eva_sieve

"Captain, it's just a model..."

I did think of one specific thing that the Borg are significantly better than the Empire at: time travel. Everyone and their mother in Trek does it, and the Borg do it while on the run in First Contact. Meanwhile, (spoilers for a show that ended 6 years ago) the Emperor's desire+inability to control a force-based time nexus is a subplot in Rebels to the point where he decides his best option is to try parleying with the heroes. So, if Vader became a persistent threat the Collective's best chance would be to zip into the past and kill/assimilate child Anakin./

All that said, any ideas as to how this might work really falls apart when you look at temporal mechanics across universes. Trek canonically has a fluid (though resilient) timeline, this was stated onscreen in SNW. What little we see in Rebels indicates that Star Wars has a single stable timeline (one character survives a duel in Season 2 this way), and you can argue that this squares with Force precognition (including most notably the clear and unambiguous visions courtesy of the Mortis Gods in TCW).

Definitely fair, the Borg are on the low end of scary as far as space zombies go and I'd say at that point we're kind of running up against the fact that the Force does what the plot needs.

Vader at the peak of his power is pretty crazy. IMO it'd take a lot of drones to overwhelm him in a direct confrontation, but a cube has drones in the tens of thousands, so that's at least in the realm of plausbility.

Most interesting cross-universe interaction is if the Force can be used to resist transporters, because spacing Vader is probably the best way to get rid of the threat. I think that's a moot point though since the borg can (and do) blow up their own ships to eliminate even minor threats (see: the Borg Queen blowing up a cube of 64k drones for a couple deviants in Unimatrix Zero). So, their best chance is to transwarp to the middle of nowhere and self destruct the cube he's on. If the ship's detonation doesn't take him out, just count on the cold equations of space to do the rest.

Conclusion: Darth Vader would pose a grave threat to any Borg facility he should choose to board, but the Collective is resilient enough to not really care about any damage he could do.

"Neither are the true Picard. Both are the true Picard."

Prodigy memes? Neat.

"One must imagine Ensign Kim happy..."

My mental justification is that the Tardigrades were either extinct at that point (which is stated to have happened at some point prior to the end of DISCO S3), or what few post-Message in a Bottle admirals might know about the classified project couldn't justify making them suffer-- because, y'know, that is a thing that happens with the spore drive.

Hell, even if it was an option, would Janeway go for it? We saw her get rightly pissed at the equinox crew for running their ship off space aliens' suffering. and I feel like the next-closest alternative known at the time (genemodding someone with Tardigrade DNA and also making them suffer through the jump) might also fly in the face of her highly principled stance.

The defining characteristic of US classified documents is that their release would cause some degree of damage to US national security, ranging from harmful to gravely harmful. here's a Cornell Law writeup that squares with what I know here.

Regardless of any opinions one might have as to the use and application of classification, in the eyes of the US government taking these documents without authorization is harmful by definition.

This is incredibly stupid.

I laughed.

Best attempt:

The story is mainly about Kelvin Kirk learning to be less of the cocky dipshit he still is at the end of '09. He's still riding high from his victory over the future Romulans, so he really doesn't respect the seriousness the Chair should command. You see this in the completely unforced error at the start of the film--Spock is (for some reason) dead to rights, and Kirk decides that the power of friendship is more important than the Prime Directive. Pike rightly reams him out for this, but the character thread really comes to a head when the USS Vengeance catches up to Enterprise and prepares to utterly destroy her. Much as I complain about the movie, I do like this little moment of helplessness from Chris Pine's Kirk. Staring down the larger ship's guns, Kirk can only watch helplessly and apologize for leading his crew to their deaths. It has the same vibes as Kirk from Generations--he didn't believe he was dying until he actually did. Obviously, the general thread of Kirk actually taking responsibility for his crew culminates in him doing percussive maintenance inside of the Warp Core and dying for Enterprise's sins. He gets better, but honestly I can accept this as the transition between cadet Kirk of the 09 and the actually quite competent Captain Kirk in Beyond.

Spock is the other big character in this movie. Sad as it is, this is the only real time we get to see Kelvin Kirk and Kelvin Spock's friendship explored in depth. They were at each other's throats for most of '09 and Beyond focused more on McCoy + Spock's relationship. Spock's friendship with Kirk is the main avenue through which they explore Spock's classic dilemma of his Human vs. Vulcan sides. As cynical as I am about them recreating the end of WoK in reverse here, I will at least concede that Pine and Quinto did well with what they were given.

Main complaint, besides Cumberbatch being Khan: they totally wasted Bruce Greenwood's Admiral Pike here. I'm of the opinion that Kelvin Pike was the best version we'd seen prior to Discovery, and probably did more than a little bit in reviving interest in the character. Here he gets stuffed in the fridge like half an hour in to make Kirk mad/sad. What a shame.

Loath as I am to defend Into Darkness, this is arbitrary skepticism and Voyager is by far a worse offender.

It's not explicitly said but the circumstances are much tighter: I'm pretty sure McCoy stuffs Kirk's corpse into a cryo tube almost immediately after he dies and the gang also needs to capture, not kill a raging genetically enhanced warlord to have a shot at it. The two subsequent references to the Kelvin timeline after this offers no circumstance under which this technology could reasonably be used but wasn't. If they somehow did manage to repurpose Khan's magic panacea blood there's no indication it would be more than an immediate revival drug--like something we see used in Lower Decks as a joke.