posted
I mean, their ship never got took offline and some how everyone on the ship got disconnected from the hive mind...or they never got hit by some borg killing pathogen....so what happened to Hugh's ship to set them all free.
Sure i know in the episold it was said Hugh himself gained a sense of individuality and spread it to his ship and hopefully the entire collective[which never happend]and they all said hey where individuals....LOL comon this can't happend on a borg ship its not like those drones were never individuals and never experienced it...their identities been suppressed.
And wheres the vinculum?--isn't it suppose to prevent things like this from happening or is that the Queen's job? You can't just remember your indivuality on a borg ship and even if you did-won't it just quickly get filtered out?
btw---what kind of ship was Hugh's ship---it's not really a mine is it as hinted in "Scorpion"?
posted
Um, first of all, you've got the premise of the TNG episode "I, Borg" wrong. The drone who would become Hugh was one of five drones on a small scout ship that crash landed on the surface of a planet that I wouldn't recommend spending a vacation on. Hugh was badly injured and repaired by the Enterprise crew.
Now, it's been a while since I've seen "I, Borg," but I think it was mentioned that Hugh's connection to the Borg Collective was severed for some reason. Again, I repeat that I think this was mentioned but I'm not for certain.
Through the efforts of Geordi babying Hugh, he regained his sense of individuality. He was returned to a Borg vessel that was sent to investigate the disappearance of their scout ship. His individuality spread through his portion of the collective and that lead to the events seen and described in "Descent" parts one and two.
Now, if the Collective connection was severed or disrupted, Hugh would be able to regain some of his individuality. We've seen this before in Picard and various episodes of Voyager (the Borg children, Seven of Nine, the Planet of Freed Borg, etc). It would seem that the connection with the Collective is an integral part of keeping individuality repressed in the drones.
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
posted
no. i know that---Hugh gained his individuality from his disconnection from the hive mind and interaction with the E-D crew[Geordi]--d'uh
but the ship that retrieved him never got disconnected, Hugh sent his new found individuality for a breif moment when he was relinked---that shouldn't have effected the ship since everyone on the ship was connected to the hive mind---which as you've said repress those emotions through a number of safety protocols.
posted
Er...that didn't appear to be what you were talking about.
However, there is a rather gaping plot hole leading up to "Descent," yes. If assimilating an individual somehow infects the Borg with individuality, then they could never assimilate anyone at all.
posted
While the mechanism of Hugh's corruption of the local Collective was never explained, let's speculate a bit. I trust a Cube would have some sort of a subspace comm system to allow the local Drones to speak with the rest of the Collective - the individual transmitters of the Drones could not span interstellar distances. Naturally, there would be safety switches in this commlink, so that the Borg could isolate contaminated Cubes (it can't be the first time somebody tried to attack the Borg using a viruslike contaminant). So once a Cube noticed its Drones were going haywire, it would cut itself off.
So far, so good. But what about your main argument - that the Borg already are built to suppress individuality, and reassimilating Hugh should thus pose no greater threat than assimilating a typical resisting individual for the first time and suppressing his independence? I can only think of two things.
One, perhaps the key here is that Hugh did not resist. He accepted assimilation, and was rubber-stamped as "reliable" without further inspection. The auto-suppression system might only be turned on when the assimilee is deemed unreliable to begin with.
Two, and this sounds a little more plausible: perhaps Hugh's individualistic desires were something the Collective was *curious* about? In "Dark Frontier", the ruling Queen claims 7 of 9 is the first Drone to regain individuality (and then return to be analyzed). Hugh would have been another precedent, and possibly something the Collective would very much want to analyze carefully before erasing his individuality. Too bad the analysis backfired badly, and ruined a whole Cubeful of Borg before the limiters cut in...
This was supposed to be the mechanism of the "visual weapon" Geordi and Data devised, too. The weapon would not try to propagate aggressively - instead, it would arouse the curiosity of the Borg, who would then fall deeper and deeper into its clutches due to their desire to find out more about the weapon. They would not see it as a threat until it was too late.
posted
I don't believe, at this point in the series, it had been astablished that the Borg assimilated peopel in the manner that we know they do today. Wasn't it still kind of thought that the Borg were there own species?
In other words, the writers figured that drones were born into the Collective and had never experienced individuality, therefore it would come as a shock to them.
The Borg just weren't very fleshed out at this point, IMHO
posted
I never bought the "impossible visual" answer anyway. As Phil Farrend pointed out, going by Geordi and Data's logic, the Borg could have been destroyed my an M C Echer drawing.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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i think the vinculum is the stand in for a borg queen on a local ship level---and it should have been responsible for bringing some order back to chaos that Hugh might have cuased.
[ June 15, 2001: Message edited by: TheF0rce ]
[ June 16, 2001: Message edited by: Charles Capps ]
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