Seven at Wolf 359

[Finn]

The Borg timeline indeed feels a bit fractured as a whole. TNG, First Contact, Voyager and Enterprise all add their own elements to that murky soup - for example the NX-01 obviously encountered the Borg earlier than Picard did in "Q, Who?" only to be beat by Picard again - as far as timeline goes year-wise - in "First Contact" which led to NX-01's situation to begin with. Time travel, I tell ya...

I'm not overly bothered, since what fictional universe wouldn't have its continuity errors, especially ones with just a few too many time travel incidents... besides, as far as time travel goes, isn't it awfully convenient that the "future police" doesn't stop the events in Timeless from happening, yet they intervene in Relativity and, of course, Future's End? It doesn't really make sense, just like some things in the Borg timeline, but don't let that get in the way of the story at hand

As far as people being assimilated at Wolf-359... well, there's the sphere theory, and possibly the Borg assimilating (semi-)intact ships that they then send elsewhere, and so on and so on. Numerous possible explanations. All of them are not necessarily 100% logical, but then again the Borg aren't exactly logical either.

Except Picard would have known if there was a sphere. And if they assilimated a ship, there would have been report of a ship missing. Perhaps it was that 40th ship- didn't they only report 39 ships destroyed?

 

[pookha]

considering how many ships seemed to be in little bitty pieces they may not have been sure.

and maybe because they were allowing locutus a little more autonomy in allowing him to be a leader it is possible they also kept some things of the collective from him.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The Canadian Military briefly Occupied the White House during the War of 1812.

Collectively we just forget stuff.

 

[Tiberius]

The Hansons could have started by chasing rumors.

By the time they knew what it was they were researching and perhaps linked with the information in their data base about Archer's encounter with Humans turning into "robot-people" they had already passed through a few conduits into sections of space where they could no longer communicate with the alpha quadrant.

The Hansons defiantly weren't Starfleet, the importance of reporting in might not have occurred to them. They came across to me as a bit self-adsorbed.

I figure that there was a fair bit more than rumours about the Borg that the Hansens knew of. Just remember - just because Starfleet is aware of them doesn't mean that Picard would have known about them. he is just a captain after all. he wouldn't be told every top secret thing.

And my idea of the Borg Collective suggests that the Queen is not the body we saw - that's just a puppet. The mind that controls it is spread throughout every drone etc in the whole collective. That's how she kept coming back. The body was destropyed, but the mind that controlled it kept going.

 

[Tiberius]

Except Picard would have known if there was a sphere. And if they assilimated a ship, there would have been report of a ship missing. Perhaps it was that 40th ship- didn't they only report 39 ships destroyed?

I just figured that the Borg assimilated a starship and high tailed it outta there. Starfleet finds that the ship is missing and they figure it was totally destroyed. There's enough debris out there that they wouldn't be able to identify anyway.

 

[Finn]

^They would be able to add up all the derbis and see if there's enough derbis to account for all ships involved in the fighting. Remember that episode where Fajo kidnapped Data. They put in components in the shuttlecraft that made the Enterprise it was Data's body. Plus in Conspiracy, they were able to calculate the mass of the derbis they came across to be the Horaito. A bunch of ships investigating Wolf 359 would be able to determine if a ship was unaccounted for.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Except Picard would have known if there was a sphere. And if they assilimated a ship, there would have been report of a ship missing. Perhaps it was that 40th ship- didn't they only report 39 ships destroyed?

I just figured that the Borg assimilated a starship and high tailed it outta there. Starfleet finds that the ship is missing and they figure it was totally destroyed. There's enough debris out there that they wouldn't be able to identify anyway.

I think the 40th ship was the USS Endeavour, and that it survived the battle. In Scorpion, Part I, Janeway reads a log entry in which the captain of the Endeavour talks about an engagement he had with the Borg. The only known Borg engagement any Starfleet captain, other than Picard, could have been involved in at that point was Wolf 359.

 

[Michael]

I think the 40th ship was the USS Endeavour, and that it survived the battle. In Scorpion, Part I, Janeway reads a log entry in which the captain of the Endeavour talks about an engagement he had with the Borg. The only known Borg engagement any Starfleet captain, other than Picard, could have been involved in at that point was Wolf 359.

... but then again, the Endeavour's captain may have talked about a completely unrelated Borg incident.

 

[Amasov]

I was over in the Enterprise forum, talking about large continuity problems and ways to explain them when it occured to me that one of the largest continuity problems about Voyager I always hear mentioned is...

How could Seven of Nine and the Borg Queen have been present at the Battle of Wolf 359 when that Borg Cube was completely destroyed? For that matter, how could the former drones from the episode Unity have been at, or assimilated at, the battle?

I'll offer this possible explanation....

Star Trek: First Contact clearly establishes that Borg cubes (at least some of them) are equipped with smaller vessels (the Borg Sphere). Since there is no canon evidence to contradict it, it appears reasonable that the Cube at Wolf 359 could also have a Sphere onboard. If that is the case, the Battle could have taken place, then the Sphere could have seperated from the Cube. At that point, the Cube continued onto Earth under Locutus' command and the Sphere returned to the Delta Quadrant. Starfleet personnel could have been assimilated at the Battle and taken to the Delta Quadrant by the Sphere. In addition, this would mean that both the Borg Queen and Seven of Nine could have been present at the Battle and survived by returning to the Delta Quadrant before the Cube was destroyed. Also, since there are large periods of time during The Best of Both Worlds, Part II (both before and after the battle) where the action focuses on the Enterprise, not the Cube, we can't be certain what the Borg were doing exactly. These events could have simply taken place offscreen.

Thoughts?

I tend to look at what the Queen told Picard in First Contact when he brought up the same question to her.

"You think in such three-dimensional terms."

It clearly suggests that the destruction of the Cube does not necessarily mean that she would have gone with it. While it can be interpreted many different ways, I'll use this "logical" explanation as the answer to the question you pose.

 

[startrekwatcher]

I have no problem with the Hansens searching for the Borg. "Dark Frontier" made it clear that they wanted to confirm their existence meaning they weren't even sure they were for real much like Bigfoot. It isn't stretching things to assume they heard whispers of these creatures from the El Aurians and other survivors spoke of these evil powerful cybernetic organisms from another quadrant of space. The Hansens hear about them and want to confirm it.

They encounter a cube and never heard from again.

As for the Queen's comment of Picard only thinking in three dimensional terms I always took that as her chiding Picard for forgetting that as a Borg one is part of a shared consciousness so she really wasn't physically(3-D terms) there but with Locutus mentally. The scene in FC where we see her whispering and caressing his face was just a depiction of her inside his head--that is how she could still be around--she was in Unimatrix One the whole time.

 

[Amasov]

As for the Queen's comment of Picard only thinking in three dimensional terms I always took that as her chiding Picard for forgetting that as a Borg one is part of a shared consciousness so she really wasn't physically(3-D terms) there but with Locutus mentally. The scene in FC where we see her whispering and caressing his face was just a depiction of her inside his head--that is how she could still be around--she was in Unimatrix One the whole time.

That's a good point. I did consider the possibility that she was not physically there and we were indeed seeing a hallucination of some sort.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

I'm not overly bothered, since what fictional universe wouldn't have its continuity errors, especially ones with just a few too many time travel incidents... besides, as far as time travel goes, isn't it awfully convenient that the "future police" doesn't stop the events in Timeless from happening, yet they intervene in Relativity and, of course, Future's End? It doesn't really make sense, just like some things in the Borg timeline, but don't let that get in the way of the story at hand

I think the future police only step in when someone or something from their time interferes in another time. Interfering in someone else's time travel would just be silly, especially if someone else is going to fix it anyways (City on the Edge of Forever, FC, A Matter of Time, etc.)

 

[Tiberius]

^They would be able to add up all the derbis and see if there's enough derbis to account for all ships involved in the fighting. Remember that episode where Fajo kidnapped Data. They put in components in the shuttlecraft that made the Enterprise it was Data's body. Plus in Conspiracy, they were able to calculate the mass of the derbis they came across to be the Horaito. A bunch of ships investigating Wolf 359 would be able to determine if a ship was unaccounted for.

true, but remember that the Borg were vaporising ships as well. We saw it happen to the melbourne in the DS9 pilot. There's no reason to expect that every single gram of each starship would be accounted for.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Well, considering they'd want at least a gram of every lost crewmen for their funerals? As hit load of matter floating about in the debris field would have been scanned and catalogued.

It's possible that the Queen Owrwelled him.

Changed his memories to facilitate the shape of their present conditions.

"I if I had existed then, then I would have been there, so I might as well have been and lets just say that i was and that's what I mean by four dimensional thinking."

If the borg and Seven were at Wolf, what would the wardrobe department have cojoured up fro those two women, which would most certainly not have looked like they wore in the movie and corpion and most certainly not like how picard viewed them in his dream during first contact.

Some one has to have photshopped this?

 

[tvih]

I have no problem with the Hansens searching for the Borg. "Dark Frontier" made it clear that they wanted to confirm their existence meaning they weren't even sure they were for real much like Bigfoot. It isn't stretching things to assume they heard whispers of these creatures from the El Aurians and other survivors spoke of these evil powerful cybernetic organisms from another quadrant of space. The Hansens hear about them and want to confirm it.

They seemed to have more info than rumors though. They apparently knew what their ships looked like to a good degree of detail (the cube miniature Annika played with), seemed to know about transwarp, and so on.

I think the future police only step in when someone or something from their time interferes in another time. Interfering in someone else's time travel would just be silly, especially if someone else is going to fix it anyways (City on the Edge of Forever, FC, A Matter of Time, etc.)

Well, that's not entirely true. The first time we see Braxton, he comes to stop Voyager from causing an event in the future. So he does it to stop them from time-traveling, sort of. Similarly when that is prevented in the end, he comes to move Voyager to the proper time since they detected it wasn't where it should be - again they want to prevent time travel. Also, when we see Braxton the next time, it's to stop Voyager from being destroyed by a temporal agent, and they don't apparently even know from what time the agent is. And the agent ends up being from the timeship's own future, actually, not from their own time.

So, in none of these cases do they actually come to stop anyone from their own time from doing something. Yet they allow stuff like in Timeless and Endgame to happen. It's one of the reasons I don't like time travel much in general. There's just too many illogical and inconsistent things that come with it a lot of the time. All these Borg timeline alterations are a good example. Just think of episodes where time "resets" since events are altered (like Year of Hell and Time And Again), yet in others (Timeless, Endgame) the changes stick despite the future people who changed the past effectively never even existed since in the new timeline they didn't in fact alter the past. So there's no "loop" formed and thus it doesn't make sense (not that loops do either). Janeway certainly had the right idea about temporal paradoxes early in the series...

 

[Admiral Shran]

^ I like time travel episodes. But I think it would have been much better if they hadn't introduced the "future time police" storylines. Like you say, it causes to much inconsistency.

 

[USS Renegade]

Okay, the Hansen's may have known about Cubes and Transwarp, but that could have been rumor as well. Any of the survivors of Guinan's people could have stated that and the information was passed through the generations as rumor because no facts had ever been found to establish them.

I mean, really, "Transwarp" is just a label, not a specific description of the technology or how it works. They can travel faster than warp speed. So it gets called "Transwarp" in the myths and rumors. The universal translators then label the Borg's 11010010101101000101011010101110101011010101101010100101000110101 FTL technology as "Transwarp" because, being a translator, that is what it does.

If people today can still hunt for ghosts, bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster, I don't think a couple of researchers going Borg Hunting is all that unbelievable. Just a couple of loonies who had the misfortune of being correct.

And Picard never hearing of them isn't a surprise either. As was mentioned, he wouldn't be told every scrap of 100 year old secret intel that Starfleet had. He also was not the type of guy to buy into or chase after stories of space ghosts, unicorns, or robot people. He would probably consider that nonsense and go read some Shakespeare or do some REAL research.

And I still stand firm to my theory that Enterprise actually took place in the NuTrek universe, not the Prime universe, so there are no unexplainable Borg continuity holes.

 

[Tiberius]

USS Renegade, I'd be interested in your theory that Enterprise is in the NuTrek universe. Could you post about it in my "Is Enterprise Canon" thread please?

 

[tvih]

When Picard encounters the Borg in the Delta Quadrant for the first time, after that the Federation starts making some preparations in case they attack. If they knew of the Borg already, there wouldn't probably have been any sort of reaction to that effect.

Enterprise is indeed a tricky factor in this. The Federation should have had rudimentary knowledge of the Borg by the time Picard ran into them due to the events depicted in Enterprise.

However, I see no reason why Enterprise would take place in NuTrek (what a retarded term, anyway), since if it did, it would probably been told so by the people in charge. If we want to leap into conclusions, we could just as well say that since Picard and the Borg went back in time in First Contact, leading to an encounter with the Borg that early in the timeline, and then leading to the events of Enterprise, the events in "Q, Who?" never actually even took place because the future was changed.

I was personally under the impression that the NuTrek universe was essentially identical to the prime universe before the black hole through which Spock and Nero got tossed there, or didn't even exist and was only created as a result of said dislocation (like it is said that every action we make or could have make causes an alternate universe to come into existence). In either case it seems unlikely that there would be such a major difference between the two universes before Nero that Archer wouldn't have been the first captain if he was in the other did in the other. Now, since Nero and Spock appeared into a time between Archer and Picard, you could argue that their appearance caused the Borg never to travel back in time to the time of first contact, and thus Archer didn't encounter the Borg... but that would mean that either ENT didn't happen in the NuTrek universe either (or if it did, it simply happened before the events of the new movie took place, which then changed the universe... which would mean it can't really be NuTrek), or their appearance didn't prevent that from happening (unlikely, even given how illogical time travel often is, since the future was very radically altered from that point on).

Besides, if we completely dismiss Enterprise, there's no convincing evidence whatsoever that anyone in the Federation knew of the Borg before "Q, Who?". The most feasible way the Hansens knew about them would've been through the events in Enterprise (which still doesn't really explain the detailed cube model).

Also, why would the events in "Q, Who?" have caused the Borg to head to the Alpha Quadrant, when the Borg had already by that time assimilated humans (meaning at least the Hansens) and thus knew quite a bit about them, which should have already caused them to "come for more" if they wanted to?

Really. Sci-fi writers need lay off the time travel. It causes nothing but headaches. It's nothing but a cheap copout that inevitably leads to continuity errors when used in such a major role as in VOY, ENT and even TNG (can't recall if DS9 had much time travel).

Hell, I can't even make a coherent post about this, that's how illogical it all is

 

[USS Renegade]

Okay, the detailed model of the Cube can be explained by El Aurian descriptions of the Borg. The Hansen's knowledge of the Borg could have come from rumors that persisted from Cochrane's time and from El Aurian stories from Kirk's time forward. That knowledge coming from the ENT Borg episode may or may not be the most likely way they got the information, but it is certainly not the only way they could have gotten it. Especially considering the El Aurian information was much fresher, and was related to the last mission of a Starfleet legend.


Also, you have to accept paradox as a part of time travel. You don't have to understand it, just accept it.

Picard and the Borg go back in time to the 21st century. History is modified to a small degree. Even if the Nero incursion prevented Picard from ever being born in the future, the Picard/Borg incursion ALREADY happened in the past.


As for the Borg high tailing it to the AQ after the events of Q Who, the explanation is quite simple really. The Hansens were not Starfleet officers, had no in depth knowledge of Starfleet capabilities or operations. They were considered harmless and irrelevant by the Borg. The Borg know there is life all throughout the galaxy and expect to assimilate it all in due time. The didn't run to the AQ after Q Who because of the realization that there is a civilization they haven't gotten around to yet.

The Hansen's ship was certainly not as technologically advanced and state of the art as the Enterprise-D. Most importantly, it left unanswered questions for the Borg. The Borg did a survey of the Enterprise, and they have more advanced propulsion technology than Starfleet, but when they were easily chasing down the Enterprise as it tried to escape the Enterprise just disappeared. Instantaneous teleportation of an entire starship would CERTAINLY get the Borg's attention.

The way the Enterprise escaped suggested that the Federation had unknown and massively useful teleportation technology. THAT is why they came to the AQ.