Question about Seven of Nine's parents
- Thread starter doesitmatter
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Why would they need to?
Not always, if you notice every time we meet them their openning "speech" changes. If you notice, they nolonger include: "You will adapt to service us." in their opener.
The omission of "We are the Borg" in "Regeneration" was the result of writer fiat in order to not wreck continuity by having Archer actually have a name to associate with this race of cyborgs. It was cheap I thought. At first I thought that perhaps Hoshi had opened communications in mid-sentence cutting off "We are the Borg" but after watching the scene again that wasn't the case.
That would have been rather elegant IMHO. The function of the trick in "preserving continuity" would have been significant to only a small minority of the audience, but it would have been an amusingly clever way to do it...
I guess we can still pretend that this is exactly what happens. The true identity of the foe lost to our heroes because their comm interface is too slow - that's the sort of "teething troubles" we had been expecting from the primitive ENT technology, in vain.
Timo Saloniemi
Actually its probably best not to think to hard about the El Aurians either. Those refugees in Generations didn't make a whole lot of sense. The El Aurians spent 70 years crossing the Galaxy to escape the Borg and then never bother to inform starfleet as to why they were refugees? (Guinan was very familiar with their MO so the El Aurians knew quite a bit)
To be perfectly honest, these people were always something of an enigma and the writiers never bothered to give us any explanations.
They weren't Starfleet's concern for all of those 30 (not 70) years, mind you. The particular bunch in ST:GEN is the only one known to have ended up in Federation territory, and there's little indication that anybody but Guinan, Soran and the guy calling himself Martus Mazur actually remained there. Waves of refugees must be passing through each of these star empires rather regularly, and if they don't want to speak, Starfleet's not the bunch to torture them for the information. (Klingons, Romulans or Cardassians might have gotten something more out of their respective bunches of refugees... But they wouldn't have volunteered the information forward.)
Timo Saloniemi
So you're saying these refugees watched their world and culture be destroyed by the Borg as well as others but yet not one of them would give up information freely too warn others?
That doesn't make much sence, does it?
I'm not convinced you can watch the Borg assimilate a world and survive to tell the story. Not after "Dark Frontier" at any rate. When the Borg finally decide to do a world, they do it good, a sort of final harvest where every last member of the species is hunted down (insofar as practicable).
Guinan probably never saw the Borg assimilate her home. That she survived would be due to her being absent. What could her testimony really be worth to the assorted aliens she encounters on her flight? Why frighten these primitives with stories about a foe they cannot resist anyway?
It's not as if the El-Aurians would ever have viewed the Feds as their saviors or anything, really. From the looks of it ("Time's Arrow"), the El-Aurian culture would have been technologically more advanced than the Federation one, and cosmopolitically more savvy as well. If that didn't help, what would?
Timo Saloniemi
Guinan probably never saw the Borg assimilate her home. That she survived would be due to her being absent. What could her testimony really be worth to the assorted aliens she encounters on her flight? Why frighten these primitives with stories about a foe they cannot resist anyway?
It's not as if the El-Aurians would ever have viewed the Feds as their saviors or anything, really. From the looks of it ("Time's Arrow"), the El-Aurian culture would have been technologically more advanced than the Federation one, and cosmopolitically more savvy as well. If that didn't help, what would?
Timo Saloniemi
Come on, Timo.
You make it sound like the Borg are Galactus.
Seriously, the Voy. ep. "Day of Honor" showed refugees from a planet that had been attacked by the Borg. Logically even if the Borg swarmed a planet, there 's no way realitiscally they could capture every escaping ship or escape pod. A few would get thru and survive.
"Hope & Fear" & "Child's Play" are two more examples.
In "Dark Frontier", the Borg did make the effort to get everybody who tried to escape from the target planet. And there's no real reason why they couldn't have done that: they had plenty of ships of their own, capable of superior speed and aggression. If a thousand refugee ships launched, the Borg would simply pick the biggest and fastest fifty during the first five minutes, the next biggest and fastest hundred during the next ten minutes, and the small and slow remaining craft during the following hours.
They wouldn't get those members of the species who were elsewhere to begin with, but my point was that Guinan must have been one of those.
...Of course, a smart species abandons its planet at the first sign of the Borg, not when they come for the final harvest, thus explaining some of the refugee waves.
Timo Saloniemi
They wouldn't get those members of the species who were elsewhere to begin with, but my point was that Guinan must have been one of those.
...Of course, a smart species abandons its planet at the first sign of the Borg, not when they come for the final harvest, thus explaining some of the refugee waves.
Timo Saloniemi
The Borg are not all powerful.In "Dark Frontier", the Borg did make the effort to get everybody who tried to escape from the target planet. And there's no real reason why they couldn't have done that: they had plenty of ships of their own, capable of superior speed and aggression. If a thousand refugee ships launched, the Borg would simply pick the biggest and fastest fifty during the first five minutes, the next biggest and fastest hundred during the next ten minutes, and the small and slow remaining craft during the following hours.
They wouldn't get those members of the species who were elsewhere to begin with, but my point was that Guinan must have been one of those.
...Of course, a smart species abandons its planet at the first sign of the Borg, not when they come for the final harvest, thus explaining some of the refugee waves.
Timo Saloniemi
There is absolutely no way to capture every last single person fleeing from a planet. Nobody in the Trek universe has rescources like that.
In "Dark Frontier" Seven also told the refugees not to move their ship until the Borg left. They paniced and started their warp engines too soon. If they hadn't the Borg wouldn't have detected them at all. Further proof the Borg don't get everybody.
That would depend on how much starflight resources the average Trek planet actually possesses. Does everybody have a personal interstellar craft? Not in the Federation, at least! Even a professional adventurer like Vash has to buy tickets on a commercial ferry. How many refugee vessels would a planet of billions actually manage to launch? Thousands or tens of thousands? Hardly millions. Even a primitive opponent like a Klingon fleet might be able to intercept those attempting to escape, and would stand a good chance of destroying most of the evacuation vessels on the ground or in the atmosphere already.
Granted that some could slip away even from the Borg. And certainly a culture capable of launching interstellar refugees from the planet under siege would also be likely to already have expatriates all across the galaxy to perpetuate the species. But as far as Guinan's flight goes, she herself claims in "Q Who?" that
and
This would seem to support the idea that Guinan knows little about the Borg beyond their conventional qualities: mighty foe, attacks with lots of brute force, doesn't listen to reason. Not the sort of information that would scream "Borg!" to Starfleet interrogators, or create a connection with the critters encountered in ENT "Regeneration".
Timo Saloniemi[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][/FONT]
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