First Contact Defiant

[Bry_Sinclair]

Whenever I watch the battle scene at the beginning of First Contact I'm always a little disappointed with the Defiant. In DS9, her pulse-phasers are fierce bursts of energy that just overpowers its target, yet in the film when the ship fires it seems very wishy-washy (which for a ship doing what it was designed to do is a shame).

Why did the special effects team not copy what we saw on the small screen?

 

[F. King Daniel]

AFAIK, it was the same effect, just zoomed-out against a far larger nemesis. DS9 gave us lots of tight shots close-ups of the Defiant firing out of the screen.

 

[Tenacity]

The Defiant might have been hell on wheels against a opponent twice her size, but against a full sized Borg cube her weapons were weak in comparison to a battlewagon like a galaxy class.

 

[Dukhat]

The Defiant getting its ass kicked in FC was just a plot device to get Worf on the Enterprise.

 

[Admiral2]

Whenever I watch the battle scene at the beginning of First Contact I'm always a little disappointed with the Defiant. In DS9, her pulse-phasers are fierce bursts of energy that just overpowers its target, yet in the film when the ship fires it seems very wishy-washy (which for a ship doing what it was designed to do is a shame).

The Defiant was never going to do what "it was designed to do" because it was a piece of junk. From the time it was introduced in DS9 it got its rear end handed to it in almost every major engagement it took part in. For my money, it wouldn't have mattered if the pulse phaser effect looked like God bombarding Sodom and Gomorrah with balls of fire. It still would have ended up fiery debris at the end of the battle.

 

[Tosk]

The Defiant was never supposed to beat the Borg all on its own. It was designed to be part of a battle fleet.

 

[inflatabledalek]

Plus, the battle's been going on quite a while at this point, so the Defiant may have outlasted a lot of other ships.

I do love that big swoopy mother hen shot of the Enterprise covering the Defiant. One of the few times I really dig the E.

 

[Paul755]

I still refuse to believe Sisko let Worf take the Defiant to fight the Borg at Earth without him. Or Dax, O’Brien, Bashier, etc...

Shenanigans I say.

 

[Lance]

The only answer I have to that is that, like Picard, it may have been that Starfleet ordered Sisko to stay away, given the trauma surrounding his presence at Wolf 359. Though I agree the lack of other main crew from Deep Space Nine is conspicuous by their absence (charitably, perhaps the likes of Bashir and O'Brien were below decks somewhere but simply never seen. Maybe an opportunity was missed not to feature cameos from them ala Barclay? )

 

[Tosk]

I still refuse to believe Sisko let Worf take the Defiant to fight the Borg at Earth without him. Or Dax, O’Brien, Bashier, etc...

Shenanigans I say.

When does the movie claim Worf took the ship to fight the Borg? The travel time makes little sense, I say he was nearby on an unrelated mission.

 

[Qonundrum]

Meanwhile, Sisko took his duties seriously while the Big E's crew just laughed around with comic relief that made "The Outrageous Okona" genuinely hysterical by comparison and said "To hell with our orders" and warped on over to the big blast and everybody believed Picard's orders just like that even though Starfleet was gossiping to the fleet over how they felt they couldn't trust Picard in this battle situation - maybe it's accidental, but given the contrived events of "I, Borg" and "Descent" (when nobody cared Picard may have had PTSD issues or anything but at least they wrote Guinan out of character, but I digress) it makes a warped sense that Picard might be told to go pick posies by the Neutral Zone, I suppose.

Then again, the Borg who wander by are acting like a broken record player and sending only one Cube (Again. What, no adapting by sending two Cubes? Or a Cube with a Minivan?! A Cube with elderly grandmother helped along by Jethro wanting to become a double-naught spy with gazintas, perhaps?!!)

Never mind drones that didn't bother to adapt to phaser frequency settings until the 5th or 6th one was hit despite our being spoonfed the reminder they'll adapt after "1 or 2 shots" (again) but maybe the drones were all suffering from manic depression and were suicidal so they turned their shield frequency rotators off...

Might have been nice if the Queen was the result of Picard's meddling from "I, Borg" but the movie does get quick to tell us she was rubbing up and down on him as far back as TBOBW... pointless fake retroactively connived continuity.

Then again, Alice Krige's performance is what really saved the movie given the apocryphal nature of a Borg Queen (for which VOY first acts like no Queen exists, but then there's a Queen, then another Queen... how many Queens are in the Borg's stacked deck?) Ditto for Alfre Woodard and Ruby pointing out Picard's hypocrisy is the one refreshing thing in the movie, which also feels like legitimate Star Trek. Indeed, Ruby and Queen are the only characters in the movie that weren't caricatures with dialogue pointing out lame in-jokes.

TNG movies were sub par. They simply sucked, even if the Enterprise-E model is one of if not the most elegant looking ship models ever made to grace the big screen, though why replace the sky-blue deflector dish with a whiz-yellow version for no reason? But each movie sucked for not the same reasons as the next or preceding TNG movie, but none of them is more than the sum of their parts and it's no wonder Patrick Stewart said he was done with the role, back when he was Professor Xavier but it's nice to see him want to reprise his role so hopefully he's seen the scripts and thinks they're suitable, but I digress. The closest we got to anything Q was promising would be "Generations" and even the mishandled mess of "Insurrection", which also has banal action Jean-Luc McClane moments. FC and Nem are just banal action movies. Having Riker do the action stuff would have been an easy fix for some of the problems...

 

[Qonundrum]

The Defiant getting its ass kicked in FC was just a plot device to get Worf on the Enterprise.

At least FC had a plot device, paper-thin as it was. Insurrection less of one that I can remember. Did Nemesis have any told at all? Oh wait, NEM was the one that acted like Data never had an emotion chip installed - whereas in GEN he got one but couldn't control it and was fused, then in FC he can turn it off and on whenever convenient...

FC just had too many problems. The fact they didn't do a full cameo and tie-in with DS9 was a huge mistake. FC could have gotten more people to tune into DS9, which was just starting its fourth season - and its best stuff was yet to come, which is big considering how cool season four was to begin with!! DS9 got ratings but if FC was done right they would have had far more. Instead, it was a brief gimmicky throwaway. Like how most of the movie was.

 

[Paul755]

The only answer I have to that is that, like Picard, it may have been that Starfleet ordered Sisko to stay away, given the trauma surrounding his presence at Wolf 359. Though I agree the lack of other main crew from Deep Space Nine is conspicuous by their absence (charitably, perhaps the likes of Bashir and O'Brien were below decks somewhere but simply never seen. Maybe an opportunity was missed not to feature cameos from them ala Barclay? )

Yeah but just like Picard, no way would Sisko have not ultimately defied orders and gone anyway. Especially given (as Weyoun pointed out when it was destroyed) how “fond” of the Defiant Sisko was.

 

[Lance]

Yeah but just like Picard, no way would Sisko have not ultimately defied orders and gone anyway. Especially given (as Weyoun pointed out when it was destroyed) how “fond” of the Defiant Sisko was.

I do agree. And given Sisko specifically built the ship as his own personal Borg-killing vessel

 

[Timo]

Starfleet could probably have assigned any ship it wanted, including the Defiant, to the anti-Borg fleet defending Earth. They had advance warning since Ivor Prime. The last time it took the Borg a day or two to move from the UFP outer border to Earth. No real telling how much time Earth had this time around, as all the figures our heroes quote are on indirect things (such as from RNZ to Typhon, not to Earth). But DS9 has instances of runabouts being credited with travel from Bajor to Earth or Vulcan and back within a week (see "Defiant"), and even the poor Defiant ought to do a bit better than runabouts in an emergency.

What messes up this timeline is the fact that the Defiant was said to have been there at Typhon already, an unlikely reaction time for any vessel let alone the slowish "escort". But there we may plead astrography: perhaps DS9 just happens to be closer to DS5, Ivor, Typhon and the rest than it is to Earth? No need to assume Worf was already detached from DS9 when the Borg first appeared.

The Defiant may not have been a whopping success as a Borg-fighter originally, but at least she was different. And Starfleet would do well to apply different and surprising assets against the Borg whenever it could. After all, that's the only thing that stands a chance of making a difference.

It's just that apparently the Defiant didn't make a difference in the end, which is not a big surprise. Luckily, the insight of Locutus did.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[David cgc]

I don't buy the premise of the thread. The Defiant's phaser blasts seemed to be doing as much (if not more) damage as other the ships' torpedos, in terms of size and linger-y-ness of the explosions (and beam phasers weren't getting through at all except at the end, when they were aimed at a place that had already been blasted open). The ship itself took a lot of damage before being knocked out, while all the other ships we saw were either pristine or destroyed, with none in-between, suggesting Defiant was the only one without a glass jaw that was toast once its shields were holed.

 

[inflatabledalek]

In terms of where's Sisko, IIRC the Stardates basically line up with when he's in the Badlands with Edington, right? I believe the joke I saw was the Borg waited till he was out to attack because even they're scared of him.

The other old fan joke was Worf decided that running off in the Defiant to fight the Borg was better than risking having to deliver another O'Brien baby.

 

[Timo]

In terms of where's Sisko, IIRC the Stardates basically line up with when he's in the Badlands with Edington, right?

Yup. Or more precisely, if we assume that stardate-free adventures fall in their airdate order slots between stardated ones, then the movie takes place after "Soldiers of the Empire" but before "In the Cards", leaving "Children of Time", "Blaze of Glory" and "Empok Nor" as the undated candidates.

And the first features the Defiant and Worf while the last involves Sisko, no matter how peripherally - but the middle one tells the story of a prominent Sisko absence, from the nicely concealing viewpoint of said absentee.

Of course, Sisko already mentions "the recent Borg attack" several episodes earlier, in "Purgatory's Shadow". But that episode has a pre-movie stardate, or at least its other half, "By Inferno's Light", does. And it makes no mention of damage to the Defiant.

Ultimately, we have plenty of reason to think the Borg made several attacks prior to ST:FC, as Picard speaks of them advancing and the heroes falling back, something never described in any episode past "I, Borg". So when the Admiral ominously tells Picard the Borg have returned, we are to take this in the spirit of them returning once again, this time being even worse than the one last month...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I do agree. And given Sisko specifically built the ship as his own personal Borg-killing vessel

Oh yes, and he apparently had an alternate name for it, too...

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[DonIago]

I'll just say it makes sense to me that Defiant was out doing other things under Worf's command when it was diverted to intercept the cube, and there was no time to stop by DS9.

As for the "why send one cube" line of thought, there've been entire threads about that, and my view is that the Borg don't really care whether they assimilate Earth. They're just probing UFP defenses. The time travel part's a bit odd though...and notably never repeated, so it may be some anomaly in this case.

As for Worf conveniently being on the E, I kind of like it when he shows up with minimal explanation in INS. Maybe he simply had leave and decided to visit his friends? For me NEM is the only annoying occurrence of him because it seems to contradict his destiny in DS9, though the novels tried to address that...not entirely successfully IMO.