So I just finished the Destiny Novel Trilogy, for those of you not familiar with it, its post-endgame in 2381 where Janeway is promoted to Admiral and Starfleet begins implementing Voyager's technological advancements. I loved it and got to thinking... This huge mess was all started by Janeway once again and her self-righteous decisions to meddle in the affairs of others.
So Admiral Janeway comes and swoops in to save the day, giving Voyager the tech to get past the borg and on home? Good huh? Janeway gives the order to halt in effort to deal a "crippling blow" to the Borg by collapsing the Transwarp Network. This sounds all fine and dandy til you get to speculating about what actually happens to the Borg after that?
The writers did a good job of kind of leaving this open to interpretation as to what happened to the Borg after this, not saying that they were alive or dead, and the book trilogy is one interpretation of it (which is a very logical one).
Basically, the Borg retaliates and sends an invasion fleet of 7,000 cubes to the Alpha Quadrant deeming humanity as a "massive threat that should be eliminated" all thanks to Admiral / Captain Janeway and their complete disregard for the temporal prime directive using their advanced weaponry to destroy the network. I sensed a little deja vu when reading this, as it took me back to "Hope and Fear" when Janeway unknowingly sealed the fate of dozens of races by helping the Borg.
I couldn't help but thinking, "why didn't this discussion even come to the table when they were conjuring up this plan in the first place?" Everyone knows the Borg ignore what isn't a threat, and Janeway attacking them puts humanity right at the top of the food chain.
Watching the episode over, I get the sense that the writers were simply - get Voyager home with a bang since the 24th century series are over...
What are your guys thoughts and opinions on this and if the Borg were actually defeated?
From season 4's premiere "
Scorpion II"
KES: They say our galaxy
is impure. Its proximity is a
threat to their genetic integrity.
JANEWAY: Tell them we have a weapon. A devastating weapon that can destroy them at the cellular level. If they don't stop their attacks on the Delta Quadrant, we'll be forced to use it.
KES: They said your galaxy
will be purged.
From season 4's finale
"Hope and Fear"
ARTURIS: My people managed to elude the Borg
for centuries, outwitting them, always one step ahead.
But in recent years, the Borg began to weaken our defenses. They were closing in and Species eight four seven two was
our last hope to defeat them. You took that away from us! The outer colonies were the first to fall, twenty three in a matter of hours. Our sentry vessels tossed aside, no defense against the storm. By the time they surrounded our star system,
hundreds of Cubes, we'd already surrendered to our own terror.
A few of us managed to survive, ten,
twenty thousand. I was fortunate.
I escaped with a vessel,
alone, but alive. I don't blame them, they were just Drones acting with their Collective instinct.
You, you had a choice!
JANEWAY: I'm sorry for what happened to your people, but try to understand. I couldn't have known.
ARTURIS: It took me months to find you. I watched and waited for my opportunity
to make you pay for what you'd done. Then the Starfleet message, and I knew
your selfish desire to get home would surface again. That I could lure you to this vessel. That I could see to it that you'd all be assimilated, and spend the rest of eternity as Borg. I was hoping to get your entire crew,
but I'll settle for the two of you. In a matter of hours, this ship will return to my homeworld inside Borg space.
A Federation Starship Captain requires a fair amount of hubris just to have the cojones to sit in that chair with enough firepower at her fingertips to blow a moon out of its orbit.
In regards to Janeway meddling in the affairs of others... I respectifully disagree.
Janeway has had periods of "self-righteousness", but
Arturis reminds me of the line, "The lady doth protests
too much."
He admits that the welfare of HIS species was tied to the BORG's defeat
by a more powerful foe, but he doesn't once consider the implications of THAT possible occurrence.
Janeway was warned repeatedly by Kes that species 8472 was harboring dangerous thoughts towards their GALAXY, not just towards the BORG. Arturis thought of his immediate needs, and that of his neighbors, while Janeway was thinking of HER immediate needs as well as the galaxy's.
I cry at Arturis's
response to his own
Kobayashi Maru test. Oh, that's not fair. He
didn't face a
"no-win" scenario. He faced a cultural and personal life
OR death scenario. Or... to put it more plainly, he faced JANEWAY's choice, after she destroyed the Caretaker's array. She described that choice to Seven in season 7's
"Imperfection".
SEVEN: You refuse to acknowledge the severity of my condition, just as I did at first.
JANEWAY: Are you giving up?
SEVEN: I'm merely accepting reality.
JANEWAY: If I'd accepted reality six years ago I'd have settled on the first M class planet we came across.
Instead, I'm thirty thousand light years
closer to Bloomington, Indiana.
Janeway and her crew were stuck 75,000 light years from home. For all intents and purposes, "home" was dead to them, and they were only
150 or so people.
They didn't choose to give up hope DESPITE the apparently insurmountable odds, they just kept plugging along.
Arturis admits
20,000 of his fellows escaped the destruction/assimilation of the BORG, and that he escaped with this amazing ship... "alone".
Why didn't he spend the last 9 months
using it to save his fellows, to
save his remaining culture instead of becoming judge, jury and
nonselective executioner of the crew of Voyager?
In season 7's finale
"Endgame", Admiral Janeway tries to force
Captain Janeway into accepting a way home without any consideration of the consequences.
"Save yourselves at all costs" is the Admiral's mantra for most of this ep. She has
lived for 26 years with the consequences of her Delta Quadrant actions and figures there's a
better way.
She was right...
and she was wrong.
For 26 years
the Admiral allowed the pain of the Delta Quadrant to blind her to the fact that her crew did some good in that quadrant, whether it was fighting the BORG or numerous other villains, or helping other species along the way. The woman who "
wrote the book on THE BORG" eventually came to lecture extensively on the subject back at Starfleet. THIS woman knew what disasters the BORG would visit upon her Federation and on the Delta Quadrant, and yet she was willing to ignore that in an attempt to "get her people home" 16 years early.
The CAPTAIN, however, wasn't willing to stop being a Federation Captain. She wasn't going to stick her tail between her legs and run for home.
What would she have done, if after gunning for home the first time, the Queen merely sent a hundred cubes through the transwarp conduit to overpower this little ship with its new technologies?
What good is getting home, if you bring the demon home with you?
Its easy to say, "If Janeway didn't do 'X', then 'Y' wouldn't have happened, but I seriously doubt the logic in the statement.
The BORG have been interested in EARTH ever since the Q made them aware of it. They had already sent
two attacks that way during the
TNG years, and planned another one during Voyager's 5th year. There's no reason to think they wouldn't have continued to press their obsession after Janeway embarrassed their Queen in her own nebula and used the transwarp conduit with impunity to escape her wrath.
We know from our own early 20th century histories that "appeasement" rarely works as a foreign policy. I doubt it works with the BORG, either.
As for disregarding the "
Temporal Prime Directive"... before we invoke that, I would just remind you that the good ship
"Relativity" is still out there, righting Temporal wrongs. If what Admiral & Captain Janeway did WAS so wrong, I suspect the crew of "Relativity"
would have interceded.
