Wait, now there are two semi-functional Borg drone flying around earth/inside a solar system in the past or I missing something. And Vulcan and future federation ships didn't stumble into them for all this time?

10:05 - I don't get your issue there. Hawk is in danger. Picard instinctively raises his voice. It's not necessary, but that doesn't matter. It's instinct. You're gonna yell when someone's in imminent danger.

I’ve always thought the dish “charged with antiprotons” was the smaller dish the beacon was on. Picard was shooting the bigger, not charged dish.

Picard, Worf and a redshirt walk onto a deflector dish....

13:30 So, interesting fact, you can actually stop a leak like that without applying so much pressure that it would cut off blood supply. Early pressure (mainly G-suits) suits, in the legs and arms, basically had a inflatable tube, that when inflated, tightened the laces. This kept the blood from pooling in your extremities by pushing it back up. Somewhat similarly, there are things called "partial pressure suits", which only pressurize your head, and use the "squeezing" technique described earlier to keep your body under pressure, which is necessary because otherwise blood will pool where there is no pressure (which you get from the atmosphere in the suit, laces, or giant rubber bands). I can't remember the exact details, but I believe some guy doing a really high altitude jump in the early days of spaceflight had an issue with his suit, his glove specifically, and essentially just used duct tape on his wrist to seal in the pressure. His hand got frostbite and expanded to a really large size due to the lack of pressure allowing blood to pool, but he didn't lose it. Think about it like this: if you had a big enough balloon, you could stick your arm in it once it was blown up, and it would still hold the air, but it wouldn't cut off the circulation in your arm, because the pressure required to create a seal against the atmospheric pressure is less than what is needed to cut off circulation. It's helpful to remember that vacuums don't suck, it's the pressure inside the suit you're fighting against. In other words, there isn't any "pulling" force from the vacuum, just a "pushing" force from the atmospheric pressure inside the suit, which depending on the mixture, can be 1 atm with 21% oxygen, or 0.5 atm with 42% oxygen, or even less pressure with more oxygen, down to 0.21 atm and 100% oxygen, but then you run into the risk of becoming ash very quickly if a spark happens inside your suit. That's generally frowned upon.

0:10 picard, worf _and a starfleet officer_ sucks to be you lieutenant hawk

You can still yell out their name over the comm to convey urgency. Hell I do that all the time when playing online games, normal kills, normal voice, there's a guy sneaking up behind my teammate, 'yo teammate!'

"You told him about the Statue?" So Riker actually understands the situation, yes? No? Yes?

Always thought the destroy half the ship issue was due to the fact that an explosion of the dish right next to or on the hull would cause the explosion to feedback into the ship.

To me the slowness you talked about kinda makes sense in that it would take time to complete this task in a spacesuit and I imagine they also don’t want to appear an urgent matter to the borg

Literally wearing my "Assimilate This!" t-shirt. Small world.

The Borg's urgency in completing the task might be explained if the Borg can only operate in vacuum for a short time. That is, they are taking damage to their organic parts, but their nanoprobes are repairing the damage as quickly as they can. There would be a limited amount of time they could do this before running out of juice, at which point the Borg would die. (This isn't mentioned AT ALL onscreen, but it would make sense. It might also slow their reaction in adapting to damage.)

Borg, Mek'leth's, and Deflectors... OH MY

Wait? What about the borg that assimilated Hawk! Why didn't he come back with Hawk?

The Borg always seem to act only when they know the nature of the "threat". considering that the collective is "thinking" in a mechanical way, they may only act when have enough data on what the other side may be planning.

meanwhile in 40k universe, this but a legion of imperial knights with giant chainswords stomp out onto the bullworks of their transport vessels, cutting the borg to pulp, then the mechanicus comes along with their totally not the borg skitarii

12:36 Homage to Locutus' head turn from The Best of Both Worlds part 1. 12:53 "Mr Worf, fire."

This is by far the best Trek movie!

It is instinctive reaction to yell towards someone when they are in danger.

I think, I always come to expect a slow pace in low gravity vacuum combat. That said, couldnt they have power amor by then? Or even power suits that enable quicker movement? Its just a thought that somehow starfleet never comes up with that stuff.

The point of the Navigational Deflector is to shove small particles out of the ships way, so they do not impact the ship at velocities so great, they would tear through the entire ship before anyone even knew it was happening. Since particles are matter, mostly deuterium which are then sucked up by the Bussard Collectors on the Nacelles, why is there antiprotons involved? Does starfleet create millions of matter-antimatter annihilations while traveling? Wouldn't those antiprotons be running trough that cable?

I mean honestly, I'd have my weapon at the ready (on stun of course). We've got bigger concerns here than this one guy and his panic attack.

Worf would be fine. That fix of his would work to keep him conscious. And he wouldn't start losing his leg unless he were stuck in his EVA for more than a few hours. It's a quick fix that will hurt as time goes and the leg swells up because of vacuum pressure differential, but as someone will mention anyone in a low pressure environment and suited who have experienced this did the same thing. A high altitude balloon jumper had a faulty glove connection but he tied it off and continued the jump. It looked bad but was okay after awhile.

Picard turning off his boots and jumping across the dish is terrifying when you think about it. Stay well out there everybody, and Jesus Christ be with you friends.😊

12:56 First I turn my body then I turn my head and finally my eyes because I am the Terminator!

On the deflector dish - I don't think Picard meant any shot misplaced on the dish would blow up the ship; it seems to me that it was the particle emitter that was the danger area, specifically the particle emitter still connected to the ship. This makes sense, as the emitter would be where energy is run through, and the rest of dish probably acts more like a focusing lens (or dish, if you will) for the particle emitter. That's why when Worf shot it, it exploded.

This movie always made me wonder why The Federation didn't just use physical weapons on the Borg. In other words just bullets, knives, swords, and what not. Heck even flying drones into cubes to destroy them. We have seen ships fly into cubes before I think ( I could be wrong). Just have shuttles remotely flown into cubes to destroy them.

It bugs me, how was Hawk assimilated so fast under EV suit, and why was he taken away? I get it from movie aspect, but in reality?!

Worf's best line to date is still "Death to the opposition"

Thought #1: Why do people say "horror" when they mean suspense? The way it's vanished from our collective psyche, you'd think all of Hollywood is so obsessed with glitzy action sequences that they just forgot what the concept of suspense is... *OH WAIT* Thought #2: RIP Jerry Goldsmith, you musical genius. Trek hasn't been quite the same without you.

¡¡¡HE SAID THE THING!!!

I was never sure Picard pushing off and floating to the other side made sense. From the angle of the plates he pushed off of, he should have floated off into space (in 0g...in a gravitational field you can angle a jump by moving your center of mass, where in 0g that should just create a torque that starts you spinning). Also, he seemed to pass through the same jet of vapor that knocked the klingon drone into space, and it didn't alter Picard's trajectory.

Milo Murphys Law actually had a subplot/song in the Season 2 premiere that covers the same themes as the Cohcren subplot. The chorus goes "And it should be nice to know that everything will work out fine! And I'm gonna be a national treasure! But now there's all these expectations that I'll just... have to realign! And there's this future self up to which I have to measure!"

no one tell lore reloaded about his statue or what he did to get it

1:38 Well, he is the director.

I was hoping when you showed Riker using his phasor on Cochran you edited into 'bang'. Appearently when they were filming Frankes said that but it was removed and turned into a phaser sound.

"Wait, is Riker in my Star Trek Adventure game" Mate with how quickly he drew that weapon, he might very well be.

Love this scene! Oh and that other guy is Lt Hawk

Mele Weapons always seem to be the way to go against Borg Drones, truly a shame that Star Fleet only has one Officer able to use them

2:42 so in space combats enemy ships just aim for the dish and destroy half the ship

so tissue liquefies when In contact with plasma but the borg are unaffected by the vacuum of space?

To be fair, the whole Borg not attacking until they're a threat trope was dumb to begin with... the idea of someone beaming onto your ship without invitation is a threat... you don't wait for them to strike a vital area until it's possibly too late

Just wondering why Picard and Hawk didn't replicate a bat or at least a kitchen knife.

Stab in the dark here but I think Jessie's character would ABSOLUTELY try to mate with a borg!

If the borg were around before the earth had warp drive how were earth and the federation able to catch up in so much they were eventually able to hurt the borg? Sorry if this seems like a dumb question but damn they should have been Q status how much time they had to develop.

The slowness reminds of 1950's space sci-fi. Swords and spears ought to become standard issue against the Borg.

13:40 worf is standing next to a borg (what happened to that one?) and doesn't have the arm tied to his leg. also why is worf lit from two angles?

Yes, some actors are moving like they are in space and some aren't, some are moving superfast and some are moving superslow. I am sure that you meant that the ones that are moving fast were the ones moving scientifically accurately, yes? Because in space, with no gravity to literally weigh you down and no air resistance that would also slow you down (if just a tiny bit) you would move faster. Also you don't see how one couldn't repressurise your suit like that without cutting off circulation to your legs. Quite correct and seems a very Klingon way to do something, don't you think?

Why did the deflector dish have so much momentum, there was not push given to it, the Enterprise is in a standard orbit, i would think this means it moving in the forward direction. So where was all the extra inertia to have it drift so far so fast?

The rifles working makes sense. The borg adapt to shots fired. If you reconfigure the weapon, you get a shot or a couple before they re-adapt to the new frequency. The riles work - for one shot anyway - because they reconfigured them before going out.

The tension may be coming from the fact that they are walking on the outside of the ship's hull, with nothing but a suit between them and the vacuum of space. The spacewalk sequences in Star Trek Online (Boldly They Rode and Step Between Stars) have this same sort of tension.

So, theres a big glowing circle on the front of the ship that if hit could destroy half the ship ...is the Enterprise someones Boss Battle?

6:46 I just noticed the continuity error, two handed hold on the phaser to a one handed hold.

Am I the only one who thinks the first Borg drone who goes for Hawk and gets shot looks very like Robert Piccardo...??

Hahaha, You really tried to have fun with this scene didn't you Lore! Thanks for the ear worm!

The deflector dish battle scene had its flaws, but Picard suddenly launching himself into space was actually one of the more logical aspects on this whole spacewalk. It seems that everyone in this scene, Borg included, rely on magnetic adhesion to walk on the ship's hull and not wind up drifting uncontrollably in open space. Picard exhibits quick thinking by deactivating his magnetic boots, something even the Borg are unwilling to do. I actually liked this whole scene, especially Picard's brief untethered flight. We FINALLY got to see the TNG cast behaving like astronauts. The disappointment was that it took until 1996, two years after the TNG series ended, for the writers to finally create a story in which the characters actually had a reason to put on a spacesuit and step out an airlock. Space: 1999 never had that problem. Picard's flight was a belated acknowledgement that his character was a serious astronaut. The only glaring omission in this scene was Lt. Hawk's borgified Klingon. Where did he go? Obviously not back to the dish, or Picard might've been foiled. We can only assume Hawk and the borgified Klingon struggled, Hawk hurt the Borg, but the Borg injected Hawk to assimilate him. It is sketchy, but we will never know.

Cochrane drowns face down in the stream because the light stun wasn't so light LOL.

I think this has something to do with the borg mentality.? This is a continuation of the theme in which they send a single unit, a cube, to take earth. It also feeds into the 'failure to innovate' idea. Some supposition follows: I do not like the borg queen idea, but let's say she pushed for this change to assimilating all the peoples of a society instead of just take tech and raising their own borg children and only assimilating who they needed. But the collective was unwilling to change to much in one go and her push to change their method of improvement hasn't bore any fruit so she is reluctant to force other changes. We are never shown what power structure the borg actually have. Maybe with to many failures, or an ineffective queen is mind wiped by the collective, causing her to start from 'zero' again, she would retain her foreverness, or whatever but as this new queen learns she would have different ideas to attempt to overcome arising problems, hell maybe she isn't even supposed to remember being mind wiped but this one does. We just don't know, it is not explained. But

TheFatRat music was unexpected but appreciated lol

Berp...... Film school background. You're so not Wrong, tho. Just funny to hear. Long time fan. Thank you for the Great Essays.

All those decision make sense because these actors all pretended they are "underwater" meaning that each walking distance should be thought off as taking extra effort or taking longer time than it needed be. So it make sense to not attend the crewman but rather continue unlocking the Control Panel, and it make sense for the borg to finish up the Communication Array first rather than defend the 3 control panel.

Why don't bladed weapons come standard-issue? Especially if you expect to be facing the Borg?

12:50 : Oh, No! The only new character on the whole bridge crew ended up assimilated? ......anyway........^_^

im surprised you did bring up the sound-in-space theme so late and just for the communication. Yeah, we always have it, but you could always argue its just for the audience and there is no sound for "real" but this scene just don't work without sound in space, as all the Borg directly react to the LCARS sounds

The panels say AE35, little nod to 2001 a space odyssey....nice

I think the one take away from this scene is: Always bring a Bat'leth or Mek'leth (or a Pain Stick, longer reach, and they're really the only 'spear' weapons Klingons use) to a Borg fight :P Or failing that, TR-116 riffles (like the one in DS9). Come to think of it, Picard really should have started replicating and passing some of those riffles around before he started sending in security crews. Sure you could say "Computer is down, replicators don't work" but we know from Voyager that replicators have their own independent computer systems.

Picard needed to bring a 4th officer to troll the Borg. He or she could aggro the Borg to chase them, and the officer could then bounce around like Picard did to them.

The best of the TNG movies aside from Generations.

Hawk his name is HAWK! LOL

In retrospect, what's really at stake here? The Borg are trying to send a message to the Delta Quadrant summoning reinforcements. Picard and Worf don't prevent this, they just delay it until "Regeneration." And the message the [name redacted] send off in "Regeneration" doesn't bear fruit till "Best of Both Worlds." So if Picard's mission here fails, the Borg get the call for reinforcements in the 23rd century instead of the 24th, and the cube that shows up has to face nothing more powerful than some Constitution class ships. That's bad news, sure--but it's still far off in the future. Even if having the beacon hooked up to the deflector dish means the message travels faster, there's no immediate danger. Worse, the Borg are creating a grandfather paradox. If the cube doesn't arrive at the end of TNG's S3, "Best of Both Worlds" doesn't happen. If BoBW doesn't happen they don't send a second cube in this movie. If they don't do that, they don't go back in time. If they don't go back in time they don't send a call for reinforcements. If they don't call for reinforcements the BoBW cube doesn't come.

So... the Borg drones have adapted to the phaser rifles, and Lt. Hawk is assimilated. Why was Worf's phaser rifle effective against Hawk?

What mattered to the Borg is efficiency. Also, the borg are known for prioritizing.

So Borg shields can block phasers and other directed energy weapons but not Tommy Guns and swords? Maybe Starfleet needs do downgrade their weapons to face the Borg and mount 16 in guns on the Enterprise to kill a cube?

One thing I want to ask is this new idea that the Borg adapt using subspace Fields when that was never stated and was always shields and why would subspace fields be any different than shields. To me this is just some fans try to have an in universe way of having the no limits fallacy which is a notion that we see some sort of technology do some thing therefore he can do that thing in an unlimited way such as is the notion that when the board adapt to a phaser for instants that no fees or regardless of fire power could bring down the shield which I find absurd technology has clear limitations no matter how advanced it is.

Perhaps Piccard yelled because he got excited.

How come in the thousands of species assimilated by the Borg, they have never had one with a phaser in their prosthetic arm instead of a pinchy thing. Or their eye prosthetic.

Welllllll.... you did say "Im not a huge fan of the Cochrane B Plot" :D so, inferences may have been made!

More bodies could have eliminated the drama duh 😂 The drama of the many outweighs the needs of the few.

I don't think it's charitable to say the Borg began blocking the transmissions, rather logical. Done well, no one would realize it, and therefore they would neither realize it nor engage in exposition. Though I would have personally gone and made some kind of AR inset showing a drone doing it. But that wasn't really a regular thing for the Borg to be shown doing- because they were still trying to maintain the mystique.

An Australian here; what are 'Squad Daddies'?

Regarding the Borg and deflector dish I always seen them as a machines claded in human body. What do you see is not a person, but somewhat "limited" AI, which is puppeteering the living being into doing whatever the overall instructions are. And the emphasis was always on the dumb design of the AI which simply relied on (apparently) bulk instructions for the whole collective leaving any executive (and punitive) actions to be limited entirely to individual AIs, which in turn are confined within boundaries of what doesn't "cause their designation to change". The last quotation is a refference to one particular episode in ST:VOY. So simply speaking, Borg as individuals can be and often imo are resourceful and perceptive, but they are nevertheless controlled by a dumb hive mind AI, which is blindly task-oriented and is completely oblivious to any sort of efficiency and situation-related logic of action. Therefore it causes such irrational behavior like ignoring obvious threat and proceeding with the actions, that are absolutely ridiculous like repeating the task over and over despite it ending in failure each time, letting heavily armed unregulated individuals with deathwish passing by and providing totally laughable one-man opposition in situation, where numbers (or giving drone actual ranged weapon) would easily solve it.

Can we talk about how SOUND is being transfered in SPACE?

I find it strange that today's spacesuits have self sealing compartmentalization yet star fleets suits don't

Extra officers shoulda at least been waiting off screen with weapons strong enough to offer strong cover if needed. Or with at least those knives like Janeway had in one her CQB episodes and scenes (an them we never see another one using a SF melee weapon again.. save for something improved). Woulda made movie more interesting and exciting too

When Picard pulled the Flash Gordon - disable the magnetic boots, Jump then Reactivate mag boots Trick Was sure Damn LUCKY because it didn’t look like if he Hadn’t Grabbed ahold of anything His Boots Would not have saved him from Floating Away !? Like the boots are not strong enough to attract to the surface from a Distance, but had to be very Close proximity or already Touching to Stick to the surface ? Also if they floated away Would they be able to tell the Ship to Tractor Beam ???!!😅 Side note; shouldn’t their Helmet Visors be *Transparent Aluminum* !?? Because that Crack was just the same as Worfs Decompression ain’t it ?

I think you might be missing human tendencies on the yelling part. Comms or not, we're used to yelling to get someone's attention, especially when they're at distance. So I think this was very believably nothing more than that. Common reaction aside, yelling also grants more urgency, and thus would make the subject you're addressing more likely to react. I think I'm with you on the dish thing. It didn't quite mesh like it could have.

The reason the Borg didn't attack right away is that they ignore you until you are considered a threat. Starting the procedure to release the mag-locks is a threat to their plan.

first contact is an action movie of a different era, its just unique in the way it presents the action most of the time compared to how a normal action movie or scifi horror movie would be, maybe its because frakes was the director, and a lot of TNG alums worked on it, idk

10:28 I don't understand why the Klingon borg had to take Hawk out of eyesight of the others in order to assimilate him? 11:23 Why wasn't Picard blown into space like the drone was by the jet? 12:19 I think that drone must have been the second drone to go after Picard, before Picard did his Peter Pan flight. Because that drone had disappeared from where it was and he wasn't hanging onto the dish before Picard shot the cable But what happened to the Klingon borg who assimilated Hawk?

It’s slow because they’re in space and films treat space like the characters are under water

What I cant understand about the Borg, is they spent century's roaming the galaxy, eating up other races, and can adapt to any energy weapons fired at them, how come then, they never adapted a shield or armour system to stop getting chopped into sushi by the enemy, if they travelled further back in to earths past and landed in feudal Japan, they would be mince meat in hours

Of course they are in space, and there shouldn't be any audio at all for this whole scene LOL. So Picard yelling is especially silly. But so is all the other audio in this scene. Of course ST has always had explosion sounds in space, and no audio would be boring.

Worf should have lost his leg due to no atmosphere. Plus the locks have no sound in space.

They could deassimilate Picard and Seven but they must kill every other humanoid which was assimilated!

I think the Borg's weird "only ever send one drone" is about their seeming obsession with efficiency. Their goal is, in this situation, to send a message to the borg of the period. The more time spent on this task is time that could be spent assimilating the Starfleet crew or seducing Data. They want to get the task done as fast as possible, so they keep as many drones assigned to it as possible at any one point. When the threats first arrive, there's no use attacking them immediately, it distracts from the task at hand and takes up energy to engage three people, adapt to their weapons etc. However, they save energy by carrying on with the task and send one drone at a time, to limit how many drones are taken off the main task, to try deal with the threats. One dies and they go "Alright this task is too important, let's adapt and send another one" and they figure they're fine because generally, in one-on-one hand-to-hand combat in space, a borg drone is gonna win, but they obviously didn't account for Worf's magically appearing blade. And then when Picard completes his thing and flies over, the borg just decide that if they send a drone after him, he'll likely get rid of them first, so they let him carry on with the maglock sequence and try get it done quickly, and send the new Hawk drone that wasn't assigned to anything important to stop Picard, thinking Worf was probably dead and it was no problem. Then Hawk gets shot, nothing they can really do at this point and they get destroyed.

Great movie THE BORG THE BORG

Today? Heck yeah, Lore! Btw just a comment for the algorithym. Mostly to pass the time for ads! Also maybe 1st?

9:24 I guess that blood would be frozen and not fly off

My only thought is that I like Cochran’s ponch pattern vest. A more pin-worthy comment has never been posted, I’m sure.

I was sincerely hoping you'd notice the phase rifles magicly staying instead of floating away!