Why was the Federation retconned into having Knowledge of the Borg before Q Who?

[Unimatrix Q]

Thanks to the "foreboding" last line in the ENT episode it set up that the events of First Contact were a pre-destination paradox, that the Borg and the E-E crew had always gone back in time to the flight of the Phoenix so that the Borg would learn of humans and understand the importance they seemingly are to the Collective.

That's the problem with this. If the Borg are supposed to have been always like this because of the pogo paradox mentioned in "Relativity", there is apparently no way that the TNG episodes happened the way we have seen them storywise.

It would have been better to have been explained as a simple change in history because of the Borg travelling back in time without being predestined.

 

[Prax]

It would have been better to have been explained as a simple change in history because of the Borg travelling back in time without being predesti

How did the Borg change?

 

[Six of Twelve]

How did the Borg change?

In Q Who, nothing is said about assimilation. In the Borg nursery scene with Riker, it is strongly implied that drones are born part of the Collective, rather than being assimilated - in Voyager, the nursery would have been called a maturation chamber. In Drone, Seven of Nine states that new drones come from assimilation, not incubation; that One is a departure from usual Borg procedure.

In Q Who, the inside of the cube looks different, especially the regeneration alcoves, which are called "slots" in this episode and the drones plug into them with an attachment on their arms, rather than in back as in later appearances, plus two drones share a "slot", as opposed to one drone per alcove.

Plus, early Borg are more about scooping up cities on planets, rather than the emphasis on assimilation as in later appearances.

 

[Prax]

Well, that's almost a retcon, but as long as there are no contradictions, it's just part of natural story development. There's no reason to assume that the Borg didn't assimilate before BOBW, as they take people from the Enterprise(which Picard doesn't even posit the thought of attempting to rescue them)

The Borg babies in Q who are in maturation chambers.

There is one, not contradiction, but kinda weird statement by Riker. When he's on the ship and speaking to Picard via communicator, he says "Captain, this is incredible! It seems they've discovered a way to connect a computer into the human brain!"

-As if he never had that whole experience with binary...

 

[Maurice]

18. There were 18 crew members in the section of the D that the Borg "cored".

 

[φ of π]

Maybe the Hansens just met some El Aurian people.

 

[Prax]

They visited conspiracy sites

 

[Timo]

IMHO the overall Borg story is the best-ever piece of Trek writing on how Star Trek heroes would face an alien entity.

No 60 minutes minus credits and commercials (is it down to 29 now?) from encounter to solution. Instead, the heroes first stumble on the entity, get their bottoms whipped raw, and emerge with nothing but misconceptions. Then they learn more, seem to win some, and then learn even more to reveal they actually lost those ones, too... And then they learn that they were Johnny-come-latelies to the whole business to begin with, and that some crazy Bigfoot hunters or shady refugees had it right all along. This doesn't take them a decade, it takes them a decade plus two rounds of time travel... Plus the efforts of lots of offscreen sidekicks.

But that's IMHO. More heroic heroes and more straightforward stories of discovery may work for others.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nyotarules]

I always figured it was a case of they knew there was *something* and it was the events of Q-Who that put it all together, a bit like Columbus with the Americas.


dJE

With Columbus being the Borg right?

 

[M.A.C.O.]

To answer the OP, it was retconned for the same reasons the Ferengi made into ENT and were caught on security footage but never documented with Starfleet. It was retconned because the Trek creatives don't care about continuity. VOY was the "it" show at the time and First Contact was the biggest Trek film to date. Add in Brannon Braga being the showrunner of VOY for season 4-6, co-writer of FC and co-creator of 7 of 9. You knew that liberties were going to be taken.

Don't bother trying to make it fit, because it doesn't. The creatives goofed and don't care.

 

[Sophie74656]

To answer the OP, it was retconned for the same reasons the Ferengi made into ENT and were caught on security footage but never documented with Starfleet. It was retconned because the Trek creatives don't care about continuity. VOY was the "it" show at the time and First Contact was the biggest Trek film to date. Add in Brannon Braga being the showrunner of VOY for season 4-6, co-writer of FC and co-creator of 7 of 9. You knew that liberties were going to be taken.

Don't bother trying to make it fit, because it doesn't. The creatives goofed and don't care.

It does fit

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I'm thinking more the fact the Denobulans just happen to be tricky to assimilate and that 24th century Borg are defeated by Archer of all people! Plus the fact that it was kept quiet for 200 or so years seems a little far-fetched.

Why would it have to be "quiet?" Riker and Data had never heard of polywater contamination in "The Naked Time" and it was just dumb luck that Riker happened to remember something vaguely similar because he'd been reading the mission logs of previous Enterprises. Starfleet has hundreds of starships and hundreds of star bases and probes and different departments that all encounter different things at different times; without a fleetwide briefing and a note "this shit is really really important right now!" no one would have known or cared about the Borg outside of a handful of librarians at the Starfleet archive whose job it is to keep track of obscure, little known, seldom-encountered alien species.

Hell, the El Aureans had known about the Borg for years after they destroyed their home world a hundred years earlier. Starfleet almost certainly knew about the Borg and had people looking into it. But Picard didn't personally debrief Guinan or any of her people about their refugee status when they rescued her, and since the Borg (probably) never showed up in Federation space they probably filed it away under "Big scary things we don't really understand." Which, for Starfleet, is a pretty huge file.

 

[Nyotarules]

Retcon and lack of continuity is a Star Trek norm. If it works for the story anything can happen. For we all know Sarek and Amanda had 6 kids between them serving on the good ship USS Brady.

 

[Prax]

That was clever AND funny.

Edit: (The Columbus thing. Right after I posted, the page reloaded more comments)

 

[Prax]

To answer the OP, it was retconned for the same reasons the Ferengi made into ENT and were caught on security footage but never documented with Starfleet. It was retconned because the Trek creatives don't care about continuity. VOY was the "it" show at the time and First Contact was the biggest Trek film to date. Add in Brannon Braga being the showrunner of VOY for season 4-6, co-writer of FC and co-creator of 7 of 9. You knew that liberties were going to be taken.

Don't bother trying to make it fit, because it doesn't. The creatives goofed and don't care.

For something to be a retcon, it has to outright contradict something established previously. Riker speculating on how the Borg reproduce upon his first visit to a Borgish cube doesn't count as establishing how Borg reproduce, or Q saying "They're not interested in talking, they're just interested in your technology" doesn't establish that Borg don't assimilate people. Q-Who confirms that the Borg were already in Federation space assimilating humans. Picard was never established as the first human to see the Borg.

 

[danellis]

With Columbus being the Borg right?

The Borg being the Americas - we knew there was something there, but weren't sure what.

The closest analogy to Columbus in this would be the crew of the Valencia, who ran into the Borg but thought they were the Klingons!!

dJE

 

[danellis]

That was clever AND funny.

Edit: (The Columbus thing. Right after I posted, the page reloaded more comments)

Thanks

dJE

 

[Go-Captain]

7's family pursuing the Borg at least ends in a dead end. They get lost in space, then they basically die in space, so it really doesn't retcon anything, it just fills in the background, at least in broad strokes rather than details. It works a lot better than the near misses and outright wrong stuff of Enterprise.

 

[Six of Twelve]

7's family pursuing the Borg at least ends in a dead end. They get lost in space, then they basically die in space, so it really doesn't retcon anything, it just fills in the background, at least in broad strokes rather than details. It works a lot better than the near misses and outright wrong stuff of Enterprise.

It does, however, make clear that the Borg already knew about humans, Species 5618, before Q took the Enterprise to see them and that Q did not make humans meet the Borg long before they were supposed to. It makes me wonder if Q knew that humans had already met the Borg, even if it didn't involve a Federation ship.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It makes me wonder if Q knew that humans had already met the Borg, even if it didn't involve a Federation ship.

You say that like Q actually gives a shit one way or the other.