Borg of Enterprise....
- Thread starter Dark-prophet
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I am pretty sure that Riker and Laforge knew enough about time travel to avoid leaving evidence of their involvement in the first flight, I doubt they stopped and had their photo's taken. Cochrane probably changed the details in his report when it came to his co-pilots.
I do like the idea of the self fore filling prophecy re the Borg and that it was the NX-01's Borg that sent the signal that brought the Borg travelling towards earth in the first place.
I'm with @Albertese on all of this, and, I'll throw in one more bit of "evidence": we seem to know from "In A Mirror Darkly" that the events surrounding FC *also* resulted in the branch that led to the Mirror Universe. So it could be taken that that event is the shatter point for a large number of divergent quantum realities.
Actually, the mirror universe existed well before First Contact. The opening credits of IAMD bear this out (re: MU Neil Armstrong). Also: Remember Phlox's thoughts about Earth literature? He points out the differences.
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No, first contact in Mirror Darkly shows a very different Cochrane to that seen in the movie. They should have given him beard just to make it clear - as if shooting a Vulcan in the chest wasn't clear enough.
I actually think all of Enterprise was "supposed" to happen in all other Trek shows, EXCEPT for Regeneration, since we know time was changed in First Contact. The TCW/Xindi was history by TOS.
Temporarily, yes. The Borg-infested Earth was the only time that was changed. Eventually, it got changed right back.
The Hansen's got their ideas about cybernetic creatures from somewhere.
I guess that would depend on if anyone took photos at the time. It didn't look like anyone did.
And, hey, shouldn't this be in the ENT forum?
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Generations, and the rescued El Aurians who briefed Starfleet on the threat.
No it's discussing different shows and movies. It's fine here.
Although it appears they did not. Or at least Starfleet's great show of ignorance about the Borg, in "Q Who?", coincides with the presence of one of these supposed witnesses!
Harriman and the other 23rd century folks never learned onscreen what the El-Aurians were fleeing from, although they appeared familiar with the concept of "El-Aurian refugees" from the get-go. Oddly enough, Soran appeared to be the only one actually wanting to go back to the Nexus. Sign that he had been deeper in the Nexus than any of the other victims, for whatever reason - or that he was the only one (besides Guinan) to have lost loved ones to the Borg and for that reason wishing for the alternate reality where that wouldn't have happened?
In any case, neither Soran nor Guinan appears to have witnessed the actual assimilation of anything much. Their very survival probably depended on them not being actual eyewitnesses. At best, they could repeat the distress calls they had heard from their homes. Would those really be all that informative?
Guinan had nothing to offer in "Q Who?" either way: perhaps she was being stubbornly unhelpful for whatever reason, meaning she would have been that back in the 23rd century already, or perhaps she really was ignorant about anything of relevance about the Borg besides their name.
Timo Saloniemi
What's funny is that in the very first TNG episode about the Borg, Guinan had to tell Picard who they were. You'd think he would have already known if the Federation had rescued survivors from their attack 70 years before. Maybe Starfleet never seriously considered them a threat because the Delta Quadrant was so far away?
From Guinan's example it would seem El-Aurians like to travel. Might be none of the refugees came from the Delta Quadrant, or even from anywhere near El-Auria which supposedly lies much closer (somewhere near J-25 which is very much in Alpha/Beta still).
The two ships hauling the refugees are in Federation registry if we believe the (not really readable) Okudagrams. Not coming from the edges of the universe, then (unless they were re-registered and, in the case of the [iRobert Fox[/i], renamed on the run).
Timo Saloniemi
The two ships hauling the refugees are in Federation registry if we believe the (not really readable) Okudagrams. Not coming from the edges of the universe, then (unless they were re-registered and, in the case of the [iRobert Fox[/i], renamed on the run).
Timo Saloniemi
I'm sure there was likely more than one source of information on the Borg considering all the contact with them prior to "Q, Who". Picard and the Enterprise crew seem to be about the only one's that don't know about them.
Unless I've forgotten some important bit of dialogue here, there's nothing to indicate the cube was heading in any particular direction with regard to the federation, it appears on the forward viewscreen, that's about it.
Even if we make a rather shaky leap to the assumption it was directly in front of the E all along and at no point did they turn to face it (which seems to be standard practice) that still means nothing. Watch the means by which Q transported them there, they span around all the way to the Delta Quadrant. They could have ended up facing any direction.
So the best we have is that:
if the E ended up facing directly away from federation space (pretty unlikely on balance) and:
if she didn't turn at some point without us being made aware of it (which happens literally all the time) and:
if the cube hadn't changed course to investiagte the E (what with having better sensor technology),
then maybe the cube happened to be moving generally towards the federation, or at the very least not further away. From any given position in space that would still cover a lot of possible vectors and destinations.
Given this dubious string of suppositions and assumptions it then takes quite some leap of logic to claim "so they must have picked up the signal sent by the "Regeneration" Borg". Why must they? In fact why would we even consider it a particularly merit worthy hypothesis?
The truth is we don't know what direction they were travelling, where they were going, or what they intended to do when they got there. There is pretty much nothing in the episode (or subsequent ones) to suggest anything of note about that particular cube amongst the thousands of others prowling the DQ other than it happened to be the one nearest the E when she arrived.
The big mystery is, why should our heroes think the Borg come from / live on the Delta Quadrant? I mean, they do (think so - Crusher says so in ST:FC), and they do (live there - VOY shows this to the audience), but there's no reason our heroes should be aware of that.
The system J-25 in "Q Who?" was clearly not in the Delta Quadrant, as that quadrant would be tens of thousands of lightyears from the Federation yet the system was only about 7,000 ly from the vicinity of SB 173. The Borg hideout in "Descent" was explicitly in the Delta Quadrant, yet this is best possible proof for the Borg not living there, as the hideout was for hiding from the Collective! Nothing connects the Borg to Delta until Crusher for no good reason speaks the line in ST:FC. Did Starfleet have adventures with the Borg that we did not get to see?
Well, they did. Or at least the Borg advanced and the UFP fell back, something we never saw happen but Picard insists upon. Either it happened off screen in connection with a Picard adventure (say, the Borg took over the Argolis Cluster after "I, Borg") or it involved other sets of heroes. Those might have discovered the Delta connection, then.
VOY paints a picture of an ancient and omnipresent Collective, matching Guinan's and Q's early vague descriptions from "Q Who?" - except when VOY shows Delta natives commenting upon the Borg and apparently mistaking them for a much more local/localized culture of lesser age. The infamous Species Numbers rather suggest that humans are well known to the Borg long before Picard's time (indeed, long before human spaceflight), too. And "Dark Frontier" gives the angle where the Borg are everywhere but reveal themselves nowhere until they deem it fit. So the whole concept of "the Borg coming from a direction / to a destination" is probably invalid to begin with. The Borg already cover the entire Milky Way, and they assimilate species at their leisure - and before doing so, they extensively toy with them, as in "Child's Play". So the events of ST:FC and "Regeneration", even if connected, are fairly insignificant to the Borg/Earth relationship overall.
Timo Saloniemi
The system J-25 in "Q Who?" was clearly not in the Delta Quadrant, as that quadrant would be tens of thousands of lightyears from the Federation yet the system was only about 7,000 ly from the vicinity of SB 173. The Borg hideout in "Descent" was explicitly in the Delta Quadrant, yet this is best possible proof for the Borg not living there, as the hideout was for hiding from the Collective! Nothing connects the Borg to Delta until Crusher for no good reason speaks the line in ST:FC. Did Starfleet have adventures with the Borg that we did not get to see?
Well, they did. Or at least the Borg advanced and the UFP fell back, something we never saw happen but Picard insists upon. Either it happened off screen in connection with a Picard adventure (say, the Borg took over the Argolis Cluster after "I, Borg") or it involved other sets of heroes. Those might have discovered the Delta connection, then.
VOY paints a picture of an ancient and omnipresent Collective, matching Guinan's and Q's early vague descriptions from "Q Who?" - except when VOY shows Delta natives commenting upon the Borg and apparently mistaking them for a much more local/localized culture of lesser age. The infamous Species Numbers rather suggest that humans are well known to the Borg long before Picard's time (indeed, long before human spaceflight), too. And "Dark Frontier" gives the angle where the Borg are everywhere but reveal themselves nowhere until they deem it fit. So the whole concept of "the Borg coming from a direction / to a destination" is probably invalid to begin with. The Borg already cover the entire Milky Way, and they assimilate species at their leisure - and before doing so, they extensively toy with them, as in "Child's Play". So the events of ST:FC and "Regeneration", even if connected, are fairly insignificant to the Borg/Earth relationship overall.
Timo Saloniemi
Although you say that with great certainty, there's nothing to confirm that in canon. While ENT used timeline messing extensively and that has been used to hand wave away some of the continuity issues, we are left with the USS Defiant we see in In A Mirror Darkly. That ship was, at least to all visual appearances, the exact same ship that vanished in The Tholian Web, from the original prime timeline, and it's databases contained profiles on the Enterprise NX-01 and Archer, listing him as famous explorer, UFP President, Admiral, and the namesake of two worlds. This leads me to two conclusions: firstly, that something roughly the same as the ENT series is canonically part of the prime timeline which lead to TOS, and secondly that the Kelvin destruction genuinely created a new timeline at that point which altered what happened after it (and potentially, given star Trek's passion for predestination paradoxes, what had gone before - do the Kelvin timeline Borg go back in time at all?).
But if no new timeline was created by STFC, the events of Regeneration were also always part of the other shows' history. They were just the effect of a cause that was still to come.
This also makes the 'it's a new timeline when they go back' thing difficult - the Enterprise crew see the effect of an historical change straight away, in real time, in their own timeline. They haven't had a chance to cross universes at that stage, yet they see an assimilated planet. It appears the Borg traveled back to the history of that particular timeline/universe, so it makes sense that by using the same portal, the E-E does too.
In general, I agree with @Timo - there were lots of opportunities for word of the Borg or fragments of evidence of their existence to reach the Federation over the years, and there is strong evidence in the dialogue of STFC that there were Borg encounters we didn't see on-screen.
It's also quite reasonable Picard and co wouldn't know of the events of Regeneration when they met the Borg in Q Who - it was one incident, hundreds of years before, and other than the word 'cybernetic' they'd have nothing to make the connection until they've already got more data than the historical stuff would give them anyway. We know that the Hansens were seen as a bit nuts for pursuing the rumours about the Borg and as such publications on the subject were probably not frequent or common knowledge.
The continuity of how much Starfleet knew about the Borg and when they knew it went awry back in "Q Who?" and "The Best of Both Worlds". In the former, it's established that the Borg attack on J-25 matches the mysterious attack on an outpost in "The Neutral Zone" from Season 1...yet at the end of the episode, Picard still acts shocked at the realization that "they'll be coming". Likewise, in BOBW, Starfleet acts suprised that the Borg managed to get to them so soon. Hello? You guys already knew that there was likely already a Borg cube operating in Federation space back in Season 1!
I wonder if you could spin that not as sloppy writing but the rules of Chaos Theory apply to time travel, that is, strange attractors to certain timelines.
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