Take a seat.
Not sure if you’ve ever done one of these before, but – have you ever done one of
these before?
Okay.
Well, it’s real simple.
I’m gonna show you a few photographs.
If you see the guilty party among them, just tell me who it is.
Easy enough?
All right.
Go ahead and take a look at these, and tell me . . .
Who Actually Ruined the Borg?
Take your time.
Maybe it would help if we talked through each one.
Yeah?
All right.
Let’s start with this one.
Sure, you might be thinking that it’s gotta be one of the other two, because it was Next
Generation that introduced the Borg.
“Q Who”, “Best of Both Worlds” – those are great episodes.
But blow that rose-colored fog off your brain and you might recall a couple of Borg episodes
on TNG that made you say “WTF.”
Remember “I, Borg”?
Sure you do.
Good episode!
Very clever, the way they were able to bring the Borg back after “Best of Both Worlds”
without having to diminish the threat they posed.
Sure, Hugh, the stranded Borg the Enterprise crew befriends ends up being a pretty sympathetic
character, but the Borg Collective itself remains fearsome and intimidating – so much
so that Picard and company go out of their way to avoid direct conflict with a Borg cube.
But what about the Borg’s next appearance on TNG?
The “Descent” two-parter that bridges seasons six and seven?
We meet a clan of Borg drones that have been cut off from the collective after becoming
infected with individuality thanks to Hugh.
Lost and confused, this group of Borg is taken over by Data’s evil twin, Lore, who turns
them into a kind of cult to aid him in his plot to . . . seduce Data to the dark side?
Improve the Borg with positronic brain implants?
And then use them to . . . destroy the Federation?
Maybe?
What was Lore trying to accomplish, anyway?
Whatever, that’s not the point.
The point is, “Descent” is the first time we see the Borg being presented not as a nigh-unbeatable
existential threat, but as typical villains of the week to be outwitted by our heroes.
Sure, these Borg aren’t the Borg, per se; they’re an isolated group, and it’s explained
why they’re different from the Borg we’ve seen previously, but the fact remains: the
crew of the Enterprise encounters the Borg, and they defeat them, and this time it’s
really not that big of a deal.
You buyin’ that?
Okay, then.
We’ve got two more suspects to consider.
What about this one?
[Puts the First Contact photo down on top of the TNG one.]
Star Trek: First Contact.
Good movie.
Most would agree it’s the best of the Next Generation movies, maybe one of the best Star
Trek movies, period.
But let’s think about how it treated the Borg.
Starts out, Picard’s having nightmares about the Borg, flashing back to being assimilated.
Seems a little sudden, he hadn’t really been bothered about it for a while.
Remember, after it happened, he went home to France, drank some wine, mud-wrestled his
brother, and he was good!
Encountered Borg a couple more times, no panic attacks, no nightmares, no voices in his head.
But whatever, it’s a movie, just go with it!
The Borg are shown to be evil badasses.
One cube is on its way to Earth, Starfleet is attacking with everything they’ve got
but they don’t seem to be making much of a dent until the Enterprise shows up and Picard
– calling on some secret Borg knowledge he remembers from when he was Locutus, I guess
– tells everyone where to shoot.
Then they blow the cube up real quick-like.
Hey, Jean-Luc, if you knew where the best place to shoot the Borg cube was, maybe you
could have, you know, told someone else about it at some point in the last six years?
I’m sure the rest of the attack fleet would have appreciated it.
[Clip of Borg cube destroying a Federation ship during battle] Especially the crew of
that ship.
[Clip of another ship being destroyed.]
And that one.
Anyway, the Borg travel back in time to assimilate Earth in the past when there’s less resistance
– which isn’t futile, I guess that was just Borg propaganda.
Man, if you can’t even trust genocidal fascist cyborgs . . .
It takes the crew of the Enterprise the whole movie to defeat the Borg this time, and the
Borg almost succeed.
Once again, they’re the ultimate threat!
That’s good!
But they also have a Queen now.
The Queen is retconned as having always been a part of the Collective – she was even
there at Picard’s assimilation.
She’s not a bad villain, actually, and having a single character to represent the Borg threat
makes sense dramatically, because it gives Picard – and Data – a foil, a physical
adversary to contend with.
The Queen works fine for First Contact.
I mean, yes, she does allow the screenwriters to fall back on the “you have to kill the
head vampire!” trope – once Picard and Data destroy the Queen, the rest of the Borg
who have taken over the Enterprise start throwing sparks and dropping dead – which is a lazy
plot contrivance, but it happens right at the end of a pretty good movie, so I’m not
bothered about it.
Sure, the unstoppable Collective made up of billions of Borg thinking and acting with
a single will was diluted by the introduction of the Queen.
And sure, the Queen was also established as Borg’s glaring weak spot, something they
never had before.
But if First Contact had been the last time we ever saw the Borg, it would have been no
problem.
It wasn’t the last time we ever saw the Borg, though, was it?
And you have to think the producers of the movie realized that at the time, don’t you?
So, does that mean it was First Contact that ruined the Borg?
Or was it . . . this final suspect?
To their credit, the producers of Voyager did hold back on introducing the Borg to their
series until the third season.
And the first episode to feature the Borg, “Unity”, is pretty good.
As in TNG’s “Descent,” the Voyager crew encounters Borg that have been damaged or
disconnected from the collective, which allows the creators to tell a story involving Borg
without needing to further water down the threat of the Borg by having Voyager face
and defeat a Borg cube at full strength.
Even better, “Unity” finds something new to say about the Borg, suggesting that their
amoral ruthlessness might be the inevitable result of an entire society plugging in to
a hive mind, even if the collective is established with the best of intentions.
Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there.
The Borg appear in almost two dozen episodes of Voyager, and by my reckoning are prominently
featured in around ten.
As a point of comparison, the Borg only appear in six episodes of TNG, plus the film First
Contact.
With every appearance on Voyager, the Borg grow less and less intimidating.
The process of reducing the Borg to just another group of hostile aliens kicks off in “Scorpion”,
the two-parter that bridges Voyager’s third and fourth seasons, which is the first time
we see Captain Janeway and her crew confronted by the Borg Collective proper.
One of the things that made the Borg as they were originally conceived so scary was the
fact that they couldn’t be negotiated with.
Remember their first appearance in the TNG episode “Q Who”?
Guinan, whose people were all but wiped out by the Borg, meets with the senior staff,
and Picard’s like, “So, what’s the deal with these Borg?
How do we reason with them?”
And Guinan’s like, “Uh, the same way a seal reasons with a great white shark?”
[Picard:] “What does that--”
[Guinan:] “It means you don’t.
That’s the point I’m making.
They just eat you.
You don’t reason with them.”
[Riker:] “So, we’re like . . . the seal?”
Later in that episode, Q backs up Guinan’s opinion.
The Borg don’t play by the rules of other species, he tells Picard.
All they’re interested in is consuming things they’ve identified as beneficial to them.
There’s no room for negotiation, they offer no terms other than your total surrender.
They’re truly alien, unlike anyone else our heroes have had to face, and that makes
them formidable and frightening.
So what happens when Voyager comes face-to-face with the Borg Collective for the first time?
Janeway transports aboard a cube and strikes a deal with the Borg within a few minutes.
Oh.
So, I guess they can be negotiated with after all?
[Chakotay:] “Captain, how the hell were you able to make a deal with the Borg?!”
[Janeway, whispering menacingly:] “Because I’m the shark.”
And yeah, I know Janeway’s deal with the Borg is justified by the Borg needing help
in their conflict with Species 8472, but the problem isn’t that Janeway made a deal with
the Borg that was unjustified within the story – the problem is that the producers of Voyager
chose to tell a story where anyone makes a deal with the Borg for any reason.
It undermines one of their defining traits.
Sure, you could construct a story where it makes sense for the Borg to strike a deal
with a Starfleet ship, but why the hell would you want to?
That’s not all Voyager did.
The show also brought back the Borg Queen, and wrote her not as the embodiment of an
unfathomably vast collective consciousness, but like any old human supervillain.
She watches things happen on screens, she has malfunctioning or disobedient Borg brought
to her in her – I dunno, throne room?
Whatever it is?
Why would any of that be necessary?
Shouldn’t see be able to see and hear and read the thoughts of any Borg drone anywhere
on her ship, hell, anywhere in the galaxy?
The worst thing Voyager did to the Borg was over-expose them.
They just used them too much.
They went from being something special to part of the show’s routine.
Voyager would encounter a Borg cube, or sometimes a bunch of Borg cubes, and they’d always
escape somehow.
The Borg went from being the most powerful existential threat ever faced by the Federation
to typical villains of the week who couldn’t even destroy one ship.
And it kinda took the shine off ‘em.
That’s the inevitable tragedy that befalls all unbeatable villains, however compelling
they are – and the Borg were unquestioningly among the most compelling and original villains
ever created for Star Trek, at one point – the more you use them, the less effective they
are.
The heroes defeating an enemy that just took out half of Starfleet with one ship might
work great once or twice, but that’s about it.
The more you show the unstoppable bad guys being outwitted or outright defeated by the
good guys, the more stoppable they start to appear.
Look, from a commercial standpoint I get it.
They’re the Borg.
Put ‘em in an episode and Trekkies are gonna watch, especially if it’s 1996, 1997, and
they were just the featured bad guys in a movie that pretty much everybody liked.
But the fact that the producers of Voyager felt like they had to lean so heavily on the
Borg to get people to watch those last few seasons speaks to their failure to create
compelling antagonists of their own, don’t you think?
Ahhh, I’m getting off-topic.
Bottom line:
The Borg went from being an adversary so unstoppable that Captain Picard had to beg Q for help
in order to escape them, to cookie-cutter villains-of-the-week who were no more difficult
for the crew of the Starship Voyager to defeat than, I dunno, the Vidiians.
Okay, maybe not that easy, but pretty easy.
And what I’m asking you is, who’s responsible?
You witnessed the whole thing.
We just went back over it.
Now it’s up to you: TNG?
First Contact?
Or Voyager?
Who actually ruined the Borg?
Whoooooo ruined the Borg?
Come on.
You know what I want to hear.
Just tell me.
Who ruined the Borg?
Just tell me the truth.
All right.
I guess I must be a little mixed up.
I thought we were gonna help each other.
You do right by me, I do right by you.
That doesn’t appear to be the case after all, does it?
Some eyewitness you turned out to be.
You know what?
Beat it.
Take a hike.
Hey!
Keep your nose clean.
Don’t give me an excuse to haul you back in here.
Under different circumstances, you might not find me as hospitable.
Understood?
All right, scram.
This concludes our interview.