Star Trek (TNG): Q Who

[CharlesPhipps]

The Borg are Thanos.

Thanos is awesome but if you keep using him, you cheapen him.

[Deledrius]

I think it was Best of Both Worlds Part 2 actually with the whole Data can hack into the collective via Capt. Picard and just mouse over to the "sleep" menu and click on that.

It works because it was a long-shot solution which was so inane that it was left unprotected, and was never going to be viable a second time.

It's basically the Death Star trench run, without the exciting action sequence.

The reason this is a decline problem is that you can't keep pulling that kind of trick around the Borg (and to be fair, they never used exactly the same trick), but if you keep managing to pull a different rabbit out of the hat every time it's still going to be progressively less impressive; it stretches credulity so far that it stops being a convincing illusion and just reminds us that the hat is an infinite source of deus ex machina solutions. The Borg are not scary when we know that no matter how they improve or adapt, the crew will make up a magical solution to defeat them or escape. It's boring from both ends.

[RobbyB1982]

It's villain decay. You can't defeat a villain every week and have them remain credible, and this applies to any franchise. They have to win occasionally to remain a legit threat. The problem being you can't really do that when you only have one ship or one cast of characters. Over in Doctor Who Daleks are especially susceptible to this. One dalek is unstoppable, a million daleks are fodder, and they've been beaten by ONE GUY a hundred times (that we've seen!) so its just impossible to take them seriously as a threat. Similarly, weeping angels were amazing once, then lost credibility fast.

There are some ways around it. Gargoyles famously had Xanatos always win because basically every one of his plans he didn't actually care about the outcome, he mostly was just testing out a piece of tech or just trying to get a thing, so he didn't care what the result really was, he just wanted to see the pieces in motion. And that worked for Xanatos, particularly since a lot of it was small scale. Unfortunately, that can't be the solution for every villain.

You have the same creative team try and pull the exact same stunt in Young Justice and have every single loss, including clear blatant outright major losses, all be "part of the plan" and it just stretches credibility in a hurry and gets equally repetitive, in a different way.

Best way to keep a villain credible it to have them only show up a few times, and give them a win some of those times.

In Might Max, the main villain SKullmaster was only in 10 episodes out of 65, but he was scary in all of them, and won a handful of times. Good stuff.

[Deledrius]

There are some ways around it. Gargoyles famously had Xanatos always win because basically every one of his plans he didn't actually care about the outcome, he mostly was just testing out a piece of tech or just trying to get a thing, so he didn't care what the result really was, he just wanted to see the pieces in motion. And that worked for Xanatos, particularly since a lot of it was small scale. Unfortunately, that can't be the solution for every villain.

Most of his plans were a relatively large-scale affair. His plans were bigger than whatever part of it that was thwarted this week, and our heroes were not fully aware of this on most occasions, so their victories were in the battles but not the war. The brilliance of him as a villain is that many times the conflict was personal (at least on one side), but most importantly the writers let him win. He still maintained his threat even when he was defeated, by making sure he was smart enough to plan for the possibility of failure and he usually managed to get a consolation prize out of it, which the show would definitely make sure he'd come around and use next time (or several appearances down the road). Another smart aspect was that Xanatos was developed as a character. Not as much as the main cast, but we'd still see some parts of the story from his point of view. We would witness his real disappointment at a failure, and he would hint at his future plans to bounce back (which were more credible than mere empty threats of "I'll get you next time!"). Without this, his defeats would have felt hollow, and his victories unearned.

That key about him as a character is something that would have been hard to do for the borg, and the invention of the Queen (while it worked as a one-off, it too was abused by constant later appearances) only undermined the borg as a concept instead of strengthening them. The borg really don't care. This is part of what makes them scary, but it also makes them less compelling as a recurring-but-not-persistent threat.

[Admiral X]

Retconning in the queen completely undid what made the Borg a unique and formidable. It's like they missed the entire point of what the Borg were in order to give Picard a villain to play off of, and it got even worse when it became Janeway vs. the queen. It's kind of like how Abrams Trek missed the point of what made Spock alien and interesting by having him lose his shit constantly.

[Fianna]

Something that helped Xanatos do the always-pull-off-a-win thing is that, a lot of the time, the goal he was working towards was not, in and of itself, bad. His two most recurring goals were to gain some sort of immortality for himself, and to get his own team of super-powered warriors. While not things you'd really want in the hands of someone as amoral as Xanatos, him getting those things doesn't automatically hurt someone else (well, except for the time he mutated a bunch of people into gargoyle-esque monsters).

So you could have the Gargoyles thwart Xanatos's apparent plan and save whoever might have been endangered by it, and then have Xanatos reveal to the audience that they actually helped him achieve his real plan, without it seeming like the Gargoyles failed to accomplish anything. Xanatos may have "won", but him getting what he wants doesn't necessarily mean other people will suffer.

That doesn't work as well when your villains have something like "take over/destroy the world!" as their ultimate goal.

[Artabax]

he reason this is a decline problem is that you can't keep pulling that kind of trick around the Borg (and to be fair, they never used exactly the same trick), but if you keep managing to pull a different rabbit out of the hat every time it's still going to be progressively less impressive;

Borg adapt and are immune to Phasers. First Contact Borg can be killed with guns, Federation Council immediately decrees the Zeroth Directive Thou shalt never use guns versus Borg. What part of Starfleet is NOT military do you not understand?

Why do Starfleet nevah evah use guns versus Borg ever again?

Villain decay is a common trope. Starfleet applies Hero decay by refusing to use guns v Borg.

[BunBun299]

Something I think I'd do, in the unlikely event I was ever in charge of a Star Trek series. I'd have the crew make first contact with some new species. Everything would seem to be going normal at first, but then a Borg Cube shows up on long range scanners. The crew knows they can't get reinforcements from the Federation in time. So they cook up a plan, something over the top, like packing an asteroid filled with some explosive minerals with all of their antimatter warheads, as well as taking the nacelles and warp cores from their shuttles and bolt them to the thing, rigging it so it can make a short warp jump, right when they lure the Cube into its path. Battle starts, the Starfleet ship and a few of their new buddies from the First Contact mission engage, get the Cube right where they need it to be, and hit the button to send that asteroid warping right into it. Que triumphant music....

...which slowly fades as the explosion dissipates revealing a damaged, but still functional Borg Cube. The score should become fire as it resumes course, grabbing little alien ships with tractor beams, slicing them up, and using them to repair the Cube as it goes. They calculated in The Best of Both Worlds that Borg Cubes could keep going even if you took out nearly 80% of them. I would use that here. Remaining weapons do Jack shit as the Borg adapt, and they don't have nearly the numbers to wear down their shields the hard way.

The crew is finally forced to retreat, maybe stopping by the planet they failed to defend just long enough to grab some of the population with the transporter. A paltry few thousand at most, compared to the billions they failed to defend. And at the start of the next episode, show the ship is packed with these last members of a now endangered species, that they're taking back to the relative safety of Federation space.

That's my idea to make the Borg scary again. And the next time they show up, they should be headed for a Federation world.

[Artabax]

Make the Borg great again!

B - OR - G !
B - OR - G !

[Beastro]

Retconning in the queen completely undid what made the Borg a unique and formidable. It's like they missed the entire point of what the Borg were in order to give Picard a villain to play off of, and it got even worse when it became Janeway vs. the queen. It's kind of like how Abrams Trek missed the point of what made Spock alien and interesting by having him lose his shit constantly.

I'd like to think of the Queens as an inevitable outcome of a hive mind: That enough like-minds coalesce becoming sub-personalities with some occasionally taking over and leading with moments of unity that are what we saw when the Collective was stable in Q Who.

This results in changes in behaviour as the Borg go from purely interested in tech and scouring planets like they once did to assimilating species, which is a manifestation of the outlook on those personalities we saw in the Queens.

From that I'd think a neat way of finally ending the Borg as a galaxy threatening plague would be to introduce something that manifests all personalities at once effectively breaking the Borg into factions based on their psychological temperament, that way they can remain a threat, but are now no longer simply weaker but actively fighting one another to reunify the Collective.