One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers inside*

[Sci]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

I call Godwin's Law!

Comparing the Borg Collective to the Third Reich is completely appropriate.

Also

Destiny Established that the Borg aren't sentient. They're ruled by two things, hunger and anger.

No, it did not establish that they're not sentient. It established that the Collective/Queen is, in essence, mentally ill. That's not the same thing.

ETA:

And furthermore, it also established that the Federation did not know that the Collective/Queen is essentially mentally ill. As far as 2377!Janeway and Future!Janeway knew, the Collective/Queen was a completely rational entity.

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

I call Godwin's Law!

Comparing the Borg Collective to the Third Reich is completely appropriate.

No it isn't. End of!

Ah hell, no offence this isn't me wanting to rant at you, this is my girlfriend being 300 miles away at uni and me still getting used to it, so i apologise to you and to the poor cold caller who are both going to feel my wrath today!

So, lets go the whole nine rounds about how the Borg weren't born out of humiliating defeat, which crippled their nation and led to depression which was present across the rest of the world!

About how the borg didn't rise because of the ability to shift the blame for things onto others (the jews, the communists, the slavs) thus making them seem like the better alternative.

Lets talk about how the borg didn't have a president who made the fatal mistake of making hitler their chancellor and thus open the door to his rise to power.

So apart from genocide, (also practiced by the british, americans, spanish and god knows how many others throughout history) how exactly are they like the third reich?

Also

Destiny Established that the Borg aren't sentient. They're ruled by two things, hunger and anger.

No, it did not establish that they're not sentient. It established that the Queen is, in essence, mentally ill. That's not the same thing.

Eh? The borg were all slaved to the collective (ie Sedin or whatever her name was) and the queen was just a conduit for her voice. Making none of them sentient. Sedin herself was reduced to nothing more than hunger or anger, there was no more consciousness than there is in the bear that decides that too many people have been poking it with a stick, so it's going to attack everyone, stick or no stick

 

[Sci]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

I call Godwin's Law!

Comparing the Borg Collective to the Third Reich is completely appropriate.

No it isn't. End of!

Ah hell, no offence this isn't me wanting to rant at you,

Then don't rant at me and don't blame your choice to rant at me on your girlfriend being far away.

So, lets go the whole nine rounds about how the Borg weren't born out of humiliating defeat, which crippled their nation and led to depression which was present across the rest of the world!

I wasn't comparing their origins, I was comparing their practices. They're both brutal, imperialistic powers whose entire reason for existence is to conquer and enslave and oppress. And they both chose to engage in acts of conquest as a response to others' attacks on them in the past.

Destiny Established that the Borg aren't sentient. They're ruled by two things, hunger and anger.

No, it did not establish that they're not sentient. It established that the Queen is, in essence, mentally ill. That's not the same thing.

Eh? The borg were all slaved to the collective (ie Sedin or whatever her name was) and the queen was just a conduit for her voice.

No. The degraded Sedin consciousness is the thing that provides the emotional drives and motivations for the Borg, the thing that the Collective and Queen feel compelled to satiate. But the Queen herself is a sentient, self-aware entity capable of making choices. The drones themselves are all mind-controlled (as established in VOY's "Survival Instinct") with their original personalities being buried beneath a new mind-controlled personality, and the Collective itself is the grand sum of all of the mind controlled drone personas. The Collective is capable of making decisions by itself (as seen in "Scorpion, Part II," where the Collective ordered the drones aboard Voyager to force it into fluidic space), but the Queen is capable of countermanding those orders (as in "Endgame," where the Collective initially chose to assimilate Voyager but the Queen instructed it not to).

The Queen and the Collective have both displayed far too much intelligence and logical reasoning skills not to be sentient. It's just that they're compelled to try to satiate the degraded Sedin consciousness, which, as you noted, is essentially a creature of pure hunger and rage. It would be as though you had an overwhelming sense of hunger and anger -- you would still be a sentient creature, but you would have a physical/emotional drive that's compelling you to behave in certain ways. You could resist the compulsion, but you probably would not want to.

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Comparing the Borg Collective to the Third Reich is completely appropriate.

No it isn't. End of!

Ah hell, no offence this isn't me wanting to rant at you,

Then don't rant at me and don't blame your choice to rant at me on your girlfriend being far away.

Ah but it's frustrating and i need something to expend all this useless frustration, and since i'm a nerd on the internet...message boards it is

I wasn't comparing their origins, I was comparing their practices. They're both brutal, imperialistic powers whose entire reason for existence is to conquer and enslave and oppress. And they both chose to engage in acts of conquest as a response to others' attacks on them in the past.

fair point i'll give you that. in fact i'll add to it, like the third reich, the borg expanded their territory in search of resources they needed (Germany the rheinland, the borg - well anything they could get their hands on, but particle 010 in particular!)

Destiny Established that the Borg aren't sentient. They're ruled by two things, hunger and anger.

No, it did not establish that they're not sentient. It established that the Queen is, in essence, mentally ill. That's not the same thing.

Eh? The borg were all slaved to the collective (ie Sedin or whatever her name was) and the queen was just a conduit for her voice.

No. The degraded Sedin consciousness is the thing that provides the emotional drives and motivations for the Borg, the thing that the Collective and Queen feel compelled to satiate. But the Queen herself is a sentient, self-aware entity capable of making choices. The drones themselves are all mind-controlled (as established in VOY's "Survival Instinct") with their original personalities being buried beneath a new mind-controlled personality, and the Collective itself is the grand sum of all of the mind controlled drone personas. The Collective is capable of making decisions by itself (as seen in "Scorpion, Part II," where the Collective ordered the drones aboard Voyager to force it into fluidic space), but the Queen is capable of countermanding those orders (as in "Endgame," where the Collective initially chose to assimilate Voyager but the Queen instructed it not to).

The Queen and the Collective have both displayed far too much intelligence and logical reasoning skills not to be sentient. It's just that they're compelled to try to satiate the degraded Sedin consciousness, which, as you noted, is essentially a creature of pure hunger and rage. It would be as though you had an overwhelming sense of hunger and anger -- you would still be a sentient creature, but you would have a physical/emotional drive that's compelling you to behave in certain ways. You could resist the compulsion, but you probably would not want to.

Yeah that's also true, damn i hate when my arguments get thoroughly destroyed! It's true what they say, never post angry!

The mental illness thing got me thinking, do you mean mentally ill because of the inbalance between logic (the machine part of the collective which did everything in an ordered fashion) and emotion (the Sedin part)

could the argument be made that the borg's going crazy would have happened anyway. as they gained more and more trying to satiate the hunger, but failing, the sedin consciousness would have become more and more frustrated and ultimately sent them on their blitzkrieg out of sheer frustration?

 

[Sci]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

The mental illness thing got me thinking, do you mean mentally ill because of the inbalance between logic (the machine part of the collective which did everything in an ordered fashion) and emotion (the Sedin part)

Well, I didn't necessarily think of it in terms of "machine," but, yeah, I thought of it as being equivalent to a person who has a severe emotional disorder -- say, someone who has intermittent explosive disorder, except that the bouts of overwhelming anger are permanent, and the overwhelming emotional can be hunger as well as anger.

could the argument be made that the borg's going crazy would have happened anyway. as they gained more and more trying to satiate the hunger, but failing, the sedin consciousness would have become more and more frustrated and ultimately sent them on their blitzkrieg out of sheer frustration?

Oooooh. That is a brilliant point! The Borg Collective had been going for thousands of years by 2381, all without ever really satiating the Sedin hunger; one wonders how the Collective and Queen would react to realizing that they'd never be able to sate the hunger?

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

The mental illness thing got me thinking, do you mean mentally ill because of the inbalance between logic (the machine part of the collective which did everything in an ordered fashion) and emotion (the Sedin part)

Well, I didn't necessarily think of it in terms of "machine," but, yeah, I thought of it as being equivalent to a person who has a severe emotional disorder -- say, someone who has intermittent explosive disorder, except that the bouts of overwhelming anger are permanent, and the overwhelming emotional can be hunger as well as anger.

could the argument be made that the borg's going crazy would have happened anyway. as they gained more and more trying to satiate the hunger, but failing, the sedin consciousness would have become more and more frustrated and ultimately sent them on their blitzkrieg out of sheer frustration?

Oooooh. That is a brilliant point! The Borg Collective had been going for thousands of years by 2381, all without ever really satiating the Sedin hunger; one wonders how the Collective and Queen would react to realizing that they'd never be able to sate the hunger?

mMybe they did, in a way. their reaction to the federation could be viewed on a far more primitive level than we've been giving them credit for. the federation had repeatedly refused to be assimilated...in other words they had refused to feed the hunger.

And we know the borg had never had this happen before, "resistance is futile" was true 99 times out of 100. so part of their genocidal rage could have been due to the fact the Federation had stood up and said, "actually we're not going to feed you." and the collective couldn't cope with that and lashed out.

 

[Cybersnark]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

If [Q] considered Picard a "pet" and Janeway a potential romantic interest, why didn't he do more to help them in their darkest hours?

How do we know he didn't?

Q seems to (or at least "can") exist outside of time, so he would know how these "darkest hours" are going to/will/have already play(ed) out. He didn't need to help them. Yes, boo hoo, it was painful and they nearly all died. . . It's supposed to be painful, and they didn't die.

Q&A pretty clearly establishes him as a teacher --teachers don't do their students' homework for them.

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

^ Sorry but i disagree.

While Q&A (fantastic book, no denying it!) established Q as a teacher, it's just the latest in a long line of retcons.

Q has been a troublemaker, an observer, an enemy of guinan, a soldier, an agent of the continuum, a helper, a lover, an "aww shucks dad!".

I think the simple explanation is that while Q introduced the Feds to the borg, this was because the plot required it, not because Q was teaching them anything (in fact in Q Who he was pissed at Picard and did it to slap him down)

 

[Sci]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Q has been a troublemaker, an observer, an enemy of guinan, a soldier, an agent of the continuum, a helper, a lover, an "aww shucks dad!".

All of which is the long way of saying that Q is Star Trek's version of the Trickster archetype.

I think the simple explanation is that while Q introduced the Feds to the borg, this was because the plot required it, not because Q was teaching them anything (in fact in Q Who he was pissed at Picard and did it to slap him down)

The problem with that hypothesis is that Q explicitly says in "Q Who?" that he introduced the Federation to the Borg because he thought the Federation was too arrogant and needed humbling.

 

[Stevil2001]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

^ Oh, while we're on the topic of cumulative defeats over ten-plus years here in TrekLit, has there been any writing about USS Endeavour's conflict with the Borg in "Strange New Worlds" or any other book? In "Scorpion, Part 1", Janeway spoke of the logs of a Captain Amasov of the Endeavour who, as far as we knew, survived his encounter with them.

Unless the log entry Janeway quoted was his final entry into the log buoy before Endeavour was wiped out, that is.

Memory Beta talks about two appearances he made in the comics: http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Amasov

I've read both, but I don't remember him appearing, so I can't verify personally.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

And yet the actual text of the novel disagrees with you.

Right there, she makes it very clear: It's not any one thing, it's the entire history of Federation defeats of the Collective.

And yet, on-screen canon disagrees with 'Destiny' and you:
In 'Dark frontier' a delta quadrant species that could only muster ~2 dozen ships in its defence attracted 3 borg ships - the borg were more interested in this species than they were in the entire alpha/beta quadrants.

At the beginning of 'Endgame', the borg's interest in starfleet was so low, the queen didn't even bother assimilating Voyager.

And, no, killing the Borg Queen four times is not something that "barely counts as a skirmish."

As per on-screen canon, it does barely count as a skirmish - understandably so. The queen can be easily replaced by a copy, an iteration is utterly expendable.
After the first 3 times the queen was killed, the borg's interest in the alpha/beta quadrants remained minimal - as proven by the lack of anything deserving the name of 'counterattack' by borg standards.
The fourth time a borg transwarp hub was destroyed as well - which made all the difference.


And, of course, this discussion has no impact, one way or another, on the point I made:
The peoples of the alpha/beta quadrants will blame the federation/humanity for the massive borg invasion because the actions of one Earth born starfleet captain (in your interpretation, two - Janeway and Picard) directly caused the borg killing ~64 BILLIONS alpha/beta inhabitants.

 

[TerraUnam]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Q has been a troublemaker, an observer, an enemy of guinan, a soldier, an agent of the continuum, a helper, a lover, an "aww shucks dad!".

All of which is the long way of saying that Q is Star Trek's version of the Trickster archetype.

I think the simple explanation is that while Q introduced the Feds to the borg, this was because the plot required it, not because Q was teaching them anything (in fact in Q Who he was pissed at Picard and did it to slap him down)

The problem with that hypothesis is that Q explicitly says in "Q Who?" that he introduced the Federation to the Borg because he thought the Federation was too arrogant and needed humbling.

Q and Trelane before him were also both negative stereotypes of "God". Roddenberry used them as a literary outlet for his atheism.

Q's character latter evolved into the "Trickster" archetype.

 

[Christopher]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Q and Trelane before him were also both negative stereotypes of "God". Roddenberry used them as a literary outlet for his atheism.

That's reading wayyy too much into it, especially where Trelane is concerned. For one thing, Roddenberry didn't create Trelane. Paul Schneider did, and he intended the episode as an anti-war statement, with Trelane representing a spoiled child playing at war.

For another thing, Roddenberry did write "Bread and Circuses," which is just about the most blatantly pro-Christian episode in the whole of TOS. So the allegation that Roddenberry was pursuing an atheist agenda in the writing of TOS -- even in episodes he didn't write -- is a critical failure of research.

It's also a mistake to say Roddenberry was an atheist. He didn't respect organized religion or its institutions, but that's not the same as not believing in a higher power. Rather, it means he didn't believe those human institutions' claims that they accurately represented the nature and will of that higher power. I think it's fairly clear from his writings that he did believe in something higher, or at least in the possibility of it, but didn't believe -- to quote a line of Picard's in Howard Weinstein's TNG novel Power Hungry -- "that any structure or philosophy devised by man could ever hope to represent or replicate divinity."

As for Q, Roddenberry's purpose in creating him was not to comment on God, but to comment on humanity. I mean, it's self-evident in the character's name. The "Q" stands for "question." Q's role in "Encounter at Farpoint" was to be a character who questioned and challenged humanity's worth, throwing out straw-man attacks so that Picard could refute them with grand speeches about how much better humanity had become. He was a rather obvious and unsubtle plot device, nothing more. There's nothing in the dialogue of "Farpoint" that specifically critiques religion; indeed, the only character who even mentiones the word "god" is Q himself, and he, the villain of the piece whose opinions about humanity are uniformly wrong, is the one who speaks dismissively of our "tribal god images." Given how heavy-handed Roddenberry's writing of the Q scenes in "Farpoint" was, if he'd intended an atheistic tract, it would have been spelled out blatantly in the dialogue.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

As for Q, Roddenberry's purpose in creating him was not to comment on God, but to comment on humanity. I mean, it's self-evident in the character's name. The "Q" stands for "question."

Actually, Roddenberry named Q for Star Trek fan Janet Quarton.

 

[Christopher]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

But there had to be some in-story justification he had in mind for having a cosmic superbeing refer to himself by a letter of the human alphabet. I do recall reading a comment sometime long ago about Picard being the "A" in response to "Q," or words to that effect.

And regardless of quibbles about the origin of his name, it's self-evident from "Farpoint" that Q's role was as a gadfly and challenger for humanity, not a comment on religion. So let's not get distracted from the real point.

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Yeah but works of art can have interpretations that their creators never intended...

So Q's god eh?

 

[Christopher]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Yeah but works of art can have interpretations that their creators never intended...

True, but I was responding to a post that claimed outright that it was what Roddenberry intended, which just plain doesn't fit the evidence.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Christopher, I was just pointing out that there is nothing "self-evident" about your assertion that Roddenberry named Q after the word "question," when the evidence, in fact, points to naming the character after a figure in British fandom.

I don't know if Q was to mean anything in-universe and I don't really care; there's ample historical evidence that Roddenberry's conception of what anything meant in-universe was dependent entirely upon what day of the week it was, who he was talking to, who he was feuding with, and who he wanted to fuck over.

 

[JB2005]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

^ Or just remove the word over...

 

[Christopher]

Re: One thing that irked me about the Destiny trilogy. *spoilers insid

Okay -- my point was that it's obvious on many levels that Q's role in "Encounter at Farpoint" was to be humanity's inquisitor. He was explicitly cast as the inquisitor, the judge, in the trial sequence. My assertion about his name origin was not even remotely the point of my statement; it was merely an illustration of my point. I was saying that, on top of everything else, even his name fits that pattern and reinforces the clear fact -- clear from plenty of other evidence -- that his function in the story was to be a critic and challenger for humanity, NOT a vehicle for an atheistic tract. So even if you question my side assertion about his name, it doesn't have any bearing on my actual point, which is that the claim that Q and Trelane were intended as some kind of atheistic propaganda is just plain wrong.