I, Borg and Descent

[Hober Mallow]

My feelings about the Borg from all the Borg episodes--

"Q Who?" -- Great.

"BOBW" -- Great.

"I, Borg" -- Not bad. At this point the Borg are still unstoppable in combat. Picard avoids conflict with Borg. The Borg still have their balls.

DS9's "Emissary" -- Unstoppable Borg flashback. Good stuff.

"Descent" -- Meh. Crusher defeating the Borg takes some of their balls away, even if these aren't normal Borg.

"First Contact" -- Complete pile of monkey poo. What made the Borg interesting and frightening was that they were a collective, with no single voice, no personality. Moore and Braga ruin that with a sexy Borg queen. Now the Borg are a "hive," one of the oldest cliches in b-movie history.

Voyager episodes -- Never watched them, never will.

Enterprise episode -- the last episode of the series I ever bothered watching. Crap.

 

[Unicron]

What exactly is the difference between the collective and the hive? I've never really seen much of a difference, and I'm not sure how the drones can somehow create their own collective will if they're to be treated as assimilation zombies so to speak. There has to be something more than just the concept of "we" versus "I" binding them together and making them so dangerous.

* shrugs * I do agree the collective nature of the Borg is partly what makes them frightening and effective, but there's more to it than that. Another part is that the Borg are highly advanced and adaptable, and have the means to crush most forms of resistance. They're not invincible, as they shouldn't be, but merely powerful. Not unlike how the Dominion was portrayed as being powerful through its superior resources and use of fear during the war.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Re: assimilation, the Borg didn't assimilate people at first. They weren't interested in people at all, only their technology. That was another thing that made them scary. The just didn't give a crap about you. You could study them, shoot at them, beam over to their ship, but they didn't care, because you were little more than an insect.

An enemy that is completely indifferent to your suffering is far more frightening than an enemy who passionately hates you.

 

[Unicron]

I agree. However, the problem with that is, Q's comments in "Q Who?" could easily be interpreted as supporting the view that assimilation was already a common practice. Nowhere does Q say that the Borg only care about absorbing literal technology, and weren't willing to treat individuals as just raw materials (as Guinan put it). The assumption that they didn't assimilate people prior to "Q Who?" is just an alternate interpretation.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

"Descent" -- Meh. Crusher defeating the Borg takes some of their balls away, even if these aren't normal Borg.

See, I disagree there--their technology didn't seem normal, as far as the ship went (none of the self-regeneration powers seemed evident), and their judgment and ability to work as a crew was potentially quite dodgy, so a defeat makes sense and to me says nothing whatsoever about the combat abilities of the Collective.

 

[Anwar]

And also, they didn't defeat them with their weapon strength or technobabble contrived weaponry or anything. Crusher just used a raw force of nature even the Borg couldn't defeat.

It's no more silly than how Crichton destroyed that Scarren Dreadnought in Farscape.

 

[Kev]

Hi, new to the forum here but as I was recently discussing this a little bit on another Trek forum thought I might commence here.

My personal take is that 'I, Borg' is quite superior to 'Descent, Parts I and II'. Micheal Piller had the right notion that after the events of 'Best of Both World's' and the general epic-ness of that show that there was very little way to 'top' it.

Unless you take it right back to a single drone.

It allowed for a much more emotional storyline with further follow-up from Picard's assimilation which hadn't been covered really since 'Family' and introduced the idea of a Borg given individuality.

The argument over the merits of genocide were pretty well covered as well before the final decision to introduce the program.

So, 'Descent' was quite well primed to then extend that and progress the story further. The problem, IMO, was the very bad decision to include Lore and a 'Federation Takeover' plot. I feel there were two separate stories worth telling - the Borg continuation and the Data/Lore story but they did not work well together as a single two-parter.

The Lore part is just too cartoonish in the end.

As for FC - I don't mind the Borg Queen. I can appreciate technically it's not 'out-the-box' thinking to devise a physical opponent for Picard to go up against - but then 'out-of-the-box' thinking is, I believe, not a comment that can often be stated about 1990s Star Trek. She has a function in the film and although it probably (along with 'Descent' marks the point at which the Borg began to lose their impact, they remained sufficiently threatening to that point.

VOY however, really and very badly eroded them into a completely unthreatening enemy who were never really a huge problem for the ship and crew.

The over-use of them in that series did destroy them.

 

[Anwar]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

 

[RyuRoots]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds.

Look, that's not true, and you KNOW it's not true. For god's sake, they went up against the Borg in Scorpion and came out on top, but nothing felt like a deus ex machina or cheap writing. You can face the Borg and make a good story of it. The problem is that if you use the same enemy enough times while not taking special care to preserve what originally made them interesting, they'll have to start losing some of their ferocity.

For this reason, I'm glad TNG used the Borg a number of times you can count on one hand. Or if you count BOBW as 2 eps and include FC, that's 7 times. And most of them did a pretty good job at maintaining that threat level, I think. And in Descent's case, they're not part of the collective anyway, so I don't count it as a knock against them.

 

[Kev]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

Then the writers collectively failed on two counts - creating 'new' enemies or antagonists and preserving an 'existing' one as the danger they had been established to be.

Perhaps the mistake was in trying to have 'enemies' in the first place instead of making more out of the journey of discovery through a massive uncharted region of space.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

Voyager might have been better served if they confined the Borg to the fourth season. They did a good job of introducing them in Scorpion. By having a greater threat introduced it saved us the experience of having to see how little Voyager would fair going up against the mighty Borg. But having them appear over and over was just completely unrealistic. If the Borg really wanted them destroyed all they had to do was send one cube, fire, and Voyager is gone. I don't think the writing staff was prepared to write an enemy that really didn't talk or do anything interesting either. So they ramped up the Borg Queen as the mustache twirling villain and made her the focus instead of the Borg which completely gutted the whole concept of the Borg and made the drones into basically robot puppets. It would have been better if Kes had sent them out of Borg territory completely and the only Borg episodes we got were ones like Unity or Survival Instinct.

 

[Anwar]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

Then the writers collectively failed on two counts - creating 'new' enemies or antagonists and preserving an 'existing' one as the danger they had been established to be.

Perhaps the mistake was in trying to have 'enemies' in the first place instead of making more out of the journey of discovery through a massive uncharted region of space.

There was nothing wrong with the enemies VOY created, it was the negative audience reaction that got rid of all of them (whether that reaction was justified or not). The audience was just pre-disposed to giving VOY's creations a harder time than the other shows.

Basically, this would've been like if DS9 had stopped mentioning the Dominion after "Jem'Hadar" because there was a bad reaction to them (and if the episode was written EXACTLY the same).

So it was a chain reaction: VOY has to stop using their original creations, meaning they have to keep using the Borg, which causes inevitable villain decay.

If the audience had just accepted the original aliens VOY made, then it would be a different story and they'd have more than the Borg to fall back on.

 

[RyuRoots]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

Then the writers collectively failed on two counts - creating 'new' enemies or antagonists and preserving an 'existing' one as the danger they had been established to be.

Perhaps the mistake was in trying to have 'enemies' in the first place instead of making more out of the journey of discovery through a massive uncharted region of space.

There was nothing wrong with the enemies VOY created, it was the negative audience reaction that got rid of all of them (whether that reaction was justified or not). The audience was just pre-disposed to giving VOY's creations a harder time than the other shows.

Basically, this would've been like if DS9 had stopped mentioning the Dominion after "Jem'Hadar" because there was a bad reaction to them (and if the episode was written EXACTLY the same).

So it was a chain reaction: VOY has to stop using their original creations, meaning they have to keep using the Borg, which causes inevitable villain decay.

If the audience had just accepted the original aliens VOY made, then it would be a different story and they'd have more than the Borg to fall back on.

*facepalm* Or maybe, ohhh....I dunno. Maybe people just DIDN'T LIKE the Kazon or Vidiians. Durrrrrrrrr. That happens here in real life, Anwar.

And no, the villain decay isn't 'inevitable'. I originally said that, but I thought about it. I thought about the Dominion. And throughout DS9's run, the neither the Jem'Hadar nor the founders lost the menace they had when they were introduced. And because of the Dominion War, we of course had a lot of run-ins with them. I chalk up the Borg's failure in VOY in a lot of ways to the queen. Like Dark Journey said, focusing on the Borg as a single moustache-twirling villain kind of gutted them. And then there's just plain bad writing. I can't remember what ep it was, but Janeway just strolls up to a Borg cube and aims for parts of it in the same way you see captains do against conventional ships.

 

[RobertScorpio]

I Borg, on the surface, is a great episode. But, unfortunately, it started the Borg down the slipper sloap of ruining the best thing about them; the Zombie angle. I think what made the Borg so cool was the fact they were going to come for you....and there was no way to barter with them because all individuality was taken away once you were assimilated....

Descent is just an awful episode that ruins the Borg, and made them just another DORKY villain, and also ruins Lore, turning him into a baffoonish bad guy.

Rob

 

[Emnabtond]

Descent was awful.

 

[RyuRoots]

and also ruins Lore, turning him into a baffoonish bad guy.

"turning him into"?

He was a horribly corny character to begin with if you ask me. The evil twin robot. Would've been better if TNG had just let him fall off the edge of the universe like he apparently did after Brothers and before that point.

 

[RobertScorpio]

and also ruins Lore, turning him into a baffoonish bad guy.

"turning him into"?

He was a horribly corny character to begin with if you ask me. The evil twin robot. Would've been better if TNG had just let him fall off the edge of the universe like he apparently did after Brothers and before that point.

I totally agree with that idea...

Rob

 

[Kev]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

Then the writers collectively failed on two counts - creating 'new' enemies or antagonists and preserving an 'existing' one as the danger they had been established to be.

Perhaps the mistake was in trying to have 'enemies' in the first place instead of making more out of the journey of discovery through a massive uncharted region of space.

There was nothing wrong with the enemies VOY created, it was the negative audience reaction that got rid of all of them (whether that reaction was justified or not). The audience was just pre-disposed to giving VOY's creations a harder time than the other shows.

Basically, this would've been like if DS9 had stopped mentioning the Dominion after "Jem'Hadar" because there was a bad reaction to them (and if the episode was written EXACTLY the same).

So it was a chain reaction: VOY has to stop using their original creations, meaning they have to keep using the Borg, which causes inevitable villain decay.

If the audience had just accepted the original aliens VOY made, then it would be a different story and they'd have more than the Borg to fall back on.

But Voyager was in the theoretical position of having the greatest freedom to create and finesse and discard what wasn't working (either for the writers or the viewers).

The whole idea is that the ship is constantly moving, so if the must have enemies (and since the writers apparently felt that was something the show simply HAD to have, which I don't agree with) then you have the perfect get out every time - the ship moves past their space!

That way you can experiment with the scenarios and try different things, safe in the knowledge you have a way to write out anything not working.

Having a regular constant villian wasn't needed (we already had that on DS9) - and using the Borg as that crutch was outright laziness by the writing staff.

and also ruins Lore, turning him into a baffoonish bad guy.

"turning him into"?

He was a horribly corny character to begin with if you ask me. The evil twin robot. Would've been better if TNG had just let him fall off the edge of the universe like he apparently did after Brothers and before that point.

And ironically, he was Gene Roddenberry's part-creation as 'Datalore' was the last officially credited episode Roddenberry co-wrote.

However, I agree that he didn't really need to appear again after Brothers.

 

[Myasishchev]

Nemesis: better with Lore instead or B-4 (or, for that matter, Shinzon)? I say yes.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Well, it was inevitable in VOY's case since because otherwise they'd all be dead in 15 seconds. And in case you'll say "then use another enemy", they tried that repeatedly and in every case it failed due to negative audience reaction (NOT because of the writing).

You can speak for yourself. My problem with Voyager's aliens was indeed the writing. The execution of a unique and interesting alien race all comes down to the writing.