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A decent review of a pretty decent episode by Enterprise standards. The one serious hole I can find in the review is the effectiveness of Archer and Reed's weapons. Chuck missed the fact that Reed had been tinkering with them to increase the yield - one of the few good things about later Borg episodes is that adaptation went from magic no-limits immunity to something that could be overcome to an extent by BF&BI.

BF & BI?

Anyway, I enjoyed the review, but it sounded like Chuck was getting a tad nervous when comparing the nanoprobes to venom.

Pretty much agree with the review. Continuity headaches for sure, but it was an entertaining episoe for Enterprise.

That said, I always assumed that the Borg hail was partially cut off rather than them simply not bothering to introduce themselves.

A somewhat decent episode, I guess. The fact that they have to fall back on a classic Star Trek TNG villain to generate any half-way decent story-telling really shows how little this show had going for it. They shouldn't need to bring out the Borg. Where are all the interesting new Enterprise villains? Oh right... these idiots...

In regards to the drones self destructing when destroyed, i would like to know the instances when this had happened. The one instance in this happening that i can recall was in Q Who, where a destroyed drone left behind enemy lines in the hands of someone which might be able to gain some intelligence from it. I don't see at as being unreasonable that the self destruct is something that they can toggle on and off for certain circumstances.

Zor

Channel72 wrote:A somewhat decent episode, I guess. The fact that they have to fall back on a classic Star Trek TNG villain to generate any half-way decent story-telling really shows how little this show had going for it. They shouldn't need to bring out the Borg. Where are all the interesting new Enterprise villains? Oh right... these idiots...

Don't forget Future Guy. He's a guy, from the future.

I remember actually being in favor of this episode when it premiered. I felt the Borg's attempts to alter the time-line needed to be addressed within ENT and this was a decent follow-up -- continuity headaches aside.

Zor wrote:In regards to the drones self destructing when destroyed, i would like to know the instances when this had happened. The one instance in this happening that i can recall was in Q Who, where a destroyed drone left behind enemy lines in the hands of someone which might be able to gain some intelligence from it. I don't see at as being unreasonable that the self destruct is something that they can toggle on and off for certain circumstances.

Zor

Yeah, when he said that my first thought was 'wait, what?' I remeber dead drones being surrounded by a beaming effect. Not self-distructing. Besides these wasn't the first example of nanoprobe necromancy. Seven ressurect Neelix in one VGR episode.

Actually, the drones that are destroyed when the Borg invade the Enterprise in BOBW do not have a beaming effect, they fade out and leave a faint black shadow on the ground. I presume that this is their self-destruct.

Crazedwraith wrote:

Zor wrote:In regards to the drones self destructing when destroyed, i would like to know the instances when this had happened. The one instance in this happening that i can recall was in Q Who, where a destroyed drone left behind enemy lines in the hands of someone which might be able to gain some intelligence from it. I don't see at as being unreasonable that the self destruct is something that they can toggle on and off for certain circumstances.

Zor

Yeah, when he said that my first thought was 'wait, what?' I remeber dead drones being surrounded by a beaming effect. Not self-distructing. Besides these wasn't the first example of nanoprobe necromancy. Seven ressurect Neelix in one VGR episode.

Before that they had re-activated Borg Drones onboard a Derelict Cube in Season Three of Voyager. As far as Star Trek pseudoscience goes, there is far more silly things that they have done than using nanoprobes fixing up a well perserved corpse to working order.

Zor

I sort of had a theory about the Borg and their drones, in terms of their Assimilation abilities, drones being repaired vs left behind and so on after watching this episode the first time.

My theory was basically that the Borg Collective views the self destruction of a single drone as little more then a cell dying, even on the Cube scale, especially if it has been 'destroyed' in combat. In those cases, any local drones may salvage some key bits of intact technology, then trigger the failsafe in the drone which causes it to disintegrate.

It makes some sense in terms of the Borg having plenty of resources on hand, so the expense of rebuilding a drone killed by something like a 'set to kill phaser' vs just salvaging a few key bits and destroying whats left so it can't be used against them. The most efficient choice if you will. We know from a couple of Voyager episodes that a lot of Borg technology has failsafes that destroy the key components in their ships if they are destroyed, Transwarp coils being at least one example. Same sort of idea.

However in the Regeneration example, the Drones probably went to some failsafe isolation protocol. The drones wake up without a local Collective to link into, so the most efficient thing to do is to conserve the maximum number of resources. Each step along the way in Regeneration bears this out;

1. Their 'local' assimilations after the science team on Earth were all with a minimum of nanoprobes, saving resources for their own ship. Still more then ample to do the job, just over a longer time.

2. Likewise, the two drones on Enterprise use the minimum force to escape sickbay, and the injection into Phlox was more to knock him out for a few seconds then assimilate him, its just that a couple of nanoprobes probably got mixed in with the tubes and started on automatic. Not that it in any way excuses the copout BS how he stopped them.

3. They are two drones alone on a ship with a high threat level, so they hoard their resources for the work they do up in the conduits, all the work going on inside them is turning them into a kind of 'construction drone'. We know there are specalized drones such as Tactical Drones, Medical Drones (as in specialized assimilators) so it makes sense that there is a kind of 'engineering drone' as well. So by the time they get deep into the ship, said drones have internally built all manner of fabrication/replicator tech for their work, hence explaining the 'WTF that was fast' construction/appearing out of nowhere we see when they jab the tubes into a part of Enterprise, and why the nanoprobes hadn't bothered to do trivial stuff like removing the hair and such that they normally do.

Chris OFarrell wrote:and why the nanoprobes hadn't bothered to do trivial stuff like removing the hair and such that they normally do.

Well, as far as I remember, their hair was thinning considerably between the scenes in the sickbay and those where they're constructing their little surprise boxes. I think that isn't a deliberate doing of the probes but a side-effect of borg-skin becoming near-necrotic.

Also, the technology of the Enterprise literally morphs into borg-tech, it's not just replicated tech appearing on top of the old and that's what inidividuals that have just been assimilated are capable of? That's a capability the Borg haven't displayed before or since, even on First Contact the captured decks of the Enterprise didn't become so totally borg-esque like they did on the captured shuttle, and those are supposedly the same Borg. Regeneration was so full off wank, you could almost see the Borg soiling their exo-armors.