Why do the Borg have a logo?

[JonnyQuest037]

...Does it seem weird to anyone else that the Borg have their own logo?

I can accept Starfleet, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Ferengi all having their own branding, since they all have their own military organizations, but I can't imagine why the Borg would ever feel the need for such a thing.

Did the Borg have a big board meeting & decide that taking chunks out of planets and assimilating races wasn't giving them enough brand recognition? Did they hire Graphic Designer Seventeen of Twenty do work up some comps and then conduct some market research? And why would a cybernetic race decide that a stylized claw was the best way to represent themselves?

It always struck me as strange when I was first watching TNG, and it strikes me as even more odd today.

 

[USS Triumphant]

That struck me as odd, but then, so did things like them talking to one another when no humans were involved, which happened on occasion. (Either Borg/Borg or Borg/Lore. For that matter, Data/Lore, or any time Data gave any part of the ship verbal commands.) A certain amount of it is done for us dumb viewers.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Yeah, because the Borg were SO unrecognizable otherwise...

 

[Jedi_Master]

Brand recognition is important in any century.

We Are The Borg™ and we seek perfection for ourselves and our clients. You will find that resistance to our low prices and efficient service is futile.

 

[ManOnTheWave]

The Borg logo was on the stands when the Playmates toys came out, and I thought it odd the Borg would have a logo. The only time I remember seeing the logo onscreen was in the city occupied by the Borg ruled by Lore. So I assumed the logo was actually that of a dead people. The savage Borg either wiped them out or moved into their territory after they were gone.

I suppose it possible the logo could be Borg, dating back to whoever they were before their technology took over and made them culture-less meat robots. Again, a remnant of a dead people.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Maybe they assimilated enough species with a strong drive for iconography, and felt the need to have one. Maybe the Collective just fancied one - just because individual drones have no personality doesn't mean the overall Collective doesn't. And/or, maybe the logo was actually invented by a multi-system species that they assimilated a piece at a time to represent their ships and presence on a big situation board or something, and when the Borg took their homeworld, they adopted it.

 

[trekker670]

The logo was introduced in Decent, was the symbol seen in other contexts as well? This logo may have been the symbol of the "revolution" that Lore was leading with the (now individual) Borg.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

The Borg logo was on the stands when the Playmates toys came out, and I thought it odd the Borg would have a logo. The only time I remember seeing the logo onscreen was in the city occupied by the Borg ruled by Lore. So I assumed the logo was actually that of a dead people. The savage Borg either wiped them out or moved into their territory after they were gone.

If the logo wasn't visible on the show until after the Borg were infected by emotions, I could buy that a little easier. I thought it was visible in The Best of Both Worlds, though. Does anyone know for sure?

I suppose it possible the logo could be Borg, dating back to whoever they were before their technology took over and made them culture-less meat robots.

That's probably the best possible explanation; it's an artifact of a pre-Borg time.

 

[ManOnTheWave]

Hmmm, according to this discussion, the logo was present in Q, Who? Never saw it. I assumed it was first seen in Descent.

 

[trekker670]

Oh interesting, right you are!

 

[trekshark]

maybe it's a carry over from the original species that became the borg

 

[vulcan redshirt]

Hmmm, according to this discussion, the logo was present in Q, Who? Never saw it. I assumed it was first seen in Descent.

That is certainly an awkward truth, given that if the logo only ever appeared in Descent, it could so easily have been attributed to the influence of Lore, hence not seen elsewhere. However, Lore certainly seemed to like the logo,judging by the wall mounted banners he had set up to greet the away team.

Certainly by the time of Voyager, either the production team had forgotten about it, or considered that the Borg using a logo to not be fitting to how they were defined/characterised.

IIRC In Q who, the Borg were still being considered to be associated to that spinal parasite thing from Conspiracy, and depending on recepton to the episode, possibly just another AOTW. Since we know that ST producers have a habit of many alien species frequently showing off their 'national' logo extremely conspicuously and not always in places that one would expect (such as just on a comm screen), in that case the fact that the Borg were also given a logo is to be expected. Consequently, we are left with a retcon job - that the logo is associated with the progenitor species to the Borg.

 

[Timo]

Perhaps it's not a logo but some highly utilitarian techno-gizmo instead. When the Borg get sentimental, i.e. insane, they may print its likeness on flags and banners ("Descent") - but when it's found on the wall of a Collective ship or installation, it's actually an antenna vital for the Collective consciousness...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Green Shirt]

Brand recognition is important in any century.

Cause is looks cool on their bowling shirts.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

...Does it seem weird to anyone else that the Borg have their own logo?

I can accept Starfleet, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Ferengi all having their own branding, since they all have their own military organizations, but I can't imagine why the Borg would ever feel the need for such a thing.

Did the Borg have a big board meeting & decide that taking chunks out of planets and assimilating races wasn't giving them enough brand recognition? Did they hire Graphic Designer Seventeen of Twenty do work up some comps and then conduct some market research? And why would a cybernetic race decide that a stylized claw was the best way to represent themselves?

It always struck me as strange when I was first watching TNG, and it strikes me as even more odd today.

Absolutely nothing here I can ague with. A logo for the Borg is a dumb idea, period. Mainly, you have a race introduced as being totally dissimilar to us...yet they'd have a logo. Okay.

Though I admit to a bias: I also roll my eyes at the athlete at a press conference, obligingly wearing a cap with a Nike swoosh.

I'm much more inclined to accept it, if I must, as a type of technological device whose purpose we can only guess about (the Borg logo, that is, not the Nike cap ).

Actually, I always tied the 'blanding' of the Borg to the point at which they began introducing themselves "We are the Borg". How silly is that? First of all, there's going to be someone in the story who will mention that they are Borg, so a Borg self-introduction is completely superfluous.

 

[MacLeod]

maybe it's a carry over from the original species that became the borg

I would go with that explanation as well

 

[Finn]

maybe it's a carry over from the original species that became the borg

Or an alliance made up by the first few Borg races

 

[The Wormhole]

IIRC In Q who, the Borg were still being considered to be associated to that spinal parasite thing from Conspiracy, and depending on recepton to the episode, possibly just another AOTW.

I don't believe there were any plans to have the Borg associated with the Conspiracy aliens. Indeed, at the time Conspiracy was written, the writers would already have been developing the Borg, and if there were any sort of a connection, surely it could have been touched upon in The Neutral Zone?

Anyway, it is obvious from Q Who the Borg were not intended to be just another Alien of the Week. Too much was done on them in that one episode that wouldn't have been done unless there was a 100% guarantee they'd be brought back. They had a new model built for their starship ( a simple design, but still expensive to build) they had new interior sets for their ship and new costumes made along with new makeup. That's a lot of money that went down the drain, there's no way they'd spend that on someone who was going to be an Alien of the Week. Hell, at that point, the Klingons were still recycling from the TOS movies for their makeup, costumes and ships. In fact, from the period of 1987 to 2001 only two new Klingon ship designs would be created, and no new costumes.

 

[SicOne]

The Borg are known to assimilate materials and structures from the surface of planets, as depicted in TNG's "The Neutral Zone" and "Best of Both Worlds". Prior to seeing the photo of Data on a cube with the symbol on the wall next to him, I had thought that Lore had made up the symbol on his own, but now I am thinking that the symbol might have been on some material or structure lifted off a planet and assimilated for raw materials inside that particular cube, and during his research of the Borg prior to setting himself up as the commander of a bunch of them, he saw this symbol and decided to utilize it as a symbol for his movement.

Or I could be completely mistaken and this symbol is on all Borg ships in a prominent place, so they can center their chakras or shit like that.

 

[killerbee256]

IIRC In Q who, the Borg were still being considered to be associated to that spinal parasite thing from Conspiracy, and depending on recepton to the episode, possibly just another AOTW.

I don't believe there were any plans to have the Borg associated with the Conspiracy aliens. Indeed, at the time Conspiracy was written, the writers would already have been developing the Borg, and if there were any sort of a connection, surely it could have been touched upon in The Neutral Zone?

They were going to linked to the blue gill, the original idea was that borg were going to be insectoids, hence the hive mind. But this was dropped for budget reasons, long before the final Borg made it on screen.