And no individual has ever changed his mind? Not everyone is like starswordc!
Of course some individuals change their minds. But as I mentioned with the fundie and the conspiracy theorist (by the way, please stop quote-mining), some don't. Some racists (for example) get their lives saved by the people they hate and have a revelation, others live to be a hundred and four and go to their grave as racists. Their is zero evidence for the Collective being the former, and a mountain of evidence for the latter.
So, I'm calling your bluff. Provide evidence, not speculation, based in STO canon, that your scenario is possible and that you're not talking out of your TRIBBLE, or concede.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
I completely agree with starswordc's take on this. There is no diplomatic solution with regard to the Borg. Ultimately, you will either destroy them or they will assimilate you. I think any other interpretation of their nature is misunderstanding the Borg.
They're like the Terminator ... "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Or perhaps even better, how Alfred describes the Joker .... "Some men aren't looking for anyting logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."
And then we get later:
Sarah Connor: You lying Terminator *****. You're building Skynet.
Weaver(T-1001): No. I was building something to fight it. And I'd watch who's calling who a *****. Coming James?
James Ellison: Coming?
Weaver(T-1001): After John Henry. Our boy.
James Ellison: He's not my boy. And you, you...
Weaver(T-1001): Do you mind picking up Savannah, then? Gymnastics ends at 5:30.
Sarah Connor: John, we can't.
John Connor: He's got her chip. He's got her. (Sarah steps out of the time bubble) Mom...
Sarah Connor: I'll stop it.
Of course some individuals change their minds. But as I mentioned with the fundie and the conspiracy theorist (by the way, please stop quote-mining), some don't. Some racists (for example) get their lives saved by the people they hate and have a revelation, others live to be a hundred and four and go to their grave as racists. Their is zero evidence for the Collective being the former, and a mountain of evidence for the latter.
So, I'm calling your bluff. Provide evidence, not speculation, based in STO canon, that your scenario is possible and that you're not talking out of your TRIBBLE, or concede.
Evidence:
Locotus of Borg. Why did the Borg create him? The seemed to realize that they needed to present a "face" to the people they wanted to assimilate. They actually saw a value to diplomacy.
Hugh. He was completely shaped by the Collective. There was nothing to suggest that he ever was anything but a Borg. Born in the maturation chambers, part of the Hive Mind. And he learned the value individuality presents to others and respect their wishes to remain individuals.
Seven of Nine. She was a Borg for a very long time, but she didn't want back - she had experienced all the things that the Borg Collective knew, and yet she refused it.
Icheb and the others have similar stories as Hugh and Seven of Nine.
One. A future Borg that also refused the Collective. He may even be the Collective's best proof, too - a "future" type Borg will no longer agree with forced assimilation.
The Undine. The Borg had bitten off more than they chewed. They tried negotiation with an enemy. They betrayed them in the end - but they showed a willingness to actually approach a diplomatic solution. Even if they always planned a betrayal at that point, they adopted a new method we haven't seen them use before. It is still a long way from not betraying people in the end, but they are not forever limited in their methods.
That is my evidence.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I completely agree with starswordc's take on this. There is no diplomatic solution with regard to the Borg. Ultimately, you will either destroy them or they will assimilate you. I think any other interpretation of their nature is misunderstanding the Borg.
They're like the Terminator ... "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Or perhaps even better, how Alfred describes the Joker .... "Some men aren't looking for anyting logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Wow, we're actually agreeing on things. Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
Yeah, basically "Q Who?" was Q giving the high-minded pretentiousness of the pre-Wolf 359 Federation (not to mention Jean-Luc Picard) a massive reality check. At that point in history the galaxy was the Federation's oyster. The Klingons were their somewhat-distasteful allies, the Romulans were isolated and ineffective, and apart from a couple low-key border conflicts with the Cardassians, Talarians, and Tzenkethi the Federation hadn't had to fight an actual war in almost a century.
What Q did at that point was not only give the Feds a heads-up about a proximal threat, but also an object lesson to Captain Pretentious Ninny Picard that THIS IS REALITY. There are some problems that with the best will in the world you cannot solve with diplomacy and high-minded idealism because the other side has no interest in obliging you (like I keep saying, diplomacy is a two-way street), and where ignoring them until they go away (the Bajoran Occupation, the Space Somalia situation on Turkana IV) is not an option either. It's unfortunate, but true, that sometimes war the only reasonable option.
No matter how much Roddenberry wanted it to, the reality of Star Trek doesn't run on idealism. It runs on realpolitik and enlightened self-interest. The Federation the OP believes in is one of suicidally incompetent hypocrisy. "The first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth," and that includes the truth of reality. I'll take a just war over an unjust, unwise peace any day of the week.
Evidence:
Locotus of Borg. Why did the Borg create him? The seemed to realize that they needed to present a "face" to the people they wanted to assimilate. They actually saw a value to diplomacy.
You sure about that? Or did they just assimilate him to get up-to-date intelligence on Starfleet tactical doctrines and fleet positioning, and use his familiar, famous face for psychological warfare?
Hugh. He was completely shaped by the Collective. There was nothing to suggest that he ever was anything but a Borg. Born in the maturation chambers, part of the Hive Mind. And he learned the value individuality presents to others and respect their wishes to remain individuals.
Seven of Nine. She was a Borg for a very long time, but she didn't want back - she had experienced all the things that the Borg Collective knew, and yet she refused it.
Icheb and the others have similar stories as Hugh and Seven of Nine.
One. A future Borg that also refused the Collective. He may even be the Collective's best proof, too - a "future" type Borg will no longer agree with forced assimilation.
None of them had any individuality at all until after they had been forcibly disconnected from the Collective. And the Collective reacted to Hugh rejoining them by disconnecting his entire ship from it.
They are not examples of how the actual Collective behaves.
The Undine. The Borg had bitten off more than they chewed. They tried negotiation with an enemy. They betrayed them in the end - but they showed a willingness to actually approach a diplomatic solution. Even if they always planned a betrayal at that point, they adopted a new method we haven't seen them use before. It is still a long way from not betraying people in the end, but they are not forever limited in their methods.
On the contrary, that just demonstrates how pointless negotiation with the Borg is. It took threat of imminent total destruction to get the Borg to the bargaining table, and they reverted to standard operating procedure, "you will be assimilated", immediately upon that no longer being the case. They didn't even slow down to rebuild. You cannot make a lasting peace with a group that won't honor its deals.
Got anything else?
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Well, let's not forget rule 1 of bargaining.... "Bargaining only works if you have something you are willing to give up that the other side wants."
Peace is futile when the other side doesn't want it. It doesn't really matter if it's the Borg, Klingons, Skynet or Undine. They're all equally implacable when they don't want peace.
It took a major catastrophe to get the Klingons to want peace, and it took the threat of annihilation to get the Undine to talk.
Do they strike you as someone that are willing to get destroyed?
Of course not. But as "Scorpion" proved, it takes an immediate threat of extinction to get them to talk, and that threat has to be maintained continuously or they revert to trying to assimilate you. That's not a sustainable situation.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Except they have free will. The Borg do not. The Collective doesn't strike me as the type to surrender.
The Borg have will. The Borg have goals they work towards. The Borg make choices based on the way the situation interacts with their goals. An individual drone will not make a choice about whether to choose peace, but then.... that wasn't the way it worked with the Klingons either. It was a collective decision made by a vote of the High Council, not the whim of an individual.
The Borg have will. The Borg have goals they work towards. The Borg make choices based on the way the situation interacts with their goals. An individual drone will not make a choice about whether to choose peace, but then.... that wasn't the way it worked with the Klingons either. It was a collective decision made by a vote of the High Council, not the whim of an individual.
Pun intended. :P
Unfortunately, actions by the Borg are at the whim of an individual, that individual being the will of the Collective. And its aims, to assimilate or destroy everything in the galaxy that thinks, have never wavered once.
I think that's why the Borg Queen is continually resurrected, by the way: she's not really an actual person you can kill. She's just an anthropomorphic personification of the Collective itself, kind of like how Death in the Discworld books is a literal personification of the concept of death.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Do they strike you as someone that are willing to get destroyed?
Of course the Borg do not wish to be destroyed, but they would never surrender.
Here is a hypothetical scenario that may or may not occur in STO:
The Iconians are fed with their servitors getting their butts kicked so they decide to take matters in their own hands. Lets assume the Borg end up as their enemies (its implied as an Iconian ship has already destroyed a couple of Borg ships in the past, I forgot which mission that was though.)
So the Borg (reluctantly) assist the Alpha/Delta Alliance against the Iconians and beat them. What happens? The Borg revert to their old habits in no time, just like in VOY Scorpion Part 2.
Except they can't win. They get beaten to an inch of their cybernetic life but I refuse to believe the Borg would ever surrender. To anyone.
My theory (!) is that if the Borg were ever about to be exterminated for good, they would simply leave. They got transwarp, so they can pretty much go anywhere they want. They got multiple transwarp hubs too. They might even leave the milky way galaxy if they have to. Then, one day, they come back in force because somewhere else they found new victims that weren't prepared for them and the whole assimilation campaign starts all over again. The Borg don't learn their lesson. They might come up with new adapted weapons and technology assimilated from other species and use that against us, but their ways will not change.
They will just run off and come back stronger.
So I'm sorry. I'm all for making peace with enemies. Heck, I'm one of the few that actually LOVE the fact that theres a Romulan Republic now that is an ally to the Federation AND the Klingons. But the Borg? I don't think its possible with them, safe for liberated ones.
Except they have free will. The Borg do not. The Collective doesn't strike me as the type to surrender.
To clarify: The Collective has will. A Borg does not. Thus, the Collective is willing to sacrifice as many individual Borg to stop a threat as are necessary, because an individual is to the Collective as one of your cells is to you - a vital part, but something that may be sacrificed to save the whole.
A Klingon has free will - as seen in, for instance, "Day of the Dove", in which Kang was able to choose to stop fighting at the behest of the energy form goading them on, even though the Empire and the Federation were in a state of "cold war"-style conflict at the time. A Borg would never have been able to make such a choice.
Did anyone here read the Star Trek Destiny Trilogy? It's must read for any Trek fan.
It would be a lot of fun to see similar events play out in STO.
I loved that series and how it handled the Borg. Both how they came to be and everything else that happened to them
I would like it if STO went with this but I would LOVE it if a new TV miniseries came out with that as the main story.
And they should start the series with the same line that ended the book that came out right before the Destiny books.
"We are the Borg. You will be annihilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness have become irrelevant. Resistance is futile... but welcome."
Dr. Miranda Jones: I understand, Mr. Spock. The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
No, peace with the Collective would never make sense. Going back to the original presentation of them as a force of nature, seeking nothing more than assimilating technology they had never encountered rather then the weird bee structure that was introduced in first contact would make them more threatening IMO. Those Borg as originally conceived could not be reasoned with or negotiated with.
I don't get a sense from that depiction of them that they would assimilate the life form anyway. That really came from First Contact, which wasn't a bad thing, but I just prefer the original TNG presentation of them. Don't even get me started on the "Enterprise" episode where Borg that had encountered 24th century technology somehow get pwned by 22nd (?) century tech. :P
Don't even get me started on the "Enterprise" episode where Borg that had encountered 24th century technology somehow get pwned by 22nd (?) century tech. :P
Honestly, I rationalized that one as 24th century folks having gotten so used to looking for complicated high-tech solutions that they've forgotten that lower-tech trickery can work too. TRIBBLE trying to work around the adaptation, just turn up the juice and burn right through it. Borg resilience is not infinite.
Just like with the Asgard and the Replicators over in Stargate SG-1.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,584Community Moderator
edited December 2014
starsword made a good point. The Borg encountered in Enterprise were used to the more advanced 24th Century tech. The more primitive 22nd Century tech worked because it was less advanced. Same idea with the Tommy Gun pwning the Borg in the Holodeck in First Contact. A more primitive weapon was effective.
Honestly, I rationalized that one as 24th century folks having gotten so used to looking for complicated high-tech solutions that they've forgotten that lower-tech trickery can work too. TRIBBLE trying to work around the adaptation, just turn up the juice and burn right through it. Borg resilience is not infinite.
Just like with the Asgard and the Replicators over in Stargate SG-1.
There does seem to be an element of truth in this.
Voyager was a state of the art ship. The Defiant was designed to fight the Borg. Neither one ON ITS OWN managed to make a dent in that regard through tech alone. What did make a dent every time was cleverness. And you could argue what Admiral Janeway did in Endgame boiled down less to tech (which provided a momentary advantage) and more to deceit and cleverness (which provided just enough of an advantage).
In general, my issue is less with what the heroes in stories do or don't do and more with what the villains do or don't do.
There's a lot of debate about Superman snapping Zod's neck in the last Superman movie as a tactic, as a moral choice, etc. But what I observe there is that Zod was a complete idiot in that film to play into that scenario and even to set that scenario up explicitly.
Likewise, a lot of what the Borg do is just plain stupid and plays into their own weaknesses for cleverness, for deceit. In the books and comics, we get far more examples of them being clever and actually using the gifts they acquire through assimilation. For example, they can sense changes to the timeline in the comics because they have incorporated that ability from El Aureans. They have used Locutus-style spokesborg more often because it is an effective psychological tactic both for breaking the enemy and for overcoming resistance to the fear of losing one's individuality. The books have been more prone to have Borg seduce or trick people by having drones who appear to retain their original personality.
It also seems like Borg would have a huge tactical advantage if they made assimilation internal and it was no longer apparent that someone had been assimilated, rather than giving drones the appearance of a rotting corpse.
The minute we saw wrinkles added to the Borg mythology, it became impossible for them to ever truly be a complete force of nature. This goes back to Best of Both Worlds. The producers could have made Picard unrecoverable. They didn't. They made the Borg susceptible to a simple hack. Hugh furthered this.
I think the introduction of the Queen was an absolute necessity for having a Borg centered movie with a complex plot. There would have been two basic ways to approach the Borg in a film. They could have made them a natural threat in which case the movie would have been essentially a pure thriller like Alien. But the Alien movies have always floundered with plots that attempted complex twists or themes. In order to have complex themes, comedy, and an A/B plot that could employ bluffs and deception, they had to give the Borg a face.
And it was probably a strong choice in a Hollywood sense to do a quasi-romantic plot with the Borg Queen because it gave the actors some range. It did get in the way of the Picard/Lily romance which had been more overt in earlier script drafts, by establishing a quasi-romantic plot between Picard and the Queen. But it gave Brent Spiner the chance to act more. Even if his scenes feel rather tacked on, Data wouldn't have much of a character arc in the film without the Queen.
But all these choices add up in a way where the "force of nature" take on the Borg has diminishing returns with every appearance. This continues with the quasi-incestuous "Seven has two mommies" that played out by having Janeway and the Queen as competing mother figures for Seven while also having the Queen be portrayed in a way that fuels Seven/Queen shipping in the fandom (which was to some extent a logical continuation of the Queen as a seductress).
I can see the logic and even some necessity in each choice made with the Borg by the screenwriters but the result IMHO is that clinging to the original concept of the Borg makes them seem stupid. Whereas if you've read a decent amount of sci-fi, such as the work of Asimov or Philip K. Youcan'tsayhislastnameontheforums, there are a wealth of viable things the Borg could do that they aren't doing in order to stay close to their original concept.
I think the Borg can be scary or the Borg can be trumped up to get back to their roots but that it's either-or. If you want them to be legitimately scary, without retcons, their only option is to drift further from the original concept.
To clarify: The Collective has will. A Borg does not. Thus, the Collective is willing to sacrifice as many individual Borg to stop a threat as are necessary, because an individual is to the Collective as one of your cells is to you - a vital part, but something that may be sacrificed to save the whole.
But if the Collective has a whole is threatened - not just a bunch of drones, but the whole collective - it will not want to perish. And I also don't think it is willing to accept any amount of losses, either. Could the Undine really have hunted down the Borg to their last drone, and the last semblance of the Collective? If they could, we could bring the Collective to its knee, too. If they couldn't, then the Collective doesn't accept any amount of losses before it changes its strategy, even if just temporarily.
Of course there is no guarantee for eternal peace with the Collective - but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Of course we still have to prepare for the Collective to change its mind again on its methods. But this is something the Federation has to deal with the Klingons, Dominion, Romulans or Cardassians, too.
---
From a writer perspective, I think it would not be hard to write the Borg into a point where it makes sense that the Hive Mind changes. Especially if we take STO's history with the Borg into account. The Borg are foiled at every turn, basically.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Unfortunately, actions by the Borg are at the whim of an individual, that individual being the will of the Collective. And its aims, to assimilate or destroy everything in the galaxy that thinks, have never wavered once.
I think that's why the Borg Queen is continually resurrected, by the way: she's not really an actual person you can kill. She's just an anthropomorphic personification of the Collective itself, kind of like how Death in the Discworld books is a literal personification of the concept of death.
A collective is not an individual, the very word of collective means a group, not singular, the Collective however has 1 goal, to achieve perfection and they will assimilate everyone to try and reach that unreachable goal.
But if the Collective has a whole is threatened - not just a bunch of drones, but the whole collective - it will not want to perish. And I also don't think it is willing to accept any amount of losses, either. Could the Undine really have hunted down the Borg to their last drone, and the last semblance of the Collective? If they could, we could bring the Collective to its knee, too. If they couldn't, then the Collective doesn't accept any amount of losses before it changes its strategy, even if just temporarily.
Of course there is no guarantee for eternal peace with the Collective - but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Of course we still have to prepare for the Collective to change its mind again on its methods. But this is something the Federation has to deal with the Klingons, Dominion, Romulans or Cardassians, too.
It didn't take the threat of extinction to get the Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans to the bargaining table (it was respectively economic collapse, an internal revolution the first time and the Dominion turning on them the second, and another internal change of government to a faction that was more reasonable), and threatening the Founders with extinction by Section 31's bioweapon just pissed them off. And you keep conveniently ignoring the part where as soon as the threat of extinction was withdrawn, the Borg went back on the deal instantaneously because they have a hard-coded imperative to assimilate or destroy every thinking creature in the galaxy.
You're not getting it. The entire point of the Borg is that they're an enemy that the Federation cannot beat by being high-minded pretentious idealists. It's like trying to argue with Ebola, or, perhaps more appropriately, with Stuxnet.
From a writer perspective, I think it would not be hard to write the Borg into a point where it makes sense that the Hive Mind changes. Especially if we take STO's history with the Borg into account. The Borg are foiled at every turn, basically.
They were foiled at every turn in canon Star Trek too. No effect. You misunderstand your opponent. That is the greatest mistake you can ever make.
A collective is not an individual, the very word of collective means a group, not singular, the Collective however has 1 goal, to achieve perfection and they will assimilate everyone to try and reach that unreachable goal.
Calling the Borg a "collective" is hardly the first time Star Trek has misused real-world terminology. They murder engineering terms all the time. I'm going by actions, not descriptions.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
You're continually treating the Borg like it's a society. This is fundamentally wrong, per TNG canon (though honestly the writing on Voyager was so bad it's hard to tell whether Berman and Braga really understood what a hive mind entails).
What even the Federation forgets at times is that the Borg is one mind. It is an omnicidal maniac that is absolutely, insanely, irrevocably programmed to kill everything else that exists by turning every other living thing into an appendage (i.e. a drone). The Borg Queen, at least the First Contact version, is the Borg entity's CPU, and as such functions and interacts with the world in a way quite similar to the Borg itself; in fact, the Borg Queen can be considered to BE the Borg entity, and even says so herself.
The Borg cannot be reasoned with. Not one single assimilated drone can be reasoned with or interacted with as anything but a hand of the Borg entity.
The very idea of attempting to make peace with the Borg by any means other than exterminating it is ludicrous.
As for the Undine...they are a clearly individual society. A racist, xenophobic, stupid society, but nonetheless a society of individuals. As Cooper's command ship, the Boothby Undine, and several others from the Terradome prove, these are individuals that CAN be reasoned with.
Peace with the Undine, while unlikely given social pressures, is fully hypothetically possible. Peace with the Borg is not, as it is an insane, single entity.
Mirror Picard dealt with the Borg the way I would have liked Picard Prime to have dealt with them.
Mirror Picard used an Iconian retro Virus that attacked the Borg's hive mind and wiped out all the Borg that were still connected to the hive mind.
There is no reasoning with the Borg.
The Borg have evolved to the point that the collective will use deception and will say what they needs to be said in order to obtain their true goal the assimilation of all they deem worthy of it.
Calling the Borg a "collective" is hardly the first time Star Trek has misused real-world terminology. They murder engineering terms all the time. I'm going by actions, not descriptions.
Well fair enough. That's your take on things, canon states it's the Borg collective, the Borg are many, not singular.
But I will leave it at that because it's pointless going over it forever because you will never change my opinion.... And I will never change yours.
Comments
So, I'm calling your bluff. Provide evidence, not speculation, based in STO canon, that your scenario is possible and that you're not talking out of your TRIBBLE, or concede.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Sarah Connor: You lying Terminator *****. You're building Skynet.
Weaver(T-1001): No. I was building something to fight it. And I'd watch who's calling who a *****. Coming James?
James Ellison: Coming?
Weaver(T-1001): After John Henry. Our boy.
James Ellison: He's not my boy. And you, you...
Weaver(T-1001): Do you mind picking up Savannah, then? Gymnastics ends at 5:30.
Sarah Connor: John, we can't.
John Connor: He's got her chip. He's got her. (Sarah steps out of the time bubble) Mom...
Sarah Connor: I'll stop it.
Hehehe... contrasting the two is fun.
My character Tsin'xing
Evidence:
Locotus of Borg. Why did the Borg create him? The seemed to realize that they needed to present a "face" to the people they wanted to assimilate. They actually saw a value to diplomacy.
Hugh. He was completely shaped by the Collective. There was nothing to suggest that he ever was anything but a Borg. Born in the maturation chambers, part of the Hive Mind. And he learned the value individuality presents to others and respect their wishes to remain individuals.
Seven of Nine. She was a Borg for a very long time, but she didn't want back - she had experienced all the things that the Borg Collective knew, and yet she refused it.
Icheb and the others have similar stories as Hugh and Seven of Nine.
One. A future Borg that also refused the Collective. He may even be the Collective's best proof, too - a "future" type Borg will no longer agree with forced assimilation.
The Undine. The Borg had bitten off more than they chewed. They tried negotiation with an enemy. They betrayed them in the end - but they showed a willingness to actually approach a diplomatic solution. Even if they always planned a betrayal at that point, they adopted a new method we haven't seen them use before. It is still a long way from not betraying people in the end, but they are not forever limited in their methods.
That is my evidence.
Yeah, basically "Q Who?" was Q giving the high-minded pretentiousness of the pre-Wolf 359 Federation (not to mention Jean-Luc Picard) a massive reality check. At that point in history the galaxy was the Federation's oyster. The Klingons were their somewhat-distasteful allies, the Romulans were isolated and ineffective, and apart from a couple low-key border conflicts with the Cardassians, Talarians, and Tzenkethi the Federation hadn't had to fight an actual war in almost a century.
What Q did at that point was not only give the Feds a heads-up about a proximal threat, but also an object lesson to Captain Pretentious Ninny Picard that THIS IS REALITY. There are some problems that with the best will in the world you cannot solve with diplomacy and high-minded idealism because the other side has no interest in obliging you (like I keep saying, diplomacy is a two-way street), and where ignoring them until they go away (the Bajoran Occupation, the Space Somalia situation on Turkana IV) is not an option either. It's unfortunate, but true, that sometimes war the only reasonable option.
No matter how much Roddenberry wanted it to, the reality of Star Trek doesn't run on idealism. It runs on realpolitik and enlightened self-interest. The Federation the OP believes in is one of suicidally incompetent hypocrisy. "The first duty of a Starfleet officer is to the truth," and that includes the truth of reality. I'll take a just war over an unjust, unwise peace any day of the week.
You sure about that? Or did they just assimilate him to get up-to-date intelligence on Starfleet tactical doctrines and fleet positioning, and use his familiar, famous face for psychological warfare?
None of them had any individuality at all until after they had been forcibly disconnected from the Collective. And the Collective reacted to Hugh rejoining them by disconnecting his entire ship from it.
They are not examples of how the actual Collective behaves.
On the contrary, that just demonstrates how pointless negotiation with the Borg is. It took threat of imminent total destruction to get the Borg to the bargaining table, and they reverted to standard operating procedure, "you will be assimilated", immediately upon that no longer being the case. They didn't even slow down to rebuild. You cannot make a lasting peace with a group that won't honor its deals.
Got anything else?
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Peace is futile when the other side doesn't want it. It doesn't really matter if it's the Borg, Klingons, Skynet or Undine. They're all equally implacable when they don't want peace.
It took a major catastrophe to get the Klingons to want peace, and it took the threat of annihilation to get the Undine to talk.
My character Tsin'xing
Do they strike you as someone that are willing to get destroyed?
Of course not. But as "Scorpion" proved, it takes an immediate threat of extinction to get them to talk, and that threat has to be maintained continuously or they revert to trying to assimilate you. That's not a sustainable situation.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Pun intended. :P
My character Tsin'xing
Unfortunately, actions by the Borg are at the whim of an individual, that individual being the will of the Collective. And its aims, to assimilate or destroy everything in the galaxy that thinks, have never wavered once.
I think that's why the Borg Queen is continually resurrected, by the way: she's not really an actual person you can kill. She's just an anthropomorphic personification of the Collective itself, kind of like how Death in the Discworld books is a literal personification of the concept of death.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Of course the Borg do not wish to be destroyed, but they would never surrender.
Here is a hypothetical scenario that may or may not occur in STO:
The Iconians are fed with their servitors getting their butts kicked so they decide to take matters in their own hands. Lets assume the Borg end up as their enemies (its implied as an Iconian ship has already destroyed a couple of Borg ships in the past, I forgot which mission that was though.)
So the Borg (reluctantly) assist the Alpha/Delta Alliance against the Iconians and beat them. What happens? The Borg revert to their old habits in no time, just like in VOY Scorpion Part 2.
Except they can't win. They get beaten to an inch of their cybernetic life but I refuse to believe the Borg would ever surrender. To anyone.
My theory (!) is that if the Borg were ever about to be exterminated for good, they would simply leave. They got transwarp, so they can pretty much go anywhere they want. They got multiple transwarp hubs too. They might even leave the milky way galaxy if they have to. Then, one day, they come back in force because somewhere else they found new victims that weren't prepared for them and the whole assimilation campaign starts all over again. The Borg don't learn their lesson. They might come up with new adapted weapons and technology assimilated from other species and use that against us, but their ways will not change.
They will just run off and come back stronger.
So I'm sorry. I'm all for making peace with enemies. Heck, I'm one of the few that actually LOVE the fact that theres a Romulan Republic now that is an ally to the Federation AND the Klingons. But the Borg? I don't think its possible with them, safe for liberated ones.
"Let them eat static!"
A Klingon has free will - as seen in, for instance, "Day of the Dove", in which Kang was able to choose to stop fighting at the behest of the energy form goading them on, even though the Empire and the Federation were in a state of "cold war"-style conflict at the time. A Borg would never have been able to make such a choice.
I loved that series and how it handled the Borg. Both how they came to be and everything else that happened to them
I would like it if STO went with this but I would LOVE it if a new TV miniseries came out with that as the main story.
And they should start the series with the same line that ended the book that came out right before the Destiny books.
"We are the Borg. You will be annihilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness have become irrelevant. Resistance is futile... but welcome."
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
I don't get a sense from that depiction of them that they would assimilate the life form anyway. That really came from First Contact, which wasn't a bad thing, but I just prefer the original TNG presentation of them. Don't even get me started on the "Enterprise" episode where Borg that had encountered 24th century technology somehow get pwned by 22nd (?) century tech. :P
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Honestly, I rationalized that one as 24th century folks having gotten so used to looking for complicated high-tech solutions that they've forgotten that lower-tech trickery can work too. TRIBBLE trying to work around the adaptation, just turn up the juice and burn right through it. Borg resilience is not infinite.
Just like with the Asgard and the Replicators over in Stargate SG-1.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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Even a punk interpretation of them should have Organians quaking in fear. They are bad, they are what we fear the most, what we don't want to be....
Every franchise needs a satan. an enemy..
who else do we measure ourselves up to?
No peace in our time!
There does seem to be an element of truth in this.
Voyager was a state of the art ship. The Defiant was designed to fight the Borg. Neither one ON ITS OWN managed to make a dent in that regard through tech alone. What did make a dent every time was cleverness. And you could argue what Admiral Janeway did in Endgame boiled down less to tech (which provided a momentary advantage) and more to deceit and cleverness (which provided just enough of an advantage).
In general, my issue is less with what the heroes in stories do or don't do and more with what the villains do or don't do.
There's a lot of debate about Superman snapping Zod's neck in the last Superman movie as a tactic, as a moral choice, etc. But what I observe there is that Zod was a complete idiot in that film to play into that scenario and even to set that scenario up explicitly.
Likewise, a lot of what the Borg do is just plain stupid and plays into their own weaknesses for cleverness, for deceit. In the books and comics, we get far more examples of them being clever and actually using the gifts they acquire through assimilation. For example, they can sense changes to the timeline in the comics because they have incorporated that ability from El Aureans. They have used Locutus-style spokesborg more often because it is an effective psychological tactic both for breaking the enemy and for overcoming resistance to the fear of losing one's individuality. The books have been more prone to have Borg seduce or trick people by having drones who appear to retain their original personality.
It also seems like Borg would have a huge tactical advantage if they made assimilation internal and it was no longer apparent that someone had been assimilated, rather than giving drones the appearance of a rotting corpse.
The minute we saw wrinkles added to the Borg mythology, it became impossible for them to ever truly be a complete force of nature. This goes back to Best of Both Worlds. The producers could have made Picard unrecoverable. They didn't. They made the Borg susceptible to a simple hack. Hugh furthered this.
I think the introduction of the Queen was an absolute necessity for having a Borg centered movie with a complex plot. There would have been two basic ways to approach the Borg in a film. They could have made them a natural threat in which case the movie would have been essentially a pure thriller like Alien. But the Alien movies have always floundered with plots that attempted complex twists or themes. In order to have complex themes, comedy, and an A/B plot that could employ bluffs and deception, they had to give the Borg a face.
And it was probably a strong choice in a Hollywood sense to do a quasi-romantic plot with the Borg Queen because it gave the actors some range. It did get in the way of the Picard/Lily romance which had been more overt in earlier script drafts, by establishing a quasi-romantic plot between Picard and the Queen. But it gave Brent Spiner the chance to act more. Even if his scenes feel rather tacked on, Data wouldn't have much of a character arc in the film without the Queen.
But all these choices add up in a way where the "force of nature" take on the Borg has diminishing returns with every appearance. This continues with the quasi-incestuous "Seven has two mommies" that played out by having Janeway and the Queen as competing mother figures for Seven while also having the Queen be portrayed in a way that fuels Seven/Queen shipping in the fandom (which was to some extent a logical continuation of the Queen as a seductress).
I can see the logic and even some necessity in each choice made with the Borg by the screenwriters but the result IMHO is that clinging to the original concept of the Borg makes them seem stupid. Whereas if you've read a decent amount of sci-fi, such as the work of Asimov or Philip K. Youcan'tsayhislastnameontheforums, there are a wealth of viable things the Borg could do that they aren't doing in order to stay close to their original concept.
I think the Borg can be scary or the Borg can be trumped up to get back to their roots but that it's either-or. If you want them to be legitimately scary, without retcons, their only option is to drift further from the original concept.
Of course there is no guarantee for eternal peace with the Collective - but the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Of course we still have to prepare for the Collective to change its mind again on its methods. But this is something the Federation has to deal with the Klingons, Dominion, Romulans or Cardassians, too.
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From a writer perspective, I think it would not be hard to write the Borg into a point where it makes sense that the Hive Mind changes. Especially if we take STO's history with the Borg into account. The Borg are foiled at every turn, basically.
A collective is not an individual, the very word of collective means a group, not singular, the Collective however has 1 goal, to achieve perfection and they will assimilate everyone to try and reach that unreachable goal.
You're not getting it. The entire point of the Borg is that they're an enemy that the Federation cannot beat by being high-minded pretentious idealists. It's like trying to argue with Ebola, or, perhaps more appropriately, with Stuxnet.
They were foiled at every turn in canon Star Trek too. No effect. You misunderstand your opponent. That is the greatest mistake you can ever make.
Calling the Borg a "collective" is hardly the first time Star Trek has misused real-world terminology. They murder engineering terms all the time. I'm going by actions, not descriptions.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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You're continually treating the Borg like it's a society. This is fundamentally wrong, per TNG canon (though honestly the writing on Voyager was so bad it's hard to tell whether Berman and Braga really understood what a hive mind entails).
What even the Federation forgets at times is that the Borg is one mind. It is an omnicidal maniac that is absolutely, insanely, irrevocably programmed to kill everything else that exists by turning every other living thing into an appendage (i.e. a drone). The Borg Queen, at least the First Contact version, is the Borg entity's CPU, and as such functions and interacts with the world in a way quite similar to the Borg itself; in fact, the Borg Queen can be considered to BE the Borg entity, and even says so herself.
The Borg cannot be reasoned with. Not one single assimilated drone can be reasoned with or interacted with as anything but a hand of the Borg entity.
The very idea of attempting to make peace with the Borg by any means other than exterminating it is ludicrous.
As for the Undine...they are a clearly individual society. A racist, xenophobic, stupid society, but nonetheless a society of individuals. As Cooper's command ship, the Boothby Undine, and several others from the Terradome prove, these are individuals that CAN be reasoned with.
Peace with the Undine, while unlikely given social pressures, is fully hypothetically possible. Peace with the Borg is not, as it is an insane, single entity.
Mirror Picard used an Iconian retro Virus that attacked the Borg's hive mind and wiped out all the Borg that were still connected to the hive mind.
There is no reasoning with the Borg.
The Borg have evolved to the point that the collective will use deception and will say what they needs to be said in order to obtain their true goal the assimilation of all they deem worthy of it.
Well fair enough. That's your take on things, canon states it's the Borg collective, the Borg are many, not singular.
But I will leave it at that because it's pointless going over it forever because you will never change my opinion.... And I will never change yours.