Failure to Assimilate

[Mr Silver]

Janeway, Torres and Tuvok must be the luckiest drones in existence. They not only avoided being completely assimilated into the collective (save for Tuvok briefly being influenced by the Queen) but they came away with no permanent effects!

What I mean by "permanent effects" is that none of them had their eyes or arms removed in favour of superior Borg prosthesis. Did they avoid this because the EMH provided them with something to influence the Borg's choice in drone assignment, or did the Borg simply not finish the full assimilation process? After all, there was an insurrection going on and three new drones are three new drones, regardless of them not being fully outfitted with Borg technology.

Look at Seven for instance, she's more machine than human even with the majority of her implants removed. She still has a giant green crystal in her brain, a copper skull coating and a bionic eye! Furthermore, her cortical implant, assimilation tubules and a few other bits and pieces cannot be removed - whereas those same things were completely removed from the undercover trio upon their return to Voyager.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Seriously this, something just exactly like this, was posted like two days ago.

The Borg suspected a trap?

Put those drones into a sealed pocket of the collective.

Assimilated them in safemode?

Humans have been associated with some nasty collective ending viruses in there day and they would have been fools not to have a couple in their blood... Was this before or after Icheb?

It's year before Icheb, but a couple months after Infinite Regress, and then there's what happened to Hugh, and there's the virus Geordie wrote...

Does anyone seriously believe that virus... Sorry, "logic loop" would have phased the Borg for more than a few seconds?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Sounds familiar.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

"What we have here is a failure to assimilate." - Paul Newman of Borg

 

[Anwar]

Janeway, Torres and Tuvok must be the luckiest drones in existence. They not only avoided being completely assimilated into the collective (save for Tuvok briefly being influenced by the Queen) but they came away with no permanent effects!

What I mean by "permanent effects" is that none of them had their eyes or arms removed in favour of superior Borg prosthesis. Did they avoid this because the EMH provided them with something to influence the Borg's choice in drone assignment, or did the Borg simply not finish the full assimilation process? After all, there was an insurrection going on and three new drones are three new drones, regardless of them not being fully outfitted with Borg technology.

Look at Seven for instance, she's more machine than human even with the majority of her implants removed. She still has a giant green crystal in her brain, a copper skull coating and a bionic eye! Furthermore, her cortical implant, assimilation tubules and a few other bits and pieces cannot be removed - whereas those same things were completely removed from the undercover trio upon their return to Voyager.

Anyone got any ideas?

Same reason Picard didn't have any of HIS parts removed when he was turned into Locutus?

 

[Deks]

Easy.
There's a period of time before humanoids become too dependent on Borg technology for survival.
7 of 9 was part of the collective for 18 years, and as such, her body developed dependency on some of the technology (at least until Federation science advances to the point where they can be removed and regular body parts would be able to resume their function).
The neonatal drones Voyager encountered (Icheb and the kids) were recently assimilated and emerged from maturation chambers prematurely... which probably caused them to have even less implants than 7, and Icheb was able to donate his cortical node to 7, after which (and with assistance from his personally devised genetic re-sequencing technique) he was able to resume functioning without problems.

Finally, Picard was part of the collective for what, days?
It probably wasn't enough time for his body to become too dependent on the Borg tech.
Same goes for Tuvok, Janeway and Torres.
They were assimilated for a few days at best.

As for amputated body parts... Picard never had his hand amputated... merely had an addon installed.
I would surmise that different drones have their body parts amputated... these would probably be highly specialized drones (such as medical ones), and it's possible that once they were assimilated, Janeway/Tuvok/Torres weren't assigned any highly specialized functions that would require amputation.

From what I was able to tell, the majority of body armor and whatnot stems from the nanoprobes.

 

[The Dominion]

Was this before or after Icheb?

It's year before Icheb,

It was after Icheb, he came on around the end of season 6.

"What we have here is a failure to assimilate." - Paul Newman of Borg

This is the best thing I have ever read.

 

[You_Will_Fail]

Only one of many reasons why I despised "Unimatrix Zero", the chief reason being the writing was just BAD. Its amazing the wonderful "Workforce" could come from the same writing team at this stage.

 

[Anwar]

But Picard was assimilated without losing any body parts. So why should the VOY crew get off harder than him?

 

[Deks]

Of course.
And as I said... we do have certain evidence from 'Dark Frontier' (Voy episode) where the Doctor recovered an biomechanical arm which belong to a medical-repair drone apparently, and the Doc wanted to use it to revolutionize his way of doing surgery.

This 'might' suggest that certain drones which are assigned 'highly specialized tasks' require amputation.
In the case of Voyager's away team in Unimatrix Zero, they were not assigned any specialized tasks.

Furthermore, it's possible that amputations are only done if necessary.
Body parts can still be retained without the need of amputation as evident in Picard's case. Furthermore, perhaps fingers in an arm that has a biomechanical attachment requires in some cases existence of fingers.

 

[Mr Silver]

Picard was only partially assimilated, his appearance in comparison to the other heavily machine augmented drones is clear. He did have a unique function though, so perhaps he didn't require any serious surgical modifications. The Borg were only using him for his knowledge and to speak for them in dealings with humans.

Going by what's seen in FC, the process of assimilation is something like this...

1) Nanoprobes injected into bloodstream create the core implants such as, the neurotransciever that connects a drone to the collective and modifies the body to shed hair and circulate an organic compound throughout the blood stream. The nanoprobes also create the drones assimilation tubules and the implants that create a personal shield when the Borg have adapted to weapons.

2) Surgery is performed where an eye and/or limb is removed and replaced with prosthetics related to the drones specific function.

3) Exo-plating is attached to the drone.

 

[Anwar]

Not really, he only looked less assimilated at first because the process wasn't complete. He looked more like the other drones in BOBW part 2, except they left off enough for Patrick Stewart to be able to act through it. THAT was why he didn't have spinny things out of his eye socket.

He's proof that being assimilated doesn't require having your body parts removed.