Dalton wrote:OK, what the hell happened?
Just the other day I watched Q Who. Guinan mentions that the Borg are not interested in the people, merely the ship and the technology, and that new Borg are made in the usual fashion. No mention of assimilating humans at all, no "Resistance is Futile".
And suddenly they completely fucking change! What the hell? How do we rationalize this rather gaping YATI?
Did Guinan say that? I have the episode on tape,
somewhere in a big mess, and I've got the LD, but finding the former and getting the latter to work would be a big task
This is what I found:
PICARD: Guinan -- what else can you tell us about these creatures?
GUINAN: I only know bits and pieces.
PICARD: Anything would be helpful.
GUINAN: They are a mixture of organic and artificial life that has been developed over a thousand centuries.
...
Q: The Borg is the ultimate user, with the result that they are unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced. They have no interest in political conquest -- or wealth or power as you know it. They simply want your ship -- its technology. They have identified it as something they can consume.
I didn't see Guinan say anything about how they were strictly limited in technology, though I agree with you Dalton--that was the obvious implication.
As far as Riker's observation that the "Borg appear to be born 'human'," from later information we can say he was just making a hasty generalization...he'd opened a Borg "maturation chamber" and found a newly assimilated baby inside. Borg put all children in these things, even Seven when she was 6-7 years old. Not knowing that, Riker just guessed drones had gotten jiggy with it and made some babies.
Now, what Q said
is a bit puzzling...we can easily explain away his "not a he, not a she" line as how gender identity is irrelevant in the context of the Borg Collective
itself. But the bit about "only interested in your ship" is a little harder to rationalize.
What he could've meant is that the Borg
do usually seek technology first. IF it's worth a damn, then the people who pilot it might also be worthwhile--a conditional concern. If it's not technologically "worthy," they'll most likely ignore you AND your ship unless you have something really special to offer; e.g., knowledge concerning the Omega particle.
That might fit Q's arrogant posturing where humanity itself is concerned, he thinking that we're little more than "savages" and talking monkeys. Though he knew differently--that is, that the Borg WOULD want to assimilate us--he put on airs and acted as if we're the bunch of clods he'd always said we were.
But the Borg are truly riddled with all kinds of inconsistencies. I've tried to rationalize them all just for fun, but it's tough. Take a look at all this:
1--Guinan says the Borg have "been evolving for thousands of centuries." 1,000 centuries is 100,000 years.
Yet, in "Dragon's Teeth," one of the Vaadwaur comments that, 900 years beforehand, the Borg only occupied a handful of systems. Evidently he'd encountered them first-hand. Seven responds that she doesn't remember Vaadwauri; "records from that period are fragmentary," whatever that means.
This isn't actually a contradiction, but it's not REAL consistent with what Guinan said...it would've meant that the Borg spent almost all of their time in a couple of star systems, and only within the past thousand or so years started to expand slowly. It explains a good bit about why they're not spread throughout the entire galaxy, though...like Darth Mike once said in his fanfic, the Borg seem content to sit in the DQ and polish their little jewel of an organization.
2--First Contact with the Borg was...when? Picard thought that, in 2365, his ship was the first to encounter the Borg. Later we learn the Hansens encountered them earlier, in the mid 2350s.
But hold on a second. If Borg species' nos. are chronological, humans are species 5618. Ktarians are 6961, Vulcans are 3259, and the Ferengi are 180!!!!!
The Hansens identified a Ktarian as Species 6961 in "Dark Frontier," IIRC. This itself might be an inconsistency...I'm not sure the Federation knew of Ktarians until Riker ran into them and picked up that cheesy videogame.
Anyway, I digress. If humans have a lower no. than Ktarians and the Borg hadn't even yet noticed the Hansens, then the Hansens weren't the first humans assimilated. First Contact therefore happened earlier than the 2350's.
3--Ferengi, Species 180? Wha? We know from ENT that the Ferengi evidently had high-warp capable ships. In "Little Green Men," Quark said that the Ferengi Alliance bought warp drives from somebody...so it's vaguely possible that an intrepid Ferengi caught a Borg ship's attention hundreds of years ago.
Damn, I have to run. I hate to leave that thought half-formed but I'll come back to it. Lots more inconsistencies after this commercial!
After all, when Q was Human Guinan took advantage and stabbed him with a fork. 