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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Whether you're utterly destroying your enemies through assimilation or through genocide (with the half rear end justification of "saving lives"), the effect is the same: your enemies, who are beings with the right to life, are completely gone. It's very difficult to say that the Borg are wrong for doing it one way when you intend to do the same thing the other way. This is ignoring that you're condemning other species to death just through inaction and the Borg by their very nature cannot be defeated decisively conventionally, reasoned with or bought to the diplomacy table. So by insisting 'all life' has a right to exist, the Enterprise is passively condemning countless other species to be devoured by the Borg, but hey they're all off screen and largely live in the Delta Quadrant thousands of light years away so all of those holocausts are out of sight and out of mind!
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Oct 25, 2021 21:42
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Eimi posted:By the time of First Contact, Picard had been killed and replaced by his Mirror Universe counterpart, Larry. Ah, another erudite fan of the Shatnerverse I see.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:44
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multijoe posted:This is ignoring that you're condemning other species to death just through inaction and the Borg by their very nature cannot be defeated decisively conventionally, reasoned with or bought to the diplomacy table. So by insisting 'all life' has a right to exist, the Enterprise is passively condemning countless other species to be devoured by the Borg, but hey they're all off screen and largely live in the Delta Quadrant thousands of light years away so all of those holocausts are out of sight and out of mind!
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Oct 25, 2021 21:44
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FlamingLiberal posted:This was the argument of that alien played by Ray Wise on Voyager, who tries to take revenge on the crew because they got his homeworld wiped out by stopping Species 8472 Was he wrong? About the genocides that is, not pointlessly taking revenge on Voyager.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:47
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It's pretty dumb to imagine that they could kill the Borg with a jpeg. Like, if it really is that hazardous, why didn't it destroy the Enterprise's computer? Also genociding the Founders doesn't destroy the Dominion. You've still got all those Jem'Hadar and Vorta kicking around. If anything, utilising the threat of it on the Founders to force peace is the smart play - it's like having a hostage, once you actually kill the hostage you lose your leverage.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:53
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I still say that they should've used the opportunity in Voyager to mostly kill off the Borg with species 8472. Have them find nothing but destroyed cubes when they got there. Then stumble across some wreckage and rescue Seven of Nine to find out what happened. Be very creeped out about something easily defeating the Borg like that. Then book it out of Borg space as fast as possible. Maybe hint that pockets of the collective survived and they might build back some day.
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Oct 25, 2021 22:01
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John Wick of Dogs posted:When quantum duplicate Harry Kim brought quantum duplicate baby Naomi Wildman to Voyager, what did they do with the dead baby Naomi Wildman they still had on their ship? Put her in some kind of baby torpedo casing? Recycle into the replicator? Turned into feline supplements.
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Oct 25, 2021 22:01
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The long form, optimistic view of the Borg is that you ultimately could, through the strength of your ideals, bring them into a peaceful galactic community. I assume this was never intentional writing, but the Borg evolved a lot through their interactions with the Federation. Janeway explicitly Does reason/negotiate with them. And that unimatrix zero thing showed an emergent behaviour where individual Borg drones were living out a fantasy life as individuals with their previous culture intact. It would be awesome to have a (well written) series where in the future all the galactic powers are existing peacefully, and have to cooperate to address some new challenge.
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Oct 25, 2021 22:05
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Grand Fromage posted:I think the real problem is we don't know what the virus was going to do exactly. We've seen numerous examples that when you cut off the connection to the collective, drones regain their sense of self. So if the virus is destroying the collective itself, not all the members of it, I don't see the moral issue with that. I'm pretty sure the 'total systems failure' it's intended to produce is the death of all borg. They're too busy thinking about fractals to do stuff like life support or reactor control. 'I, Borg' is what, the third time the Federation has interacted with Borg? That's two skirmishes and one peaceful conversation with Hugh. But hey they're difficult to understand so just slaughter them all. Did no one learn anything from watching Shatner fight a man in a rubber dinosaur costume?
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Oct 25, 2021 22:11
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The Gorn analogy would be more applicable if the Gorn actually were guys in rubber suits and freeing them from the rubber suits lets them act like who they previously were. That's the thing with the Borg. Sure killing them is bad, but destroying the Collective and freeing the drones? Saving drones and de-Borging them is always portrayed as a heroic act. How is doing that on a large scale different than the small ones we've seen?
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Oct 25, 2021 22:15
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Eimi posted:The Gorn analogy would be more applicable if the Gorn actually were guys in rubber suits and freeing them from the rubber suits lets them act like who they previously were. That's the thing with the Borg. Sure killing them is bad, but destroying the Collective and freeing the drones? Saving drones and de-Borging them is always portrayed as a heroic act. How is doing that on a large scale different than the small ones we've seen? Because they never do it on a large scale and at the end of 90s trek they're just as much a menance to everyone else in the galaxy as they were at the start. Obviously that would be the ideal solution but it's also completely outside the scope of anyone's ability
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Oct 25, 2021 22:19
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This whole debate is literally just I Borg in forums chat, lol. Picard WAS ready to press the button until Hugh showed that a Borg removed from the collective COULD regain individuality and that the collective is not the Be-All End-All of what a Borg is. He was already resisting the moral of his own rescue until he saw it reflected in Hugh. Now the question is what the gently caress ARE the Borg anyway? They have babies in drawers. Are those actual Borg The Original Species babies or assimilated babies? Are the original Borg the bulk of The Borg still and they reproduce or have they gone completely beyond that? There's no known origin of the Borg, one could suspect it was a society of individuals that went too far into The Singularity and grey gooped themselves into this poo poo? Was Hugh an original Borg or an assimilated? I don't think there's any way of knowing from what's in the show. I don't know that I have a point here, just thinkin' bout borgs
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Oct 25, 2021 22:30
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MillennialVulcan posted:This whole debate is literally just I Borg in forums chat, lol. Picard WAS ready to press the button until Hugh showed that a Borg removed from the collective COULD regain individuality and that the collective is not the Be-All End-All of what a Borg is. He was already resisting the moral of his own rescue until he saw it reflected in Hugh. And then you find out it was some dude whose last thoughts were that he didn't want to become a cyborg and there we go.
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Oct 25, 2021 22:39
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Destroying the Founders would be a bad move (says the Vorta fan, but). You wipe them out, you're effectively destroying the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar too and then chaos reigns in a huge chunk of the galaxy that hasn't known anything else for thousands of years. I mean they *really* suck, but that's some loving around that will lead to some serious finding out. e: "Where are the supply ships?" "Who knows, they left a message screaming 'THE GODS ARE DEAD, SAVE YOURSELVES' and we haven't heard back since" HopperUK fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 23:01
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They kind of address that in The Die Is Cast right? The Romulan/Cardassian leaders get called out on "Yo if this works and you nuke the Founders every Jem'Hadar is going to go loving apeshit and come screaming out of the wormhole" and their response was basically "Yeah, they'll burn themselves out after a while. Sucks to be you on DS9 though." Edit: Oh god I just fact checked myself and worse than the strike force leadership saying that it's a Starfleet Security Vice Admiral because OF COURSE IT IS I'm also surprised that the Obsidian Order fleet was setup 11 whole episodes before this all went down. For Season 3 DS9 that's actually some pretty impressive planning. J33uk fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 23:21
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Possibly you could view the Borg like the crystalline entity, just a force of nature that doesn't really understand what it's doing, or maybe they're mysterious enough that there might be something nice about the Borg that just eliminating them without thinking through the details would destroy. Maybe any mass-de-borging attempt wouldn't penetrate the entirety of the collective and would just antagonize the Borg into attacking directly. Maybe a mass-de-borging without a fleet of superfast refugee aid ship would just kill all the former collective members as they find themselves on non-functional ships out in the depths of space that they don't know how to use and probably don't have enough food to keep all units independently active at once. Of course, the real answer is that the Borg are a cool part of the franchise that still generate a lot of fan interest (unlike the Romulans) so eliminating most of them would be foolish, but there is a sort of instinct that destroying unique things may be bad. Unless any writer in the franchise wants to do some big elaboration on the nature of the Borg (and is allowed to write a big story to do so), they will be stuck at the current status quo forever. But then I still want some Star Trek to pick up what TMP laid down and find that machine society that doesn't acknowledge organic life that fixed up the Voyager probe so it could start absorbing technology. Or maybe that space whale society.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:11
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Although I would have let Odo and the founders die if I was hypothetically in the Star Trek universe and had some sway in section 31 or whatever, I do wonder if the Dominion War would have been avoided if Tain and the Tal’Shiar hadn’t gotten the bright idea to preemptively whack the founders. From the perspective of the Founders, I could see that attacking the founders evaporated any hesitation they may have had about going to war with the Alpha Quadrant. I also fully understand why the characters on a show who are the protagonists of an evolved humanity wouldn’t do this poo poo, and that I am taking the side of roughly 99% of the starfleet admiralty, who presumably would be on board with heinous poo poo. I can live with it. I can live with it.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:Unless any writer in the franchise wants to do some big elaboration on the nature of the Borg (and is allowed to write a big story to do so), they will be stuck at the current status quo forever. FWIW, the relaunch novel timeline did this (I suspect because every author was pitching their own Big Borg Story and the higher-ups finally said "fine, let's do one major Borg event and then they'll be gone for good"). It was... fine-ish, and I give them credit for staying away from the Borg from then on, and since the relaunch novels are ending it looks like they stuck to that successfully. Mostly, it was used to get all the individual relaunch series synced up with each other and to set up a new political status quo. Because at the end of the day, as Voyager showed, Borg stories lose a lot of power if they're overexposed.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:30
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Hey, I still love the Romulans! I can't say I really like what the recent shows have done with them, but they are my favorite race in Trek. They have so much potential, even if it all boils down to them being sneaky and uniform. Which doesn't make sense for a race who is supposed to be highly emotional, which is why I want them to be examined in more detail.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:33
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Romulans are also my favorites and have been done dirty many times.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:37
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Thirded
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Oct 26, 2021 00:43
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On a certain level this Borg conversation is academic, since it was later established in VOY that anytime a Borg ship is infected by some sort of unknown pathogen, whether biological or computational, the collective just dump the afflicted ships out of the network or outright destroy them. In all likelihood the virus would not only have had no effect on the collective beyond the initial point of infection, it would have made the Federation's situation worse by making the collective perceive them as a greater threat even more worthy of assimilation. And to add my two cents on the Founders, I think something we tend to overlook is that they are profoundly spiteful when they put their mind(s) to it. In the alliance's final assault on Cardassia the Female Changeling didn't so much have a defensive strategy so much as a command to inflict as many casualties on the alliance as possible to make the actual end of the conflict and reestablishment of peace all the more difficult. Added to that the penchant of the Founders for extreme out-of-left-field gambits (Kamikaze a Federation capital ship to insert a Vorta mole at Starfleet HQ! Sacrifice your homeworld to orbital bombardment to destroy the Romulan and Cardassian intelligence services!) and I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that, with their strategic position in the Alpha Quadrant collapsing while their species dies of an incurable disease, the Founders would order one final ultimate act of revenge against their enemies. Imagine the Founders giving their last order to supply the Jem'Hadar fleets with those trilithium bombs changeling Bashir had and sent them on a suicide run to nuke the suns of the key systems of all the major powers. Sure, not all the Jem'Hadar would get through, but probably enough to kill a few dozen billion people, if not destroy interstellar civilization in that region of space for the next half a millennium. What I'm trying to say is that while you can be the 'ard man and go full genocide against enemies that pose an existential threat, there's no guarantee that your solution will actually work, and there's a pretty good chance that if you fail those enemies will escalate to a level you cannot hope to match. J33uk posted:I'm also surprised that the Obsidian Order fleet was setup 11 whole episodes before this all went down. For Season 3 DS9 that's actually some pretty impressive planning. Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 00:45
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Problematic Soup posted:Although I would have let Odo and the founders die if I was hypothetically in the Star Trek universe and had some sway in section 31 or whatever, I do wonder if the Dominion War would have been avoided if Tain and the Tal’Shiar hadn’t gotten the bright idea to preemptively whack the founders. From the perspective of the Founders, I could see that attacking the founders evaporated any hesitation they may have had about going to war with the Alpha Quadrant. The Tal'Shiar head honcho running the 'nuke the founders' operation was a founder. They're loving cops, man.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:47
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Been rewatching Enterprise and I've surprised myself by enjoying it, but just got to Dear Doctor and I forgot how much I utterly hate that episode. Gotta love making our captain basically guilty of genocide, with utterly laughable reasoning. It fits with that era utterly failing to understand the Prime Directive though.  It's there so our heroes make a choice to defy it and do the right thing, in universe to put a stop before someone goes helping, not to provide an excuse for genocide.
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Oct 26, 2021 00:55
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disaster pastor posted:FWIW, the relaunch novel timeline did this (I suspect because every author was pitching their own Big Borg Story and the higher-ups finally said "fine, let's do one major Borg event and then they'll be gone for good"). It was... fine-ish, and I give them credit for staying away from the Borg from then on, and since the relaunch novels are ending it looks like they stuck to that successfully. Mostly, it was used to get all the individual relaunch series synced up with each other and to set up a new political status quo. Because at the end of the day, as Voyager showed, Borg stories lose a lot of power if they're overexposed.
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Oct 26, 2021 01:18
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MillennialVulcan posted:This whole debate is literally just I Borg in forums chat, lol. Picard WAS ready to press the button until Hugh showed that a Borg removed from the collective COULD regain individuality and that the collective is not the Be-All End-All of what a Borg is. He was already resisting the moral of his own rescue until he saw it reflected in Hugh. The Borg collective is a mechanical parasite that infects sentient biological hosts and uses their brains to act as processing nodes of its collective. If you kill all the drones you genocide the Borg. If you free all the drones you genocide the Borg. Shyrka posted:It's pretty dumb to imagine that they could kill the Borg with a jpeg. Hey now, .jpgs are magical things. There are thousands of people today that think you can become rich by owning a link to one. Marshal Radisic posted:the dissolution of the collective in 2381 Wait, what? A.o.D. fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 01:52
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A.o.D. posted:Wait, what? It's the novel extended universe where there was a large ongoing 'final' Borg conflict that resulted in the Collective ceasing to exist in 2281. It was dissolved and the Drones that didn't choose individuality reabsorbed into the non-hostile race that the Borg were an offshoot of, I think it went.
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Oct 26, 2021 02:08
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Shyrka posted:The Tal'Shiar head honcho running the 'nuke the founders' operation was a founder.
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Oct 26, 2021 02:18
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Seemlar posted:It's the novel extended universe where there was a large ongoing 'final' Borg conflict that resulted in the Collective ceasing to exist in 2281. It was dissolved and the Drones that didn't choose individuality reabsorbed into the non-hostile race that the Borg were an offshoot of, I think it went. Yeah. I'll spoiler it to be safe, though the trilogy is over a decade old at this point: - Just before the Earth-Romulan War, Columbia is crippled in a Romulan attack and loses warp drive and communications. Much, much later, they make it to the nearest M-class planet, home of the Caeliar, an advanced species who have very strong feelings about not interfering with other species and not being interfered with. Because they're also super preservative of life, they let the Columbia crew stay on the condition that they don't gently caress anything up. Also they're so advanced that they've replaced their own cells with programmable semi-artificial cells. I wonder if that'll be relevant. - Because the Columbia crew are humans (and Enterprise-era humans, objectively the worst kind), they gently caress things up and the planet explodes in a time-travely way. Three Caeliar city-ships survive. The "main" one is thrown back to the 1600s or so and finds a new planet. The second one is thrown back billions of years and ends up Dyson-sphering a whole galaxy. The third one is thrown back about 6000 years and into the Delta Quadrant; eventually, desperate to survive, the last Delta Quadrant Caeliar combines her cells with the last of the Columbia crew and we have the first Borg. (Columbia herself is thrown into the Gamma Quadrant, but nobody survives.) - 2381, the Borg are going their big gently caress-off Alpha Quadrant invasion where they're so pissed at being foiled by humans so many times that they're just destroying everything and only bothering to assimilate people if they're so important that it would give the Borg a tactical advantage. Titan finds the main Caeliar, who are mostly like "wow, that sucks, but this isn't our fight, sorry." Until finally they discover, "whoa, one of us did this, this is kinda our fight." Long story short, they get themselves a link into the Collective, usurp the Queen, then set all the drones free. It'd be a deus ex machina if you weren't supposed to see it coming for three books. The vast majority go with the Caeliar to a new life somewhere else, yay. As I said, it's arguably a less interesting story than the aftermath was (having to deal with tens of billions dead, thousands of ships blown up, hundreds of planets destroyed, and the formation of a new political alignment), but they definitely went big with it.
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Oct 26, 2021 02:23
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Why would they even allow Locutus to keep that stupid mixer attachment on his arm if they could just remove it from the start.
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Oct 26, 2021 02:55
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Man I'd like to have the job of doing for the Vorta and the Dominion what Una McCormack did for the Cardassians or Diane Duane for the Romulans. The only time we ever see two Vorta talking to each other, both of them are Weyoun. What are they like?? Like, day to day? Weyoun is kind of lovely and quick-tempered with people he perceives as below him - are they all like that? Is he like that with other Vorta? How come Yelgrun's affect is so different? Are Vorta in general incapable of doing violence with their own hands? It kinda looks like it. Someone hire me to write glorified fanfic or an RPG supplement or something. I want to work all this out.
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Oct 26, 2021 03:06
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HopperUK posted:Man I'd like to have the job of doing for the Vorta and the Dominion what Una McCormack did for the Cardassians or Diane Duane for the Romulans. The only time we ever see two Vorta talking to each other, both of them are Weyoun. What are they like?? Like, day to day? Weyoun is kind of lovely and quick-tempered with people he perceives as below him - are they all like that? Is he like that with other Vorta? How come Yelgrun's affect is so different? Are Vorta in general incapable of doing violence with their own hands? It kinda looks like it. The Vortas are people persons. They take the orders from the Founders to the Jem'Hadar and the other lesser races. They're people persons. They're good with people!
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Oct 26, 2021 03:24
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There is some ACTING going on in this episode. Now Picard is covered in mud and having a breakdown. Goddamn what a piece of poo poo Robert is. This tough brotherly love angle is just not earned enough.
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Oct 26, 2021 03:55
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Shyrka posted:The Tal'Shiar head honcho running the 'nuke the founders' operation was a founder. Yes but also no. He was running the operation, but it wasn't his idea. The Dominion was already working the Alpha Quadrant powers against each other before that, but Tain's plan forced them to move their timetable up by decades. The Cardassian strike was going ahead even if that guy wasn't a Founder. His impact was supplying the cloaking devices (that were ultimately a charade anyhow). It isn't like the Founders needed a false flag operation to justify their war or anything. The Cardassians had the idea to nuke the Founders and Tal'Shiar guy found a way to get a whole second bird with that stone.
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Oct 26, 2021 04:52
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were tom paris and kes loving the whole time?
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Oct 26, 2021 05:09
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punishedkissinger posted:were tom paris and kes loving the whole time? No, sometimes Paris flies the ship.
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Oct 26, 2021 05:11
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When I was a kid I watched TNG and Voyager, not really in any particular order. Picked up Discovery out of boredom and really loved the first 2 seasons so far, especially Pike in season 2. It prompted me to start watching through TOS with a friend and wow the remaster looks great for something from the 60s, I kind of finally get why so many people got so invested in ST. The misogyny and sexism however 
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Oct 26, 2021 12:30
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ijyt posted:When I was a kid I watched TNG and Voyager, not really in any particular order. Picked up Discovery out of boredom and really loved the first 2 seasons so far, especially Pike in season 2. It prompted me to start watching through TOS with a friend and wow the remaster looks great for something from the 60s, I kind of finally get why so many people got so invested in ST.
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Oct 26, 2021 12:56
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Personally I'm in favour of attempting to aggressively culture-jam the Borg with cloned bodies run by cybernetic implants and stuffed full of ethical viruses. Sure thing pal, add our distinctiveness to your own, we're going to assimilate you from the inside out
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Oct 26, 2021 15:15
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The best solution is the Night Crew solution. Get one Borg to party all Borg will have to party. Just beam over only your most sloshed crew members.
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Oct 26, 2021 15:25
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