FC plothole? Why didn't the Borg create the vortex in the Delta Q?

[DostoyevskyClone]

My apologies if this has been brought up before, but it just occurred to me: why didn't the Borg create the temporal vortex in their own galaxy, thereby precluding any possibility that they would be interfered with?

I'm assuming they traveled from the Delta Quadrant. Couldn't they have just made the same journey...but in 2063? If they had done this, wouldn't this have assured they met no resistance when entering Earth's orbit?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I thought the time travel was plan B, hastily implimented once plan A (Fly cube to Earth. Destroy. Assimilate. etc.) failed and the queen got her knickers in a twist.

 

[MacLeod]

Another Plot hole, is why not just use the transwarp conduit that exits about 1 ly from Earth. (VOY: Endgame) of course it might not have been constructd at that point.

 

[Christopher]

The Borg having time travel at all is a huge plot hole. If they already had the ability to go back in time and change history, why haven't they already done so and assimilated the whole galaxy retroactively? It's also out of character for them; when they suffer a setback, they just accept it and keep on pushing forward until they overwhelm it by sheer numbers and persistence. (I offered a possible explanation for this inconsistency in my novel Watching the Clock.)

 

[6079SmithW]

It is possible that the Borg had just recently invented/assimilated the time travel technology and it was not a sure thing. If the technology was new and not completely refined, perhaps they only had enough power for one time travel trip. With regards to the location of the trip, maybe they thought it would be more efficient to time travel physically close to earth so they wouldn't have to travel a long distance once the time travel trip was complete.

 

[R. Star]

Because the heroes couldn't follow them if they time traveled in the Delta Quadrant.

 

[Christopher]

It is possible that the Borg had just recently invented/assimilated the time travel technology and it was not a sure thing. If the technology was new and not completely refined, perhaps they only had enough power for one time travel trip.

But that happened in 2373, and we know the Federation is still intact as late as 2387. If the Borg got time travel once, then presumably all Borg would've had the knowledge from then on, and could've built another device. So the galaxy would still be screwed.

Giving the Borg time travel at all was a very bad idea storywise -- it opens a huge can of worms that the screenwriters didn't bother to address because it was nothing more than a plot gimmick to them. It would've been better if they'd had the Borg and the Enterprise thrown into the past by accident -- say, "Yesterday's Enterprise" style, with the energies of the battle interacting with a natural cosmic phenomenon and creating a time rift.

 

[MrJ]

(I offered a possible explanation for this inconsistency in my novel Watching the Clock.)

Which is awesome, by the way.

It is possible that the Borg had just recently invented/assimilated the time travel technology and it was not a sure thing. If the technology was new and not completely refined, perhaps they only had enough power for one time travel trip.

But that happened in 2373, and we know the Federation is still intact as late as 2387. If the Borg got time travel once, then presumably all Borg would've had the knowledge from then on, and could've built another device. So the galaxy would still be screwed.

Giving the Borg time travel at all was a very bad idea storywise -- it opens a huge can of worms that the screenwriters didn't bother to address because it was nothing more than a plot gimmick to them. It would've been better if they'd had the Borg and the Enterprise thrown into the past by accident -- say, "Yesterday's Enterprise" style, with the energies of the battle interacting with a natural cosmic phenomenon and creating a time rift.

None of the TNG films were well regarded for their writing. Your idea is better than what we got.

 

[EmperorTiberius]

Alternativelly, Borg could have sent 2 cubes and the jig would be up.

 

[F. King Daniel]

There was something in one of the DS9 Millenium trilogy novels, where someone asks why the Federation's enemies don't just keep going back in time to conquer Earth in the past. Worf said the Klingon Empire did try, a century ago. They sent fleets back using the slingshot maneuver, but they were never heard from again. It was originally thought they were destroyed going back through time, but another later theory was that they travelled back and succeeded - but in doing so branched off alternate timelines (this was written almost a decade before STXI, btw). So maybe the Borg tried and tried, but Borg-Prime never benefited?

 

[R. Star]

The problem with that is, it worked in the case of First Contact... they did change the Prime timeline.

 

[blueziggy]

i never had a problem with it. its a little convoluted but:

-if the borg go back in time and assimilate earth before earth develops certain technologies what would become of those technologies? would they just disappear?

-its always stated that the borg want the biological and cultural distinctiveness of each race it assimilates. why would you completely assimilate a culture at a point when its at its infancy? assimilating everyone never made sense because then there would be no growing. leaving a few hundred thousand to continue the culture makes more sense.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The problem with that is, it worked in the case of First Contact... they did change the Prime timeline.

Good point.

Unless that "temporal wake" that hit sucked the Enterprise-E into the resultant alternate timeline... and the other survivors of the fleet are left forever wondering where the Borg sphere and the Enterprise vanished to. Not exactly dramatically satisfying...

 

[DonIago]

^That would be how I'd interpret it though, much like how Nero and Spock jumped tracks.

One wonders whether Our Heroes checked their quantum signatures when they returned to the future to ensure they were back where they were supposed to be.

 

[blueziggy]

^That would be how I'd interpret it though, much like how Nero and Spock jumped tracks.

One wonders whether Our Heroes checked their quantum signatures when they returned to the future to ensure they were back where they were supposed to be.

it wouldn't matter since picard is still stuck in the nexus anyway.

 

[R. Star]

^That would be how I'd interpret it though, much like how Nero and Spock jumped tracks.

One wonders whether Our Heroes checked their quantum signatures when they returned to the future to ensure they were back where they were supposed to be.

it wouldn't matter since picard is still stuck in the nexus anyway.

Well Picard in the Nexus got us the X-men movies.

 

[NKemp3]

My apologies if this has been brought up before, but it just occurred to me: why didn't the Borg create the temporal vortex in their own galaxy, thereby precluding any possibility that they would be interfered with?

I'm assuming they traveled from the Delta Quadrant. Couldn't they have just made the same journey...but in 2063? If they had done this, wouldn't this have assured they met no resistance when entering Earth's orbit?

At the very least if the Bog were going to break off of their plan by abandoning an attack on the "modern" Earth of the TNG days, they could have at least waited until they had flown back towards the Delta and then pulled their time travelling stunt once they were out of view of the Federation. Its a flaw some of us have been pointing out since the far away days of the ST AOL forums.


Of course VOY made it worse by giving us a glimpse of the hundreds of cubes the Borg appeared to have at their disposal. So why send one to attack Earth? Especially considering it carried a very important piece, albeit contrived, cargo in the form of The Queen.

 

[DonIago]

Meh, I assume that any Borg ship has the ability to create the queen as needed.

 

[Christopher]

Of course VOY made it worse by giving us a glimpse of the hundreds of cubes the Borg appeared to have at their disposal. So why send one to attack Earth?

Because it's a very, very big galaxy and Earth is just one very remote part of it as far as the Borg are concerned. Given how vast their territory is, they must be at war with thousands of different civilizations at any given time as they strive to expand their territory. Our attention as viewers is focused exclusively on the Federation and its ships, but the Borg's attention must be primarily directed toward those thousands of other civilizations that we know nothing about because their battles with the Borg are taking place in what, to us, are remote and unknown parts of the galaxy. So the Federation was very, very far from being the Borg's highest priority. It was interesting to them, interesting enough that they wanted to assimilate it, but not so important that they would allocate more than a single cube at a time to the effort, not when their cubes were needed in so many other battles far closer to home.

Of course, Voyager destroying the Borg's transwarp hub and Unicomplex would've changed that, raising the Federation from a source of curiosity and a minor nuisance to the level of a major threat. And in the Destiny trilogy in the novels, we see what happens when the Borg really do make the Federation their priority.

Meh, I assume that any Borg ship has the ability to create the queen as needed.

As I see it, the Queen isn't really a person, just sort of a coordinating nexus for the collective consciousness. The physical body is just a substrate for what's basically a software entity. So any individual Queen body is expendable. If one is destroyed, a new one has the Queen software downloaded into it.

 

[Tom]

It could be that only the Sphere had the abilty to travel in time. But they needed a a Cube to carry the Sphere because it may have not had the long range abilty the Cube had. Also, the Sphere was very weak as we saw, it destroyed with just 3? Quantum torpedo's. So the Cube was needed to get it to Earth, once near there it could have gone back in time. I think that is a reasonable explanation.