Did Star Trek Voyager ruined the Borg?
And can the new show be a soft reboot of Star Trek without interfering with TNG and DS9?
shareYes, Voyager ruined the Borg. To be fair, the ruination began in the latter seasons of TNG, particularly with I Borg and Descent. They still could've been salvaged, even after the introduction of a Borg Queen, but what Voyager did was make the Borg grotesquely inept so that Janeway could have some sort of diplomatic coup with them, by giving them a weapon to fight an enemy they couldn't contend with, and then pulling the rug out from them when they decided to renege on their agreement.
With any monster, the more you show it, the less scary it becomes. There are ways to get around this, and one way is to use them as sparingly as possible and whenever they show up, it is always very costly. The other way is to do what the new Battlestar Galactica did with the Cylons; make them menacing, relentless, and largely invincible. You could say they did the latter, but BSG did it much better with the Cylons, because they put the remainder of the human race in constant jeopardy. The Cylons were menacing in a way the Borg weren't because they weren't used enough for that purpose. That's okay, so long as you do not, at the same time, make the monster stupid.
The Borg's descent into stupidity began with The Best of Both Worlds, when they did not bother to assimilate the Enterprise and retrieve Locutus when they had a chance. You could say that it began long before when they allowed intruders to beam aboard their ship as if they owned the place, and did nothing until they started hurting stuff, but I kind of cut them a little slack in the beginning, but not after, because they don't adapt to that. That's a complete lack of operations security.
Then over time we find they are vulnerable to things they really oughtn't be vulnerable to, like a subverted POW who gains some individuality and infects that among his immediate drones, only to have Lore take them over. Or the thing in Unimatrix Zero, of which the Borg Queen's response is to destroy entire ships who have maybe a few infected drones out of thousands. The ploy Janeway uses to fool the Borg only makes them look even more foolish. I didn't mind the war with Species 8472 so much, but it seemed rather convenient for them to have happen right as Voyager was about to enter their space.
Can the new show (presuming it's Star Trek Discovery) be a soft reboot without interfering with TNG and DS9? Sure, if done right, but that requires a firm commitment to continuity which Star Trek has routinely ignored at their leisure.
The reason why the Borg didn't have any security if because they collectively was consentrated on the Enterprise decoy maneuver. Wasn't that stated in Q Who when Riker, Data and Worf visited their ship? The drones ignored them because they were focus on repairing their ship.
I like the addition of Locutus. I felt FC should have used a similar being for the job. Perhaps somebody Picard knew very well from Starfleet?
They were able to beam aboard the Borg Cube even when they weren't repairing the ship. If our heroes did any sort of logical thinking about this, they could've ended the Borg incursion into Federation space either at J25 or in Best of Both Worlds, by merely beaming over a thermonuclear device and have it go off the instant it materialized. It would've likely saved a whole lot of lives doing that, even if they do that when Picard is Locutus.
Did the Enterprise carry thermonuclear devices? They had different kinds of torpedoes, and Voyager destroyed a Borg scout ship by beaming one over. I don't think I'd want to be on a ship that had a nuclear bomb aboard.
shareThe Enterprise has antimatter, which they could rig into a bomb. They could use the warhead out of a photon torpedo, which, according to tech manuals, is equivalent to 64 MT of TNT, which is six times more than what I recommend, roughly 10 MT. If Scotty could make an antimatter explosive to destroy the space amoeba in TOS Immunity Syndrome, Geordi likely could do the same.
shareThe Enterprise has antimatter, which they could rig into a bomb. They could use the warhead out of a photon torpedo, which, according to tech manuals, is equivalent to 64 MT of TNT, which is six times more than what I recommend, roughly 10 MT. If Scotty could make an antimatter explosive to destroy the space amoeba in TOS Immunity Syndrome, Geordi likely could do the same.
You don't know what all they could or could not do, so just accept that solution wasn't feasible. share
You don't know what all they could or could not do, so just accept that solution wasn't feasible.
No. Until they explain why that isn't at all feasible, I'm not going to accept that. Because I can think, sweetie, and just because some writers can't or won't will not stop me from offering the most obvious solution to the situation. All they had to do was say why it wouldn't work with a few lines of dialogue. That's all. They never even bother to. It would've been nicer if they demonstrated why it wouldn't work, but they don't. It's either a huge mistake on the part of the writers and producers, or they deliberately did this, which I doubt.
The Borg, as a adversary, initially were done well enough, but it's clear that they, the producers and writers at the time, didn't really bake them long enough for them to consider just how to make them scary and intelligent. They could've handled my solution in a very clever way; make it succeed the first time. The second time the Borg show up, they come with not one cube, but three, and beaming over bombs don't work this time around, and now the heroes have to think on their feet. Or, maybe, let the Borg win; see what happens when Earth is assimilated. What will they do?
Adversaries are there to challenge our heroes, and depending on how you present them they can tell a different kind of story. What the producers and writers did with the Borg, initially, was make them seem invincible, but they just assumed they were and had to do something silly like the "Sleep" command in order to end the threat. If an adversary is more powerful than our heroes, the heroes have to learn to retreat and cut their losses, and learn more about the adversary to mount a resistance. If they are equivalent, they have to battle them with their abilities, intellect and wisdom. If they are superior, what problems do the adversaries pose that could throw our heroes for a loop (like the Pakleds)?
share
Wilde, it's pretty obvious that you're prejudiced against TNG, which is why you nitpick it, and claim you're here to keep us from masterbating to it. ANY show can be nitpicked. Heck, I have an old book, The Nitpickers' Guide to Star Trek (TOS). Which is your favorite Trek, DS9? We can use nitpicking to make its crew look incompetent just like you're trying to do with TNG.
shareThis weakness I have shown about the Borg is not a nit, it's a major mistake. A nit is something like noticing that Riker's hair is parted differently in one shot than another. I don't care about that.
If it weren't for people like me, people like you would be masturbating to it. You don't question what the show is telling you, showing you. You accept what it gives you, just like a good little slave. You're being programmed, and you don't even know it. You're damn right I'm biased against TNG, because it portrays a very dystopian future, one where 10,000 years of human tradition is cast away in favor of socialism, hedonism, and comfort. That is not a positive future; it's a bleak one. Learn to think. Look for the Truth, and it shall set you free!
No, it's nitpicking. BOBW's reception by fans in general show me they don't view it the way you do. 9.3 and 9.2 user ratings, which is very high. You're the one with the issues, you're nitpicking.
Fans are not being, "programmed." We know this is just a sci-fi show. There are some very intelligent people who are fans, like Stephen Hawking.
High ratings doesn't mean that the show is really all that good. It just means those who were asked about it liked it. But even if they liked it, that doesn't mean the episode has flaws that even they would acknowledge if they were asked.
Fans are being programmed. Just because some might be intelligent doesn't make them wise. If you can't look past the high production values of a show, you're being programmed. You obviously can't, hence your silly refrain, not to mention your idiotic use of the ratings as some sort of defense. People liked Triumph of the Will, too, when it was new, and didn't think about it too much. People liked the original Birth of a Nation.
No, I don't think Voyager ruined the borg. But I DO think they over-used them a bit. Some seasons were a bit too borg-centric, and after a while they started making the borg look a little too weak and vulnerable. I mean, every other weak they were breaking in and out of a borg cube, causing chaos, rescuing someone from the borg, etc. When Picard got abducted by the borg it was actually scary. People didn't think he would be saved.
shareI blame Janeway.
shareStandard *beep* claim when an idiot disagrees with the majority on the quality of a story, that the majority is, "programmed." Star Trek fans are not sheep, we think for ourselves and decide what we like and what we don't like. And why do you feel the need to devote time and energy to TNG since you don't like it? Why does it bother you so much that fans love it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Both_Worlds_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)#Reception
Receptionshare
The first episode won Emmy Awards for "Outstanding Art Direction for a Series" and "Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series".[4]
The storyline appeared in TV Guide's "100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History" (July 1, 1996), ranked number 50. The episode was also ranked #70 on the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time.[5]
In 2008, Empire magazine rated Star Trek: The Next Generation 37th on their list of "The 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time" and cited "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" as the show's best episode.[6] The episode was ranked #36 on TV Guide's list of "TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time".[7] The two-episode arc ranked second in Entertainment Weekly's list of top 10 Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.[8] Starlog magazine listed the two part episodes as number three and four on their 25 top episodes of The Next Generation.[9]
These two episodes, prepped for Blu-ray release and to promote the release of the Season 3 on Blu-ray, were combined with interviews and outtakes and shown as a one-night only event in movie theaters across USA and Canada on the night of April 25, 2013.[10][11][12][13]