Rambling thoughts on Cochrane, Federation History and the Borg
Historical footnotes, that’s what the episode Regeneration is about. The end of Star Trek: First Contact left many questions for continuity and Regeneration answer many of them, as well as some from the Next Generation and Voyager. Many Historical events have an ominous foreshadowing, the removal of the abolition clause in the original Declaration of Independence, The proclamation of a new Second German Reich at Versailles in 1871, even personnel events can have the same effect such as the day when Zapata present a peasent petition to Mexico’s president Caranza in the let 1890’s. these events some small some large will eventually find there ay into the history books as a footnote, a point of small interest to the later overall story.
In Regeneration we see that Cochrane made his own footnote for the chroniclers of the late 24th century when they finally sat down to write a full history of the Federation and Borg, even though the events of First Contact would be considered by Starfleet highly classified and subject to tight government secrecy bits and pieces will slowly filter out as the crew of the Enterprise E returns home. These stories will build a sense of things “your not suppose to know” fascination and investigation much as Alien astronaughts, UFO”S and crop circles do for us today. It would only be a matter of time before these 24th century conspiracy theorist would “discover” Cochrane’s long forgotten speech and notice the similarities between it and the supposed events surrounding the 2371 Borg invasion of the Sol system. As to that speech itself we can assume his apologists and admirers of biographers would bury it as deep as his drinking and womanizing, a fact showed by the time of Kirks Enterprise when we are confronted with the mythical hero image of Metomorphis and the fact that even Cochrane has now, we assume, become concern, (maybe because of Geordies and every body else’s hero worship), about his image due to hiding his true self from Kirk and company.
Thus we see that only Archer, a man literally bounced on the great man’s knee and knew his faults would be interested enough to go looking for this odd bit of trivia about “cybernetic beings” and humans from the future (which matches another recent interest of Archers, time travel). So why would Picard have never heard of this speech, all I can say is that just think of some one who you admirer, some one like Abraham Lincoln and tell me, even if you have a complete biography of him, what he said in every public speech he ever made? You can’t, why, because while you admire him you don’t want to go digging too deeply because you are afraid of what you might find. Its like Jefferson, people idolize him for his thinking but yet shy away from the conundrum of his owning slaves. People want heroes and in the late 21st century after decades of war and instability they wanted one Zephram Cochrane and that’s what they got by burying the full extent of the past but yet the past has a nasty way of making sure you remember it correctly.
The BORG sphere ship crashed in Artic over 90 years before the events of regeneration I find it highly strange that while the remains of other more recent events in the antic are covered by snow relatively quickly most of the debris is still laying around much as if it had just fallen. The hatches which were open should have been frozen shut and buried under more then 90 years of pack ice. When I first heard of this episode I thought maybe some small piece of the ship was still left exposed with an entrance to larger areas below for a kind’ a Mummy feel (the original 30’s version) to the show of archeologist looking something. Further I am left perplexed that while Borg can seem to exist in the cold vacuum of space, there are unable to live in the cold of the artic. But these are technical points and are outside of the historical angle of this paper.
We have a very interesting sociology look here at BORG culture. The two drones left, unattached to the collective quickly reestablish themselves in a smaller one, an impulse which we have seen before in drones First Contact, I Borg, and others. What was unique in this was the fact the drones knew they were unable to fall back on the knowledge of a larger collective. We see that while a drone might be able to do anything in the 24th century he does not know everything. The two drones start building there new collective with the Earth researchers and make a start but they have very little ability to progress fast. The Artic surveyor is quickly assimilated and the engineering knowledge of the researchers enable the ship to become faster the two drones working with the knowledge they know and have gained from the researchers of the 22nd century technology fashion a crude BORG weapon. Meanwhile they are limited; the small size of the new collective does not have the rapid overcoming ability of the huge 24th century collective. Starfleet weapons have an effect which last longer then it does in the 24th since by reason we are working only on the two drones knowledge of weapons, an area the researchers and the Tarkalian (?) crew knows little about.
So what we see here is 24th Century BORG Drones trying to work with both 22nd century assimilated knowledge (and beings) and 22nd century technology. In some ways we see a BORG version of Spock’s working with “knives and bearskin” to render aid in an out of time situation. When split we see that the two groups of drones have a slowed ability to rapidly communicate, or Archer and Reed would have been in a lot of trouble quickly when they beamed on the assimilated shuttle. Face it the Enterprise crew had only 2 shots before the drones adapted meanwhile Archer and Reed continued to shot them down like they were buffalo on the prairie! We can assume that the BROG divided themselves into two groups one with the military knowledge (including the original drones) which boarded Enterprise and one to maintain the assimilated ship (probably the Takalian crew) which means when resources are finite the BORG are capable of understanding the importance of utilization of force or in this case knowledge. With the slower collective communication ability (as well as the fact they were all dedicating collective resources to the subspace message) the BOR kept those with the original knowledge closer to areas where they were most needed. For once the BORG had to manage their resources instead of not having to worry about them.
We can even assume they had figured out they were going to lose but put all their effort into gaining time so that there message could be sent home to the Delta Quadrant. Which brings me to my next point these cybernetic creatures obviously scared the crap out of Starfleet at the time of Enterprise. And Starfleet looked at the most direct route and figured there was nothing between them and their homeworld. However, within 10 to 20 short years they would find that another powerful culture was between them and Earth, the Romulan Empire. That force would be a bulwark against first Earth and later the Federation and the Cybernetic bogy men on the other side. In the end the bogy men might have been forgotten altogether but a guiding principle of Federation policy was enforced always keep the Romulans stable and happy. Hence the Federation would do all it could to keep the status que, steal a cloaking device, give them up later, and above all keep the RNZ stable all apart of Federation policy because at some high level somebody knew one day that the Federation would need the Romulans to protect them. The fact that the BORG would come with a single minded determination like a hot knife through butter through that empire never occurred to the Federation defense planners however. At least the Treaty of Tomed makes sense in my mind.
Now we have the image of a secret gathering of high level Starfleet and Federation officials who acted as the keepers of a near prophecy like belief that in two hundred years the cybernetic beings might appear again. And they kept that knowledge a secret until Picard’s incident with Q. Now let use reverse roles and look at it from the BORG perspective, you are living happy in your nice ever expanding mid-24th century BORG collective and resistance let alone defeat is unheard of then suddenly a drone picks up the sub space signal sent 200 years before, you can’t believe its contents so you send it out to the rest of collective, the collective reacts with disbelief that some race in the far other alpha quadrant has beaten the BORG not once but three times. The queens pool there collective together and discuss this event. Then a Cube intercepts a Human vessel close to the delta quadrant the technology has advanced considerably since the message was sent. Then bam, right in the middle of the Collective appears a human ship with no explanation and as soon as your cube seems to be winning Bam it disappears as quick as it appeared.
The queens say “woh” at this rate the humans might be the ones saying “resistance is futile” in a few years. The Collective decides on invasion especially after the first scout ships report back there findings along the edge of Federation space since the Federation and Earth seem to be the only threat which might oppose them. So now we can see that the two little old drones might have completed there mission to reestablish contact with the collective but in doing so sowed its destruction in 2379 when Voyager returned home since no drone in the collective understood that it was contact period, regardless of time and place, with Humanity which meant the end of the collective as they knew it.
In the end Regeneration is both prolog and epilog to the Star Trek BORG story. Little would realize until much latter the importance of this little footnote in Starfleets history would play. It is easy to see some Starfleet Admiral rereading of these event in the 2380’s saying to some one “if only we had realized sooner, if only we had known.”
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mmmm....
. Good reason (beside the huge distance) that could account for the Borgs' unability to contact their 22nd century siblings 
