Should Picard really have shot the assimilated crewman?

[Marc]

The Klingons had another idea - kill all the Gods, and it's already sorted out by default!

wasn't Dr. Phlox, on ENT, able to actually reverse the assimilation process and kill the nanoprobes when they encountered the Borg - all the way back in the 22nd century???

Apparently, he was. But perhaps he was the Nicola Tesla of his time, a bit too weird for the mainstream scientific community to take seriously, and unmotivated to reveal his greatest secrets?

Certainly it's made clear that Picard remains unaware of anything related to Phlox' achievement or his encounter with the cyborgs right through ST:FC and beyond. Why is that? Well, ENT was taking place in a timeframe where another comparable revelation apparently got "unrevealed" somehow - the identity of the Romulans, and their ability to make their ships invisible. Perhaps the early years of the Federation featured some incident where a lot of information was erased?

Timo Saloniemi

a) More a case of the events of First Contact had a ripple effect on the timeline.

b) Picard is a starship captain not a CMO. removal of borg impants isn't his area of expertise

c) Picard was fighting to save his ship and prevent a borg assimilation of earth

d) some people need to step back from the computer and realise it's onl make believe.

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Locutus had access to all of Picard's memories and prior knowledge,

Do we know that's not standard for all assimilated Borg? I've always assumed that Picard's individuality remained because he was newly assimilated and the collective hadn't had a chance to grind down his personality. Give it a week and he would've been like everyone else.

and he was programmed as an
Individual, not a run of the mill drone. So I do think "de-Locutification" (lol) was definitely different than regular "deborgification". The main reason being that his sense of individuality was always intact, even as Locutus.

I disagree. The whole, "I am Locutus of Borg..." speech was the Collective talking through its new meat-puppet, with Picard briefly managing to reassert himself by calling Riker "Number One".

Hugh didn't revert back to a prior personality? So when he said, "Don't hurt my friend Geordie," that was all Borg?

I think Hugh was a natural born Borg, like the ones we saw in Deja Q. There was no original personality to reassert. The personality he developed emerged tabula rasa, which is why his dessimilation was different from Locutus and Seven.

 

[Daggin]

I feel that Jean-Luc was acting within the moment, as stated prior here by others, he had no knowledge, or certainty of the ultimate outcome, fully aware though, of the battle ahead to save his ship, and the future, from the Collective's intent. He cared about every member of his crew, and knew all too well what the lad would face.

 

[Tiberius]

Hugh didn't revert back to a prior personality? So when he said, "Don't hurt my friend Geordie," that was all Borg?

That was only after he had the concept of friendship explained to him. There was no reverting back to a pre-borg personality.

Then why didn't Seven do the same thing?

I think it's very explainable by saying that Hugh was assimialted as an adult (only a fairly short time before we saw him, a few years at most) and thus was able to regain his former sense of self.

Seven was assimialted as a child, and thus had no sense of self developed (or at the very least, only a rudimentary sense of self) so she had a much harder time of it.

So the proof that Hugh had regained his former sense of self is that he was able to grasp the concept of friend at all.

The Klingons had another idea - kill all the Gods, and it's already sorted out by default!

wasn't Dr. Phlox, on ENT, able to actually reverse the assimilation process and kill the nanoprobes when they encountered the Borg - all the way back in the 22nd century???

Apparently, he was. But perhaps he was the Nicola Tesla of his time, a bit too weird for the mainstream scientific community to take seriously, and unmotivated to reveal his greatest secrets?

Certainly it's made clear that Picard remains unaware of anything related to Phlox' achievement or his encounter with the cyborgs right through ST:FC and beyond. Why is that? Well, ENT was taking place in a timeframe where another comparable revelation apparently got "unrevealed" somehow - the identity of the Romulans, and their ability to make their ships invisible. Perhaps the early years of the Federation featured some incident where a lot of information was erased?

Timo Saloniemi

I figured that since the nanoprobes were probably designed to work on Humans, they wouldn't have been quite as effective on Denobulans. And the radiation dose he subjected himself to was too high for a Human to survive. Almost too high for Phlox to survive too, by the looks of it.

Hugh didn't revert back to a prior personality? So when he said, "Don't hurt my friend Geordie," that was all Borg?

I think Hugh was a natural born Borg, like the ones we saw in Deja Q. There was no original personality to reassert. The personality he developed emerged tabula rasa, which is why his dessimilation was different from Locutus and Seven.

Natural born Borg? Where did you get that idea? From the borg baby? The fact that there was a baby in a maturaion chamber doesn't prove that it hadn't been assimilated. The Borg kids in Voyager had been in maturation chambers, and they had been assimialted from other cultures. There's absolutely nothing to suggest that the Borg take sex cells and combine them artifically.

 

[Mr Silver]

Natural born Borg? Where did you get that idea? From the borg baby? The fact that there was a baby in a maturaion chamber doesn't prove that it hadn't been assimilated. The Borg kids in Voyager had been in maturation chambers, and they had been assimialted from other cultures. There's absolutely nothing to suggest that the Borg take sex cells and combine them artifically.

Ah but the Borg more than likely assimilate pregnant women (or men) and thus the child has never known anything, but the Borg collective.

 

[Tiberius]

That is possible, but to think that's the only way the borg get new drones is not really sensible.

Anyway, we know for a fact that the Borg assimialte children and put them in maturation chambers, because that's what they did with Annika Hansen.

 

[Timo]

The Borg don't necessarily want to get new Drones except through assimilation. After all, assimilation is supposed to be done in order to improve the quality of life of the target. It would be self-gratulatory to create new Drones by "artificial" means, not to mention morally dubious, because that would mean so many poor wayward humanoids left unassimilated.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr_Homn]

Hugh didn't revert back to a prior personality? So when he said, "Don't hurt my friend Geordie," that was all Borg?

That was only after he had the concept of friendship explained to him. There was no reverting back to a pre-borg personality.

Then why didn't Seven do the same thing?

I think it's very explainable by saying that Hugh was assimialted as an adult (only a fairly short time before we saw him, a few years at most) and thus was able to regain his former sense of self.

Seven was assimialted as a child, and thus had no sense of self developed (or at the very least, only a rudimentary sense of self) so she had a much harder time of it.

So the proof that Hugh had regained his former sense of self is that he was able to grasp the concept of friend at all.



I figured that since the nanoprobes were probably designed to work on Humans, they wouldn't have been quite as effective on Denobulans. And the radiation dose he subjected himself to was too high for a Human to survive. Almost too high for Phlox to survive too, by the looks of it.

Hugh didn't revert back to a prior personality? So when he said, "Don't hurt my friend Geordie," that was all Borg?

I think Hugh was a natural born Borg, like the ones we saw in Deja Q. There was no original personality to reassert. The personality he developed emerged tabula rasa, which is why his dessimilation was different from Locutus and Seven.

Natural born Borg? Where did you get that idea? From the borg baby? The fact that there was a baby in a maturaion chamber doesn't prove that it hadn't been assimilated. The Borg kids in Voyager had been in maturation chambers, and they had been assimialted from other cultures. There's absolutely nothing to suggest that the Borg take sex cells and combine them artifically.

Well Voyager changed the borg a lot, so I'd say the inconsistency is due to their writers taking a lot of liberties with a TNG creation that were never the intention when TNG was made.

 

[YARN]

Yes.

 

[antiquityscion]

From Picard's POV, the ship and mission comes first. Picard was trying to save not just the ship, but humanities future. That was the mission. He didn't have time or even the ability to save the crewman. Considering Picard had once been assimilated and forced to kill fellow starfleet officers at Wolf 359 against his will, he knew what being a Borg meant. Picard's knowledge killed many people, and probably a lot of people he knew personally. If the crewman was fully assimilated, he would have tried to assimilate or kill other crew members. So shooting him was an act of mercy.

 

[Tiberius]

Well Voyager changed the borg a lot, so I'd say the inconsistency is due to their writers taking a lot of liberties with a TNG creation that were never the intention when TNG was made.

I've heard that a lot. But it's my opinion that everything the Borg do is explanable in terms of one idea about them, that their actions are all internally consistant.

 

[Timo]

...The same with Spock, who was supposed to be many a thing in the beginning, turned out to be very few of those things but a hundred unintended things instead, and still keeps growing in complexity. Or, better still, Worf, who was really supposed to be a one-trick pony but grew to become one of the three main characters of TNG - all that within the writing of just two spinoff shows. The EMH probably underwent an even greater expansion of role, and that only took one spinoff.

It would have been a shame to forget all about the Borg after their initial TNG appearance. But any exploration of the critters also necessarily means expansion and extrapolation, which may not be to everybody's liking.

Timo Saloniemi