Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 3x05 - "Die Trying"

Maybe the Borg may be a non-issue by the 31st Century. I'm OK if they don't bring them up.

 

All Borg cubes were operational and used dilithium; and hopefully all the Borg transfer hubs needed dilithium to operate too = The Borg were completely wiped out when the burn occurred (well one can hope).

 

I don’t think the Borg should have been the focus, the Burn feels like a better story.

But I do think the Borg are still kicking around somewhere though. Remember we did see a Borg child in that flash forward scene in Lower Decks.

If we do see them, I would expect it means Picard won’t have them in S2.

 

No data on first contact. Some time before the 2250's, probably. They were a known species in 2366.

While the Barzan didn't have spaceflight capability they seem to engage in trade with societies that do. When the wormhole was discovered they had the ability to contact several prospective "buyers".

 

We have no evidence that Borg vessels used dilithium.

IIRC, when the Borg cube in "Q Who" is first scanned, nobody could figure out WHAT its method of propulsion was. No discernible engine core or anything like that. So there's no way to know what powers Borg tech.

 

Except by "Best of Both Worlds Part 1" The Federation has had a year to study the scans taken by the 1701-D; can understand and read its power signatures, And have even analyzed it to the point where Wesley crusher mentions that it would remain tactically effective until 73% of it was destroyed.

Nice attempt at cherry picking though.

 

We also have no evidence that they don't.

 

We’re not getting the Borg this season. Picard s2 maybe, but probably not a fully functional Borg cube.

 

Nothing you "quote" above or in that/those scenes say it's dilithium controlled warp power. Just they can read the signatures.

 

Okay let's do it logically then. By the 27th century when the dilithium shortage hit; I'm sure the Federation has a lot of data on the Borg annd their technology.

If the board had a reliable method of warp technology that didn't employ dilithium crystals; one would think the Federation would quickly switch to it. That they didn't shows that the Borg didn't have an alternate way of making and controlling warp power.

 

Your "being sure" is irrelevant. We don't know the Borg's drive specs. It could be warp drive as we know it but they could be using a totally different method of controlling the matter/anti-matter reaction (that's all that dilithium does). Or they could use the forced singularity core. We don't know.

 

The argument that our TNG heroes couldn't figure it out is a convincing one: the heroes rarely blink at alien technology that only minimally differs from their own.

"Switching over to what the Borg do" doesn't sound doable in general. The Borg are more advanced than the Feds or their peers. We have no metric to determine how many centuries it would take for the UFP to catch up. Do they have personal shields now? Apparently not. So Borg-style warp is an unlikely prospect, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Dilithium is not necessary for warp, it’s only useful to control the intermix in a matter/antimatter reactor. you can have a warp drive that doesn’t rely on M/A (the Romulans definitely do, for example) or a matter/antimatter reactor powering something with no warp drive, such as a station or planet installation.

Regarding the Borg, we just don’t know what they used.

 

I really hope they do...doesn’t sound that far fetched.

Or maybe someone destroyed the Borg turning them into a resource: they sewer their heads to harness their personal shields!

 

I didn’t expect we would. I was speaking more to Disco S4.

 

Please Jesus don’t let the Borg show up in Discovery.
Enough already.

 

Overall, I liked the episode but it raised a lot of questions; it's deepening the mystery of the Burn. I still find it very odd that the characters are all referring to the Burn as if it's something they experienced. The characters of this new world seem to be feeling and lamenting the effects of dilitihum being scarce as if they have a sense of what the old world was like before this event happened. I have been saying from the start of the season that everyone seems to be referring to the Burn as if it just happened.

The scene with David Cronenberg has to be a setting up of what will eventually become the Section 31 series.

Nahn's departure - while in the context of the character was great - carried no emotional weight for me because we've not gotten to know this character very much over the last season. She's been there since the first episode of season 2 and she's barely been given time on screen to make any substantial contributions. I've no doubt we'll see her again, but, I couldn't care less if we don't.

 

Speaking of personal shields, what's the deal with the forcefield-based breathing masks? I mean, they look stupid enough, but why do the heroes switch them off? Why do their shoulder thingamabobs stop burping out vapor? Barzan air is supposed to be real bad for other kinds of life, ever since "The Price". Yet assorted plants thrive in it, and the human heroes seem to be comfortable with it, too. So were the masks superfluous to begin with, and everybody has been inoculated against the air, or gets enough antidote from invisible vapors after the initial puff of visible stuff?

Nhan isn't likely to be gone forever. She's just tasked with completing the mission of janitoring the seed ship till the next team takes over. And we never learn how long this would take. Two years? Fifteen? Three weeks? Plenty of leeway for the actor to return to claim her regular credits status.

Book was very clear on the Burn being an old thing. But that's how it works: for a civilian, WWII was in the previous millennium, thus a thousand years ago or so, but for a soldier, it's not just required learning but also something he needs to pretend happened yesterday, or he couldn't fight it again when the next one comes around.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This is the first time this season I have chimed in, but I have been enjoying the season so far. Even though they are continuing to shoehorn Michael into situations because she is the "star", the writing is leagues ahead of where it was and they are "spreading the love" slowly to other characters.

Speaking of Michael and her misuse, she was probably the last person on the away party to talk to the doctor and make him open the seed vault. Nhan was emotionally invested, but she is still the same race and understands his motivations better than anyone else. Culber actually died and had the emotional baggage to go along with that. And moments later, Nhan has this tear-filled speech about how awesome Michael is.

I'm still confused why the rest of the crew, the eighty plus, decided to come to the future. I can't believe they all felt it was their duty to save the galaxy and if the show decides to try and sell that bill of goods, it will be a misstep.

This should have been a Nhan centered episode if they were going with the Barzan family on the seed ship. We would have called out the similarities to Airiam’s episode last year, but it would have also proven to us that the writers can use other characters in good ways. And why did she need to resign? They indicated the Barzan family only had months left in their tour of duty. Why couldn’t she tell Michael that she came in the future because she truly felt alone back home and this allowed her a true connection to her people and she needed that before she came back? Again, not explaining the motivations of the rest of the crew to travel into the future just causes more bad writing.

They really need to bench Michael for an episode or two and let some other characters take the lead even though she has been better this season. She’s been more human feeling at the end of the day and showed more natural emotion that she has previously.

While I understand Starfleet was being cautious, they were written as antagonists to the Discovery crew and I found that boring. Vance is aggressive, especially with the breaking up the crew idea that has been discussed to death, but file me under the idea that it would make no sense to re-assign the crew to new starships where they have to be brought up to speed or fill Discovery with a 32nd century crew that has no idea how to run it. If I'm Starfleet, I'm thinking about sending this ship, with appropriate envoys, to the worlds that have been cut off and trying to rebuild or at least trade for resources. At the very least, I'd be placating them until I could figure out how to backwards engineer the spore drive. And those new uniforms are ugly, especially the collar with the rank insignia by the throat.

I'm a person that really disliked the Mirror Universe and Section 31 diversions Discovery took in their first two seasons. The idea that David Cronenberg's character is either one of them gets an angry sigh from me. Frankly, having him from some version of Starfleet Intelligence (remember them?), who senses a weakness to exploit in Georgiou, would be stronger. As for her last scene, I'd rather see her rattled by their discussion. Even if she doesn't believe him about what happened in the mirror universe, there is a lot of inflection she could have after finally allowing it to catch up with her.

 

4 Months. They said it on the show. 4 months left of the Barzan having the assignment