# The Enterprise and The Borg. Please give me a timeline **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 21, 2003, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721 "2003-08-21T17:09:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/1 "2003-08-21T17:09:01Z")
So I’m watching New Frontier and they meet The Borg. I remember when in The Next Generation, it was said that humans had never come across The Borg before. But then in Voyager it looked like humans and Borgs had bumped heads long before originally thought. I also remember all that time traveling done in the movie were The Borg took over Earth so TNG had to go back again again and. . … Can someone explain this Star Trek timeline for me? ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/2 "2003-08-21T18:27:27Z")
24th and a half thentury, Humans meet Borg in _Encounter At Farpoint_ thatks to Q. (TNG premeir) _First Contact_ movie shows Borg went back in time 200 years to stop Vulcans and Humans meeting. _Voyager_ time line is (mostly) right after TNG timeline. But, it all takes place in Delta Quadrant. Leftover Borg from _First Contact_ wake up 100 years later in _Enterprise_ era (pre TOS), but never say “We are Borg…” The canon gets a little confusing here. ---
**Author:** ![DoubleJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/67e7ee/32.png) [@DoubleJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DoubleJ)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/3 "2003-08-21T18:37:52Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by NoClueBoy \* > 24th and a half thentury, Humans meet Borg in _Encounter At Farpoint_ thatks to Q. (TNG premeir) Not quite. The Borg are introduced in the 2nd season episode “Q Who” (I think that’s the one) and are seen again in the third-fourth season two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds” and a handful of TNG eps after that. ---
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/4 "2003-08-21T18:51:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by NoClueBoy \* > **24th and a half thentury, Humans meet Borg in _Encounter At Farpoint_ thatks to Q. (TNG premeir)** When this happens (since we have the benefit of having already seen NF and the movie first contact) it is actually like the 3rd or 4th meeting? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by NoClueBoy \* > \*\* > _First Contact_ movie shows Borg went back in time 200 years to stop Vulcans and Humans meeting. \*\*This is when everything we learned in TNG gets thrown out the window, right? ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/5 "2003-08-21T19:01:52Z")
:smack: Of course **DoubleJJ** has the right episode. The time travel eps is what really mess up the timeline. Canon appears to have been severely stretched in order to fit Borg into _Enterprise_. You could almost make sense of the TNG/VOY/Movie timeline until then. ---
**Author:** ![Bambi\_Hassenpfeffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Bambi\_Hassenpfeffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bambi_Hassenpfeffer)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/6 "2003-08-21T19:17:23Z")
OK, let’s try putting all together, here. Dates may be Obi Wan because of the difference between the TV calendar and the real calendar, and also because of my overly geeky but failing memory. **2364** – Enterprise-D launches. **2365** – in episode “Q Who?”, Q sends the Enterprise across the galaxy to the Delta Quadrant, introducing the Federation to the Borg. Guinan warns Picard to get out now, because the Borg destroyed her culture, the El Aurians. **2366** – Picard is assimilated by the Borg at end of 3rd season, rescued at beginning of 4th. **2371** – Voyager is lost in the Delta Quadrant. **2372** – The Borg Queen travels back in time to 2063. This time is significant, because it is the date of the first warp flight by human beings. A Vulcan science vessel happens to be in the Sol system at the time and notices the test, leading to first contact between humans and another alien species. The Borg Queen intends to prevent this and therefore prevent the Federation from ever happening. **2152** – A Starfleet research team discovers Borg drones frozen in the Arctic. They of course manage to reactivate themselves and assimilate the research team. Eventually, they get off-world and are destroyed by the Enterprise-01, but not before they manage to send a subspace signal to unknown coordinates in the Delta Quadrant. The message will not be received until c. 2360. The options for wiggling out of canon issues are two-fold. [ol][li]The records from this time in the past (from the view of the 2300s) are somewhat spotty. This is a believable option, as many references in TNG lead one to believe that there have been only five Enterprises, which do not include the NX-01. Of course, it’s difficult for me to believe that a vessel that made so many supposedly important contributions to the furthering of Starfleet could be so completely forgotten. Maybe something they did was so incredibly horrible that their entire existence was erased from the records in the interest of interstellar harmony. [/li] [li]Or, because of the events in _First Contact_, all of Star Trek canon up through that film are suspect, because the past has been changed. As often as Bermaga approved the Reset Button in Voyager (meaning plots in which all character development and growth is rendered null due either to time travel within the episode or hallucinations from hostile species), this is certainly plausible.[/ol][/li] To keep my wits about me, I go with explanation number 1. ---
**Author:** ![Bambi\_Hassenpfeffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Bambi\_Hassenpfeffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bambi_Hassenpfeffer)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/7 "2003-08-21T19:34:09Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Biggirl \* > \*\*When this happens (since we have the benefit of having already seen NF and the movie first contact) it is actually like the 3rd or 4th meeting? \*\* “Q Who?” would be the second meeting, unless you count Alfre Woodard and Zefram Cochrane having met them as a meeting; that would make it three. 1a. 2063, on Earth. 1b. 2152, on Enterprise. 2. 2365, on TNG. > [@](#): > > \*\*This is when everything we learned in TNG gets thrown out the window, right? \*\* Yeah, because Cochrane mentioned cybernetic beings from the future defeated by humans also from the future in a speech after his flight. Of course, he later retracted that statement and was also known to be a drunk. I’m assuming that since the Borg in the Enterprise episode never actually identified themselves as such and that they had a relatively minor effect on the crew, that future generations would forget about them. I’m telling myself this so I can stick to my explanation #1 and my sanity. ---
**Author:** ![Lord\_Ashtar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ea924/32.png) [@Lord\_Ashtar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Ashtar)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/8 "2003-08-21T19:40:03Z")
I was about to start a thread on this myself today, since I just watched the same _Enterprise_ episode last night and was quite confused. Thanks all. ---
**Author:** ![Julius\_Henry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8797f3/32.png) [@Julius\_Henry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Julius_Henry)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/9 "2003-08-21T21:43:05Z")
There was a TNG episode (first season) where we are reintroduced to the Romulans. In this, both Federation types and the Romulans are investigating the destruction of some planet. It has the signatures of later Borg attacks, and is refered to early on in the first part of “The Best of Both Worlds.” ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/10 "2003-08-21T21:59:12Z")
_Silicon Avatar_ also had planetary destruction that resembled that description. When TNG was first run, there was a lot of fan talk about that. At convs, anyways. I didn’t have web access til about '93 or so. Anyone on a BBS or something when TNG was first run? ---
**Author:** ![Cliffy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/59ef9b/32.png) [@Cliffy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cliffy)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/11 "2003-08-21T22:14:51Z")
The episode mentioned by **Julius Henry** is entitled, IIRC, “The Neutral Zone.” Ultimately, **Biggirl** , your confusion arises from the problems in the continuity created by Voyager during the introduction of 7 of 9. In the early TNG episodes dealing with the Borg, they were brand new as of “Q Who” in TNG’s (IIRC) 2d season. (Although as noted by **Julius** , there’s evidence that the Borg were already raiding outposts along the Neutral Zone at that time; they just hadn’t been discovered yet.) When the 7 of 9 character was developed, the desire was to have her 1) be human and, 2) have been assimilated as a child. Unfortunately, it’d been only about a decade since the Federation first _heard_ of the Borg, only about half the time needed for the chronology to fit. Although I think it wouldn’t have been that hard to figure out a way to fix the problem (c’mon – transwarp conduits are weird; why can’t they be temporally unstable, too?), I think the right decisions was made for purposes of story – Voyager floundered throughout its run, but the Seven of Nine episodes (despite being overmilked) were much more likely to be good ones (in large part due to the actress); those episodes weren’t worth giving up just to have a consistent timeline. –Cliffy ---
**Author:** ![Achernar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e274bd/32.png) [@Achernar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Achernar)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/12 "2003-08-21T22:36:46Z")
I only saw the episode once, so correct me if I’m wrong. But I thought that they took care of that by having Seven’s parents be deep-space explorers. They took their daughter with them to the Delta Quadrant (or maybe they fell through a wormhole to get there?) where they encountered the Borg in their home space. ---
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/13 "2003-08-21T23:08:00Z")
I _was_ thinking of 7 of 9 when I guessed the Q Who episode was the 3rd or 4th meeting. There was the First Contact meeting, the outpost meeting in the New Frontier (and the subsequent meeting by the Enterprise in the same episode), and the meeting when 7 of 9’s family encountered them. I’m glad I haven’t shown myself to be a complete Star Trek idiot with this question. ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [August 21, 2003, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/14 "2003-08-21T23:19:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Biggirl \* > \*\* > I’m glad I haven’t shown myself to be a complete Star Trek idiot… \*\* Don’t worry. **Aesiron** has that position sown up. :dubious: 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/15 "2003-08-22T02:07:10Z")
I tried posting to this thread about six hours ago to mention both Seven and the Romulan outpost incidences but the hamsters were on break. Damn rodents. Anyway, to throw an even bigger wrench into the Borg storyline, it’s generally accepted that V’ger from ST:TMP was the result of Voyager VI being assimilated by the Borg. It’s never been said on screen and thus isn’t canon but like TAS’ “Yesteryear”, it might as well be. ---
**Author:** ![Achernar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e274bd/32.png) [@Achernar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Achernar)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/16 "2003-08-22T02:10:22Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Aesiron \* > Anyway, to throw an even bigger wrench into the Borg storyline, it’s generally accepted that V’ger from ST:TMP was the result of Voyager VI being assimilated by the Borg. It’s never been said on screen and thus isn’t canon but like TAS’ “Yesteryear”, it might as well be. I disagree. Certainly not everyone accepts that. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/17 "2003-08-22T03:30:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Achernar \* > \*\*I disagree. Certainly not everyone accepts that. 😃 \*\* yeah, not canon. But it was in at least one of the better books. Reminded me of IX from _Dune_. I’m pretty sure it was presented as a benevolent race, though. Not Borg. ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/18 "2003-08-22T03:43:08Z")
I didn’t say everyone accepted it or that it’s even canon… only that it’s generally accepted, like the aforementioned animated “Yesteryear” and/or McCoy’s daughter, Joanna. ---
**Author:** ![Achernar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e274bd/32.png) [@Achernar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Achernar)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/19 "2003-08-22T03:46:02Z")
I didn’t say you said everyone accepts it. ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2003, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721/20 "2003-08-22T03:48:11Z")
:dubious: I’m pretty sure I’m missing some subtext here. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-enterprise-and-the-borg-please-give-me-a-timeline/196721.md?page=2)