Why didn't Q bring back to life the 18 crew people killed by the borg

in Q who?

 

Genies aren't allowed to raise the dead.

 

He was trying to teach Jean Luc a lesson

 

Because he's an asshole?

 

thank you

 

He was trying to teach them a lesson.

 

^Yep. If he'd snapped everyone killed back into existence, it would've softened the blow for Picard and detracted from the danger The Borg represent. Q was illustrating the peril ahead and - in his own way - giving them advanced warning. The dead stay dead hammers the point home with brutal effectiveness.

 

To let JLP keep his bloody nose

 

Perhaps he wasn't allowed to. IIRC, any other deaths due to Q (and reversed) came about by his own illusions.But these deaths weren't caused by him directly, but by something "real" with an existence independent from him. Perhaps there's a rule in the continuum against reversing deaths caused by such real causes, even if Q is to blame for bringing them into contact with the Borg in the first place.

(Not that I necessarily believe this explanation myself).

 

Q really isn't into this resurrection business. In "Hide & Q", he let that kid in the underground colony stay dead. He didn't melt that redshirt he froze in "Encounter at Farpoint", either (although presumably the guy at least lived, in some capacity).

I doubt there's any sort of a ban on resurrecting. It's just that Q sees no point in it.

Now, there might have been a ban involved when Amanda Rogers didn't resurrect her parents. But it's equally likely that she, too, failed to see the point. Or that she in fact did resurrect them, right before departing to be True Q - she says she has to "go and see [her] parents", while some scenes before this she had defined the folks killed by the Continuum as her true parents... (Although on the fourth hand, resurrecting Q may be more demanding than resurrecting mere mortals, and beyond Rogers' capabilities.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Unless it's Jean Luck

I think she meant her adoptive parents, because she said something about "having to explain all this." If she resurrected her biological parents, they already know and understand...well, everything.

 

Have we ever seen Q resurrect someone from "real" death? It may be less of a rule, and more something that's just beyond his abilities (no matter what he says).

 

Arguably Picard in "Tapestry"?

(But that one also sets up a number of arguments on a number of issues (e.g. anyone who isn't a captain just like him is a mud puddle boring dullard of a wastrel so far beneath the deckplate and his nose, which is one of many possible takeaways people have praised and/or criticized the episode for being from time to time... the basic thing of persistence is a robust message but the way Picard stood up for himself was... oops? ))

 

The Q aren't illusionists. They are really traveling in time, or really traveling to real places. When the one Q hides in the Christmas tree, they really went to someone's house on Christmas, or when Q takes Picard to some other time, he really takes him. And if it's not a real historical place, it's a reality created that is just as real as real life.

 

Didn't you hear his amazing speech? Besides they were all going to die anyway in a hundred years at least.

 

Clearly not everything they do is an illusion. But when they create personalized environments that seem to be disconnected from the rest of the universe ("Hide and Q", "Tapestry", "All Good Things"), there's a good argument that those situations are not as "real" as, say, throwing the Enterprise at the Borg. And since the only deaths that seemed to be reversed were within those scenarios (I think), they may not have been real, true, final deaths (much like Chekov's death in "Spectre of the Gun"). That makes me question how much power the Q have over life and death the rest of the time.

 

I think the better question is: Why would Q have brought them back to life?

 

Cause he doesn't care.

 

But when Picard finds himself in the future in All Good Things, he has a memory of all those intervening years, like his marriage to Beverly, Geordi's romance novels, the Klingon conquest of *Romulus, or that Worf used to be an ambassador, etc.

And in Tapestry, Q says "You're dead," and "Oh... This is as real as your so called existence gets."