DrForester said:
Yeah, I wasn't very happy with the Borg in TNG after TBOBW. The whoel thing with Lore was boring.
I really didn't have much issue with First Contact. I liked the idea of the Borg queen , and I thought they retained their menacing aspect int he film.
I don't believe anything with a leader is scary. Leaders can be killed. Leaders can be attacked. Leaders can be defamed. Leaders can be weak. Cavill undermined the initial fear of the Cylons in BSG. The Borg Queen undermined my fear of the Borg in First Contact.
I don't think anything that cares or forms an emotional attachment is scary. The Borg work at first because they are an unending wave. Because they blankly state "Resistance is futile". They don't care if you fight or not. Your choice is die now or die later. If you kill a few drones, who gives a shit? They're drones. There are an infinite amount more of them. We don't need them. Introducing the Borg Queen gave an emotional component that served, like the Lore / Independent Bore / 7 of 9 arcs, to humanize the Borg and make them weaker and attached and sentimental and to give them a goal with an emotional / cultural connection.
I don't believe anything that can be beaten is scary. The only thing that will scare me is watching the good guys lose hard and often, with lasting consequences. The smaller the victory and the harder fought it was, the more satisfying it is to me. Even BSG 2005, which spent, jeez, a hundred hours on one central protagonist-antagonist relationship and killed off a flat majority of the show's cast still felt like the final victory was too easily won relatively to the scale of the menace in my opinion.
Q Who? worked because it ended with the Enterprise fleeing instead of winning, with the ghastly warning that a) they had very little time to prepare, and b) it was futile anyway because they would end up fucked hard.
Think of how the internet works. Millions of interconnected servers. Redundant routes. No central point of failure. Something fails and the signals route around the failure. It can't be regulated. It can't be disconnected. In the real world in the 21st century it's not a fully redundant system because DNS servers have central authorities and governments have control over the physical fibre lines, but think of the concept--of how powerful it is. The Borg were a wonderful actualization of that. If they have a weakness, they fix it. If you hurt a bit of them, the rest of them soldier on.
The thing is, the concept is so ripe for being defiled. Networks want "badass" moments. They want plotting to serve marketing. They don't want a show that's too depressing. They don't want real consequences. They want sex appeal. They want there to be bigger and bigger everything-bigger explosions from bigger bombs on bigger ships. They want SUPER Star Destroyers. They want each season to be bigger than the last. And it's easy to write a convenient silver bullet technology or "TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT" plot--easier than dealing with an enemy that can't be foiled by either. So I can't imagine anyone could have ever pulled off what I'm talking about. Maybe if they did I'd be complaining the show was too negative and masochistic. But I'd still have loved to see someone try.