Was it really necessary to get rid of the Borg on a permanent level?
Of course it's not "necessary." Nothing is "necessary." But it was a good idea.
I felt the Borg should have been central and their new drive to exterminate rather than assimilate was a great dramatic element on which a series of books could have been built on.
That would just be a rehash of "The Best of Both Worlds,"
Star Trek: First Contact, and
Before Dishonor. We've
seen that already. There's nothing new or interesting there -- and doing it
yet again would just make the Borg all the more ridiculous and un-threatening unless you have the Borg either finally, permanently win or have the Borg finally, permanently defeated.
It's like Steven Moffat said recently about the Daleks: They're the Doctor's most reliable bad guys, but that also means they're his most reliable defeatable bad guys! The Borg should not be reliably defeatable.
I've a mixed view about this one. My criticism is the circumstances surrounding the Borg's defeat, it seemed a little too one mighty bound after the buildup throughout the books. As to removing the Borg entirely making Trek without the Borg is like having Doctor Who without the Daleks
See above re: the Daleks.
or Babylon 5 without the shadows etc.
The problem with that analogy is that the Shadows
lost. They were defeated and they left. The Shadow War ended. They didn't keep coming back.
I dislike, more than anything, the fact that the Borg's roots are pretty much Human.
Not really. The first
victims of the Borg happened to be Human, that's all. The real roots of the Borg are Caeliar. And while it may be improbable in-universe that the Borg's first victims would be Human, let's remember that a novel's obligation is to link all themes together to create thematic unity. Humanity being present at the Collective's beginning and end works on that level.
The Caeliar were a terrible race based on an overly utopian way of life and there paranoia and cold logic about captivity had almost '"1984" vibes about it.
You're contradicting yourself. They were either overly utopian or paranoid and impersonal and imperious -- you can't be both.
Meanwhile, I happen to think that that strange mixture of great social progress, telepathic democracy, egalitarianism, reverence for life, and self-sacrifice, combined with their arrogance, their xenophobia, their social stagnation, their resistance to change, and their imperial tendencies, made for a fascinating and very realistic culture. No culture, after all, is perfect, and all struggle with their good and bad tendencies.
I dislike how the Caeliar did a Deus Ex Machina in the end of the story and essentially "wiped the Borg out of existence".
I liked it. It's not a
deus ex machina per se, because they did not appear out of nowhere and resolve the conflict with no advance warning or thematic connection to the larger conflicts of the work. It was, in point of fact, eminently appropriate that the Caeliar resolve the conflict -- because they only did so after adopting Federation ideals of pluralism and diversity and social evolution. Federation values save the Caeliar from their own culture's darkest impulses, and, in return, the Caeliar save the Federation from its greatest threat -- and in the process, inject the pluralism into their society that they so desperately needed to survive and to overcome their dark side. It's as perfect an ending as can be had -- and the only plausible ending, either, given how overwhelmingly powerful the Borg inherently are.
What about those Borg who were assimilated against their will and who haven't been "raised" by the Borg like Seven Of Nine? Surely its not up to the Caeliar to decide the fate of individuals?
No. The entire point of that scene was that those who left with the Caeliar did so by their own free will.
So you could say that I resent the Caeliar and the fact they were essentially a plot device used to eliminate one of the most important and intriguing races in Trek.
Except they're not a plot device. They're a vividly-drawn, multifaceted culture whose ultimate fate reflects the greatness of Federation values when they adopt them, and embodies the concept of mutual redemption and salvation.
Heres one more thing arguing against the extermination of the Borg. Why did the Borg bother going back in time to stop First Contact?
I believe this is addressed in
Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Cloak. As for myself, I always hypothesized that that was, in essence, an attempt on the Borg's part to gauge Federation inventiveness and adaptability.
We could argue that by assimilating the Human's in the past would make sure the Borg existed anyway, but if the Colombia crew weren't around, then how would the Borg collective have been formed?
The Borg did not know that the first drones were Human and that Sedin's creation of the Collective depended upon the
Columbia crewmembers; they had no memory of their own origins. So they did not intentionally act against their own interests.
Meanwhile, presumably, in a post-Borg-alteration, pre-Picard-restored timeline, the Borg Collective would simply have arisen on 21st Century CE Earth in the Alpha Quadrant instead of 46th Century BCE Arehaz in the Delta Quadrant.
I'm with lvsxy808. The Borg, in and of themselves, are rather boring. In their pure form, they're not so much antagonists as an impersonal force of nature, and there are only so many stories you can tell about fighting a force of nature. Most of the really interesting Borg stories have not actually been stories about the Borg, but stories about their victims or survivors, about the aftermath of their actions on a personal or civilizational level -- Picard dealing with his post-assimilation trauma, Hugh being set free and discovering individuality and its problems, Seven of Nine's journey from drone to human, Arturis dealing with the loss of his species and the desire for vengeance, etc.
If the Borg were kept around, all you could really do with them is have them invade and get pushed back, invade and get pushed back, lather, rinse, repeat, yawn. The more they get hobbled so they can be defeated, the less impressive a threat they become. Destiny let us see them as they were meant to be, a truly galactic-level threat far beyond the Federation's ability to survive. It was the only way to really cut them loose and let them live up to the hype. But once you raised them to that level, there was no credible way to keep them around as a recurring threat; either they went away for good or the Federation did. So we get one epic story that really lets the Borg be the Borg, no limits, no holds barred... and then when they're gone, there are still countless stories left to tell about the aftermath of the Borg, about the consequences faced by their survivors, which is what the truly interesting Borg stories have always been about. So we get, if you'll pardon the expression, the best of both worlds.
This. This. A thousand times, this.
