What was the point of FC?

[c0rnedfr0g]

I know, it's a favorite, especially with the TNG crew. But really, what are the Borg doing? I thought they were interested in Humanity for its technology, but Earth has worthless technology in the 21st century. It's not like the Borg need to eliminate this great Federation threat, which has been able to only destroy 2 cubes (out of thousands?) at a cost of many Starfleet ships. How about an "all-out invasion" constitute more than a SINGLE cube?? Especially since the Borg have a transwarp conduit right on Earth's doorstep (according to "Endgame"). I seem to recall the Voyager episode "Dauntless" where the alien described "hundreds of cubes" just around his single planet, much less an entire Federation. Do the Borg need a source of drones? I doubt they would pick Earth, considering all the drawbacks listed by the Queen in "Dark Frontier," not to mention that BEFORE WWIII would've been a better choice (600 million more drones). Plus I don't think that they're running short on drones.

The only thing I can think of is that the Borg want a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant. But without Earth, all that delicious (or not? not too effective vs. Borg) Starfleet technology doesn't exist, and so they would begin assimilating species with also not-too-impressive technology in that century (save for the Vulcans). The Borg should just send a few hundred cubes straight to Earth and collect all that great 24th-century tech and be done with it. Stop the clever ploys that don't add up.

 

[DonIago]

There is a force more powerful, more fearsome than the Borg...

...the Writers.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Starflee has shown they have the ability to come up with ingenious tactics and weapons. I imagine the Borg calculated that the Federation may become a threat and launched a minor mission to keep them from ever becoming so by removing the main driving force (Humans).

 

[Timo]

Then again, we should remember that the Borg are using time travel to retroactively change history. This carries a clear implication: they can do it again, and again, and again, until they get it right, or destroy themselves so that they can't make another attempt.

Since the Borg still exist at the conclusion of the movie (as established in VOY), we must therefore conclude that the Borg mission in ST:FC was a complete success.

And, really, it looks like one. There we have this deluded hillbilly from Earth who couldn't put together a warp drive even if a 24th century engineer showed him how. But now the Borg lure that engineer, along with his entire staff, to help the hillbilly "rebuild" his piece of junk into a warpship - and lo, the technological miracle that is the Federation is given a kickstart.

It probably didn't happen all at once, during a single loop. What we witness might be the ninety-fourth loop, with LaForge's contribution now limited to making small refinements to Cochrane's design rather than building it from scratch. After this final loop, the iterative process is complete, and the ship that Cochrane designs will be the same that LaForge learned about at school, and hence the ship that LaForge helps Cochrane build.

What would originally have been a cesspool of stagnated cultures, with the low-tech Romulans and Klingons fighting ankle deep in the ashes of the Vulcan civilization, now becomes a unified high-tech Federation, an endless source of quality assimilables for the Collective.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ebuntor]

Wow, I really like that theory Timo. Makes perfect sense and it gives First Contact a lot more dept.

Using your theory we could also assume the first cube that was send in BoBW was an incentive for the Federation to start developing anti-Borg countermeasures: Defiant class, quantum torpedoes etc.
Taking it even further we could say "Endgame" too was a whole setup to allow Voyager to take back all that future technology although it seems kinda excessive for the Borg since it ended with their entire Unicomplex and transwarp network being destroyed. But heck if the tech is worth it to the Collective, who knows.

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

What would originally have been a cesspool of stagnated cultures, with the low-tech Romulans and Klingons fighting ankle deep in the ashes of the Vulcan civilization, now becomes a unified high-tech Federation, an endless source of quality assimilables for the Collective.

I see... so you liken the Borg to what could be thought of as "galactic farmers," in that they manipulate time to 'seed' various/promising parts of the galaxy in the past, 'cultivate' it with repeated time incursions, and then 'harvest' slowly (in the case of the Federation) or just slaughter altogether. Interesting....

 

[Ronald Held]

We have no idea how many times it took for the current timeline to occur. I do not think the Borg at that time to be that inventive/creative.

 

[startrekfiero]

..or, maybe the whole point of FC was just to be entertaining..

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Teh quean wuz sexi.

About as much thought as Braga and Moore put into the script, apparently--check the Details artticle which tried to sell FC on its sex ap- , I'm sorry, it's sex , no, really , its sex appeal . It's the article that gave us the infamous 50 ft woman quote from Braga. Yeah, that about sums it up. And yet it's still hands-down the best of the TNG films. Go figure.

 

[RobertScorpio]

Teh quean wuz sexi.

And yet it's still hands-down the best of the TNG films. Go figure.

Nope..Just proves to me that GENERATIONS is still the best TNG movie...

Rob

 

[Gagarin]

Then again, we should remember that the Borg are using time travel to retroactively change history. This carries a clear implication: they can do it again, and again, and again, until they get it right, or destroy themselves so that they can't make another attempt.

Since the Borg still exist at the conclusion of the movie (as established in VOY), we must therefore conclude that the Borg mission in ST:FC was a complete success.

And, really, it looks like one. There we have this deluded hillbilly from Earth who couldn't put together a warp drive even if a 24th century engineer showed him how. But now the Borg lure that engineer, along with his entire staff, to help the hillbilly "rebuild" his piece of junk into a warpship - and lo, the technological miracle that is the Federation is given a kickstart.

It probably didn't happen all at once, during a single loop. What we witness might be the ninety-fourth loop, with LaForge's contribution now limited to making small refinements to Cochrane's design rather than building it from scratch. After this final loop, the iterative process is complete, and the ship that Cochrane designs will be the same that LaForge learned about at school, and hence the ship that LaForge helps Cochrane build.

What would originally have been a cesspool of stagnated cultures, with the low-tech Romulans and Klingons fighting ankle deep in the ashes of the Vulcan civilization, now becomes a unified high-tech Federation, an endless source of quality assimilables for the Collective.

Timo Saloniemi

If only the writers were able to do that kind of mind-screw.

 

[Timo]

They did go for the "Borg fake an attack in order to promote the development of technologies" plot in the VOY episode "Child's Play"... Too bad our heroes never saw the wider connection!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[22 Stars]

The point of FC was to make a 'Borg' movie. Becuase the Borg were 'kewl'. The movie, as popular as it was is just not THAT good IMO.

If you look at the zero gravity scene by itself, and just imagine what else the writers could have come up with to fill that 15 or 20 minutes. I mean that 'action' scene is just so slow and lame it bothers me each time I try to watch the movie. The pacing just sucks, the effects are passable but not exciting, it just slows the whole movie down.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Teh quean wuz sexi.

And yet it's still hands-down the best of the TNG films. Go figure.

Nope..Just proves to me that GENERATIONS is still the best TNG movie...

Rob

To you. As far as I'm concerned, that movie's plot was even more arbitrary, made even less sense and was something FC had the good graces not to be, even with all its flaws: skull-crushingly dull.

 

[WalkinMan]

On a contrarian note, and not necessarily one I agree with, Seven of Nine states in "Relativity"...

SEVEN: The Borg once travelled back in time to stop Zefram Cochrane from breaking the warp barrier. They succeeded, but that in turn led the Starship Enterprise to intervene. They assisted Cochrane with the flight the Borg was trying to prevent. Causal loop complete.
DUCANE: So, in a way, the Federation owes its existence to the Borg.
SEVEN: You're welcome.

So the actual point of FC was for the Borg to be there in order to cause Zefram Cochrane to finish his warp ship, thereby leading to the creation of the Federation, a unique source of plunderable technologies for the future...maybe only the Queen knew this...maybe subconsciously...

 

[tomalak301]

Kind of going on this original title and maybe it's already been asked, but does anyone understand the Borg Queen? All these years and I still don't think I do, considering how Voyager handled her?

 

[Timo]

I rather like it that I don't understand this character/plot element, either. Fancy finding something alien in a scifi show...

On the surface, it just looks as if the Borg hive mind sort of elected a leader of some kind. Perhaps she's more of a spokeswoman than an actual decider, though, even though her voice gives the final rubber-stamp to Collective decisions. In that, she could be like an insect queen, the lowest of slaves, reduced to serving the hive in some narrow and degrading fashion (whether it be laying of eggs, or communicating with enemies, or thinking on her own brain without being connected to the Collective).

However, there are more intriguing possibilities there. The Queen could be a feature of the Collective that emerged by accident, a parasitic lifeform the Collective would rather do without, but can't get rid of. Or the Queen could have come from outside and carved herself a cozy home in the Collective. Perhaps she is something that the Collective once assimilated but to their dismay got more than they bargained for, something the hive mind couldn't control?

It could be that the Queen has her own agenda, which only incidentally agrees with that of the Borg - the same way a parasite would incidentally wish for the survival of the host lifeform. Or the Queen could be slave to the Collective and work for the Collective agenda, but would most often be employed in sprouting disinformation: lying about her own status, lying about Borg plans, lying about how the Borg really viewed whomever was having this discussion with the Queen.

Certainly it could be argued that in ST:FC, the role of the Queen was specifically and even solely to confuse Picard and Data. A sort of PR specialist, or entrapping prostitute, or something of that ilk.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RobertScorpio]

No, sorry, I go with the simple answer here. Bad writing created her, bad writing made her even worse. All it did was gut QWHO, and the principle 'experts' of the Borg in that episode; Guinan and Q. The relentless attack of, well, zombies, that you could not negotiate with is what made the BORG so different.

The Queen just made them yet another Star Trek race, with a bumby-headed ruler, who you could converse with. Absolutely ruined them, all because the producers thought a horny Borg queen would get a rise out of the targeted audience that FC was aimed at; teenage boys.

It worked...they got their erections, and it got FC a lot of bucks. But to me? I think the Borg went downhill from there. In fact, the next big step in the Borg story was yet, another sexy Borg, Seven, aimed at the same crowd. And this time, they weren't even subtle about it.

Rob

 

[Brutal Strudel]

Timo doesn't care much what the writer intent was--he'll spin an incredibly dense and brilliant theory around some of the dumbest stuff Trek has done and he'll make the dumbest Trek writers sound like a cross between Stanislaw Lem and the Hal 9000. We love him for it.

Really, the queen was born of what you say--a desire to sex us up, as Shatner might speak/croon--and from a silly, rudimentary concept of what the "queen" in an insect colony does. (Termite queens have it so bad they will scrape their legs down to nubs trying to escape their grotesque egg-legging abdomens; they aren't so much slaves of the colony as they are victims of natural selection, as are we all.) Thematically, she was born of something far darker: a misogynistic caricature of the sexually voracious and manipulative chick who not only gets between a man and his best friend but his favorite gadget as well (both "incarnated" in Data). She's the yin to the collective's yang: where the colllective is dispassionate, she's motivated by lust and loneliness; where the collective is direct, she is devious; where the collective uses masculine force; she gives "blow" jobs. Despicable, really. But you know what? So what? FC is still the only TNG movie with a scintilla of entertainment value.

 

[Falcor5]

Whats the point of FC? The same as any movie to be entertaining and make the studio a profit. First Contact delivered on both counts.