^That question is a complete non sequitur. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the point under discussion.
Borg
- Thread starter James Wright
- Start date
On further consideration, my Borg notion has a shade of similarity to Vulcan's reticence to reveal their relation to the Romulans in the ENT novels. Humans shouldn't care that their enemy is a millenium-distant relation to their greatest and first interstellar ally, but the Vulcans seem the think that they (and others) will care.
Seems to be the same sort of reasoning.
Seems to be the same sort of reasoning.
And yet -- when humanity did find out a century later that the Romulans were related to the Vulcans... they didn't care. It didn't result in any sort of fanatical racist backlash against Vulcans. Maybe a teeny-tiny minority of bigots like Styles would've reacted that way, but on the whole, people didn't blame the Vulcans for the actions of the Romulans. The canonical evidence is that the citizens of the Federation are not as stupid and xenophobic as you seem to expect. Which really should go without saying, because if they were, they never would've joined the Federation in the first place.
kkozoriz1
Fleet Captain
I agree that we didn't see any backlash against Vulcans but I don't see how the absence of something can be taken as evidence that it never happened. It's not like we ever saw Earth or any of the other major planets during the series except in very small part.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
So? That was a single outburst of tension arising from an immediate refugee crisis, a direct conflict over land and resources, and it was ultimately resolved peacefully. It wasn't motivated by some kind of kneejerk xenophobia or some desire to blame an entire species for something a smattering of its members had a peripheral involvement in centuries before. It's a totally different situation from what you're pushing and thus has no relevance. I'm not saying there's never any circumstance in which members of the Federation might come into conflict; I'm saying that the specific basis for conflict you're proposing just doesn't make sense.
How can a story idea be boring? It's how it's written that counts.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
Therin of Andor, there are plenty of boring books/movies out there - which are otherwise well done.
Never said there weren't.
I've paid to watch many boring movies, but you said "Bringing the new caeliar back in the stories would be detrimental - boring, actually" and I can't work out how you know it would be boring? Because it hasn't even been written yet, and such a premise could just as easily be excellent.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
How can I work it out? I already mentioned it in this thread:
"The new caeliar don't have much story potential left in them.
It was exhausted at the end of destiny, when every problem/issue they had was resolved.
No internal conflict (caeliar society being 'perfect'), no external one (their overwhelming power was also established) = no story.
Anyone who could squeeze a story out of the caeliar (such a sterile source) could make a much more interesting story by utilizing other players."
The internal conflict could be the caelier getting used to the new people. They didn't seem all that friendly to the columbia crew if I remember right. Just imagine the type of personalites that millions of people might bring into the mix. The new people getting used to not being borg anymore and most of their or all of their people gone. Or trying to keep the Voyager crew or anyone from finding them. I am curious about what happened to all the former borg and how they are handling their new lives.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
All those who have experienced the caeliar society after it integrated the former borg (Picard and 7 of 9) described it as, I quote, "PERFECT".
Not much potential for internal conflict here.
As for what the caeliar are doing, you can be certain their 'magic level' technology makes acomplishing whaever objectivs they have trivially easy.
In this respect, they're similar to the Q, only they don't have the latter 'stagnation' or 'boredom' issues.
They don't want to be noticed by Voyager? For the caeliar it's trivially easy to be near the ship and be absolutely invisible/undetectable.
All this translates in no external conflict.
Any society can seem perfect for the maybe ten minutes Picard and Seven were connected to it.
Picard and 7 only experienced the gestalt for a very short period of time. Their perception of "perfection" could be woefully flawed, or the gestalt could have easily hidden it from them. Similarly some of the Borg trasformees could (like Hernandez) have a different enough personality that they impress change upon the gestalt in such a way that the Caelier we saw in Destiny aren't even close to the same Caelier they've become. This leaves open many avenues of story telling that don't involve "magic technology" or a perfect and conflict-free utopia.
Also, it apparently isn't trivially easy to do that, since they were stumbled upon twice by two different starships within a couple centuries of each other.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
No society known to men (even trekverse men) could pass for perfect for 10 minutes if you could sense the thoghts/feelings of all its members.
Due to its collective nature, Picard&7 of 9 did a HIGHLY exhaustive exploration of the caeliar society.
In other words, in order to have some stories with caeliar, one needs to devolve them/their society, giving them some problems.
The intent of the writers who described post transformation caeliar was obviously to make their society 'perfect' - there was no ambiguity whatsoever about this.
Even the romulans or klingons can be invisible/undetectable - and they're complete primitifs by comparison with the caeliar.
The caeliar, in all of 5 minutes, assimilated the borg:
They beat the borg by playing the game it was expert at (assimilation), got pass all the collective's formidable defenses, transformed trillions of drones, uncounted artifacts - all this FAR faster than it would take even a subspace message to reach all the collective.
If the caeliar cared enough about being absolutely undetectable (rather than making some half-assed effort - one than can be bested by what, for them, is cave men technology), their 'magic tech' would enable them to do just that effortlessly.
And yet, they couldn't even agree on whether or not the Borg were truly not a threat anymore. Hardly exhaustive.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
O, they agreed the caeliar society was perfect - none of them had the smallest doubt about this. And it was exhaustive.
7 of 9 had issues with a voice inside her head - these were responsible for her fear of borg.
But this is something of a false representation of the Caeliar as described in the book. They are all mentally connected, yes, but they also all have the ability to privitize their thoughts and keep secrets. As evidenced by the fact that the gestalt couldn't agree on certain things, as well as after they brought Hernandez into the gestalt they still kept her on the outside. Then after centuries she was finally let in but she was able to keep her actions interacting with the Titan crew from the rest of the gestalt too. So hiding any imperfections from Picard and Seven would have been (to use your words) "trivially easy."
Unless David Mack comes in and says this specifically I don't see it that way. But even then, it wouldn't be the first time later writers come along and change what another writer intended in the interest of good story telling.
The Caeliar have been actively trying to hide from the rest of the galaxy/universe for millions of years and have been doing so only somewhat successfully. Destiny told of how the Caeliar can and has completely relocated entire civilizations to other galaxies because they encountered them. So not only did the Columbia and Titan stumble on to them, so did apparently a few other smaller civilizations. One would think that if they cared that much about staying out of the sights of the rest of the galaxy and how apparently easy it should be to go undetectable they would have done so by now.
Also why would they go to all the trouble of relocating a civilization to a ridiculously far away place if they could afford to not care that they are being searched for since they could "simply" hide from searchers?
The Caeliar also mentioned that, while they could relocate the entire Federation, doing so would require the movement of pretty much the entire alpha and beta quadrants (and based on the reasons why, probably the entire Dominion and The Borg and every other society the Federation has come into contact with.) What I'm getting at with this is that the Caeliar do have one apparent thing they can't do, and that's screw with the minds of other living things in such a way that they simply forget that they ever encountered the Caelier to begin with, instead they resort to other more drastic and less effective ways of getting rid of outsiders. This makes them (from my perspective) less powerful and less magical than say Q. Because I'm under the impression Q could absolutely do that if he/they wanted to.
So, like Q, I see the Caelier as having plenty of potential for good stories, even given their god-like magical powers and their allegedly perfect society. I'm pretty sure that before Voyager introduced the Q civil war that we would have thought the continuum were pretty much perfect too.
In fact I'd love to see a story that involved both the Caelier and the Q, it could offer us a decent non-fantasy like explanation for why Q is so magically powerful and potentially display a lack of some powers when dealing with the Caeliar. (Note: I've not read all Q books so we may already have a non-fantasy explanation of Q).
He has. All the surprise witnesses in "Death Wish" had their memories of their visit to Voyager removed. Considering that the Federation and it's peers can do mind-manipulation, though, I'd imagine it's one of the Caeliar's ethical qualms and not a technical barrier.
Indeed, I had forgotten about that Q example.
As for the Caeliar, perhaps that could provide the limitations needed to tell a good story for the Caeliar, their ethical limitations.
Similar threads
