I think they mention vaporizing in Nor the Battle to the Strong
A couple of First Contact criticisms.
- Thread starter Gojira
- Start date
In reference to Klingon disruptors.
If I'm not mistaken, Riker vaporized a woman in the TNG episode The Vengeance Factor, using a Starfleet phaser.
^Second season. It was later on that the producers seemed to abandon the disintegration setting.
And in TUC, Chekov comments: "Vhy not simply waporize them?"
That was in the third season actually and don't forget that Cal Huston disintegrated his uniform in The Maquis part II.
Checkov again was using the phrase vaporize...not talking about a setting on the phaser and Spock and Valeris then demonstrated why a phaser could not be used on board a starship.
Not to mention in Chain of Command where they vaporize a hole in a rock wall large enough to crawl through, or Frame of Mind where Riker makes the comment about how his phaser on max would destroy half the hospital he was currently in (which is arguably less reliable because of the nature of the episode, but still).
And again in Deep Space Nine's "Rapture" at the archeological dig. Though you could argue that that that's more "melting" or "burning" than vaporizing. Not that that wouldn't have some of the same practical problem Christopher has mentioned.
...The trope also known as the transporter.
Really, Star Trek would be just another generic scifi show if it didn't have transporters. Death rays that make targets disappear from our universe are a rather natural spinoff technology. And Trek has made a rather explicit connection between phasers and transporters ever since it got its first spinoff show, by applying the terminology of "phasing technology" to both.
Transporters and phasers behave remarkably similarly, teleporting out an arbitrarily shaped object of arbitrary composition but not touching its immediate surroundings. It would appear to be a characteristic of this funny "phasing" phenomenon that the effect truncates at "phase borders", i.e. when body tissue or clothing tissue changes into air or deck duranium. A very neat weapon - and one that would probably require decades of fine-tuning before it stopped teleporting entire enemies out of this universe, and started doing neat little holes in their chests instead.
Timo Saloniemi
I'd pay real money to see a good vaporize phaser effect. They did it in TNG a few times, and the phaser rifles in the Elite Force games could do it, too.
In any case, none of it makes any sense, because everything up until that point told us that the Borg were after the Fed's sweet, sweet, technology, and more or less ignored humans (even ones intruding on their territory) until they became a direct threat. Going back in time to assimilate humanity before they got that tech defeats the purpose. First Contact more or less turned The Borg into time-traveling, mutiplexin' zombies.
Not at all, because it eliminates human beings as "a direct threat."
If you want to split hairs about whether anything about the Borg "makes any sense" then start with the business about wanting the Fed's "sweet, sweet technology" because they consider it in any way sophisticated - point out a major example of something that the Feds can do that the Borg aren't already capable of. From the Borg POV there can't be a lot of difference between Earth in the 22nd century and in the 24th.
In fact, the idea of the Borg attacking Earth because humans are an effective adversary is the only motivation that begins to "make sense" - regardless of the merits of our "distinctive technology" one way or the other, the only important fact about us is that we've interfered effectively with them on more than one occasion.
The way in which stories are told in Star Trek seems to encourage some fans to accept what characters say in the stories as if it's the truth regardless of how well it jibes with what the characters do. Same deal as with the claim that Vulcans are in control of their emotions.
The Federation apparently has tech that was previously unknown to the Borg. During their first encounter, the Enterprise was able to take out large chunks of Borg-hull with their weapons, and disable the ship long enough to board it and snoop around, which must've made the Starfleet weapons and tech rather tasty-looking to the Borg. (There's also the possibility that the Borg were wowed by the apparent ability of the Enterprise to wink in and out of existence, thanks to Q's meddling). After this introduction, the Borg immediately go after the ship and its technology, and ignore the crew, something which is pretty consistent all the way up through the movie in question, First Contact, wherein the drones *still* just stand there and let Federation officers with phasers walk past them unmolested.
So no, I don't really buy that the Borg just want to take out Earth. The lyrics just don't fit in with the song they'd been singin' since 'Q Who'.
The idea that the Q trick fooled the Borg sounds the likeliest to me. But let's remember that the Borg are perfectly willing to harvest species for seemingly insignificant and incremental advances - in "Child's Play", they prod a world for advances in agricultural techniques for which the cyborgs would appear to have little use. There's no need to start thinking that the Feds were exceptionally interesting and appetizing; being of average interest would suffice.
That the Borg would want to eliminate the humans as a threat is a pretty absurd proposition, unless the plan was actually hatched in the future of the 24th century parts of ST:FC, in response to Janeway wreaking noticeable havoc with the Collective...
It would be less absurd to assume that the Borg attacked Earth and traveled back in time for the explicit purpose of enabling Cochrane to contact the Vulcans and thereby create the Federation, whose technological success the Borg would come to depend on. If the Borg didn't lure LaForge to the past, Cochrane might never have gotten his rocket working and there'd be no Federation, and the Borg would have to live on scraps invented by Klingons.
Timo Saloniemi
That the Borg would want to eliminate the humans as a threat is a pretty absurd proposition, unless the plan was actually hatched in the future of the 24th century parts of ST:FC, in response to Janeway wreaking noticeable havoc with the Collective...
It would be less absurd to assume that the Borg attacked Earth and traveled back in time for the explicit purpose of enabling Cochrane to contact the Vulcans and thereby create the Federation, whose technological success the Borg would come to depend on. If the Borg didn't lure LaForge to the past, Cochrane might never have gotten his rocket working and there'd be no Federation, and the Borg would have to live on scraps invented by Klingons.
Timo Saloniemi
No, they don't.
Feds can beam in and out of the Borg ship - just like the Borg can beam in and out of their ship.
Feds can blow bits of the Borg ship up with their weapons - of course, the Borg ship then repairs itself. The Borg can blow up Federation ships too, and the feds don't repair themselves.
There's no evidence - nada - in Star Trek that the Borg consider anything about Federation tech superior to their own. There is plenty of evidence in the other direction - self-repairing ships, transwarp conduits, etc.
The argument that we have anything the Borg would want because it's better doesn't survive even a cursory examination.
Interestly enough, the Borg don't initially describe their intent as acquiring better stuff - just "distinctive" tech. For all we know, that's no more than collecting butterflies and rock specimens. Now, that's not very plausible, granted - the plausible answer is that the writer didn't think very hard about any of this (given that Hurley was the writer, that's not hard to believe).
Really, the only explanation for the attack on Earth that makes any sense is the attempt to eliminate an enemy that's not dangerous because of technology but by virtue of the way we behave. The Borg's attempt to invade Federation space in BOBW, after all, was not defeated by the Federation per se but by a single ship commanded and largely crewed by human beings.
Well, that's the crux of it all, really. And not just one writer, but the later writers picking up the threads of previous ones, and introducing their own ideas, missing the point of their predecessors, etc.
I stand by my statement that in their very first encounter in 'Q Who?', the Borg weren't so superpowerful as they were later portrayed, and Federation phasers, torpedoes, and the mysterious (Q-endowed) capacities of the Enterprise were the tasty treat. The Enterprise DID (temporarily) cripple a Borg Cube with standard phasers and torpedoes, and, had our intrepid crew been less merciful (and curiosity-driven), could've probably atomized the thing. The later badassery of the Borg should be viewed in the light that they adapted to the Starfleet showing, not that they were so advanced and unstoppable from the beginning. Because they demonstrably were not. Therefore, the Borg certainly *did* have a reason to chase after Starfleet tech.
The problem is, after The Best of Both Worlds and the return of the Borg, their storyline should've ended, really (okay, I'll accept 'I, Borg', because it had something new to bring to the concept). BOBW had the Borg return, newly adapted to Starfleet tech, eager to assimilate again. And, again, the idea is that the Borg just want data - and mere humanoids are an impedance; Picard was turned into a 'spokesman-drone' in an attempt to convince pesky humans to give up and let the Borg pursue their goal of 'personal growth' by absorbing new tech, new science, etc. Data. I don't think it's an accident that the whole affair resembles V'ger's refusal to even accept 'carbon units' as life forms; V'ger deployed Ilia - the *template* for Borg Picard - as its avatar-of-sorts to deal with the 'carbon units' because that was the only way it was going to get to what it wanted - the 'life form' which was the Enterprise.
This was all pretty straightforward and internally consistent until First Contact came along, which completely shifted the Borg Goal from a rather inhuman-but-rational goal of self-betterment through assimilating data and knowledge to a goal of merely subjugating races and turning them into drones, which just doesn't make any sense in light of all the scenes in which unBorgified humanoids are allowed to wander through corridors of active Borg who ignore their presence until threatened. That trope is a holdover from the original portrayal of the Borg as tech-heads who don't care about fleshbags.
Of course, after FC, Voyager took that new portrayal and ran with it, and ever since then, the Borg are functionally no different than space-zombies - damn near unkillable, and seek to eat your brains and turn you into one of them.
I applaud Timo's suggestion that the Borg were attempting to not stop Starfleet's creation but ensure it, because it's a great effort to reconcile both behaviors - but, how could the Borg make a plan like that? Starfleet obviously existed in their current time... etc.
Since I've had some time to think about it while writing this post... I'll amend 'I accept I, Borg' to say 'I commend it', because of an element I think has been overlooked - Picard and Co. initially wish to deploy a holographic whatsit as a logic bomb to confound the Borg and cause them to shut down. In the end, they make the (moral?) choice to instead release Hugh, hoping that his individuality will, perhaps mimetically, carry throughout the collective. What I never considered before now is that it's the same plan.
...Kinda.
I've often thought there's a simpler explanation for why they changed the Borg in FC:
It simply worked better for the movie. Having a head "bad guy" in the form of the Borg Queen was a more conventional approach than having a faceless collective as the enemy(they did this before with Locutus).
It's hard to have a faceless, leaderless group for your antagonists.
Second, the quick assimilation through nanoprobes was necessary because the Borg assimilation equipment was on the destroyed cube, and the idea of Borg being able to turn crewmembers into drones quickly through touch makes them much scarier.
So yes, they changed and somewhat ruined the cooler aspect of the Borg, that is their collective, egalitarian nature, and turned them into a dictatorship made up of cyborg zombies.
Then Voyager just went with the change and added overuse to the problem.
It simply worked better for the movie. Having a head "bad guy" in the form of the Borg Queen was a more conventional approach than having a faceless collective as the enemy(they did this before with Locutus).
It's hard to have a faceless, leaderless group for your antagonists.
Second, the quick assimilation through nanoprobes was necessary because the Borg assimilation equipment was on the destroyed cube, and the idea of Borg being able to turn crewmembers into drones quickly through touch makes them much scarier.
So yes, they changed and somewhat ruined the cooler aspect of the Borg, that is their collective, egalitarian nature, and turned them into a dictatorship made up of cyborg zombies.
Then Voyager just went with the change and added overuse to the problem.
To dig deeper into this idea, I feel the primary failure is the notion that an 'antagonist' needs to be a 'bad guy' or 'enemy' in the first place. The best Trek has been about the challenges we face, and the lessons we learn while overcoming those challenges - and I mean the literal 'we', not the editorial one, because those great stories have real-world or personal parallels. These challenges can manifest themselves as 'bad guy enemies', but that should be secondary to the bigger-picture considerations, which - storytelling being a form of art - are:
- What are the notions, concepts, ideas that we can use to tell a story?
- What is the story that we want to tell?
- How will this story resonate with people? That is, how can we make this compelling, emotionally relatable, etc?
- Because our ability to put stuff on screen is inherently limited by way of visual and time constraints, what can we do to stir the imaginations of our audience, so that the audience takes away more from the experience than we directly put into it?
Consider these questions, and keeping them in mind, judge both The Wrath of Khan and Nemesis. They tell almost the exact same story - but TWOK satisfies the above questions, while Nemesis comes across as a paint-by-numbers attempt to re-implement the plot elements of its predecessor while failing to recognize what made those elements work in the first place. It wasn't just 'having a good villain', 'a hero sacrifices himself', 'a doomsday device', etc. The Wrath of Khan told a mature, intelligent, emotional story about: growing old; having, enjoying, and celebrating a purpose ('Your first best destiny is...'); facing responsibility (in facing death or the 'no-win scenario' in a mature, logical fashion rather than trying to cheat it, because that doesn't work in the real world), etc - I could go on. Not to mention the literary allusions - A Tale of Two Cities vs. Moby Dick. AToTC used to bookend the movie; Spock's death in the sunrise of a new world; the best of times, the worst of times, indeed - and Kirk's reflection upon Spock's sacrificial act: 'a far, far better better thing I do than I have ever done'... Sydney Carton's dying words in the book, as he sacrificed his life for similar 'needs of the many' metrics. A pity that Khan's 'Moby Dick' allusion - a man driven blind, or mad, by a need for revenge - was recycled for First Contact, because it engenders the not-inaccurate sense that the Trek franchise was feeding off of itself in later incarnations. Nemesis skipped this second-order narrative altogether, and tried to construct the exact same plot structure that The Wrath of Khan did, while completely omitting the elements that made The Wrath of Khan such a great, resonant story.
And, to bring it back to First Contact, consider the four questions posed above. While a rousing action flick, in my opinion, it didn't consider these questions, while the previous episodic outings with the Borg did - which is why the Borg motivation changed in the film. For instance, instead of, 'What are the notions, concepts, ideas that we can use to tell a story?', it was, 'What's a good threatening bad guy we can use for the good guys to beat?' As a result, the Borg were downgraded from a conceptual challenge - an alien philosophy, contrary to human values, to be confronted (with sci-fi-battle window-dressing) - to literal zombie-like bad guys: the philosophy excised; now just an excuse to tell an action story; no deeper emotional or philosophical element to be probed or analyzed, beyond the cribbing of TWOK's Ahab references.
I have the exact same feelings about the latest cinematic outing.
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