It gets soooOOOooo much better! Like, I was honestly poised to scoff at it after the first four or five eps but it gets jaw droppingly amazing!
I mean... for at least the cochrane test; it depends on how closely you look at the cause and effect circumstances. The borg cause the incursion which required the enterprise to step in. The enterprise was only THERE to step in because the test was successful and it led to the federation. Seems like an outside sourced predestination paradox, but we generally don't have ridiculous concrete details as to the "on the ground" history around cochrane and the phoenix test, so we don't really know if the damage, from the attack, from the borg would have also been mirrored from contemporary sources, or how likely a contemporary event was to happen.
Apologies: that's not what I meant by mirrored right there. I meant "would there have been an attack even if the borg weren't there". The population was blaming it on an old attack satelite, and lily sloane thought picard was with the eastern coalition. Would what was seen from the ground have happened even if the borg decided to just do something else that day.Well we know the Cochrane test also happens in the Mirrorverse.
Apologies: that's not what I meant by mirrored right there. I meant "would there have been an attack even if the borg weren't there". The population was blaming it on an old attack satelite, and lily sloane thought picard was with the eastern coalition. Would what was seen from the ground have happened even if the borg decided to just do something else that day.
Of course, the more nit-picking Trekkers also also knew that the Borg were messing with the UFP-Romulan Neutral Zone half a season before Q formally introduced us.But we also know the borg were introduced to the federation by the Q cause he's a jerk like that. If Q hadn't decided to be uppity that one day, or had decided to be a prick in some OTHER way...
Long story short: I hate time travel, and it gives me a headache. Man was not meant to ponder all possible outcomes simultaneously. At least not without some kind of intoxicant.
Well, I've always highly ranked:Given the ease at which they were able to travel to the 1960s in 'Assignment: Earth' on a pre-retrofit Constitution class and to 1980s on a non-federation starship that Scotty didn't think much of in Voyage Home, I'd say the basic mechanics were understood in the second half of the 23rd century.
Of course, the more nit-picking Trekkers also also knew that the Borg were messing with the UFP-Romulan Neutral Zone half a season before Q formally introduced us.
Basically, we had to wait until Season 2 of Enterprise for the causality loop to be closed in the 22nd century (when frozen Borg from the incursion into 2063 were defrosted, and managed to get a slower subspace signal to the other side of the galaxy before being destroyed by Jonathan Archer and his crew).
But yes, that event was used by some temporal theorists out-of-universe as evidence that First Contact really did change everything (and they mean everything) that we think we know about Star Trek.