

[Anwar]

If the only thing that's good about an enemy is that they're "Mysterious" then that just highlights what a poorly thought out enemy they are.

 

[Luminus]

What is this, Deadpool?
The crew of Trek knows they're finding loop holes due to the writing staff?
Are we arguing Trek Universe facts or real world writer facts because I've lost track?

You asked about the loopholes and I gave you the answer. I'm not breaking the 4th wall, here.

As a producer, one of my main priorities is to my audience. They are what draws in sponsors to create revenue for my show. The Borg, like Venom and Doomsday proved to drawn in viewers/readers/money. TV is a business just like any other. So if my audience is telling me they really like the Borg, Venom & Doomsday by increased sales/viewership, then it's incompetence on my part for not filling the supply of that demand.

The Borg are fan favorites.
Every time they showed up, viewership increased.
Voyager was a show that needed to keep up it's ratings, so as a writer/producer you do what is best to keep the show on the air. If that means showing the Borg every season to get folks to watch, you do it. If the fans don't like it in hindsight, it's too late. While the show was on, feed back for the Borg was positive.

And, as a result, the producers/writers creation fall heavily out of fan favor. Gee, I wonder why? No one trashes the Klingons or the Romulans. No on trashes the Green Goblin. And no one trashed Lex Luthor, until, you guessed it, the producers/writers (i.e., you) decided to overuse/misuse him.

The Klingons are fan favorites, but you never saw them suddenly becoming logical. They never started becoming calm. They never inexplicably started to say, "Today would be a good day to die, if it wasn't Sunday." And they never decloaked a space station that was 1-light year from Earth.

The reason the ratings kept jumping, is because people kept coming back to see if the writers were actually going to write a good Borg episode. I know, because that's why I kept watching.

I was the obsessed Borg fan at one point. I had almost all Borg paraphernalia, right down to that Borg bank that had a tractor beam on the Enterprise D all the way to a mini borg cube paperweight. So, of course, feedback for the Borg themselves was positive. I AM the audience the producers were catering to and as that audience I am telling you the producers screwed up. I came back, because I was hoping for a better story. I was hoping they would be redeemed. I was hoping for an origin story. All I got was increasingly weak Borg with terrible Borg Queen portrayals. (At 1 point the Borg queen is shown treating her drones as if they were common thugs, instead of treating them as an extension of herself, you know, like the Borg are supposed to be.) But they were Borg and Borg were exciting, like that very good lover who cheats on you, you keep coming back for more, because that loving is soooooo good. But the "aftertaste" is terrible and the regret is huge.

Stick to the rules that I mentioned before and you'll be fine. You want to show the Borg every season? Fine. But people have to die. Significant property has to be destroyed and not rebuilt in the very next episode (I'm looking at you Delta Flyer). Tears must be shed.

Just because something is popular, doesn't mean you abuse it. A good writer knows this.

 

[Anwar]

They VOY should've had cannon fodder, instead of just being alone. Of course giving them cannon fodder would violate the premise of the show.

So they did the other logical thing and had there be other species out there as tough as the Borg.

And how did the audience react? They though that since there were other species out there as tough as the Borg the Borg were now irrevocably ruined.

And naturally, if "Scorpion" had been a TNG or DS9 episode, no one would care.

You just can't win.

 

[zar]

If you tuned in to the Borg eps., regardless of your personal reasons then you gave them the go ahead to create more Borg eps. You aren't giving them the info that you aren't liking the stories, you're giving them just the opposite. You're giving them approval.

How do you think they found out that the Borg were a fan favorite in the first place? Just because people tuned in to BOBW? They did receive feedback, you know.

If you are a writer, then you should have started a letter writing campagine to the studio.

When has there ever been a letter-writing campaign over something so mundane? It's not like they killed off a favorite character.

A writer job has nothing to do with keeping track of what is pulling an audience. So it doesn't matter what you believe a good writer does, honestly. They still have to do what their bosses the producers and studio asks for.

I'm not an expert on the process, but I'm pretty sure the extent of the producers' direction is something like "Let's do a Borg episode." Then deciding whether to accept a story once it's submitted. Handling the actual story is up to the writer.

A writer's job isn't necessarily to keep track of the audience, but it IS their job to keep track of the characters they're writing and keep their portrayal consistent. Inconsistent portrayal is the root of the audience's dissatisfaction. "Weaken" is a relative term.

Martok seemed like a pretty logical and calm Klingon too me.

In which episode?

 

[Lord Manitou]

This question came about in Endgame when the Transwarp Hub was destroyed. Apparently there are 6 Transwarp Hubs in the galaxy and each one standing by with a Borg complex and millions of drones. This implies only a Transwarp Hub was destroyed and the general facilities that kept the queen. Whether it is possible to cripple the Borg using the same nano-probe type infections is being debated. It is also true if the Borg isn't stopped they will use their technology to conquer the galaxy.
Their are loop-holes concerning the Borg but an unnecessary loop-hole is what happend after the TransWarp Hub was destroyed.

 

[Anwar]

Which all ties back to the original problem: If they were going to stupidly overpower the Borg like they did in Q Who? and BOBW, then they shouldn't have dug themselves even deeper and give them millions of Cubes and a huge area of Space.

VOY did the sensible thing by showing that the Borg have at least one enemy who can wipe the floor with them, and keep them at bay (the 8472). This solves all real problems with the Borg, and despite that it was critically panned.

You just can't win.

 

[zar]

then they shouldn't have dug themselves even deeper and give them millions of Cubes and a huge area of Space.

They didn't. VOY did that.

"But... but Guinan said they swarmed through space!"

You just can't win.

I've noticed.

 

[exodus]

How do you think they found out that the Borg were a fan favorite in the first place? Just because people tuned in to BOBW? They did receive feedback, you know.

Yes, and....?

has there ever been a letter-writing campaign over something so mundane? It's not like they killed off a favorite character.

If it's mundane, why are we even complaining?

I'm not an expert on the process, but I'm pretty sure the extent of the producers' direction is something like "Let's do a Borg episode." Then deciding whether to accept a story once it's submitted. Handling the actual story is up to the writer.

No, a producers job is to over see the entire production of a show and is way, way more than "Let's Do A Borg Ep." Producers are often part of the writing bull pin and are over see the direction of the show.

A writer's job isn't necessarily to keep track of the audience, but it IS their job to keep track of the characters they're writing and keep their portrayal consistent. Inconsistent portrayal is the root of the audience's dissatisfaction. "Weaken" is a relative term.

Voyager eps. were meant to be repeated out of sequence and had shows aired out of production order during it's original airing. Voyager was meant to be stand alone eps. and never meant to be 100% consistent. Voyager like ENT from the start was meant to bring back the casual viewer that doesn't notice or care about inconsistency. There were inconsistency in TNG, the most popular one and the audience never caught them and/or didn't care.

 

[exodus]

What is this, Deadpool?
The crew of Trek knows they're finding loop holes due to the writing staff?
Are we arguing Trek Universe facts or real world writer facts because I've lost track?

You asked about the loopholes and I gave you the answer. I'm not breaking the 4th wall, here.

As a producer, one of my main priorities is to my audience. They are what draws in sponsors to create revenue for my show. The Borg, like Venom and Doomsday proved to drawn in viewers/readers/money. TV is a business just like any other. So if my audience is telling me they really like the Borg, Venom & Doomsday by increased sales/viewership, then it's incompetence on my part for not filling the supply of that demand.

The Borg are fan favorites.
Every time they showed up, viewership increased.
Voyager was a show that needed to keep up it's ratings, so as a writer/producer you do what is best to keep the show on the air. If that means showing the Borg every season to get folks to watch, you do it. If the fans don't like it in hindsight, it's too late. While the show was on, feed back for the Borg was positive.

And, as a result, the producers/writers creation fall heavily out of fan favor. Gee, I wonder why? No one trashes the Klingons or the Romulans. No on trashes the Green Goblin. And no one trashed Lex Luthor, until, you guessed it, the producers/writers (i.e., you) decided to overuse/misuse him.

The Klingons are fan favorites, but you never saw them suddenly becoming logical. They never started becoming calm. They never inexplicably started to say, "Today would be a good day to die, if it wasn't Sunday." And they never decloaked a space station that was 1-light year from Earth.

The reason the ratings kept jumping, is because people kept coming back to see if the writers were actually going to write a good Borg episode. I know, because that's why I kept watching.

I was the obsessed Borg fan at one point. I had almost all Borg paraphernalia, right down to that Borg bank that had a tractor beam on the Enterprise D all the way to a mini borg cube paperweight. So, of course, feedback for the Borg themselves was positive. I AM the audience the producers were catering to and as that audience I am telling you the producers screwed up. I came back, because I was hoping for a better story. I was hoping they would be redeemed. I was hoping for an origin story. All I got was increasingly weak Borg with terrible Borg Queen portrayals. (At 1 point the Borg queen is shown treating her drones as if they were common thugs, instead of treating them as an extension of herself, you know, like the Borg are supposed to be.) But they were Borg and Borg were exciting, like that very good lover who cheats on you, you keep coming back for more, because that loving is soooooo good. But the "aftertaste" is terrible and the regret is huge.

Stick to the rules that I mentioned before and you'll be fine. You want to show the Borg every season? Fine. But people have to die. Significant property has to be destroyed and not rebuilt in the very next episode (I'm looking at you Delta Flyer). Tears must be shed.

Just because something is popular, doesn't mean you abuse it. A good writer knows this.

I'm not getting this.
You tuned into a show you felt had weak writing thus contributing to the increased viewership of those eps., in turn giving the TPTB thr green light to do more of them........and it's the producers that screwed up?

You gave them the approval every time you tuned in.

 

[zar]

How do you think they found out that the Borg were a fan favorite in the first place? Just because people tuned in to BOBW? They did receive feedback, you know.

Yes, and....?

You were insinuating that people like Luminus didn't give any feedback outside of the fact that they tuned in to the shows, therefore the producers had nothing but "approval" and had no idea what people actually thought of what they were doing with the Borg. That's hogwash.

If you are a writer, then you should have started a letter writing campagine to the studio.

When has there ever been a letter-writing campaign over something so mundane?

If it's mundane, why are we even complaining?

I must be out of the loop. Is it customary to only discuss things on this forum that we feel strongly enough about to have started a letter-writing campaign about it?

A writer's job isn't necessarily to keep track of the audience, but it IS their job to keep track of the characters they're writing and keep their portrayal consistent. Inconsistent portrayal is the root of the audience's dissatisfaction. "Weaken" is a relative term.

Voyager eps. were meant to be repeated out of sequence and had shows aired out of production order during it's original airing. Voyager was meant to be stand alone eps. and never meant to be 100% consistent. Voyager like ENT from the start was meant to bring back the casual viewer that doesn't notice or care about inconsistency.

We're talking about consistent portrayal of the Borg's character, not continuity. If they didn't expect viewers to care about that, why did they think viewers wanted to see the Borg's return in the first place?

 

[Saito S]

I've stayed on the sidelines through this massive thread, having not felt the need to engage yet AGAIN on any of these familiar subjects (several of which have been completely deconstructed multiple times in threads long past). It has certainly been a bizarrely entertaining read, though.

But there was one thing that just jumped right out at me, and I wanted to make sure it had a spotlight shined on it:

VOY did the sensible thing by showing that the Borg have at least one enemy who can wipe the floor with them, and keep them at bay (the 8472). This solves all real problems with the Borg, and despite that it was critically panned.

You just can't win.

Nope. It wasn't. "Scorpion" was, in fact, critically celebrated. It is widely regarded as one of the best - if not THE best - VOY eps (or two eps, depending on how you look at it), and is considered a great ep among the entire franchise, not just Voyager. And not just on this BBS either, but in general. And the 8472 were well-received (until, of course, "In the Flesh"), in large part BECAUSE the Trek audience - for the first time - was presented with a new alien species that had the capability to completely blow the Borg up. Neither "Scorpion", nor the 8472, were critically panned. If you'd like to assert that they were, provide some proof.

Repeating a falsehood over and over and over (in this case, "You just can't win", which you have literally repeated verbatim several posts in a row now) does not make it suddenly become true.

 

[Anwar]

The fact that all folks can say when they think of Voyager and the Borg is "Voyager ruined the Borg".

Do they say "Voyager started out okay with the Borg but ruined them later"? Do they say "Voyager had an interesting idea with those 8472 aliens fighting the Borg"?

No, ALL they do is whine about how Voyager ruined the Borg. Every single second, every single appearance, every moment of the crew NOT being spineless cowards when confronted by them.

That's all the proof I need.

 

[thatborg]

I was bored, and came across this forum and thread and was compelled to chime in.

First I want to call Zar out on what I would describe as purely epic trolling. Your trolling rages on even in the face of facts and logic in the greatest troll style.

Second I think Voyager did a phenomenal job fleshing out the Borg. Using what was fleshed out, I will make some suppositions.

Voyager did actually weaken the Borg, the number of ships and planets that were destroyed in Scorpion was a great loss of resources to the collective. By that extension the Borg was weakened.

Think about it and the purpose of the Unimatrix. Borg colonize planets to extract resources, procure minerals and energy, they transport the materials to the giant to the Unimatrix for processing. The borg use a lot of minerals and energy and use a lot of resources to maintain ships and empires. Species 8472 destroyed a lot of Borg planets and ships, and with it their production and output capacity.

Switching subjects my theory on the cube that was seen in the next generation and a canonical reason why that design was never seen again is that it was a ship of older design. Why wouldn't the Borg recall older ships and scrap them. The Borg have been around a long time, surely they must have a few old Orbeth class cubes floating around in the fleet waiting to be decommissioned.

Also the debate about cubes being different sizes, of course they have cubes of different sizes. Borg scout ships are cube shaped and smaller. Borg probes like the one that voyager destroyed were probably the successor to those.

The cubes in Borg home space are numerous and performing other functions than just being out on the frontier assimilating, you can also assume that

The nature of the Borg makes them inherently uncreative, they rely on other races to provide them with upgrades to their technology and don't generally research it on their own. This is quite a logical draw back.

I think its quite plausible that the federation gained a significant leap forward on the borg because they're creative and motivated. The Borg on the other hand only get new tech when they assimilate it.

The idea of transwarp conduits as far back as TNG is quite logical. The Borg vessel that assimilated the outposts on the neutral zone before Q Who probably took all the assimilated people and everything they scooped up back to the Unimatrix for processing and reassignment.

Also in regards to assimilation, in a prior post it was mentioned that the difference between TNG and FC where one looked like zombies the other was neat and surgical

Think about it like this, the Borg in FC was assimilating people on the Enterprise after they lost their vessel, they didn't have access to proper assimilation chambers to put the finishing touches on the enterprise crew members who were assimilated. They also had other tasks to complete than completely outfitting new drones.

One last point, a previous post in this thread made mention of the fact that having Locutus and Seven of Nine and the Borg Queen completely shattered the idea of the collective mind.

I don't believe that to be the case, I see the Borg as a tightly controlled computer network with user levels. Even among the drones, some drones just have a higher user level than others.

 

[exodus]

You were insinuating that people like Luminus didn't give any feedback outside of the fact that they tuned in to the shows, therefore the producers had nothing but "approval" and had no idea what people actually thought of what they were doing with the Borg. That's hogwash.

No, that's assuming.
Why would I assume something and address something that nobody has mentioned? I read what Luminus had to say and answered based on the facts he provided.

I must be out of the loop. Is it customary to only discuss things on this forum that we feel strongly enough about to have started a letter-writing campaign about it?

Maybe, because I'm not seeing how this relates or is productive to the topic at hand?

We're talking about consistent portrayal of the Borg's character, not continuity. If they didn't expect viewers to care about that, why did they think viewers wanted to see the Borg's return in the first place? *

I already addressed this when I said popularity.

 

[Luminus]

No, a producers job is to over see the entire production of a show and is way, way more than "Let's Do A Borg Ep." Producers are often part of the writing bull pin and are over see the direction of the show.

Then the producers are screw ups. That explains the problems, right there. It's why Spider-Man 3 was garbage. Moving along...

Voyager eps. were meant to be repeated out of sequence and had shows aired out of production order during it's original airing. Voyager was meant to be stand alone eps. and never meant to be 100% consistent. Voyager like ENT from the start was meant to bring back the casual viewer that doesn't notice or care about inconsistency. There were inconsistency in TNG, the most popular one and the audience never caught them and/or didn't care.

Not doing the show any favors by revealing this bit of info. TNG didn't have as much glaring problems as Voyager. The biggest problem with Voyager is that the series should have been like "Year of Hell," considering that they were the only Federation ship in the Delta Quadrant. No such glaring problem existed on TNG. When the Ferengi first showed up, they were constantly jumping around and making noises and were about profit. The next time we saw them, there was no jumping around or stupid noises, but they were still all about profit, which is the core of who they are. If they had suddenly been about nobility, then TNG would have gotten blasted as well.

I'm not getting this.
You tuned into a show you felt had weak writing thus contributing to the increased viewership of those eps., in turn giving the TPTB thr green light to do more of them........and it's the producers that screwed up?

You gave them the approval every time you tuned in.

I tuned into the show, during the end of the 3rd season. That's how I got into Trek in the first place. Scorpion was a great 2-part episode and I started watching the rest of Trek, because of it. But after that is where Borg portrayal went downhill. I kept watching because Jeri Ryan and Robert Picardo gave EXCELLENT performances.

If [you] base a show's worth on ratings alone, then [you] are a screw up. If that's the case, then Sanjaya is one of the greatest performers of all time.