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What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

The Shatnerverse already did that. And it simply doesn't work, given the Ilia Probe's confusion over "carbon-based units" and V'ger's inability to conceive of them as "true life forms". And yet every Borg drone was once a "carbon-based unit".

Yes. The Borg and V'Ger have nothing in common beyond having a connection to technology, so it bewilders me that so many people want to force them together. I mean, V'Ger was at the ultimate limit of advancement that was possible in the physical universe and ready to ascend to the next thing. The Borg are children playing with blocks by comparison.

Even the Shatnerverse's The Return admitted that they had hardly anything in common, throwing in a handwave about how there were multiple evolutionary branches of Borg that were extremely different from each other and weren't in communication. But if they were that different, why bother to connect them at all? It was just gratuitous continuity porn.
 
Sadly, the V'Ger-Borg connection just seems to be an outgrowth of the fact that too many view Roddenberry's Words as Holy Writ. Since he made a joke about the Borg homeworld being the planet V'Ger visited while Q Who was being filmed, everyone after that has been trying to make that work.

And really, how does it make sense that if a primitive satellite showed up in orbit of the Borg homeworld, the Borg would pimp it out, task it with a god complex and send it back to its home?
 
I always thought it was V'Ger being pimped up by whatever race made the Borg as we saw V'Ger sent out and absorbing worlds.

What the Borg and V'Ger have in common is they both assimilate everything they encounter that will help them in their job of learning about a race's technology (which got exaggerated later). It's just V'Ger stores the information and people on floppy disc while the Borg turns them into cyborgs.

So I do think they have a lot in common.
 
I always thought it was V'Ger being pimped up by whatever race made the Borg as we saw V'Ger sent out and absorbing worlds.

What the Borg and V'Ger have in common is they both assimilate everything they encounter that will help them in their job of learning about a race's technology (which got exaggerated later). It's just V'Ger stores the information and people on floppy disc while the Borg turns them into cyborgs.

So I do think they have a lot in common.


I don't know. I don't see much similarity. It'd be like saying Buddhism and Catholocism have a lot in common because they are both religions and believe in a higher power.

Yes, but once you dig beneath the surface just a bit you start finding a ton of differences.
 
I always thought it was V'Ger being pimped up by whatever race made the Borg as we saw V'Ger sent out and absorbing worlds.

Not the same thing at all. The Borg assimilate living beings and technology as physical resources that they utilize equally. V'Ger just disintegrated and digitized things as pure information, not using them but simply storing them as data. What the Borg do is like hunting animals for their meat and skin and bones and using every part of the creature as part of your everyday life, while what V'Ger did was more like a photo safari, just gathering information for the sake of information, except it happened to disintegrate the things it "photographed." The Borg's mission is to use; V'Ger's was to learn, period. The Borg have zero interest in learning about anything they can't use, while V'Ger was driven to learn everything but had no interest in using any of it, except to present it to the Creator upon arrival. They're really complete opposites.
 
Not the same thing at all. The Borg assimilate living beings and technology as physical resources that they utilize equally. V'Ger just disintegrated and digitized things as pure information, not using them but simply storing them as data. What the Borg do is like hunting animals for their meat and skin and bones and using every part of the creature as part of your everyday life, while what V'Ger did was more like a photo safari, just gathering information for the sake of information, except it happened to disintegrate the things it "photographed." The Borg's mission is to use; V'Ger's was to learn, period. The Borg have zero interest in learning about anything they can't use, while V'Ger was driven to learn everything but had no interest in using any of it, except to present it to the Creator upon arrival. They're really complete opposites.
I guess this is a good time to point out that, since V'ger had digitized the machine planet that took in Voyager 6, it actually destroyed the machine planet as step one on its journey.
 
Sadly, the V'Ger-Borg connection just seems to be an outgrowth of the fact that too many view Roddenberry's Words as Holy Writ. Since he made a joke about the Borg homeworld being the planet V'Ger visited while Q Who was being filmed, everyone after that has been trying to make that work.

IIRC the original interview, he said that the Planet of Living Machines that repaired V'ger would be of interest to the Borg. Not that they were the Borg.

I guess this is a good time to point out that, since V'ger had digitized the machine planet that took in Voyager 6, it actually destroyed the machine planet as step one on its journey.

But V'ger wasn't necessarily destroying everything in its path. It was simply making digital images of its journey for "data storage". Perhaps the three Klingon ships, then Epsilon Nine, then Ilia, were the only times the actual specimens were removed from original existence. Removed because they were perceived as hostile.

And V'ger evolved its abilities along its journey, so it was long past the Planet of Living Machines by then.

V'Ger just disintegrated and digitized things as pure information, not using them but simply storing them as data... while what V'Ger did was more like a photo safari, just gathering information for the sake of information, except it happened to disintegrate the things it "photographed."

Was the disintegrating strategy a newfound skill against the Klingons, the first alien power to "shoot first without asking questions"? Until then, everything was digital photography.
 
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I'm fully of the mind that V'Ger was digitizing things and growing. You don't get to be eighty-two au in diameter by just getting upgraded by a probe.
 
But V'ger wasn't necessarily destroying everything in its path. It was simply making digital images of its journey for "data storage". Perhaps the three Klingon ships, then Epsilon Nine, then Ilia, were the only times the actual specimens were removed from original existence. Removed because they were perceived as hostile.

Except only the Klingons showed hostility. Epsilon IX and Ilia just got in the way. And the way the Ilia Probe talked about the Enterprise crew being reduced to data patterns was as if it were a routine drill.


Was the disintegrating strategy a newfound skill against the Klingons, the first alien power to "shoot first without asking questions"? Until then, everything was digital photography.

Seriously? V'Ger traveled through the far reaches of the universe, and the Klingons were the first hostile beings it ever encountered anywhere? Gotta love the optimism there, but it's not very credible, is it?


I'm fully of the mind that V'Ger was digitizing things and growing. You don't get to be eighty-two au in diameter by just getting upgraded by a probe.

It was V'Ger's outer energy cloud that was [eighty-]two AU in diameter. V'Ger itself was, I think, about 78 kilometers long. As I put it in Ex Machina, about the size of Maui.
 
Except only the Klingons showed hostility. Epsilon IX and Ilia just got in the way. And the way the Ilia Probe talked about the Enterprise crew being reduced to data patterns was as if it were a routine drill.

I dunno. Epsilon Nine's scanning of V'ger was interpreted as a hostile act.

And yes, Spock was seeming rejected by the tendrill-probe when it was looking for a template for its new probe. Ilia stood up at the wrong time, perhaps.

Seriously? V'Ger traveled through the far reaches of the universe, and the Klingons were the first hostile beings it ever encountered anywhere? Gotta love the optimism there, but it's not very credible, is it?

I dunno. I find that more credible than V'ger destroying everything it found on its way to its Creator rather than simply taking pics. Especially for the first part of the journey at least.
 
I dunno. Epsilon Nine's scanning of V'ger was interpreted as a hostile act.

And surely countless others scanned it before over its journeys, so why wouldn't it have interpreted every scan as hostile? It beggars belief that it coincidentally wouldn't have changed its behavior until we became aware of it.


I dunno. I find that more credible than V'ger destroying everything it found on its way to its Creator rather than simply taking pics. Especially for the first part of the journey at least.

I assume the larger, more distant things we saw in the Spock Walk, like whole planets and cosmic phenomena, were long-range imaging. But the things it encountered directly were digitized.
 
I'm fairly sure V'Ger wiped out everything it encountered but space is pretty big even in Star Trek. It could travel through much of it with only a few enocunters.
 
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