I might have missed something, but was it ever explained how Vadic cutting her hand off let her communicate with the Borg Queen?
I still think it was a manifestation of a voice inside her head due to the experimentation done by Section 31.
the Borq Queen is a cultural relic of the 90's and can therefore understand the symbolism of "Talk to the Hand"
She put the hand-goo on to some sort of device. Maybe it was a machine the Founders already had to communicate with each other directly over long distances, or maybe it was something Vadic built herself to be able to tap into the Borg's collective signal.
They explained it thusly: HEY LOOK IT'S THE ENTERPRISE-D!!!! LOOK JACK IS THE NEW LOCUTUS OMG REMEMBER BEST OF BOTH WORLDS?!?!?!!!
Yeah, I don't think it needed much explaining, as far as Season 3 fridge logic examples, there were way more egregious head-scratchers than that.
I have a feeling that even Terry Matalas did not know who or what that apparition summoned via Vadic’s hand was when he first penned the scene. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt, being a highly strung and vested fan and critic, so everyone else should cut him some slack too. The retrospective ambiguity about the ‘ talk to the hand’ scenes, and how they fit in with the rest of the 10 hour epic *could* be the Directors fault, not Terry’s. The SFX and VFX teams sure tried though with what they had to work with… it certainly all *looked* cool??
Why store nano probes in the hand? founders do not have physical appendages. Nano probes could function freely within the gelatinous changeling form. Nano probes both dormant and active could also communicate via augmented sub space communication on a subconscious ‘passive’ level as has been shown previously and would not need to ‘disconnect’ from their host to become a transceiver. Does Picard season 3 prove that Changelings can not be assimilated, btw? Surely if they could be assimilated then the Borg would have used them as semi autonomous, shape shifting drones rather than ‘hit men’ for hire grunts conspiring with intergalactic criminal gangs and cartels such as that ran be Sneed?
Not only was it not explained, it doesn't seem to make much sense based on what we know. And besides everything, why not just use normal communication? I don't mind things that are used to conceal information from the audience, but this seemed quite lazy to me.
Matalas said it was the Borg Queen on Twitter I think it was. But it didn’t sound like her and it was never explained how it worked.
Comparatively in the 2002 DS9 novel Lesser Evil, when a Borg drone attempted to assimilate a Founder in 2376, she foiled the attempt by shapeshifting to crush all the nanoprobes in her body. Now, obviously PIC has a different writing team operating by different rules, so I guess either the canon Borg also couldn't assimilate Founders, or nanoprobes don't work on Founders modified by Section 31, or they chose not to nanoprobe Vadic's troopers because nanoprobes would have set off Starfleet sensors, and the Borg desperately needed the infiltration gambit to strike at Earth. So a remote torture device for Vadic had to suffice.
I think it was made pretty clear that the Borg lacked the ability to assimilate period thanks to Future Janeway. To think they could adapt to assimilate a lifeform that is able to change molecular structure on command is a bit out there. I don’t mind the show using an unexplained method of communication that is totally alien. It was an effective way of disguising the truth. I would be more interested in knowing what the Borg Queen actually had over Vadic to make her so submissive? They were clearly not equal partners in crime. She feared punishment.
This was never stated as a feature of the neurolytic virus which merely had the purpose of disrupting the Queens control over the transwarp hub and conduit network - I do not believe that it was intended as a genocidal weapon, just a method of getting Voyager home early. Janeways virus had been assimilated by sphere 634, the Borg were capable of finding a cure for this neural link disrupting contagion. It is not even clarified if the virus affecting the Borg in Picard season 3 is the same virus, as its effects are different from Janeway’s. One could even say that it is implied by association that this virus was created by Section 31, in a similar way as to how this organisation created the Founder virus during the Dominion war. Also, I do not believe that it has been implicitly stated that Borg can no longer assimilate anyway - this is an assumption. Zero was being assimilated in Prodigy, though granted he is non corporeal so the method of assimilation was not conventional, and of course Jack was being assimilated in to Vox? I just assumed that the Borg had developed an alternative method to assimilate; biological assimilation, though this method seems to leave drones more self aware as part of the Collective with them not behaving like typical drones, more like interconnected ‘zombies’ acting independently rather than centrally controlled. To achieve this new form of assimilation, the Borg extracted DNA from Picard which was inserted in to other species by Changelings as they used Starfleet transporters. In essence, are these new Borg not actually human/Picard hybrids? Borg themselves are not a race, so would not have specific DNA. It is stated in the episode that this new form of assimilation only affects the under 25’s as young adults brains are still developing up until this age, which means that the Picard DNA can be spliced in to their own genetic structure. Of course, the full process of assimilation is not complete until the Borg activate a beacon from their cube hidden inside Jupiter. Nano probes are not mentioned in Picard at all, but this could be because they quite simply were not referred to by the writers, a bit like how the Changelings are never referred to as ‘Founders’, with the term ‘Changeling’ being a derogatory term for this species used by solids.