FC plothole? Why didn't the Borg create the vortex in the Delta Q?

[R. Star]

blueziggy wrote:

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it wouldn't matter since picard is still stuck in the nexus anyway.

Well Picard in the Nexus got us the X-men movies.

[NKemp3]

DostoyevskyClone wrote:

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My apologies if this has been brought up before, but it just occurred to me: why didn't the Borg create the temporal vortex in their own galaxy, thereby precluding any possibility that they would be interfered with?

I'm assuming they traveled from the Delta Quadrant. Couldn't they have just made the same journey...but in 2063? If they had done this, wouldn't this have assured they met no resistance when entering Earth's orbit?

At the very least if the Bog were going to break off of their plan by abandoning an attack on the "modern" Earth of the TNG days, they could have at least waited until they had flown back towards the Delta and then pulled their time travelling stunt once they were out of view of the Federation. Its a flaw some of us have been pointing out since the far away days of the ST AOL forums.


Of course VOY made it worse by giving us a glimpse of the hundreds of cubes the Borg appeared to have at their disposal. So why send one to attack Earth? Especially considering it carried a very important piece, albeit contrived, cargo in the form of The Queen.

[DonIago]

Meh, I assume that any Borg ship has the ability to create the queen as needed.

[Christopher]

NKemp3 wrote:

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Of course VOY made it worse by giving us a glimpse of the hundreds of cubes the Borg appeared to have at their disposal. So why send one to attack Earth?

Because it's a very, very big galaxy and Earth is just one very remote part of it as far as the Borg are concerned. Given how vast their territory is, they must be at war with thousands of different civilizations at any given time as they strive to expand their territory. Our attention as viewers is focused exclusively on the Federation and its ships, but the Borg's attention must be primarily directed toward those thousands of other civilizations that we know nothing about because their battles with the Borg are taking place in what, to us, are remote and unknown parts of the galaxy. So the Federation was very, very far from being the Borg's highest priority. It was interesting to them, interesting enough that they wanted to assimilate it, but not so important that they would allocate more than a single cube at a time to the effort, not when their cubes were needed in so many other battles far closer to home.

Of course, Voyager destroying the Borg's transwarp hub and Unicomplex would've changed that, raising the Federation from a source of curiosity and a minor nuisance to the level of a major threat. And in the Destiny trilogy in the novels, we see what happens when the Borg really do make the Federation their priority.

DonIago wrote:

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Meh, I assume that any Borg ship has the ability to create the queen as needed.

As I see it, the Queen isn't really a person, just sort of a coordinating nexus for the collective consciousness. The physical body is just a substrate for what's basically a software entity. So any individual Queen body is expendable. If one is destroyed, a new one has the Queen software downloaded into it.

[Tom]

It could be that only the Sphere had the abilty to travel in time. But they needed a a Cube to carry the Sphere because it may have not had the long range abilty the Cube had. Also, the Sphere was very weak as we saw, it destroyed with just 3? Quantum torpedo's. So the Cube was needed to get it to Earth, once near there it could have gone back in time. I think that is a reasonable explanation.

[R. Star]

Tom wrote:

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It could be that only the Sphere had the abilty to travel in time. But they needed a a Cube to carry the Sphere because it may have not had the long range abilty the Cube had. Also, the Sphere was very weak as we saw, it destroyed with just 3? Quantum torpedo's. So the Cube was needed to get it to Earth, once near there it could have gone back in time. I think that is a reasonable explanation.

The Enterprise E had no trouble at all replicating the time travel effect at the end of FC.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Maybe the Borg figured that if they created the wormhole back in the DQ, then spent all that time in the past on their way to Earth, they might accidentally change history in an unpredictable manner - a 'blowback' that might come back to hurt them. Much easier to save the time travel for the last minute, makes it less likely that they'll change something they don't want to.

[Mr_Homn]

All of the TNG movies are incredibly stupid. Don't waste time trying to make sense of them.

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

Well, some of us liked them

[R. Star]

Mr_Homn wrote:

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All of the TNG movies are incredibly stupid. Don't waste time trying to make sense of them.

Wow, that's very constructive.

[Tiberius]

As for the OP, my view is that back in 2063 the transwarp network just didn't stretch all the way to Earth.

Christopher wrote:

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The Borg having time travel at all is a huge plot hole. If they already had the ability to go back in time and change history, why haven't they already done so and assimilated the whole galaxy retroactively?

However, when we consider that the message sent in Regeneration would have contained information about the future, the Queen could have considered it important to make sure history played out that way, in order to ensure that the message with information about the future got to her. After all, if she started making changes to the timeline the message told her about, it would run the risk of rendering all that information useless.

It's also out of character for them; when they suffer a setback, they just accept it and keep on pushing forward until they overwhelm it by sheer numbers and persistence. (I offered a possible explanation for this inconsistency in my novel Watching the Clock.)

I'd be interested in learning your take, but unfortunately the novels are rare as hen's teeth around here. Could you tell me in a PM?

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

Buy it online, it's cheaper than in stores (even with shipping). And worth it!

[Tiberius]

I've never brought anything online....

[Mr_Homn]

KingDaniel wrote:

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Well, some of us liked them

Hey, there are plenty of movies with dumb writing that can be enjoyable. I enjoy most of First Contact. It may not have a smart script, but it still has some great scenes. Frakes did a good job.

Zombie Redshirt wrote:

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Wow, that's very constructive.

Perhaps not constructive, but true.

You yourself answered the OP's question perfectly:

Zombie Redshirt wrote:

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Because the heroes couldn't follow them if they time traveled in the Delta Quadrant.

Not exactly constructive either, but I definitely agree with what you said, and it's a perfect example of the kind of lazy, dumb writing that I'm talking about.

[NKemp3]

Christopher wrote:

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Because it's a very, very big galaxy and Earth is just one very remote part of it as far as the Borg are concerned. Given how vast their territory is, they must be at war with thousands of different civilizations at any given time as they strive to expand their territory.

The Borg at war? The Borg don't appear to go to war. Wars aren't typically decided by one battle or a few battles. The Borg, based on what we know, overwhelms its targets almost immediately. Outside of Species 8472 (or whatever is called) and perhaps the Dominion I can't envision any protracted conflicts involving the Borg against another foe if it decided to use a handful of cubes.

What's more I thought the Borg were smart; I thought they adapted. They lost to the Federation once when sending one cube in the Federation's direction so what did they do the second time they decided to target Earth? They sent one single cube again. Ridiculous. Of course to be completely fair that decision of theirs only took on the ultimate level of stupidity AFTER Star Trek: VOY went overkill by establishing that the Borg had hundreds of cubes at its disposal. You don't have to be a standout in math to realize that the Borg could probably afford to send a few more cubes in the First Contact film. The Borg sent ten times that much simply to take on Voyager and its crew.

And what does distance have to do with anything? The Borg are all about conquering other races and other societies, adding the conquered's technology to their own collection. By definition the Borg live to seek out new worlds and overtake them. That means lots and lots and lots of travelling. Distance isn't an issue but conquest is a priority...which makes any distance tey have to travel worthwhile.