Federation Alarm in a Borg ship?

[SS.Scientific]

Last week when I was watching VOY episode Dark Frontier,I suddenly noticed that the alarm sounded in the Borg Probe when Voy beamed a torpedo into it was identical to the alarm sound played in the TNG episode All Good Things,when Pasteur suffered from a warp core breach.

Are there any in-universe explanation for the identical alarm presented in two totally different factions?

 

[The Wormhole]

This goes on all the time. The Defiant's red alert was used on Qo'Nos at the end of Redemption Part 2. The Scimitar's intruder alert is a Starfleet warp core breach alarm. The Son'a intruder alert is the same as a Cardassian red alert.

Hell, Trek alarms get used outside the Trek franchise too. Voyager's red alert was used in a Russian military base in The Sum of All Fears. The NX-01's warp core breach alarm in Shockwave is the general alarm used on the Taelon Mothership in Earth Final Conflict, if you want an example of the reverse.

 

[somebuddyX]

Ferengi conned both groups into buying the same product.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Are there any in-universe explanation for the identical alarm presented in two totally different factions?

They assimilated it.

 

[Christopher]

A better question is, why the hell would a hive mind need audible alert sirens? As soon as one drone notices the threat, every other drone immediately knows it through their mental link. It's as bad as that later VGR episode where the Queen was giving spoken instructions to drones, which is like me having to verbally instruct my fingers which keys to type.

 

[DonIago]

A better question is, why the hell would a hive mind need audible alert sirens? As soon as one drone notices the threat, every other drone immediately knows it through their mental link. It's as bad as that later VGR episode where the Queen was giving spoken instructions to drones, which is like me having to verbally instruct my fingers which keys to type.

Are...are you saying you don't tell your fingers which keys to type?

 

[David cgc]

This goes on all the time. The Defiant's red alert was used on Qo'Nos at the end of Redemption Part 2. The Scimitar's intruder alert is a Starfleet warp core breach alarm. The Son'a intruder alert is the same as a Cardassian red alert.

I was very frustrated by Discovery in the early seasons which not only used a lot of stock sounds from the TNG-era shows, but they mixed them all up between which ones were Klingons and which were Federation. Even if the TOS sounds were too low-fi or old-fashioned, they could've (one assumes) borrowed the reimagined TOS-style sounds from the KT movies. The way they did it was the worst of both worlds, they didn't have a unique sonic identity like if the show had made a new (or new to Trek) sound effects palette, but they didn't get the verisimilitude by using sounds old fans would know in the wrong contexts.

 

[Christopher]

Are...are you saying you don't tell your fingers which keys to type?

Not out loud.

 

[DonIago]

Not out loud.

Well of course not. You wouldn't want other people to overhear you after all. That would be a security risk.

You have to whisper to them. Softly and sweetly. Like a lover.

 

[at Quark's]

A better question is, why the hell would a hive mind need audible alert sirens? As soon as one drone notices the threat, every other drone immediately knows it through their mental link. It's as bad as that later VGR episode where the Queen was giving spoken instructions to drones, which is like me having to verbally instruct my fingers which keys to type.

I still wonder how the Borg 'filter' their signals. The amount of information generated by billions of drones all giving their inputs when going about their business (e.g. detecting that intruder) probably would be way too much for any individual drone to process. So somewhere, somehow, a selection of information probably is made that is relayed to the relevant drone group.

 

[Christopher]

I still wonder how the Borg 'filter' their signals. The amount of information generated by billions of drones all giving their inputs when going about their business (e.g. detecting that intruder) probably would be way too much for any individual drone to process. So somewhere, somehow, a selection of information probably is made that is relayed to the relevant drone group.

I imagine it's similar to how neurons in a brain are networked. It's not all one big party line; instructions are sent to where they're needed. Also, I figure most of the processing drones' brains do is passive, that it's distributed across millions of drones' brains at once, like cloud computing. No single drone has to process more than a fraction of it, and none of them are consciously aware of it. It's probably just running in the background of their brains while they carry out whatever individual instructions they've been given.

 

[The Wormhole]

A better question is, why the hell would a hive mind need audible alert sirens? As soon as one drone notices the threat, every other drone immediately knows it through their mental link.

Keep in mind this was the same episode, same scene in fact that showed Borg drones getting out of their alcoves to man stations. Which was always a headscratcher to me, given in addition to regenerating, the Borg plug into alcoves in order to control their ship.

 

[Christopher]

Keep in mind this was the same episode, same scene in fact that showed Borg drones getting out of their alcoves to man stations. Which was always a headscratcher to me, given in addition to regenerating, the Borg plug into alcoves in order to control their ship.

Not so much to control the ship as to be components of the ship. They're all just cells in a single brain and body.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Not so much to control the ship as to be components of the ship. They're all just cells in a single brain and body.

That shows how "The Borg Queen" really changed the way that "The Borg" originally was supposed to operate.

The fact that "The Borg Queen" needed to install a audible alarm to alert her drones.

It's not one fluid organism, it's "The Borg Queen" subverting control of "The Collective" to her whims.

How she managed to get to the top of "The Borg Collective" would make a interesting side story IMO.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Universal Translator.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Universal Translator.

Universal Signal!

 

[Christopher]

That shows how "The Borg Queen" really changed the way that "The Borg" originally was supposed to operate.

No, not at first. In First Contact, it was clear the the entire Collective spoke through the Queen -- "I am the Borg." She wasn't a monarch, but more by analogy with an insect queen, extending the hive-mind metaphor. The hive behaves as a single organism, and the queen is the nexus it revolves around. Really, the point of the Queen was simply to give the Collective a face and a voice for the sake of giving the movie a traditional villain.

It was only in later Voyager episodes and in Picard that writers misunderstood and approached her more as a leader or an individual subjugating others to her will. But even Voyager made it clear that the Queen is just one more piece of the machine like any drone, because when the Queen was killed (as in BOBW, FC, or "Dark Frontier"), she was reconstituted. Clearly the "Queen" is software that runs in a succession of replaceable physical bodies. The Queen is like the frontal lobe of the brain, an integral part that's responsible for coordinating and directing the activity of the other parts.

But yes, even in FC, it was a change in the storytelling approach, at least. But that was a continuation of the change that started in BOBW. The original concept of the Borg in "Q Who" was that they were completely impersonal, that they had no interest in people, only technology. They were cosmic horror, an entity so vast and powerful that we were in danger of being trampled underfoot because they took no notice of our presence. But you can't tell that many stories about an impersonal threat, so they immediately started to add personal angles -- first they arbitrarily change tactics and target an individual to assimilate as a spokesperson, then a drone is liberated and develops an individual personality, then the Collective is anthropomorphized in the Queen, etc. And eventually it reached the point of the Queen being portrayed as a cackling supervillain ordering her minions around.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

But yes, even in FC, it was a change in the storytelling approach, at least. But that was a continuation of the change that started in BOBW. The original concept of the Borg in "Q Who" was that they were completely impersonal, that they had no interest in people, only technology. They were cosmic horror, an entity so vast and powerful that we were in danger of being trampled underfoot because they took no notice of our presence. But you can't tell that many stories about an impersonal threat, so they immediately started to add personal angles -- first they arbitrarily change tactics and target an individual to assimilate as a spokesperson, then a drone is liberated and develops an individual personality, then the Collective is anthropomorphized in the Queen, etc. And eventually it reached the point of the Queen being portrayed as a cackling supervillain ordering her minions around.

Didn't "The Walking Dead" do an entire series on Zombies?
Aren't the original incarnation of "Borg" just Cybernetic Alien Zombies?

 

[Christopher]

Aren't the original incarnation of "Borg" just Cybernetic Alien Zombies?

No, that's just the point. The "Q Who" Borg were cosmic horror because they had no interest in individuals; the threat came from their total lack of concern for us as they ran roughshod over us to obtain our technology. Even after BOBW, assimilation was portrayed as the exception, not the rule; drones like Hugh had been drones their entire life and had no prior identity or personality, which was why the "Descent" ex-Borg were so directionless and susceptible to Lore as a cult leader. It wasn't until First Contact that the Borg were reoriented from Lovecraftian cosmic horror to Romeronian zombie horror -- a horde of monsters that targeted individuals, infected them, and transformed them into more monsters.

(Yes, "Romeronian." I looked it up.)

The thing is, the reason the Borg in FC were assimilating the crew was because their cube had been destroyed, there were only a handful of them, and they needed to replenish their numbers. The mistake Voyager made was assuming that assimilation was the norm rather than an exception. VGR even made the bizarre claim that the Borg don't reproduce, only assimilate -- which doesn't make any sense. How can they add a species' biological distinctiveness to their own if all their drones of that species die out in a single lifetime and aren't replaced? Not to mention that relying entirely on assimilation would be too inefficient and slow a method of building or maintaining their numbers, the same way that a hunter-gatherer subsistence is far less able to sustain a large population than agriculture is.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Are there any in-universe explanation for the identical alarm presented in two totally different factions?

Is there reason there should be? I can't see the writers spending any time on that.