Before going any further I might say that I know this is television entertainment and may not always make absolutely perfect sense but so many questions, help. 'The Best of Both Worlds' part 1 is amazing and I want to like part 2 just as much but it raises so many questions it's almost hard to follow. Maybe people here can offer some explanations to different things in that episode? When they first find Picard assimilated in part 1 and Worf tries to reach him a forcefield is in the way to get to him. When Data and Worf go to get Locutus later there's no forcefield, only few drones around him. Why did the Borg let the Enterprise go after they captured Locutus? They just left Locutus behind and went to assimilate Earth? Might it be that the Borg didn't concider Locutus being on the Enterprise a threat, more like an opportunity for something? Beverly assumes the Borg is possibly unable to disconnect Locutus from the collective but earlier the Borg was able to destroy the shuttle Locutus was in with Data and Worf. What is the difference, being blown into bits is different than breaking their connection? After the battle at Wolf 359 the Enterprise catches up with the Borg ship quite fast? Was the cube damaged in the battle and was slower for the moment than the Enterprise? Perhaps the Borg were repairing the ship ready for assimilating Earth? Also, the Borg seems to be simply stupid and doesn't learn from mistakes.
The scriptwriter and everyone else forgot about part one's plot points? A forcefield would be better because it's not like we've all seen Worf pushed back umpteen times before because of the old trope "If the big guy falls then nobody else stands a chance." The Queen would just blame it on humans' limited three dimensional terms. After Wolf 359, one ship would not be a thread - it would sit there and pew pew phaser away and the Borg ship wouldn't be damaged. They'd just come back later. Then again, why do that when they could disable Enterprise and assimilate everyone there and then before going to Earth to say "Guess what? We have special guest stars Locutus plus a thousand of his people who want to greet you and win you over, as if you have a choice." Yeah, it's an impasse... Destruction vs conscious disconnection could be different things. I'm more amazed Locutus survived the Borg ship self-destruct in the way no Borg did when VOY and STFC had their ships and leaders blown to bits... VOY had episodes where Queen B disconnected droves from the Hive (adaptation to the weakness during Locutus' reign?) Impatience is irrelevant. Only when the script needs to. "Dark Frontier" is quick to show what STFC wouldn't and that's just to send two cubes and be done with it. 90s Trek did get jumbled a bit, more so when it was juggling movies with two active TV shows and while coming up with yet another...
The Borg are likely playing a dangerous game when it comes to sending only 1 cube to attack the Federation. If it succeds great, if it fails you run the risk of the enemy having created a tech you can't adapt to.
Of course, the Borg are likely arrogant enough (or rather, whatever drives them is) to believe there's no such thing as a tech they can't adapt to. Not that the Federation had ever given them any reason to believe otherwise. One wonders what might have happened if the battle with 8472 hadn't been interfered with by Voyager. Would the Borg have feared their own demise enough to voluntarily attempt diplomacy, or would they just keep mindlessly fighting until they were wiped out?
Perhaps that one cube was just a "scout cube" just like in 'Q Who' the Borg sent only one drone to investigate the Enterprise. Later there might be more than one coming.
Perhaps the Enterprise folks knew what to expect and found a way around the forcefield. The Borg are known for not assimilating individuals. Maybe one ship's crew wasn't enough to distract them from assimilating the Earth.
For the Borg, "No man left behind" is more of a mild suggestion than an imperative. When it comes to getting back wayward drones, the Collective's actions have been mixed. Sometimes they go back from them, sometimes they don't. If they lost Locutus, they might have gone back from him after assimilating Earth or they might have just made another person the new Locutus. The Borg Collective don't value people as individuals, they're just commodities to be used and/or disposed of as necessary. Yeah I know the Queen used to make a big deal about Seven of Nine, but that always seemed like spin in her broader schemes to get the Voyager crew assimilated or killed.
The Borg were perhaps not going at maximuml warp from Wolf 359 to Earth, whilst the Enterprise was, and Wolf 359 is likely at least a full days travel away from Earth.
He wasn't fully assimilated in part 1, perhaps that's why he got force field protection so no one takes him before he's 100% under their control, and has his own shields etc. He was supposed to be a 'bridge' between them, and as I recall, he decided to stay. Following her foot analogy, there are situations where a foot needs to be amputated... Maybe they wanted to wait until their chosen speaker arrives and can do his speaking
I'll take a swing at some of these: 1. I can speculate that there was a forcefield around Locutus the first time because the assimilation process had not been completed. Afterward he basically was like every other Borg. 2. Outside of the real-world reasons the series needed the Enterprise-D to not be destroyed or assimilated, I imagine that the Borg let the Enterprise go because they didn't consider it a threat. And they already had Picard's knowledge and experience, and he was still part of their hive mind. He didn't need to be physically on the cube. One of the coolest, and scariest things about the Borg were how nonchalant they were at times. The crew could beam over, the Borg didn't do anything, unless the crew posed a problem. They were so certain that they didn't sweat the small stuff, or regarding the Enterprise-D, the small ship. 3. Not sure about the Beverly question, but I still believe that the Borg still had Picard's knowledge/experience at that time and sacrifice his body. 4. Not sure how the Enterprise caught up so fast. It would've been good to see the Battle of Wolf 359 here so we could see if/how it slowed down the Borg cube. I was hoping when they spliced BOBW together and put it in theaters a few years back I was hoping they would've put in some new footage of Battle of Wolf 359 to really make it special and worth a theater visit. 5. I chalk up Borg stupidity to the writing on TNG but a lot on VOY. Though to try to explain it, the Borg are just very single-minded and certain of their power and superiority.
The reason there was no shield around Locutus was arguably that the Borg were not expecting Riker to do mount a rescue: it was incorrect strategy, after all. Riker did not defeat the Borg by doing what Picard would do, but by doing what he wouldn't.
I always took the lack of forcefield to be down to the gang shooting out a load of power distribution nodes. If it was enough to force the Borg out of warp I could definitely see it taking out their forcefield generators in that area too.
It would be like the difference between having a limb amputated and cutting it off yourself. If later episodes contradict that then, as you say, the Borg adapt.
Thank you everybody who are offering explanations as to why certain things happened. It makes it easier to just enjoy the episode instead of just worrying "why that happened that way". =)
"Classic" Star Trek, in part due to its episodic nature, didn't always fully grapple with the ideas introduced in episode plot-lines and their broader long term implications. Be aware that BOBW probably won't be last episode leaving you with more questions than answers. Don't overthink it too much, just enjoy it for what it is, sci-fi escapism.
Might be the first forcefield wasn't there for any particular anti-Worf purpose. I mean, the Borg don't normally protect their assets that way: their corridors are open to traffic even during firefights. Worf possibly just got unlucky with a wall erected for maintenance purposes. Later on, the Borg choose to battle a whole Starfleet armada, instead of just warping straight to Earth and ignoring the silly fleet. Perhaps Picard deviously managed to convince the Collective that fighting starships was worthwhile, thereby buying time for the heroes to come up with a solution, but also sacrificing 11,000 lives. In other engagements, the Borg always choose to let starships go unless there is a specific agenda to do otherwise. The shuttle was empty because of well-timed beaming action. If the Borg can't spot such action, they wouldn't know Locutus was aboard, either: he was down for the count, the shuttle was trying hard to be stealthy, and a beam-out brought the heroes and their captive aboard. So the Borg might just have been shooting at a random enemy craft with no knowledge of any Locutus-related complications. Or then Beverly was simply wrong, just like Riker was wrong to think the Borg breed by growing kids in a vat. Or then repairing Starfleet wreckage, ENT "Regeneration" style, so that assimilees could be sent to Delta (where we find quite a few of them) in vessels that gradually grow into further Cubes. Getting the Cubification properly started might require initial help from the mother Cube. Mistakes may be the only thing they can learn from, at this stage of their eternal hunt for perfection, so they try to maximize the number they make. Timo Saloniemi