I just watched the Star Trek: Borg DVD, and among them is Voyager's Dark Frontier. I had long since stopped watching Voyager by the time it was on, so this was new to me. How in the hell were the Hanson family even aware of the Borg at the time of the flashbacks, let alone equipped with a super invisible-to-Borg ship? EDIT: And can somebody explain why I spelled "Somebody" the way I did in the title?
I think it's fair to say [now] that everybody knew about the Borg except the crew of the Enterprise-D... As far as mispelling somebody, you were probably thinking of James Bond...
Kirk was killed rescuing a few thousand Ellurian refugees from a Borg Invasion, and they were granted sanctuary in Federation space. There must have been a couple of these listeners who were chatty about the events leading up tot he death of Captain Kirk in the hundred years leading up to he Events in Q Who, especially towards the officious lot who had to decide if it was worth taking them in?
In Q Who, Q implied that they should have known already, with the attacks in the Neutral Zone and all. We are to assume that Section 31 along with few scientists and other individuals were aware of the Borg to some extent. The signal those borg in ENT's Regeneration sent to the Delta Quadrant were supposed to have provoked Borg attacks in TNG's The Neutral Zone.
Heck, how could StarFleet not have known about the Borg when Guinan's people were refugees? As far back as Kirk's time, right? Stupid. I think that Magnus(?) Hansen said something about the "rumors" of the Borg that they were investigating. So maybe they were hanging out at the extreme end of the Alpha Quadrant, nearest the areas the Borg were reported to be in?
Some think that the machine race who upgraded V'Ger might have been the Borg. Archer said that Zephram Cochrane made a drunken speech about them a few years after the Phoenix launched. You must remember that Voyager was continually sliding sideways in time that many of their stories were set in completely different quantum realties than the week before if anything the writing staff was producing was to make sense after all their misadventures with tme mucking with their own causality.
I don't buy it. Q's doings in that episode was obviously introducing humanity, not just the Enterprise, to The Borg, in order to show them that humanity, not just the Enterprise was not ready to branch out as far as it was on pace to. Just another example of how the Borg were ruined, in my eyes.
Well, they had that mega-hit with "Mmm-bop-bop-bop-mmm-bop" but then their star was fading and they just dissapeared. Lost in space, I guess. Just like they had moved to another planet or been transported to another galaxy. Definitely out of transporter range, if you know what I mean.
I can buy that the Hansens were chasing half-baked rumors of a dangerous and powerful interstellar entity of some kind in that part of the galaxy (rumors from the recalcitrant El-Aurians, who obviously would not have wanted their rescuers to go tweak the Borg, or from Cochrane's drunken rantings), went out further than anyone in efforts to investigate those rumors, and found a lot more than they bargained for. Obviously, they never got a chance to report back in on what they found. While the continuity is somewhat stitched together, it still holds up okay. The real first contact between representatives of the civilizations in which someone survives to tell the tale and actually has a name to put to the threat is still "Q Who?" If Q had not zapped the Enterprise away from the Borg at the end of that episode, they'd have merely disappeared as well, with the Federation no wiser about the Borg despite the loss of several outposts and colonies along the Romulan Neutral Zone to their hostile action. It's difficult to gather and disseminate reliable intelligence on an enemy that tends to overwhelm all resistance so quickly. I just didn't like the suggestion in "Regeneration" that the Borg would be coming because of the signal. Of how much interest could Earth and its minor space program be to the Borg most of the way across the galaxy? I always thought that the Borg just happened into the Neutral Zone area and continued on their way, not judging either the Federation or Romulans worthy of further time, until the "Q Who?" incident in which they saw Enterprise-D display capabilities they did not understand. Of course, we the viewers know it was Q, but how could the Borg know this? I believe that after that incident, the very same ship headed straight for the Federation to find out what was what. I don't know why the Queen then decided to play games with assimilating Picard and naming him and wanting to marry him or whatever that B.S. was; maybe it was because the Federation didn't turn out to be the power she expected, but she picked up on the connection between Picard and Q in computer records or something like that and was curious to see how much more she could get going. Perhaps all her weird efforts could be rationalized as attempts to get Q's attention with unpredictable methodology and personal connections to Picard. She may also have only gone back in time to fulfill the predestination paradox of the signal being sent in "Regeneration"--hey, she probably knows more about this crap than we do. Ted, don't forget to wind your watch! Either way, it seems pretty clear that the Borg aren't exactly dedicating all available resources to assimilating Federation worlds; indeed, why should they? It can't be THAT great of a prize compared to other powers nearer to their point of origin. I'm sure they have better things to do.
Remember in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, Ming talks about how he likes to tour the universe every few thousand years and test the primitive worlds? Lord Ming Master of the Universe puts them through a barrage of buggery for a couple days, and if they're too thick to notice Mongo being at the crux of all this skulduggery, then he moves on. The Shadows from Babylon 5 had a more altruistic reason for attacking everyone in the galaxy every few thousand years or so, war promotes evolution. War increases technical sophistication, war gets rid of the week, war makes you better, better as a person and better as a species. When the dust settles, win or lose, what ever is still alive afterward is stronger, faster, smarter, better. The Borg may have attacked the neutral zone to provoke the humans and Romulans into inventing new technology worth assimilating, to develop cultural distinctiveness worth assimilating, to make them worthy of ascending to the next level of galactic society. To be Borg. The best defense against the Borg is to flush your technology down the toilet, and as a species become unhealthy and cubersome and ignore any incitement for self improvement anyone might offer who just really wants to eat you or enslave you. Really it's no different than that witch fattening up Hansel before she intended to eat him. The Hansens will live on forever in family Guy reruns.
The attacks we saw in TNG's The Neurtal Zone was intended to have been done by the Borg BEFORE Q Who came out. ENT's Regenration explains it perfectly, since the Borg were supposed to be from the Delta Quadrant- I remember reading a source about the Borg being from the Delta Quadrant before the plans for Voyager were even on the drawing board. The real history is full of that kind of thing. Some historians believe that an Egyptian pharoah sent a ship across the Atlantic and made it to Mexico in search of the underworld.
The Hansons were the typical push the envolope type explores. The did not follow their flight plan, they disobeyed direct orders to return to the BQ, they broke all the rules, and they should be commended for it. Discovery sometimes requires one to act and think on the fly, and the hell wth regulations. It was their research on the BORG that gave us much needed information on them, the only problem I have with their techinque was brining their daughter on this one way mission with them...
They were Junkies chasing the dragon. Sure their drug was the advancement of science and proving their theories, but it was still an incredibly destructive way for them to live their lives which had to turn out badly and then they dragged a child into it. Which made them deuches as well as suicidal. Kenny Rogers said it best: You gotta know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em, know when to walk away and know when to run. They were obviously manic incapable of making reasonable choices, and never considered ever running away no matter how dangerous it got. Would you trying to sneak between the entire Chineese army to find definitive evidence of bigfoot? Just crazy. So crazy that you have to wonder if they would have done anything differently knowing their eventual fate? Seven called them dillholes. Or some polite way of calling some one a dillhole. And then one of the talking heads spouted on about them being pioneers who believed in the bigger picture. I couldn't believe my ears! They drilled into her skull through her eye socket, scooping out enough of her brain to make way for all the technology they needed to pepper her with, before another 20 years of complete slavery mind and soul after they stuck her in a box for a year or two which made her grow up faster. Her parents did that to her. In the best of Both worlds they talked about the Borg Footprint. Seen before both in the Neutral zone and Q Who confirming that the Federation was under attack by the Borg. If the Hansens hadn't been so greedy... The federation not only would they have had an extra 10 years warning about how close the Borg where by using the Hansens tech to become functionally invisible, the Borg would practically become a herd race the Federation milked for information and technology, but the federation would have been able to defend all those neutral zone outopsts and save perhaps millions and millions of lives. Billions maybe if you countt he Romulan loss of life. Bah humbug.
I did find that the scenes with them were better when I'd mentally substitute the soundtrack with "Mmm-Bop."
And THAT is the bit that I can't wrap my brain around. You can handwave their knowledge of the Borg and ability to develop anti-Borg tech, but why in the hell would anyone bring their young daughter on this mission? There is no way that makes any sense. It's like a hastily-thrown together RPG character background.
Have you ever watched the cartoon the Wild Thorneberrys? I'm also thinking of Tarzan, but not so much the Jungle Book. If they had got back, the state should have taken Anika off them for being insanely bad parents... Not that it seems wise for their to be children on the Enterprise D, but at least that ship has a weapons system that is quite scary enough to protect them all. Her gran was in Starfleet, probably not an Admiral yet and Starships probably didn't have families yet either, so really there was no one to leave her with on earth who was a blood kin... Which means that they shouldn't have gone, or both gone.
Maybe most of them were like Guinan and just sat around "listening" and not volunteering any useful information.
Except when they were teaching Klingon's how to blow up suns or dissolving deep space stations with solid probability projection...
The Federation is a HUGE history and space. There are so many stories, of which we only see a few. Why is it so implausible that there could be knowledges that even the Enterprise would have been unaware of? The Hansons seem perfectly plausible to me.
There is one piece of evidence most miss when this topic comes up; granted it is VERY easy to miss. In "Scorpion, pt. I." When Janeway looks at her monitor concerning the Hansens and Starfleet's knowledge of the Borg, the classified database file begins on Stardate 9521.6. Since Stardates from the movies on are pretty much chronologically fixed, this would place the database in the same year as "Generations" (which is Stardate 9715.5). As others have said above, Starfleet knew of the El-Aurians before "Generations", thus some knowledge of the Borg must have leaked. One would assume that since they were so very far away in the Delta Quadrant and because nothing was heard of them, the file got buried and forgotten after nearly a century or deemed a non-imminent threat by Starfleet Security. However, and this is the part that is hard to swallow, the Federation Council of Exobiology's intrest in the Borg remained active up to the year 2353 when they allowed the Hansens to study them. Despite the USS-prefix registry seen on the Raven in "Dark Frontier", I go with the NAR-prefix as seen in the episode "Raven", denoting that the craft was a civilian vessel. The Hansens did not wear uniforms and seemed to be working independantly of Starfleet itself. They obviously weren't flying blind either since they knew what to look for, where to go and Magnus even had built a model Borg cube before ever facing them. So the real question is why did Starfleet Security disregard the Borg, rendering them little more than a piece of historial trivia (and consequently High Ranking officers like Picard in the dark about their existence), while a small somewhat inconsequential branch of science not only kept the topic alive but allowed civilians not only access to the information but also deemed them capable to carry out such a reckless mission?