So, there's one bit of fridge logic I haven't been able to get over, and I wondered if anyone might have any thoughts. Most little plot snags or inconsistencies this season are pretty easy to handwave or ignore, and I at least understand why most of the threads left loose didn't get the attention to be tied up. And anything to do with character motivations or whatnot falls into the realm of being either subjective, necessary for the story they wanted to tell, or both.
There's just one missing link in the plot that seems like a weird omission, and I think I know why it was left unsolved: there's no explanation of how Vadic got into contact with the Borg Queen and what kind of deal they actually struck. For the plot revelations and mystery to unroll themselves the way they do, Vadic can't explain anything about the Borg, because she dies before they're revealed to the audience. But it
looks like the powers had a sequence of events in mind, and I'm trying to tease out whether there's one that makes sense.
This is absurdly long but I hope it's organized reasonably well for anyone who might be as interested in the question as me.
Queen Stuff:
The first time we see Vadic interact with the then unknown Borg Queen, the Queen is clearly in control of this relationship, so it would seem like a good provisional guess that the Queen originally contacted Vadic. When the Queen describes her situation to Picard, she says it was sensing Jack that caused her to come back to the Alpha Quadrant, and this happened after she had not only been left in deep space to die with no resources, but also already consumed all of her remaining drones and been left as a singular entity. The last we saw of the Queen, Admiral Janeway killed her with a virus that caused her technological components and the technology of the Borg city around her to fail within the Unicomplex; meanwhile, Voyager destroyed the transwarp hub, or at least one of the transwarp hubs, that connected said Unicomplex with the rest of the Borg. I'd have to guess that the Unicomplex was a) positioned somewhere remote that could only be accessed by transwarp, specifically via the destroyed hub and b) was itself almost entirely destroyed by the virus, so that it had become the kind of space desert the Queen referred to in her chat with Picard. That would reconcile what the Queen said with what we previously saw.
Then, we have to assume that the Queen resurrected herself somehow, cannibalized what she could of the Unicompex and the many cubes and drones left there, constructed the giant cube full of dead Borg we see in Picard, limped back to the nearest transwarp conduit she could use, and before she'd attempted to rebuild her forces, heard Jack's signal and began actively calling to him. So in theory, she could have successfully convinced Jack to steal a shuttle and come to the nearest transwarp conduit at any time over the past several years, but it turned out to happen in the finale of the season right before she really needed him to make her plan work. His timing isn't something we need to work out.
The Queen doesn't talk about Vadic and the other changelings. Is it safe to assume that their spy network to destroy the Federation was already in place by the time they came in contact with the Borg? I don't understand how the Queen could have built the supercube and its giant transceiver purposefully as a part of this plan, but not stocked up on resources like not-dead drones in the process. It seems a lot more likely to me that she pieced together a collective that built the cube out of the remains of the Unicomplex, and then the drones died in the process of building it and in transit afterward. Then she built a plan around the supercube, not the other way around.
I wonder if reading that
Hive series Matalas wrote would help connect some dots? Has anyone read it?
Vadic Stuff:
We don't know how many spies were actually inside Starfleet, but we're told that the Great Link at least
knew about them, because Odo told Worf about them from there, and there were as many subordinates on Vadic's ship as there were vials in the Daystrom lab. That implies to me that the bulk of the spies inside Starfleet and elsewhere had joined Vadic from elsewhere, possibly traveling from the gamma quadrant to do so. I'd bet that Vadic herself was one of the Hundred Changelings and doesn't have any Founder philosophy, which is why she's comfortable killing other changelings, etc. and had a changeling crew, presumably the others from Daystrom, instead of employing some "lesser" beings like the Jem'Hadar to do her wetwork.
But the spy network proper could be of any size; any changeling convinced to join the cause would only have to link with an existing superspy to gain their powers, so they could be all over the quadrant and beyond. Suffice to say they could have known damn near anything, with one exception: no one told them how Picard's Borg brain tumor worked, because we know they had to cut it out and dissect it
after they stole the body, in the weeks or months before the beginning of the season, and then isolate the DNA responsible to program it into the transporters.
It's possible that Vadic didn't know who she was working for when she planned to get Picard's Borg genes. It's possible that the Queen no longer had access to the genetic sequence she'd implanted in Picard after losing the bulk of the Collective, and it's even possible she still had it, but had Vadic steal it anyway to create plausible deniability about who she was. What is less possible is that Vadic would have proactively stolen Picard's body and dissected his brain without being told what she'd find in there - she really needs to have been in contact with the Queen before planning the theft. [Edit: Or rather, in that case, she needs to have at least known about the Queen and the function of the brain bits.]
But like, how in the galaxy did they meet up? The Queen seems to be accessed exclusively by transwarp and only taking calls via brain tumor. Did someone from Vadic's network find and contact the Queen in her big dead cube kicking around in a nebula in the Delta Quadrant somewhere?
Vadic's Funky Hand Puppet Trick:
Thing is, the way Vadic and the Queen communicate as of the beginning of the season, some time after the changelings have stolen Picard's body and reverse engineered it, is through using part of her body as a biological receiver that the Queen can communicate with, and one that the Queen is in complete control of and can use to torture Vadic Unicron-style if she disobeys. That sounds an awful lot like Vadic herself has Picard's Borg receiver genes. (I know Crusher says the dead changeling has no genetic material, but she also says speciation is different from evolution and we know changelings are vulnerable to viruses, which notably require genetics to work, so she can be safely ignored.) Like ... if it's
not Picard's genes, then it's a pretty wild unexplained plot device in its own right. (I don't remember goomunication being a thing in DS9, but it's been a while since I saw it, am I forgetting something?)
So ... did the Queen initally contact Vadic by some other means, and then just talk her into assimilating herself?
(And does Vadic use her internal organ no jutsu mojo to make a Picard brain tumor in her hand when she does that funky summoning ritual, or is it on all the time?) If anything like that is going on, it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Queen is hiding her identity from Vadic (or that the need to steal Picard's body was a trick).
Alternately, did Vadic steal Picard's body on her own initiative and without being contacted,
knowing that it contained a way to contact the Borg, and only ring up the Queen a week before the beginning of the series, conveniently just in time for them to plan the Frontier Day attack?
I feel like one of the big questions in the big mystery plot was how BBEG had Vadic under their thumb and planted her with whatever bio-technology she was using to communicate with them. It doesn't seem any clearer to me now than it did in the beginning.
So Yeah:
I know it's entirely possible we were just meant to roll with all of this, and if it's all meant to be handwaves I'm only sort of interested in inventing a possible sequence of events that explains everything. I just felt this season seemed to be more carefully plotted out than usual - most of the stuff that didn't add up or seemed forced, I can see what they were thinking and why they did it that way. So I'm really curious if anyone felt there was a clear implied sequence of events, and I'm missing the key that makes everything really obvious. I feel like there was probably an idea in there of how everything came together, whether I'm just missing it, or it ended up being unclear as told but still works out underneath. If not, it's still fun to think about. = ]
Except for those intentional hints about not being tied to a "single flesh".