Q Who

Our old friend Q is back. And he is taking the Enterprise to meet some new friends. They are not very friendly though. They destroyed Guinan’s planet 100 years ago. Guinan and Q are also old friends. Really old. They have known each other for 200 years. And they are not really friends. Brain full yet? There is still so much more to learn when we put Q Who in the Mission Log. Cant wait to listen! Will the take out be our societies growing dependance on technology? I just wanted to post a quick one about the alert system for missing people/shuttles on the Enterprise. This is a system design issue, basically what would be monitored are things like, the opening of the shuttlebay doors, the use of the transporters, the detection of transporter signals, an unexpected increase in the number of lifeforms on board. True, although considering the Captain’s position and history so far (“The Battle” if I’m remembering correctly), they might want to make an exception. The trick will be to do this without making Picard feel like one of those toddlers at the park that are literally leashed to their parents. It’s more about procedure than anything else. You can go further and monitor biological data from any crew member, but that requires resources, monitoring etc… So how complex is the enterprise? How much effort is required to monitor the ship itself and space around it. Given the size of the bridge crew, fairly complex. Anything else you monitor is a distraction and… The enterprise can function without its captain. The Borg are TNG’s best villains. Q is a close second. You mentioned how it might get “messed up” if they ever gave the Borg a Queen. For whatever reason, I think of Victor Buono from “Man from Atlantis.” He’s a recurring villain who is always defeated. He goes from threatening the world unless someone pays him a billion dollars… to asking for one million dollars in kind of a defeated sheepish way. Done wrong, recurring villains are like that. They become an annoyance rather than a menace. In ‘Q Who’ the Borg are ominous in their dead-eyed singular motivation to take you and your stuff. By the time we get to Voyager’s overuse of the Borg, they’re just monologueing pests. Ah well. I hate when people say the Borg Queen messed up the Borg. It’s just not true. Any system that works as a collective has a governor and that governor is going to have higher level functionality as well as avatar like characteristics. Likewise the Borg Queen doesn’t take away necessarily from the menace of the Borg as the Borg operate as a collective and indipendently based on imperatives set by some nodal governor that directs which Borg goes where. This being stated doesn’t lessen the fact that this must be happening in the background of all that “Zombie-like” behavior that people derive the “menace” from. That menace come directly from the idea that each borg does whatever it is doing mindlessly having been given its initial orders from the collective mind of all. You kill one of them, the goal remains the same and another takes its place. The menace is the same. However… those that don’t realize that without it being stated may see it as losing some of the menace because its an inherent weakness that can be exploited. The fact that this weakness wasn’t exploited right from the beginning is simply lack of understanding how these things work while it’s later understanding and usage is bad writing, not because its there or that it “ruins the borg”, but because, again, it lacks understanding how such a system as the borg would operate. It’s the implications of First Contact and Voyager that hurt the borg. It’s the idea that you can kill a single cell in an amorphous system with multiple redundancies and protocols and do severe damage to the whole of the system directly and it takes them years to recoup that ruins the Borg, if anything. You’ve got it wrong… The “Queen” is the manefistation of the minds working as one, governed itself by what I’d