/strek/ - Star Trek ★

She hated the accent. They made her have this weird ‘betazed’ accent on the show that would be distinctive, then Majel Barret showed up and talked normal.

In the movies the cast got whatever they wanted - Geordi got eyes, Data got emotions, Picard got to drive around, Worf got to come back, Riker got to nail Troi, and Troi got to drop the accent. McFadden got to be seen in public.

>>9549

I thought I remembered hearing in an interview that the voice was actually Sirtis's idea, but maybe I'm mistaken. Either way, considering how she was a mediocre actor playing a shit character, I think the accent was the least of her problems.

>In the movies the cast got whatever they wanted

That makes sense. I always saw the TNG movies as a way for the cast and crew to just have fun and goof off. I don't think anyone -- not the cast, not the crew, not the audience, not anyone – took those movies seriously.

>>9554

There was at least one youtube reviewer who took them very seriously, and First Contact did screw up the Borg badly.

>>9555

True, but I mostly blame Voyager for the Borg becoming shit. They didn't have to follow First Contact's example when they nerfed the Borg, but they chose to anyway. First Contact spit in the Borg's face, Voyager kicked them in the nuts, hit them over the head with a hammer, and pissed on them as they quietly sobbed on the floor.

>>9555

>>9558

So we're all in agreement that the Borg should never have appeared after Hugh, right?

>>9565

Borg could have worked. The reason no more cubes the reason for the silence and for the low effort put out by the collective to assimilate more was species fuckit. A centuries long war with species fuckit would have kept the borg at high power but also shown why they have not sent more. and that the borg even sending a cube could literally have been a scout ship. but it saw the juicy alpha quadrant and tried to assimilate.

>>9565

They should not have done what they did post-Hugh. It’d be great to see more Borg, but I’d say the following:

1) No Borg Queen. Borg are a monolith and the hivemind is weird and inscrutable.

2) Borg adapt to everything, not just phasor blasts. If you start using swords, they start using armor. If you develop anti-Borg weapons, they develop countermeasures. The Borg were most threatening when the concept that their nightmarish existence was more effective than being an individual with freedom.

You can have interesting ideas like Starfleet starts experimenting with hiveminds to keep up in the arms race with the Borg, or Hugh comes back with overtures of peace but it’s all a deception to get a cube to earth, shit like that.

>>9572

I would have liked to see an episode about hugh being a deception by the hivemind. The same could have been said for the borg queen, of not for how they where blowing up cubes like its nothing earlier in that movie.

I also agree that the borg should have remained a monolithic alien hivemind. The kind of shit that simply didn't follow human logic. Who would sacrifice a cube just to scare the federation into starting numerous weapons programs and developing tons of new tech, so they'd have more interesting shit to assimilate when the Borg invade for real.

To a degree we can write off most of the "first contact" shit as the borg pushing the feddies to make new and better shit for them to assimilate latter. But all the voyager shit is beyond salvaging. By the end of VOY, the kazon where more threatening than the Borg.

>>9570

Species 8472. And scarily enough, I didn't have to look that up.

A coworker posited to me that the Borg are semi-regularly at war with the Dominion, and so their resources are spread out.

>>9574

>A coworker posited to me that the Borg are semi-regularly at war with the Dominion, and so their resources are spread out.

Was there anything about the Borg being out in the Gamma Quadrant? I mean they were operating in Alpha and Beta by the time TNG rolled around so I'd assume they'd also have some business in Gamma since it's right next door.

That does leave on question, how the hell would the Borg assimilate a Founder? They were having enough problems with 8472, but you have a pile of goo that can Link away most their problems in a snap.

>>9574

Why not make the Borg less then the villain make them neither

sample phrase

We are the borg Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile. Compliance is survival of all.

have The borg were originally a number of race that was the first line of planets against species 8472 and over generations became the borg in a arms race. No more individuality just survival.A mixture of bleakness fear and desperation from the outside. This super advanced terror across the galaxy is barely keeping back species 8472 from wiping out the galaxy. To me it represents complicated problems political/social technological existential problems. whats victory or defeat against something like that. the point of the borg was to make the federation know its not alone there are terrors. Is it to sympathetic to the borg? to much a cataclysmic problem? Its far away enough the federation is not directly affected.

>>9572

I have to disagree with the No Borg Queen sentiment.

As they are, when Hugh and Lore fucked around with their collective consciousness it illustrates a great weakness in their system, sort of socially engineering individualism into them. The Queen therefor can act as an exemption and higher priority signal, a regulator of the primary Borg function to more effectively keep them in line and to override and restore those that deviate back to their correct function.

Though I do take a slight bit of umbrage with her depction, I'd prefer her to be more of a bigass server stack or full Terminator rather than a slightly more sexy Drone

>>9611

>The Queen therefor can act as an exemption and higher priority signal, a regulator of the primary Borg function to more effectively keep them in line and to override and restore those that deviate back to their correct function.

But it misses the whole point. At that point the it’s just a system where one person has tons of slaves. The collective is just this thing that she controls. The whole concept of the borg is reduced to them being a robot army for what amounts to a normal woman.

The actual solution to the ‘Hugh’ problem is that a single drone spending two weeks with some Federation officers is in no way shape or form a threat to the Collective. They absorb millions of strong-willed individuals at a time (like Picard), reincluding one is nothing. They would easily defeat his sentiments and reinclude him.

The Borg Queen is dumb. It’s nothing against the actress in first contact or her performance, it’s that the concept undercuts what makes them so scary.

If the borg have a queen, then they technically aren't a hivemind.

>>9611

>subverting established themes and characterizations can be a thing because we can just rationalize it.

yeah… storytelling doesn't work that way, anon. the "borg queen" - and establishing named, individualized borg characters in general - hurt the franchise. Taking a franchise known for being soft science fiction and injecting copious amounts of technical exposition in order to cover up the betrayal of a premise is adding injury to insult, imho.

>>9618

A lot of normalfag viewers may have understood the Borg conception as an ant-colony analogue, thus the concept of a queen is easily permitted.

>>9637

This, and I’d add that the fundamental terror of the Borg is that their alien way of doing things was more effective than the Federation.

The Hugh episode -which I liked- let seep in the idea that the federation had concepts that were dangerous to the Borg. That was a huge mistake. The Borg were a stand-in for if the Organians or Iconians or some powerful alien race wasn’t friendly. Then Lore took over those Borg,and a Human-built android was superior to them.

Then the Borg Queen arrived, and suddenly she wanted Picard’s penis, then Data’s, and while mucus covered Alice Krige isn’t bad, it’s basically yet again the Borg are suceptible to Human concepts and things, and now they have a fairly Human and impulsive leader.

Then the species 8472 arc happened, and the Borg were done as a threat when a Federation vessel had to rescue them from a conflict bigger than the Dominion War. They became this bunch of buffoons who were limited by their hivemind and their sexually self-actualized queen.

>>9633

This is why I don't like applying the term hive-mind to the Borg, it makes retard think that they're like insects when they just aren't. Another big mistake that a lot of people (including writers of borg episodes) make is to think that individual drones are stupid; they aren't. Every single drone has the effective intelligence and problem solving ability of the entire collective, because they're all linked in and all working on every problem. But insead people just think they're space zombies working for a lich queen.

I heard her talk about this at a convention about a year ago. She said that the production staff realised after seven years that she could be funny and let her relax the character to bring out some humour.

This is might be why she ends up getting drunk in First Contact.

>>9565

I agree in that hugh should have been exploited and a virus vector to eradicate the borg. We shouldn't have seen the borg post hugh because the borg should have been wiped out.

But that was more an irresponsible command decision based on Picard and his crews delicate sensibilities than it was shit writing.

The writers could have made it happen and preserved the characters moral compasses, with a crazy fed spec ops team seizing hugh and putting a nasty virus in his head tossing him in a specialized torpedo canister and launching hi. In the direction of the nearest borg outpost.

>>9677

I am curious how the Swole Universe beat the Borg as the Terran Empire has multiple captured examples of Borg tech? Did they send their weightlifting champions to roid rage inside Borg Cubes?

>>10641

>swoleverse conquered the borg

Nah. Data has borg-like components, but he is designing them and installing them himself.

>>9677

Id still rather the borg go back to being tech pirates more concerning with finding new tech or resources and who bred their own baby borg rather than the techno zombies that seemed to assimilate people simply because that was the only way they could increase their numbers.

>>10764

Nu Trek will have them as overly oppressive straight white males who are easily defeated by the powers of gurl purhuh and feminism.

>>10641

>>10752

Yeah, I was confused by that at first too. It looks like borg stuff, but it's actually just random robot parts.

Maybe mirror Q didn't introduce Swolecard to the borg and so they aren't aroud because they aren't aware of the Terran Empire's existence.

>>10764

I really would rather have the original concept, too. It's much more terrifying to have a villain whose motives are unclear and whose actions don't follow human logic than to have space zombies. They don't attack you, they don't try and assimilate you, they just go about their business tearing your ship apart and don't care about you, and there's little you can do, short of a Q, to stop it.

>>10828

Assimilation is way scarier. If the borg only care about tech, then being primitive means they will pass over you. You could just float a ship to them and they’d leave you alone once they had all your tech. Assimilation could happen if they think you have some interesting biology whenever.

BoBW borg was the best portrayal, and given the Borg were a replacement for the body snatching aliens from season one, it was always the plan to make them assimilators who take over people’s bodies.

>>10787

>>10752

I'm a fan of Swoleverse Hulk Hogan ripping apart a Borg Cube with his bare hands.

>>9565

>>9555

>>9558

First Contact's treatment of the Borg was bad for them in the wider fluff but I honestly think it was the only way to make a halfway decent movie with them in: otherwise you'd just have a generic faceless mass of tech-zombies. Obviously there's more to the Borg than that but remember the film had to be something people could come into without any outside knowledge of TNG in order to be profitable and still be worth watching, the Queen in particular gives you a nice obvious antagonist.

If they'd just had a throwaway line about it be a rogue cube or something that had somehow generated a Queen as an anomaly and obviously not fucked it up more with Voyager I could happily have bought that in the name of having a good time.

>>10998

You sound just like the execs who think people are too dumb to understand a movie that doesn't have an obvious individual villain.

>Just dumb it down guys, it doesn't matter if it shits all over the TV show, wider audiences will enjoy it!

>>11011

With a film like First Contact it's more a case of dumb down the Borg a bit or you don't have a film at all, you need to convince them there's money in it to even get it made. That's the sad reality of (((Hollywood))).

>>10940

Well, yeah, you'd still have assimilation, but only if you have something unique about you: your biology, your knowledge, or your influence. I'm saying the Borg should be less "We assimilate everyone and everything because we're space zombies/Zerg" and more "We are trying to achieve perfection" like it was mentioned a few times in Voyager.

So actually yeah I guess just BoBW borg

My main point though is that it's scarier when you don't know why they do things. They have to figure out why the borg took these specific crewmen and it ends up they have an irregularity in their hemoglobin that they later find out made them immune to the new outbreak of techobabblephagia or whatever.

>>10944

>Swolecard punches the Borg Queen in the face so hard she pops out of her robot body

>>10787

>>10752

I thought someone mentioned that they were Borg parts.

>>10787

You mean mirror Q who is a responsible, and lovable guardian of the galaxy didn't want the Swolederation destroying the peaceful, and pragmatic borg who give their technology freely to all those they encounter.