I think that's pretty clearly what Michael Piller intended. After all, the wormhole aliens' avatars mostly only appeared in the contexts they occupied in Sisko's memory -- he didn't just see Jake, he saw Jake at the fishing hole or the baseball field, and he didn't just see Locutus, he saw Locutus on the viewscreen of the Saratoga bridge. For the most part, even later on, that was usually the way people experienced the wormhole aliens. It's not the same as the Q Continuum, though, because in that case, Q (or Quinn) was responsible for creating the illusion for the benefit of human observers. For instance, Quinn chose to represent the Continuum as an arid wasteland because that was what he felt it had become, and later, Q chose a US Civil War setting as a metaphor for the Q's civil war. In the case of the wormhole aliens, they weren't doing it deliberately; after all, they didn't even know what Sisko was when he entered their realm, or how human memory and time perception worked (not in Piller's original conception, anyway). What he experienced was just his own mind scrambling for analogies in its own memory to map onto what it perceived, in the absence of other sensory input. I don't think their true form is something that can be seen. If they existed in a realm that followed our physical laws and had bodies that reflected light, then Sisko could've perceived them and his brain wouldn't have needed to make analogies. Besides, time doesn't exist in their realm, so how could light or sound travel and bounce off of things? It's not about "handling," it's that there's simply nothing to perceive in the conventional sense. I think the most literal representation we've seen of the wormhole aliens' realm is the pure white void that people perceive before and between the visions. The visions are what they sense mentally when the Prophets communicate with them. Basically they're in a sensory-deprivation environment, so the imagination takes over and creates hallucinations to fill the emptiness. I don't think Borg drones would be permitted imagination. Any such distractions from their role as cogs in the machine would be suppressed -- as would their memories of their past lives, so there'd be little to draw on for the creation of analogies. I think that the Collective would perceive the Prophets much as it presents and perceives itself -- as a faceless chorus of voices, a non-localized consciousness.
Christopher do you think under any circumstances it would be possible for the Borg to assimilate the prophets?
They couldn't even assimilate Species 8472 because they had no blood, right? It would be pretty much impossible to assimilate a non-corporal lifeform. And even when the wormhole aliens possess a physical host they appear to have absolut control over them, so even if that host would be assimilated they could probably leave the body, eliminate the nanoprobes or kill the host. Then again the Borg could just fire a chroniton beam towards the wormhole to kill the Prophets to death.
No blood? I thought the reason the Borg couldn't assimilate Species 8472 was because their immune system destroyed the nanoprobes.
I'd say the very idea is nonsensical. How do you impose a change on a being that exists outside of time? Whatever it is now, it always has been and always will be. Also, the wormhole aliens don't have a physical form in terms of our universe's laws and definitions. If their nature is so alien it can't even be directly perceived by physical senses, how could physical objects like nanoprobes even detect it, let alone act upon it? Not to mention that the wormhole aliens appear to have complete control over what goes on within their realm, what's allowed to be within it and what isn't. We saw that in ways ranging from their expulsion of Dax in "Emissary" to their vanishing of an entire Dominion fleet in "Sacrifice of Angels." As soon as they recognized the Borg as "aggressive, adversarial," they'd probably give 'em the boot. After all, they learned from Sisko that the nature of corporeal, temporal beings is to seek change and growth. The Borg are trapped in the opposite mindset -- despite all their claims of striving for "perfection," they're really seeking stagnation and uniformity. Their development is arrested. The Prophets would probably deem the Borg barely worthy of their attention and just Orb them right outta there. I find it odd how some people want to exaggerate the Borg's power and advancement and imagine them as somehow greater than even the mightiest of Trek superraces -- like, there's this story in Strange New Worlds where they somehow assimilate the Q. I mean, whaa? The Borg aren't remotely near that level of existence. They're ordinary corporeal beings linked by technology. The only transcendent thing about them is their appetite. They're primitive compared to machine life like V'Ger, and even V'Ger was only at the beginning of its evolution to higher planes of existence. The Q are pretty much at the top of the hierarchy of godlike aliens; only the Douwd seem to be comparable in effortless reality-transforming power, and there are numerous tiers of superbeings that appear to be somewhat below that level, e.g. the Organians, the Edo god, Nagilum, the Nacene, etc. Granted, the novelverse linked the Borg's origins to the Caeliar, who were quite the superrace in their own right -- but it also established that Borg nanoprobes were a degenerated, far less capable version of Caeliar catoms. Basically they were a product of devolution, a profound malfunction that propagated like a cancer.
To be fair, there's also this Litverse book where they threaten to, and partially sorta kinda accomplish a portion of, assimilating the Q too. I mean, Peter David, yeah, but still. (I agree with you on principle though yeah.)
Canon does state they can be killed-chroniton radiation. They way I see it if they can be killed they can be assimilated.
The concept of canon for a thing like Star Trek with numerous individuals with creative input over the course of several decades is essentially a load of bollocks.
Yeah, well, later DS9 really lost sight of the original concept behind the wormhole aliens and dumbed them down into just one more incorporeal super-race. They started out so intriguingly alien, something so different we could barely comprehend them, which was a great science-fiction idea -- but the downside was that later writers could barely comprehend them either and thus oversimplified them into something much more cliched and uninteresting.
Perhaps non-corporeal lifeforms can be killed by specific types of radiation, but they're still unable to be assimilated as they're non-corporeal. Now, if one of them, say Sarah, was assimilated while in corporeal form, would she be able to "change back" before the Borg programming took over, or could she get stuck in physical form?
Sarah herself wasn't a Prophet, she was just 'inhabited' by one. As soon as it left her, she left Ben. So I suppose a Borg could have tried to assimilate Sarah, but the Prophet might be able to kill the nanoprobes in her.
If you make something so out there and hard to grasp its fairly predictable that well it will be too hard to grasp.
I don't think that follows, because they're two very different processes. That's kind of like saying that if a piece of iron can be melted, it can be made into ice cream. Just because some things that can be melted can also be made into ice cream, that doesn't mean it's invariably the case. Anyway, chronitons are the particles involved in temporal phenomena. They're capable of moving through time, and of existing outside of time, so it does somewhat stand to reason that if anything could affect beings existing in non-linear time and causality, it would be chronitons. But it's a complete non sequitur to assume that opens the door to a more conventional, linear phenomenon like assimilation.
This is starting to descend into "Goku vs. Superman" here, honestly. Yeah, you could make up some kind of means by which the Borg could theoretically assimilate the Prophets, but is there anywhere constructive the discussion could possibly go coming up with justification after justification? I mean, literally anything someone responds with, you could come up with a way to theoretically get around it. And then someone else could point out a flaw in that, and you could cover the flaw, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. It's only going to end when one side or the other gets bored, not when some conclusion is reached.