Everything in 2024 so far took place in the span of two days.
Yes.
During this time Soong got his license revoked, made a donation to NASA to get on the board of the Europa Mission, and now has a private army? And not just any army, all ex SF!
I think it's pretty clear that the Europa mission is being launched by I Can't Believe It's Not SpaceX, not NASA. Also, there is nothing implausible about a rich guy hiring
mercenaries.
the only thing that confused me this episode, is that to me, it seems that Juradi/BQ is trying to basically help Soong create the Confederation timeline, that she seems to want to prevent when she shows up in S2 episode 1 The Stargazer. Or i really missed something.
She's not. She's just using the promise of Soong being remembered in glory in the Confederation timeline to manipulate him.
So Emory Erickson wasn't some pioneering inventor but just copied transporter tech from the Vulcans.
More likely he observed Vulcan transporter technology and tried to figure out how to do it himself, without being given access to the tech in order to copy it.
And the Vulcans didn't even intervene when Erickson started experimenting on his own son to "invent" a transporter, even though it was meaningless as again the Vulcans already had the tech.
Yes. That is how the Vulcans operated -- they would refuse to share technology and not interfere if other worlds acted to try to develop that technology themselves.
NX-01's fear of transporters now also seems even more absurd if the Vulcans had been using them safely for centuries.
I don't agree at all. If I were a Human in 2151, I'd be way more afraid of Human transporters than Vulcan transporters.
The problem with that is, the Borg are monsters. Or, at least, as they were originally presented, a force of nature that will kill and assimilate simply because that’s their nature. They’re certainly not misunderstood good guys. They are death, carnage and rape personified. I can’t see how there can ever be peace with the Borg, unless there’s simply an agreement to avoid certain territories because a war would cost them too much are therefore not be in their best interests.
Maybe that was the original intent, but there's a point where you can't sustain that kind of storytelling anymore. In fiction, the degree to which monsters are frightening is correlated to the degree to which we do not understand them. So eventually, either the monsters become fully understood and therefore defeatable -- in which case they are no longer an interesting threat -- or, they have to be revealed as
characters, who act on motives, rather than as monsters who are just there to try to kill/convert the protagonists. And once they become characters, there's a point where, again, you can't really sustain repetitions of the same old "evil bad guys do evil bad things" story -- there comes a point where the idea that they can be reasoned with just becomes the only new direction to go in.
The idea that the Borg are an implacable non-person sailed a quarter-century ago with
Star Trek: First Contact. The idea of the Federation eventually finding a way to have peace with the Borg IMO became a creative inevitability in 1996.
Russians and Americans weren't allies historically and very much aren't now going by the news. Vulcans and Humans are allies.
I mean, yes, but it's more complicated than that. They were allies, but they weren't equals. Vulcan was the regional hegemon and Earth was its resentful client state. Vulcan wasn't exactly
colonizing Earth, but it was definitely interfering in Earth's political affairs to try to keep Humans from expanding to the stars at a rate the Vulcans considered to be "too fast," and part of that was that they were absolutely not sharing advanced tech.
Even if Vulcans don't want to share the tech, they'd stop Erickson from doing needless experiments on his own son I think.
I don't. Remember, the Vulcan government at the time was a hegemonic nationalist power locked in a cold war with Andor and working to keep worlds like Earth and Coridan under their thumbs. They weren't a purely benevolent government.
Other ways of doing this without Soong's help, like transmitting a signal to the Delta quadrant or something.
With
what? Except for Tallinn's benefactors' tech, there's no technology on 2024 Earth capable of transmitting a faster-than-light signal other than
La Sirena. She'll, what, send a signal to the Delta Quadrant and wait 70,000 years for it to arrive?
No, launching an attack on
La Sirena with semi-assimilated mercenaries is rationally her best option.
A geneticist is not the first person you'd turn to for this.
No, but a desperate billionaire whom you can manipulate into acquiring a team of mercenaries on your behalf is.
Interesting that Agnes can shrug off Borg assimilation to stop herself from killing (something many, many others in Trek including Picard were unable to do) while the same Agnes couldn't shrug off a mindmeld to prevent killing Maddox. That must be one very very weak assimilation the Borg Queen did. Except she's back to rampaging a minute later. The strength of the queen's control comes and goes with the plot.
They made it clear that her nanoprobes are severely depleted and she was not capable of producing new ones -- so, yes, they explicitly established that the Queen's ability to assimilate Jurati and subsume Jurati's personality is weaker than normal.