• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

The TCW and the Caeliar/Columbia Temporal Loop

Captain Clark Terrell

Captain Clark Terrell

Commodore
Commodore
Christopher's Watching the Clock states that the factions of the Temporal Cold War didn't want to risk interfering with Federation history because of its role in the creation and destruction of the Borg due to the Caeliar/Columbia temporal loop--as seemingly every timeline but the primary continuity (in which the loop was maintained) involved the Borg overrunning the galaxy by the 26th or 27th century.

However, if that's the case, why would they meddle in Archer's life, given that he was close to Erika Hernandez, who's crew was responsible for triggering the sequence of events that led to the Borg's creation? I suppose destroying the Columbia before she disappeared would have undone the loop and prevented the Borg from existing, but none of the factions could predict how that would have affected matters on a galactic scale.

--Sran
 
Sran said:
Christopher's Watching the Clock states that the factions of the Temporal Cold War didn't want to risk interfering with Federation history because of its role in the creation and destruction of the Borg due to the Caeliar/Columbia temporal loop--as seemingly every timeline but the primary continuity (in which the loop was maintained) involved the Borg overrunning the galaxy by the 26th or 27th century.

However, if that's the case, why would they meddle in Archer's life, given that he was close to Erika Hernandez, who's crew was responsible for triggering the sequence of events that led to the Borg's creation? I suppose destroying the Columbia before she disappeared would have undone the loop and prevented the Borg from existing, but none of the factions could predict how that would have affected matters on a galactic scale.

--Sran
Click to expand...

IIRC, Future Guy really only interfered negatively with Archer once, when he had the Suliban Cabal falsely implicate the NX-01 in the destruction of the alien colony in the Season One finale. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of Future Guy's antics seemed to revolve around Klingon politics, did it not? And of course, Future Guy and Silik actively helped Archer on two occasions -- giving them info on the Xindi, and thwarting the Alien Nazis.
 
Sran said:
Christopher's Watching the Clock states that the factions of the Temporal Cold War didn't want to risk interfering with Federation history because of its role in the creation and destruction of the Borg due to the Caeliar/Columbia temporal loop--as seemingly every timeline but the primary continuity (in which the loop was maintained) involved the Borg overrunning the galaxy by the 26th or 27th century.
Click to expand...

The role of Columbia in that time loop is frequently misunderstood by the readers. Hernandez and her crew were peripheral to the events that created the loop. It was the signal sent by the Caeliar city in the far future that triggered the loop, which they did in order to ensure their own creation. Columbia's crew just got taken along for the ride. True, a few of them did provide the first drone bodies, but if they hadn't been there, the remains of Sedin would probably have assimilated one of the local humanoids on that planet, and the Borg would still have existed.

Still, it's true that none of the TCW factions wanted to risk meddling with Federation history any more than they needed to, due to its role in the eventual liberation of the Borg.


Sci said:
IIRC, Future Guy really only interfered negatively with Archer once, when he had the Suliban Cabal falsely implicate the NX-01 in the destruction of the alien colony in the Season One finale. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of Future Guy's antics seemed to revolve around Klingon politics, did it not? And of course, Future Guy and Silik actively helped Archer on two occasions -- giving them info on the Xindi, and thwarting the Alien Nazis.
Click to expand...

Yes. ENT made it clear that Future Guy didn't want Archer interfered with if it could be avoided. Even when he did need to intervene in "Shockwave," he attempted only to frame Archer, not destroy him (and I established in WTC that Archer was only a secondary target there). Even that was a very risky move, though, and it showed how reckless and megalomaniacal he was; he assumed he'd calculated the effects on the timeline with such precision that he could take the kind of risk that no one else dared to take and trust that it would pay off in his favor.
 
Christopher said:
Sran said:
Christopher's Watching the Clock states that the factions of the Temporal Cold War didn't want to risk interfering with Federation history because of its role in the creation and destruction of the Borg due to the Caeliar/Columbia temporal loop--as seemingly every timeline but the primary continuity (in which the loop was maintained) involved the Borg overrunning the galaxy by the 26th or 27th century.
Click to expand...

The role of Columbia in that time loop is frequently misunderstood by the readers. Hernandez and her crew were peripheral to the events that created the loop. It was the signal sent by the Caeliar city in the far future that triggered the loop, which they did in order to ensure their own creation. Columbia's crew just got taken along for the ride. True, a few of them did provide the first drone bodies, but if they hadn't been there, the remains of Sedin would probably have assimilated one of the local humanoids on that planet, and the Borg would still have existed.

Still, it's true that none of the TCW factions wanted to risk meddling with Federation history any more than they needed to, due to its role in the eventual liberation of the Borg.
Click to expand...

You said that before once when I brought up the same question, Christopher, but after rereading Destiny, that just doesn't work. Yes, the signal might still have been sent to Erigol. But all the signal did was set up a feedback loop that would destroy the Erigol system, not cause the passages to be filled with deadly radiation. That was the direct result of the Columbia's crew forcing the modification of the equations of the Caeliar's subspace passages. (This was explicitly stated on page 242 of the omnibus, not sure what page in the original printing of Gods of Night.) Without Columbia, Mantilis would not have been nearly entirely destroyed during its passage and its population would not have been nearly wiped out, and there would have been no issue with its survival on the far side of its escape route.

The loop could have continued apace without the Columbia. But the Borg only exist due to the Columbia's presence in the loop.
 
Future Guy never really wanted to interfere with Earth or humanity, he even says in Broken Bow it's too soon to have Earth involved. And it seems his only real goal for Archer was to tell him about the Xindi. In fact, everything about his actions seems to be towards that goal, even when he tried to frame the crew in Shockwave and cancel the mission it can be argued it was so Earth's most advanced ship could already by in the sol system, thus making the response to the Xindi attack be as swiftly as possible.
 
The Wormhole said:
Future Guy never really wanted to interfere with Earth or humanity, he even says in Broken Bow it's too soon to have Earth involved. And it seems his only real goal for Archer was to tell him about the Xindi. In fact, everything about his actions seems to be towards that goal, even when he tried to frame the crew in Shockwave and cancel the mission it can be argued it was so Earth's most advanced ship could already by in the sol system, thus making the response to the Xindi attack be as swiftly as possible.
Click to expand...

Wow... I wish I'd thought of that explanation when I was writing Watching the Clock. That works really well.
 
The Borg also exist in the Seeds of Dissent reality, which diverged from the prime reality no later than 2010 C.E. As of 2376 C.E. they had repeatedly attacked and weakened the Romulan Star Empire. So I'm not exactly sure how that's supposed to work out. Then again, they also exist (but definitely in a different way) in the mirror universe, so I guess the Borg can exist in a number of ways.
 
The Borg assimilate other species and technologies, right? So if several different species, out of the millions in the galaxy, independently turned themselves into assimilating cyborg collectives, and they ran into each other, they'd absorb each other and become pretty much interchangeable. So the Borg could conceivably have multiple different origins, all dovetailing into the Collective we know. Take one of the ancestor collectives away, and you'd still have Borg, just a different flavor of Borg.
 
Christopher said:
The Borg assimilate other species and technologies, right? So if several different species, out of the millions in the galaxy, independently turned themselves into assimilating cyborg collectives, and they ran into each other, they'd absorb each other and become pretty much interchangeable. So the Borg could conceivably have multiple different origins, all dovetailing into the Collective we know. Take one of the ancestor collectives away, and you'd still have Borg, just a different flavor of Borg.
Click to expand...

So much of the Borg are so specific to the Caeliar situation, though, from homeworld to name to assimilation method to overall organizational structure. I could see the Borg assimilating other collective structures into itself, but Destiny (and to a lesser degree The Eternal Tide, which specificied Arehaz as the original homeworld of the Borg) made it extremely clear that the core structure of the Borg are fundamentally derived from the Mantilis incident.

Given that Mantilis traveled to a point before the divergence of the Seeds of Dissent reality, it should also be in the past of that reality despite there being no equivalent events in the equivalent period of that timeline, shouldn't it? And potentially it's a similar situation for the Mirror Universe?
 
Enterprise1701 said:
The Borg also exist in the Seeds of Dissent reality, which diverged from the prime reality no later than 2010 C.E. As of 2376 C.E. they had repeatedly attacked and weakened the Romulan Star Empire. So I'm not exactly sure how that's supposed to work out. Then again, they also exist (but definitely in a different way) in the mirror universe, so I guess the Borg can exist in a number of ways.
Click to expand...

When Paul Simpson asked me several years ago to write a history of the Borg for Star Trek Magazine, incorporating everything possible that I could (including books, comics, and video games), I had to conclude that Destiny was not the origin of the Borg. Maybe of the Borg Queen, when the Mantilis survivors were discovered by the Borg of that time period and assimilated into the Collective. But the Borg, going by other literary evidence, had been extant for millennia at that point.

(If that's so -- the Borg pre-existed the Mantilis survivors -- why did the Caeliar take care of the problem? That's quite simple -- assimilating the Mantilis survivors took the Borg in a new and dangerous direction.)

My theory on the Borg, by the way, which I couldn't use for various reasons, was that the Borg were a bioweapons project in the Slaver Wars a billion years ago. The Thrint were powerful telepaths who could take mental control of another being's mind, turning their enemies into slaves and weapons for themselves. The Borg technological modifications override the body's brain in the same way, so if the Thrint took control of the brain of a Borg drone it would do them no good at all. The Collective, then, is a master control for the modified drones. And when the Slaver Wars were over, the weapons went on without an enemy to fight anymore.
 
^ That's a really interesting idea! Two questions though: unless the Borg were all stasis-boxed or something at the time, wouldn't the Cataclysm from The Buried Age have killed them off? And if they have been active for a billion years, shouldn't they have pretty much assimilated the galaxy by Trek's time? (And IIRC, "Dragon's Teeth" implies the Borg were a fairly minor power a millennia or so ago, doesn't it?)
 
Avro Arrow said:
^ That's a really interesting idea! Two questions though: unless the Borg were all stasis-boxed or something at the time, wouldn't the Cataclysm from The Buried Age have killed them off? And if they have been active for a billion years, shouldn't they have pretty much assimilated the galaxy by Trek's time? (And IIRC, "Dragon's Teeth" implies the Borg were a fairly minor power a millennia or so ago, doesn't it?)
Click to expand...

I suspect the Borg would hibernate for a time, reemerging when the galaxy's technology level reaches a certain level, assimilate until they can assimilate no more, and then go back to hibernating. Every ten or fifteen millennia, then, the technological civilizations get wiped clean and new civilizations, which were pre-technology in the last cycle, emerge on the galactic stage. Which could explain why most everyone we meet in Star Trek is on par with everyone else.
 
Wouldn't galactic archaeologists notice that after a time, though? I mean, the Cataclysm from Buried Age wiping the galaxy clean was one thing, but that's literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of datapoints for that cycle to be repeating for literally a billion years; at some point you'd expect someone to go "wait a minute, there's been a mass collapse of starfaring civilization across the entire galaxy about every 15 thousand years reaching back literally as far as we can measure."
 
Last edited:
Allyn Gibson said:
Avro Arrow said:
^ That's a really interesting idea! Two questions though: unless the Borg were all stasis-boxed or something at the time, wouldn't the Cataclysm from The Buried Age have killed them off? And if they have been active for a billion years, shouldn't they have pretty much assimilated the galaxy by Trek's time? (And IIRC, "Dragon's Teeth" implies the Borg were a fairly minor power a millennia or so ago, doesn't it?)
Click to expand...

I suspect the Borg would hibernate for a time, reemerging when the galaxy's technology level reaches a certain level, assimilate until they can assimilate no more, and then go back to hibernating. Every ten or fifteen millennia, then, the technological civilizations get wiped clean and new civilizations, which were pre-technology in the last cycle, emerge on the galactic stage. Which could explain why most everyone we meet in Star Trek is on par with everyone else.
Click to expand...
Then the Borg must really suck at assimilating because they haven't acquired Iconian gateways.
 
FKnight said:
It seems the Iconian probes seen in "Contagion" could be an effective weapon against he Borg considering their demonstrated capabilities.
Click to expand...

Markonian said:
In the mirror universe, Picard employed an Iconian probe against a Borg cube. ("The Worst of Both Worlds")
Click to expand...

True, but there were gateways literally everywhere going by the Gateway Crisis. And even just going by the sort with its own devoted base, the Kalandan outpost and Vandros IV didn't seem to have any sort of Iconian probe defense.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top