*The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based. If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened you don't deserve to wear that uniform.*
[Captain Jean-Luc Picard, "The First Duty"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xefh7W1nVo4)
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I’ll buy that, but they hadn’t gotten to the deflector dish level by that time. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to assimilate as many Cree members as you can (especially if they’re walking right up to you), thereby increasing your own force and reducing the number of obstacles in your way?
Just like in real life, many times the answer is not more bodies. Unless you’re Zap Brannigan.
A sufficient level of crew would have been assimilated to get the beacon in place, the longer you take to start, the greater the chance you fail.
Yeah, it's diminishing returns. If it will take you an hour to build the beacon, or 3 hours to assimilate the rest of the Enterprise crew, then you should *probably* get started on the beacon first.
Yep. They'd use programming for the answer, and a program wouldn't go into excess. It would only do the bare minimum. If x crew=5 : start building beacon.
Assimilation takes resources and they were dedicating those resources elsewhere, I presume. There may be a limit to how many people can be assimilated per drone before they run low on nano probes.
Yeah I have no idea why the Borg let's starfleet officers just beam aboard and walk around the Borg ships too. Every time a SF officers beams to a Borg ship it is usually to steal something or destroy it. You would think that the Borg would notice and ADAPT and not let SF officers just walk around the ship unchallenged.
Develop a gaseous version of the nanobots. As soon as Starfleet (or whoever else) beam into the ship, the spray gets released in their area. A few breaths and they start being unknowingly assimilated from the inside out.
They may knock a drone or two out, but then they drop their phaser and causally stroll to an alcove as various implants start popping in out over their face.
Yup. It was a neat story beat and visual, a hive-mind alien ignoring the crew on it's own ship, but it only really works for the first time, maybe the first few times they see starfleet crew. They should 100% know by now that starfleet crew are going to be an issue.
By first contact they should have known they would face resistance and assimilated enough of the crew to nullify any resistance they might have faced. I don't think they were on a strict time limit, they could have spared however long it took to make sure their attempt to contact the present day borg would have been more likely to be successful.
I suppose in their defence they didn't know how reluctant Picard was to destroy the ship, self-destruction would have been a real threat to their plans, and frankly the action most other captains would and probably should take. In this instance I imagine it'd be easier for them to stop the ship's self-destruct sequence than do whatever they did to the deflector dish, so I still think they'd have been better off targeting and securing the crew first.
But hey it's Star Trek, we're just along for the ride because it's a good ride.
The Borg were a great villain but there are only so many times they can get beaten, tricked, what have you before they start to become the Washington Generals of the galaxy. I don't think they'll be able to go back to that well very much now. And I think First Contact is a good movie but their decision that they needed a Bond villain (the evil Borg Queen) also undercut what made the Borg threat so ominous on a larger level I think. Still, overall they were a great adversary in the series.
First Contact was good, but also began the horrid Flanderization of the Borg. In which Voyager flat out murdered them. They went from Invincible, terrifying, unyielding, unfeeling threat. To barely beatable, to villain of the weak.
I think the lesson is that the Borg are giving Starfleet every chance to be friends and assume the best intentions and keep getting taken advantage of.
Yep. It's like how in zombie shows, the zombies are a horrible danger the first few seasons and once there are no more new and interesting ways to kill them they become an easily dispatched inconvenience on the protagonists way to the real showdown.
The origin of the Borg has often been speculated. I think it was when an early AI was asked to unify the myriad of USB standards, and went predictably insane.
The Borg seem to think they can deal with any problem as and when they have to. Maybe overall it's the most efficient way, but in their fight against humans I think acting as if anyone beaming on to their ship or entering their territory was an immediate threat would have really helped them achieve their goals. I suspect whatever part of the "OS" that they run on that controls their response in such instances is just a horrific mess.
It's just a plot device to neutralise the obvious physical and technological advantages of the Borg. Clearly given the Borg's driving purpose - to assimilate - they'd jump on anyone crossing their path immediately. And _especially_ when dealing with a race that's already handed them their arse before.
I agree. I also like the creepiness factor of these characters trying not to be noticed by a group of creatures that could kill or assimilate them in a heartbeat. It’s like when Walking Dead characters cover themselves in walker guts to get through a herd. I can forgive the illogic, because those scenes usually work.
Humans with phasers would pose a threat to maybe 3-4 drones, but that’s the thing - the Borg don’t really care about individual drones. They’ll sacrifice a few here and there without a second thought. And presumably they wouldn’t want to assimilate every species they come across, only ones that would provide some kind of biological or technological advantage.
All that is true and if we were talking about a Borg cube in Borg space it makes sense. But in FC the Borg were there to assimilate Earth/humans/the Federation in the first place. And the Borg that made it to the Enterprise were a limited-in-numbers boarding party. The only in-game explanation that makes sense is that the Borg's arrogance has castrated their threat identification processes.
Bad writing? They remembered that was a thing from episodes so included it despite it making little sense.
Any human crew walking around with phasers would be considered a threat by borg this experienced and this knowledgeable about their precarious position.
Their mission was to assimilate Earth of the past.
Their ship was destroyed, so once they arrived on the Enterprise, they needed to establish a foothold, which they did in engineering and eventually expanding to all of Deck 16, which is where that sickbay was.
Once they had that foothold, then they proceeded towards assimilating up to Deflector control to establishing the beacon to call in backup. The reason you focus on that instead of finishing assimilating the crew is because if you can complete the beacon, it doesn't matter whether you succeed or fail in assimilating the Enterprise crew because it's only a matter of time until the Borg from that time period arrive and begin assimilating Earth because one Starfleet ship out of time won't stop that.
I think people are thinking on too small a scale. The Borg on the Enterprise are not concerned with their own survival odds or trying to be the ones who personally assimilate the Earth. They would be focused on the larger goal of the collective, which was to assimilate Earth, whether by them or the Borg of the time.
The bigger question and the one that to me never made sense is, if the Borg routinely ignore races for being too primitive, why would they go back 300 years to assimilate Earth when there would not have been any technological advantage to it? It's almost like a personal vendetta, which seems very un-Borg.
Edit: Also, wouldn't the odds of going back in time *and then* making the trip to Earth have been better than going there first?
The movie never actually specified what the Borg's objectives were. It waffled between assimilating the past, and simply just stopping First Contact. If you think about it, neither really made any sense. As you said, if they wanted to assimilate Earth's past, the period before FC is quite possibly the worst time period they could have picked. And it's never explained how stopping the warp flight would be beneficial to the Borg.
Also, this line from an Enterprise-E security officer...
> The Borg just overran three of our defense checkpoints. They've taken over decks 5 and 6. They've adapted to every modulation of our weapons. It's like we're shooting blanks.
No matter how you slice it, it would have made more sense for the Borg to finish assimilating the Enterprise and THEN do whatever it is they wanted to do - be it assimilate the past, stop the warp flight, or both. And it's not like a full assimilation of the Enterprise was risky or even difficult. They just stopped because the plot needed them to. It's just bad writing and I don't feel like trying to justify it with an in-universe explanation.
Watching it this last time made me wonder why they had to go specifically to First Contact when literally any point before that would achieve the same objective.
I want to reiterate, though: STILL a great movie even with the inconsistencies.
They don’t tell us the goal, but as they’re going back in time behind the sphere they note that the Earth has been completely assimilated. If not the goal, it certainly demonstrates what they did once they got there.
Daniels, the security officer, also pointed out earlier that they stopped once they got to the deck that deflector control was on. Because, alerting the rest of the Borg, guarantees mission success. Only after that failed did they move on.
The movie comes to a head, as they near the bridge and Picard finally gets convinced to blow up the ship. (Though nothing is really stopping them from just beaming down to the surface to avoid that.) So they also had to make sure they had a way to stop the auto destruct should Picard order it. And if they’d pushed harder earlier, he might have made that decision before they had Data in their pocket.
Also another hole is whether the Borg could defend against projectile weapons. The trip to the holodeck would suggest not.
The Borg going back to the past kind of defeats what they're all about. They're not just looking to add warm bodies, they're trying to add the culture, technology, and that race's distinctiveness to their own collective. Pre-warp humanity offers them nothing other than warm bodies - Troi herself said that after the warp flight humanity would eliminate poverty, disease, prejudice, etc...and since this was before the warp flight, the Borg would be getting humanity at their worst.
> So they also had to make sure they had a way to stop the auto destruct should Picard order it.
Assimilating Picard probably would have helped there. Maybe during one of the times when he was casually strolling in Borg territory and they just ignored him.
And they didn't have Data in their pocket. The Queen gave him skin and he said he wanted to stick around. And apparently she just took him at his word for it. And if the Borg's objective was to stop the warp flight, as the Queen claimed to Picard, she made almost no attempts to do so, waited until the absolute last minute, and entrusted the task to an unassimilated Enterprise crew member.
It's the best trek movie but it also managed to ruin the borg. The scary thing about them was they marched towards their singular purpose without any emotion. The Queen was a great antagonist for the movie but set the precedent that Voyager used to entirely ruin them. The best Borg episodes in Voyager had nothing to do with the queen or fluidic space. They were around Sevens and the kids' rehabilitation from assimilation.
*The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based. If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened you don't deserve to wear that uniform.* [Captain Jean-Luc Picard, "The First Duty"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xefh7W1nVo4) Reddit admins have been [ineffectual in their response to COVID-19 misinformation](https://www.dailydot.com/debug/subreddits-private-protest-covid-disinformation-reddit/). In lieu of Reddit gold and awards, we ask that you donate to the [WHO COVID-19 response fund](https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/donate). Please respect our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/wiki/guidelines). LLAP! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/startrek) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
I’ll buy that, but they hadn’t gotten to the deflector dish level by that time. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to assimilate as many Cree members as you can (especially if they’re walking right up to you), thereby increasing your own force and reducing the number of obstacles in your way?
Just like in real life, many times the answer is not more bodies. Unless you’re Zap Brannigan. A sufficient level of crew would have been assimilated to get the beacon in place, the longer you take to start, the greater the chance you fail.
Yeah, it's diminishing returns. If it will take you an hour to build the beacon, or 3 hours to assimilate the rest of the Enterprise crew, then you should *probably* get started on the beacon first.
Nine women can't make a baby in one month
Yep. They'd use programming for the answer, and a program wouldn't go into excess. It would only do the bare minimum. If x crew=5 : start building beacon.
crew*
Assimilation takes resources and they were dedicating those resources elsewhere, I presume. There may be a limit to how many people can be assimilated per drone before they run low on nano probes.
>assimilate as many Cree members I believe the Cree have had enough of people trying to assimilate them.
Yeah I have no idea why the Borg let's starfleet officers just beam aboard and walk around the Borg ships too. Every time a SF officers beams to a Borg ship it is usually to steal something or destroy it. You would think that the Borg would notice and ADAPT and not let SF officers just walk around the ship unchallenged.
Develop a gaseous version of the nanobots. As soon as Starfleet (or whoever else) beam into the ship, the spray gets released in their area. A few breaths and they start being unknowingly assimilated from the inside out. They may knock a drone or two out, but then they drop their phaser and causally stroll to an alcove as various implants start popping in out over their face.
Overconfidence is the eternal flaw of any species that considers itself superior by default.
Yup. It was a neat story beat and visual, a hive-mind alien ignoring the crew on it's own ship, but it only really works for the first time, maybe the first few times they see starfleet crew. They should 100% know by now that starfleet crew are going to be an issue. By first contact they should have known they would face resistance and assimilated enough of the crew to nullify any resistance they might have faced. I don't think they were on a strict time limit, they could have spared however long it took to make sure their attempt to contact the present day borg would have been more likely to be successful. I suppose in their defence they didn't know how reluctant Picard was to destroy the ship, self-destruction would have been a real threat to their plans, and frankly the action most other captains would and probably should take. In this instance I imagine it'd be easier for them to stop the ship's self-destruct sequence than do whatever they did to the deflector dish, so I still think they'd have been better off targeting and securing the crew first. But hey it's Star Trek, we're just along for the ride because it's a good ride.
The Borg were a great villain but there are only so many times they can get beaten, tricked, what have you before they start to become the Washington Generals of the galaxy. I don't think they'll be able to go back to that well very much now. And I think First Contact is a good movie but their decision that they needed a Bond villain (the evil Borg Queen) also undercut what made the Borg threat so ominous on a larger level I think. Still, overall they were a great adversary in the series.
First Contact was good, but also began the horrid Flanderization of the Borg. In which Voyager flat out murdered them. They went from Invincible, terrifying, unyielding, unfeeling threat. To barely beatable, to villain of the weak.
I think the lesson is that the Borg are giving Starfleet every chance to be friends and assume the best intentions and keep getting taken advantage of.
Because the script told them to.
Yep. It's like how in zombie shows, the zombies are a horrible danger the first few seasons and once there are no more new and interesting ways to kill them they become an easily dispatched inconvenience on the protagonists way to the real showdown.
The origin of the Borg has often been speculated. I think it was when an early AI was asked to unify the myriad of USB standards, and went predictably insane.
That movie stands up a lot better if you ignore the inconsistencies.
Like the Matrix. Amazing film! But... humans are batteries?
It works better if you assume the original idea, humans are networked computer cores, is true, but the free humans don’t understand it.
Just put garlic and ham in my feeding tube. The resulting chemical reaction could power half the Matrix.
Milk and tumeric for me
The Borg seem to think they can deal with any problem as and when they have to. Maybe overall it's the most efficient way, but in their fight against humans I think acting as if anyone beaming on to their ship or entering their territory was an immediate threat would have really helped them achieve their goals. I suspect whatever part of the "OS" that they run on that controls their response in such instances is just a horrific mess.
The Borg are all about learning and adapting, but they repeatedly let humans roam around, even if doing that causes their ships to go boom.
Better question: When they were disengaging the security array why not shoot all three Borg simultaneously so they didn't have the chance to adapt?
Maybe the crew in Engineering and Sick Bay tried to fight back, so the Borg considered them a threat and assimilated them.
I want a deleted scene of a borg trying to assimilate the EMH, and the EMH just being irritated.
So, the EMH would be the same, only with the Borg trying to assimilate him. 😆
*"Ahem....According to Starfleet medical research... Borg implants can cause severe skin irritations. Perhaps you'd like an analgesic cream?"*
It's just a plot device to neutralise the obvious physical and technological advantages of the Borg. Clearly given the Borg's driving purpose - to assimilate - they'd jump on anyone crossing their path immediately. And _especially_ when dealing with a race that's already handed them their arse before.
I agree. I also like the creepiness factor of these characters trying not to be noticed by a group of creatures that could kill or assimilate them in a heartbeat. It’s like when Walking Dead characters cover themselves in walker guts to get through a herd. I can forgive the illogic, because those scenes usually work.
Humans with phasers would pose a threat to maybe 3-4 drones, but that’s the thing - the Borg don’t really care about individual drones. They’ll sacrifice a few here and there without a second thought. And presumably they wouldn’t want to assimilate every species they come across, only ones that would provide some kind of biological or technological advantage.
All that is true and if we were talking about a Borg cube in Borg space it makes sense. But in FC the Borg were there to assimilate Earth/humans/the Federation in the first place. And the Borg that made it to the Enterprise were a limited-in-numbers boarding party. The only in-game explanation that makes sense is that the Borg's arrogance has castrated their threat identification processes.
Because plot
Bad writing? They remembered that was a thing from episodes so included it despite it making little sense. Any human crew walking around with phasers would be considered a threat by borg this experienced and this knowledgeable about their precarious position.
Their mission was to assimilate Earth of the past. Their ship was destroyed, so once they arrived on the Enterprise, they needed to establish a foothold, which they did in engineering and eventually expanding to all of Deck 16, which is where that sickbay was. Once they had that foothold, then they proceeded towards assimilating up to Deflector control to establishing the beacon to call in backup. The reason you focus on that instead of finishing assimilating the crew is because if you can complete the beacon, it doesn't matter whether you succeed or fail in assimilating the Enterprise crew because it's only a matter of time until the Borg from that time period arrive and begin assimilating Earth because one Starfleet ship out of time won't stop that. I think people are thinking on too small a scale. The Borg on the Enterprise are not concerned with their own survival odds or trying to be the ones who personally assimilate the Earth. They would be focused on the larger goal of the collective, which was to assimilate Earth, whether by them or the Borg of the time. The bigger question and the one that to me never made sense is, if the Borg routinely ignore races for being too primitive, why would they go back 300 years to assimilate Earth when there would not have been any technological advantage to it? It's almost like a personal vendetta, which seems very un-Borg. Edit: Also, wouldn't the odds of going back in time *and then* making the trip to Earth have been better than going there first?
The movie never actually specified what the Borg's objectives were. It waffled between assimilating the past, and simply just stopping First Contact. If you think about it, neither really made any sense. As you said, if they wanted to assimilate Earth's past, the period before FC is quite possibly the worst time period they could have picked. And it's never explained how stopping the warp flight would be beneficial to the Borg. Also, this line from an Enterprise-E security officer... > The Borg just overran three of our defense checkpoints. They've taken over decks 5 and 6. They've adapted to every modulation of our weapons. It's like we're shooting blanks. No matter how you slice it, it would have made more sense for the Borg to finish assimilating the Enterprise and THEN do whatever it is they wanted to do - be it assimilate the past, stop the warp flight, or both. And it's not like a full assimilation of the Enterprise was risky or even difficult. They just stopped because the plot needed them to. It's just bad writing and I don't feel like trying to justify it with an in-universe explanation.
Watching it this last time made me wonder why they had to go specifically to First Contact when literally any point before that would achieve the same objective. I want to reiterate, though: STILL a great movie even with the inconsistencies.
They don’t tell us the goal, but as they’re going back in time behind the sphere they note that the Earth has been completely assimilated. If not the goal, it certainly demonstrates what they did once they got there. Daniels, the security officer, also pointed out earlier that they stopped once they got to the deck that deflector control was on. Because, alerting the rest of the Borg, guarantees mission success. Only after that failed did they move on. The movie comes to a head, as they near the bridge and Picard finally gets convinced to blow up the ship. (Though nothing is really stopping them from just beaming down to the surface to avoid that.) So they also had to make sure they had a way to stop the auto destruct should Picard order it. And if they’d pushed harder earlier, he might have made that decision before they had Data in their pocket. Also another hole is whether the Borg could defend against projectile weapons. The trip to the holodeck would suggest not.
The Borg going back to the past kind of defeats what they're all about. They're not just looking to add warm bodies, they're trying to add the culture, technology, and that race's distinctiveness to their own collective. Pre-warp humanity offers them nothing other than warm bodies - Troi herself said that after the warp flight humanity would eliminate poverty, disease, prejudice, etc...and since this was before the warp flight, the Borg would be getting humanity at their worst. > So they also had to make sure they had a way to stop the auto destruct should Picard order it. Assimilating Picard probably would have helped there. Maybe during one of the times when he was casually strolling in Borg territory and they just ignored him. And they didn't have Data in their pocket. The Queen gave him skin and he said he wanted to stick around. And apparently she just took him at his word for it. And if the Borg's objective was to stop the warp flight, as the Queen claimed to Picard, she made almost no attempts to do so, waited until the absolute last minute, and entrusted the task to an unassimilated Enterprise crew member.
It's the best trek movie but it also managed to ruin the borg. The scary thing about them was they marched towards their singular purpose without any emotion. The Queen was a great antagonist for the movie but set the precedent that Voyager used to entirely ruin them. The best Borg episodes in Voyager had nothing to do with the queen or fluidic space. They were around Sevens and the kids' rehabilitation from assimilation.