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First Contact Defiant

The script of Nemesis does include a line of dialogue about how the life of a diplomat did not agree with him, but it was one of many character moments lost in edits.
 
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?
Oh, there's two simple reasons 1. in movie plot the Defiant was already in full combat against the Borg, system damage must've occurred, and 2. The producers didn't want any ship upstaging it's main superstar, that ugly looking Enterprise.
 
Oh, there's two simple reasons 1. in movie plot the Defiant was already in full combat against the Borg, system damage must've occurred, and 2. The producers didn't want any ship upstaging it's main superstar, that ugly looking Enterprise.

I thought the damage on the Defiant looked great, she had hulk breaches and was stil fighting like she was a new ship
 
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.
Ira Behr has confirmed that line is intended to be a reference to First Contact.
 
I keep picturing the moment the Enterprise towed the Defiant home and Chief O'Brien had a look...
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Ira Behr has confirmed that line is intended to be a reference to First Contact.

Then again, Behr is gone. Trek goes on.

As always, intent is interesting, but it need not be relevant. In this particular topic, saying that Worf wrecked the ship some time prior to "In Purgatory's Shadow" doesn't really provide any "Oh vey, it all clicks in place now!" answers to our questions. The "Sisko was chaperoning Eddington" solution comes very close to doing exactly that. For me, that is...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Picard: "The moment I have dreaded for nearly six years has finally arrived."

That's not something he'd say if the Borg had attacked the Federation last Tuesday.
 
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It would be, if he were speaking of the Borg coming for him.

Thanks to VOY, we now know the Borg are everywhere and everywhen, and pester Starfleet even when Picard isn't around. Picard's own words about Starfleet doing nothing and it being up to him to draw the line reinforce the idea - if all the encounters inevitably involved Picard, then it would be Picard's own fault.

Yet the "dreading" is not necessarily associated with any personal confrontations. Picard makes the log entry after having been informed he will not be involved in any way. On the other hand, he did have the nightmare - perhaps he knows involvement is inevitable?

Or then he is dreading the very fact that because of his rare absence from the thick of things, there will be no stopping the Borg "this time", as opposed to last Tuesday when he did save the day. :p

Intent is not canon. ;)

And much of canon is unintended... For better or worse.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Regarding Worf there and none of the other senior officers, it is very possible Worf was out with the Defiant on some other mission Sisko sent him on (I think it might line up with "THE BEGOTTEN", since I don't remember seeing Worf or the Defiant there, but both were present in "THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT" and "FOR THE UNIFORM".), and was able to get to Typhon quickly with the rest of the fleet. Which also leads to my second point, which the Defiant was indeed fighting the Borg from the start because we heard her mentioned with Bozeman and Lexicon in the audio of the battle that they listen to on the bridge.

Having fighting that cube from the start, which the battle a good while because the Enterprise took time to get there, it's astounding she lasted that long and still not destroyed after that cube blows up. So calling the Defiant unworthy of its intended purpose or a failure is completely wrong.

Riker was dead on when he said, "Tough little ship." (Which was exactly what Thomas Riker said about her in "DEFIANT".)
 
The Borg a befuddling, inconsistent uber-bad guy. Then again, most uber-bad guys are.

For example: If The Borg were seriously intent on assimilating The Federation at *that* moment in time, the line after Picard's log should have gone like this:

Riker: "How many ships?"

Picard: "Five Hundred. We're boned."

But no, they send one - even when we know via Voyager they could send a vastly larger invasion force with little drain on their overall resources. Remember Dark Fronter? One colony with 1/2 a million if I correctly recall, had two cubes and the Queen's Yacht.

So, you might then consider we have the wrong end of the stick. It's not about assimilating us now. All the way back in BOBW they stated their imperative: "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own." After the first attack then, what did Starfleet do? Created The Defiant and other defenses against them. Basically, you could look at them as prodding us into evolving our technology to such a point that our technology would add true distinctiveness. Technology that The Borg would find so irresistible they go all in with 1000 cubes and assimilate a highly adaptable and technologically powerful species. Those collective bastards had been messing with us the whole time! Manipulating us to innovate and advance in ways they can't before assimilating us.

Except that theory is blown out of the water when they go back to 2063. A backwater, technologically inferior world with nothing to offer technologically and thereby destroying the advanced civilisation you were salivating over in the first place. The huge problem is that makes The Borg's idea of conquest very basic - territory and subjects. But we were made to understand this wasn't the case. In Voyager it was stated The Kazon were too primitive, for example. It's a shame their motivations ended up being completely haphazard.
 
Having the Defiant in First Contact was a nice little tie in with the tv series I thought. If only the MCU would do that.
 
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