With Picard, as Dr. Crusher mentioned, and even years later, the Doctor mentioned, to remove the Borg components requires a ton of micro-neural surgery. So maybe there were things that Dr. Crusher and Starfleet had to leave in in order for Picard to survive, otherwise to remove them would mean his death.
Crusher did initially claim Picard was clean. And Phlox did think he was clean after the self-administered cure. Probably, to err is not merely human. And to have a bit of Borg in you need not have any adverse or apparent effects, until it does. Timo Saloniemi
Question: Why would the Borg bother to leave booby traps? You leave booby traps when you don't want to be pursued, or to protect secrets or such. The Borg trashed forty Starfleet vessels without breaking a sweat and had Picard wired into the collective. They had no reason to think that anything the Federation could throw at them between Wolf 359 and Earth could pose any level of threat (obviously, or they would have taken greater precautions). So why on Earth (pun intended) would they leave booby traps? Hell, if the Borg had known their attempt to assimilate Earth was going to fail, but not the particulars, they might have just rammed the planet out of spite. Of course, if they knew the particulars, Our Heroes' Hail Mary never would have worked to begin with. With regards to Picard, I don't think it would be accurate to say that anything left inside him was a booby trap so much as components Starfleet was unable or unwilling to remove, or simply didn't know was there to begin with. I still kind of wish they'd gone ahead and taken his arm off.
Why not leave "booby traps"? The Borg want to assimilate everybody for their own good. Their zombie Drones are ill equipped to catch most of these stupid people who don't realize they ought to submit to assimilation. Seeding the entire universe with nanoprobes preemptively sounds like a prudent approach, then. The victims of the Borg are not a threat the Borg need to deal with. They are targets of charity. Not taking every available measure to help the poor saps means letting the charity work fail. (Which I guess is permissible in charity, which is voluntary stuff not regulated by anything much, even if inexcusable in a government welfare program. But the Borg approach might actually be closer to the latter.) Timo Saloniemi
Okay...if the Borg really wanted to do that, though, then why wouldn't they have already gone ahead and done so? Even if the run of TNG couldn't settle the matter one way or another, VOY was certainly in Borg space long enough that they would have encountered or at least heard of such a thing if it was a Borg tactic.
Why would they leave booby traps? To kill or injure people? That's not their modus operandi. A booby trap is used after you have left the area, they can't assimilate after they have left, and dead people can't be assimilated, and it's not like they are going to render medical did to injured people then assimilate them. It just doesn't fit with the Borg's mentality.
I so much more preferred the Borg when they didn't assimilate individuals. They would assimilate whole cultures for their knowledge and technology and ignored individual people who weren't a threat. I felt the Borg were scarier this way.
The first time I saw the Borg episode on TV when they went into the Borg ship. I was so freaked out, I couldn't even sleep that night.
Oh I know, right? It's like "You are so far beneath us we're just going to ignore you, but we're going to go wipe out your whole world and will swat you if you're in our way." But later it's like the Borg fear and value every single individual person, which just isn't the same.
I think in the episode where I think Riker and some others were looking out over the Borg ship, there was like 10,000 Borg there. Yea, when they had the Borg Queen, totally goofy I thought. Yea, she wanted Picard! LOL It was goofy.
Had them stolen by Darth Vader, possibly ? The Ferengi could probably sell them on and make a profit.
Wolf 359 is an actual star I believe and the first time I'd ever heard of it was in an episode of The Outer Limits by the same name! It featured Patrick O'Neal as a scientist creating life on a miniature scale in a solar system of his own making and being influenced and thwarted by an unseen ghost-like entity! JB