Regeneration - What the hell were they thinking?

[Zeke]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]While I didn't like the [iost_uid0]idea[/iost_uid0] of bringing Borg onto [iost_uid0]Enterprise[/iost_uid0], I don't think they could possibly have done it better. The story was exciting, the stakes were high (higher than the characters knew), and -- this is the important part -- they didn't introduce any continuity errors, they just used one that was already there.

The fact is, the Borg timeline has never been consistent, especially since [iost_uid0]First Contact[/iost_uid0]. On the one hand, "Q Who?" was supposedly man's first encounter with Borg. On the other, the Borg were behind the attacks on Neutral Zone outposts the previous season -- both Romulan and Federation. (That was the writers' intent, though it ended up not being stated onscreen.) So right from the start we have an inconsistency.

In fact, the whole history of Borg in Trek is marked by the writers' apparently not even [iost_uid0]trying[/iost_uid0] to be consistent. In "Descent" we see what Hugh's individuality has done to the Borg -- and then never again. The question of whether (a) Hugh affected only one Borg cube or (b) the Collective just adapted is left as an exercise for the viewer. [iost_uid0]First Contact[/iost_uid0] introduced a queen, reconfiguring the whole structure of the Collective without comment. And so on through [iost_uid0]Voyager[/iost_uid0], which is where the notorious case of "Dark Frontier" comes up.

When that episode came out, I was among the most frustrated at the apparent conflict with "Q Who." Picard and crew knew [iost_uid0]nothing[/iost_uid0] about the Borg then, but somehow the Hansens were experts 20 years earlier. It was Jim's review at Delta Blues that pointed out what I was missing. Both [iost_uid0]Generations[/iost_uid0] and [iost_uid0]First Contact[/iost_uid0] had created situations where mankind might have heard about the Borg early. The El Aurian refugees surely wouldn't all have kept completely silent about the threat they were fleeing -- why would they? They didn't know they'd be creating a temporal inconsistency. Similarly, Zephram Cochrane undoubtedly got a detailed account from Lily, and while intelligent, he wasn't the type to keep a secret well. (ENT took advantage of that.)

I'm not saying the writers knew they were messing up their timeline. I'm sure it never occurred to them that through the El Aurians they were giving the Federation knowledge it wasn't supposed to have yet. But the hole [iost_uid0]is[/iost_uid0] there, and it's just barely wide enough to fit "Dark Frontier" into. (The Hansens probably had more knowledge at first than they should have had, but having [iost_uid0]some[/iost_uid0] isn't a problem now.)

So years later, along comes "Regeneration," pulling the same trick -- taking advantage of an accidentally-created hole and filling it with a story. Granted, it stretched some small stuff. You'd think Picard would have had any substantial debris from the sphere destroyed, and the Borg's final subspace message to the hive was unusually slow. But the episode made up for those small glitches by explaining others. We now know where the Hansens got most of their data, and how the Borg found out about the Federation in time to destroy those Neutral Zone outposts. What did it conflict with? "Q Who?" -- which was already in violation of continuity both before and after it.

"Q Who?" was a great episode. It introduced one of Trek's greatest villains and did it with awesome drama and suspense. But almost every major Borg arc episode since has contradicted the premise that Starfleet and the Borg had no knowledge of each other prior to TNG Season 2. If we insist on upholding "Q Who?", we have to throw out some of Trek's best stories. In my opinion, it's better for any further Borg stories to accept that continuity gap and be consistent with the new timeline -- and that's exactly what "Regeneration" did.[/colorost_uid0]