posted
I thought I'd move this out of the other thread, which I guess is now all about this episode, but wasn't originally.
I was going to talk about how "Cogenitor" and "Regeneration" (both of which I saw last night) felt like mixed bags, but on second thought I have less to say about the former than the latter.
So, Borg, huh? I'm as fond of dramatic irony as anyone, maybe more so. "Well, let's prepare to fight these weird cyborg guys," while the audience knows they don't have a chance. (Though, I guess they did. But stay with me.) There are lots of neat ways to creep the audience out when they know something about a situation that the characters don't. So, when the scientists found the wreckage from the Borg sphere I was ready to put any continuity fears aside and enjoy The Thing With Two Bodies.
Where I think the episode falls down is in the cultivation of this tension between what the audience and the characters know. Consider: Archer has every reason to believe that the Earth is a potential battleground in a temporal cold war. So shouldn't one of his first assumptions be that these super advanced aliens represent one faction or another? I would have really enjoyed watching the crew draw entirely wrong conclusions about the Borg, based on their own situation. And, really, it only makes sense. Not only are there super advanced aliens running around on Earth, but apparently Cochrane occassionally told the beer-fueled tale of alien cyborgs from the future now and then. Connecting them to the TCW seems only logical. But, that isn't done.
From the other side, we see the Borg acting kind of oddly, compared to what we know of them, what with the exceedingly slow partial assimilations and such. There are lots of good reasons why this might be the case. There was more than one Voyager episode demonstrating that, when cut off from the collective, "mini-collectives" of surviving drones are often not the most rational of agents. But this isn't done either. Now, this isn't completely non-understandable. If the characters don't rightly know how the Borg are supposed to act, they can't go around declaring that they've been damaged thanks to reentry and a century of deep freeze. But I would have enjoyed this episode a bit more if we had some idea of what was going on with the Borg, and I would have enjoyed it a lot more if the characters had been allowed to come to some reasonable but completely wrong conclusions. What if Archer assumed that this marked a ratcheting up of the conflict, and made future TCW-related decisions based on that faulty understanding. More irony! Alas.
Anyway, a quick rundown of things I liked and things I didn't, some of which may be rehashing points made in the tech thread, but I haven't read that yet.
Pros:
I enjoyed the opening scenes in the arctic, though they got a bit too horror movieish at one or two spots.
The design of the assimilated transport. I'm not sure why it needed warp drive, but once the Borg reworked the thing it looked ominous and cool.
Phlox. He made assimilation seem scary again, even if it was an oddly retarded version of the same. (Er, retarded in terms of its progression through his body.)
The general "Does anyone have any clue what's going on here?" "Nope." that Archer and company gave off.
Cons:
Magical assimilation. "The transport has increased in mass by two percent." Eh, oh? That's a neat trick. Almost as neat as the partially assimilated...Tarkalien? (It has alien right in the name! Maybe.) making weird boxes and circuitry appear out of nowhere instantaneously. Boo. Though, I did like the idea of them loading BorgOS onto the ship's computer.
The failure to tie this episode in with the show as a whole, even though it seems to me that there was at least one very good way of advancing one of the ongoing plots.
Uh, I guess it also bugged me that the plasma rifles now seem to be phase rifles. But this isn't even the first time they've shown them shooting in beams, so I don't know, and this sort of thing is hardly a dealbreaker for me.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, the way the nanoprobes reproduce by duplicating themselves could help explain the increase in mass of the transport. I like the way that the transport was assimilated, in an assymmetrical fashion. This gives some insight into Borg design. Perhaps Lore's ship in "Descent" was assimilated from something else, thus it was assymmetrical?
Also, I really liked the music in this episode.
NOTE: This post was made before I read Dan's comment in the Tech forum...
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
This is a tech-y response, but you can't have everything, right?
Well, there's the self-replicating minefield from DS9, which according to the TM used the zero-point energy method to create new particles which could be gradually assembled into new replacement mines. Given the advanced Borg technical know-how, it's possible they could do something like that, on a more massive scale.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
That sounds like a Ferengi philosiphy. Success based on how much one has aquired. What I would'nt have done to have seen Vastator on a TNG two parter....
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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quote:Listed under 'Cube variant 1': 3) Although it has never been mentioned on screen, it has been suggested that a cube may grow as new technology and new drones are assimilated. This would ultimately explain all the size differences. In particular, it would explain why the cube (variant 1), after a longer journey through the Beta and Alpha Quadrants, may be so much larger than variant 2 which we see in the Delta Quadrant. On the other hand, this would render any attempt to classify Borg ships futile as they would be extended and modified in a chaotic fashion.
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Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
But that variance in mass is because the cube has come across something that is has assimilated and added to the cube. In the case of this episode, the ship just gains mass from no-where.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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quote: But that variance in mass is because the cube has come across something that is has assimilated and added to the cube. In the case of this episode, the ship just gains mass from no-where.
quote:On the other hand, this would render any attempt to classify Borg ships futile as they would be extended and modified in a chaotic fashion.
How much more chaotic than that can you get? Logic is irrelevant! Resistance is Futile!
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
The probably took a chunk of the freighter's warp core and engines with them: thus eplaining the possible sudden increase in speed and mass.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Just to get this cleared up. Or at least not muddied down further...
When is the comment made on 3% mass increase? Could it be that this is the first time T'Pol measures the mass of the vessel, and the 3% is in relation to the design specs of the original transport? Or is it in relation to whatever readings Earth managed to get of the vessel when it departed the crash scene?
The latter would make perfect sense. As Jason sez, stuff could have been assimilated from the Tarkalean (Tarchallen?) ship via transporter or tractor beam before the Enterprise arrived, but the mass readings would be the only hint of that for our heroes.
Incidentally, did the transport ship originally have a transporter aboard, or did the Borg build one from scratch?
quote:Originally posted by Timo: Incidentally, did the transport ship originally have a transporter aboard, or did the Borg build one from scratch?
I assume they salvaged it from the sphere.
Or perhaps the transport ship had a transporter that could only transport inanimate objects, and they upgraded it using components from the sphere.
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
OK, Regeneration fits in with established canon, though it could do with a bucketload of industrial-grade lubricant.
My peeve with the episode (continuity issues aside) lies in the liberties it takes to rewrite Q Who - which was about Picard's arrogance, his firm conviction that humanity could handle whatever the universe might throw their way. But Regeneration ignores what Q was doing and why, and so alters the message Q Who presented, tones it down, lessens the impact. You know?
Registered: Nov 1999
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