First Contact: What was the Borg's plan?

[Timo]

And wouldn't this require many engineers to come back to Zef's workshop immediately after the Borg attack, each doing a little bit of the work? So until the time that they actually complete a working ship, first contact never happens, and Earth gets assimilated?

It would be more like "Cochrane almost got it but would never have made the thing really work, and each iteration of future engineers did the necessary work to get the thing warp-borne". It would then follow that each successive iteration would have to do less work than the previous one and could rely more on historical records of how the first warp engine "was" designed and built.

For example, the original ship could lack the helical field shunt altogether. The first shanghaied engineer would improvise one from available junk, as well as create a missing cuboid countersink; the second one would read from the history books that Cochrane had used mystium-coated bedsprings for the helical field shunt, and would do exactly that, plus solve the problem of the missing cuboid countersink a bit more elegantly than the first one; and the third one would have the refined instructions for both the field shunt and the countersink and could concentrate on improving a third component.

And also, if we had many different teams of engineers working on Zef's ship, why didn't we see the first team? After all, they were meant to be there at the same exact time as Geordi's team, weren't they?

Different timelines, though. For all we know, most of those other engineers were Geordi LaForge, just from a slightly different present.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[starburst]

Where are you getting the idea that the Phoenix was built by numerous time traveling Enterprise crews?

The time travel plan seemed like a spur of the moment idea as we have never seen them do this before or since. If it wasnt for the Enterprise arriving the likely next step would have been sending assimilation parties down to the planet, reason why they didnt in my mind is they only had short range transport available due to damage already sustained.

If it werent for the Enterprise seeing an Assimilated Earth in their time so needing to go back and stop the Borg/help repair the ship that we would have seen a timeline like In a Mirror Darkly.

The plot holes to me come from the original idea of FC being set in our past during the renaissance, completely different story and one which would make sense - limited technological resistance but some of the most ingenious minds of the time to assimilate.

 

[Gaith]

Is it still ok to post links to Redlettermedia videos, declare the review to be an answer to all questions the movie raises and then move on?

Cos I'm going to do that.

The Borg were acting on orders from Future Guy.

Obviously.

 

[Tiberius]

It would be more like "Cochrane almost got it but would never have made the thing really work, and each iteration of future engineers did the necessary work to get the thing warp-borne". It would then follow that each successive iteration would have to do less work than the previous one and could rely more on historical records of how the first warp engine "was" designed and built.

But each time it didn't work, the Borg would assimilate the Earth and there'd be no one in the future to come back and help him improve it a little bit more.

I'm sorry, Timo, but this idea is just way too implausible.

 

[Xerxes1979]

The whole idea of the Borg attacking with more than one ship had not yet been invented in 1996 when First Contact came out. At that time, the Borg ALWAYS attacked with just one cube, because one cube alone was always more than enough to assimilate scores of solar systems with no difficulty.

Guinan said the Borg "swarmed" through the El Aurian system two centuries prior to Q Who. Symantically can you have a swarm of one?

 

[The Castellan]

First they just wanted a rematch for their 2367 loss when they wnet for Earth. That failed, again. So, as the spehere took a hike from the exploding cube vessel, the Borg whipped up a last minute contingency for their second defeat, trying to go back in time and assimilate an early Earth. Why stop first contact and why that time? I say their time travel technology was rather crude and nasty, and that's probably as far as their machine could take them. They found themselves just before the first contact, so they figured, "Let's stop the Federation was even being created, since we are here." The plan seemed to have worked, in one reality, where Earth's apparently a waterless planet, with metal covering the continents and entirely populated with Borgs. So, I think it was more of skin of their teeth desparation, and some luck involved.