Just Can't Let It Go

Yes, I’m still annoyed with that trivia question we got right.  Yes, I have a problem


This is merely scratching the coat of wax on the surface of your problems, Jeremy.  


So, not long ago was Trivia Night.  It's a thing that happens all over the place in all manner of forms.  In this particular instance, there was actually a buzzer that you had to press, and a guy who had to run around the bar getting people's answers after they buzzed in.  It was a unique change of pace and offered some significant advantages over other pub trivia methods once they replaced the battery in our buzzer and allowed it to actually work halfway through the first round.   

Needless to say, our team was composed of geniuses like myself and we won.  That's tangential to the story.  

One of the reasons that we won was our brutal domination of a category in the second round that involved weaponry used in Science Fiction.  Questions ranged all the way from Tron to the Death Star.  One of the questions dealt with Star Trek.  Surprise surprise.  Pretty much as soon as the host mentions anything out of the Star Trek universe, you're pretty much certain that the answer is going to be "phasers," and you'd be correct.  That was, in fact, the answer, and we totally did get it right.  However, there was a quirk in the question itself that irritated me.  The question said something about a thing you can set to stun, and then went on to talk about how it's a thing that Kirk and Spock would fire at the Borg.  

Star Trek fans are cringing right now.  

Yes, setting the phasers to "stun" is classic Star Trek.  Kirk, Spock, and the Borg are key fixtures in Star Trek.  But, kids...the timeline here is just all wrong.  See, Kirk and Spock were part of The Original Series, which deals with the Enterprise's "Five Year Mission" which takes place between the years 2245 and 2250.  Humans weren't introduced to the Borg until well into "The Next Generation,"in the year 2365.  While it's entirely true that the crews of The Original Series and Next Gen had some minor overlaps (McCoy had an abnormally long life and was a guest on Next Gen's Enterprise once, Scotty was trapped in suspended animation and made a single appearance, Spock was a Vulcan, so he lived long enough to see the Next Gen Crew, and there was an entire movie devoted to time travel between the two crews), none of these overlaps dealt with the Borg.  

It's quite safe to say that the trivia question was Bunk, as Kirk and Spock never canonically fired their phasers on the Borg...set to stun or otherwise.