Waiiiiiiiiiiiiit A Minute!!!!

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TreeHedger@reddit

Don’t forget, his artificial heart fit inside of his adolescent body in Rascals without any issues.

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Constant-Box-7898@reddit

Why have I never thought about this? 🤣🤣🤣

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According_Sound_8225@reddit

Don't worry, neither did the writers.

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Sad-Working-9937@reddit

Its cannon that he wasn't Borg "long enough" for all the implants to take. and that Beverly removed them all.

She wouldn't have left a Borg heart in him.

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She would have removed his functioning borg heart, and replaced it with another defective federation heart? Not just another one but apparently, somehow, the same exact once. Because in Tapestry, they sure leave us with the impression that his heart that fails when he gets zapped is the SAME exact artificial heart.

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First_Pay702@reddit

The federation heart wasn’t defection, it got hit by phaser fire. Plenty of hearts, both borg and home grown stop working under those conditions.

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ArcherNX1701@reddit

Correct, it was hit with a disrupter.

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vendettaclause@reddit

Remember he qlsohad trouble with it during q routine replacement/maintenance operation 8n season 2

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mr_john_steed@reddit

Maybe it's just the lawyer in me, but I'd bet that "being hit point-blank in the chest by a high-powered energy weapon" is considered an extraordinary event that falls outside of the standard 24th century Space Warranty.

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First_Pay702@reddit

It was an act of Q, insurance never covers that.

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EfficientHeat4901@reddit

How many service years do you think he would have to pay afterwards in order to get that replacement then?

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KenethSargatanas@reddit

Universal Healthcare, man. The whole Federation paid for that heart.

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strangway@reddit

Maybe if he had gotten the Extended Space Warranty

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Bluestorm83@reddit

Heart shredded by a knife in a bar? He'll be fine, give him an artificial one, there should be one in the closet.

Artificial heart broken by phaser fire aboard a Starfleet Science Ship? Nothing we can do for him. If only we'd been in a bar, and he'd been stabbed.

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Sad-Working-9937@reddit

Well a Federation heart wouldn't turn him back into a Borg. but a Borg heart would.

As for Tapestry's writers forgetting that; it IS only a TV show and not reality.

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Yotsuya_san@reddit

I don't think a Best of Both Worlds era Borg heart would have reassimilated Picard. They were still in their "physically chop you up and replace bits" phase of their process. They didn't get the nanoprobe technology until sometime between here and First Contact.

If Nanoprobes were a thing in BoBW, the Borg wouldn't have even needed to kidnap Picard. They could have just left him on The Enterprise and possibly even gone on to assimilate the remainder of the crew.

So yeah, they could have left behind a superior Borg heart.

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Optimaximal@reddit

You see him get injected with the nanoprobes and it turns his skin grey. It was the hand-mounted tubules that came later.

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Snobpdx@reddit

Pulaski wouldn't have fk'd it up, just saying.

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atorin3@reddit

I think a lot of organs would fail when shot lol. Besides, borgs use nanotechnology. It may just be safer to remove as much as you can to prevent unforseen complications.

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Training_Cut704@reddit

The artificial heart was in the drawer with the uniform and communicator the Borg inexplicably kept that Shelby and the away team found. You just don’t see it on screen. Worf quietly grabbed all of it without mentioning anything because he didn’t want the Captain to feel dishonored that his heart was cut out. Once the Captain was recovered and the cube destroyed, he quietly turned it all over to Beverly so she could reinstall the federation heart because they had no way of knowing if the now disconnected Borg heart would continue working.

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mr_john_steed@reddit

I mean, to be fair, regular human hearts also tend to fail when they're blasted by a disruptor

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StickOnReddit@reddit

Things often fail when they cease to exist, it's true

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Ahlq802@reddit

Don’t I remember Picard having an artificial heart of some sort? He got into a fight when he was younger that he regretted, but it turned out to be what crucial to his drive.

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admiral_bringdown@reddit

Bet you he still got that borg dick tho

EDIT: I am sorry

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Sad-Working-9937@reddit

ACKTUALLY; since Picard Season2, its (fully functional) robo-penis.

(ok now I'm sorry)

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sosire@reddit

canon*

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Gold_Dragoon@reddit

But he still had implants and could hear the collective when near a cube. He said as much during insurrection.

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Training_Cut704@reddit

The artificial heart was in the drawer with the uniform and communicator the Borg inexplicably kept that Shelby and the away team found. You just don’t see it on screen. Worf quietly grabbed all of it without mentioning anything because he didn’t want the Captain to feel dishonored that his heart was cut out. Once the Captain was recovered and the cube destroyed, he quietly turned it all over to Beverly so she could reinstall the federation heart because they had no way of knowing if the now disconnected Borg heart would continue working.

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Dizzy-Violinist-1772@reddit

So it’s Beverly’s fault then

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Interesting-Image-89@reddit

I mean, I guess the Borg would have clocked 'oh already got a Robot Heart, cool, mark that for upgrade later.' and focussed on the immediate issues of sucking up all his knowledge and swatting 40 starships like bugs. And apparently having the Borg Queen drape herself all over him. Maybe that's the reason, they meant to get some nanoprobes in that heart and upgrade it to Borg level Super Heart, with handy dandy extra features like, I dunno, FM radio. But she's crawling all over him. All sweaty like and they just never got to him to do the updates.

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IKindaPlayEVE@reddit

Why replace it when the nanites could probably upgrade it in-place with zero additional downtime?

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NobleEnsign@reddit

They didn't have nanites at the time. They still did surgical implants and cybernetic grafts at the time. When First Contact happened that's when the Nanites were introduced, 6-7 years(in-universe) after Locutus was desimilated.

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IKindaPlayEVE@reddit

They had nanites. They still do surgery during Voyager. Let's not conflate TV/budgets with how the Borg "are."

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NobleEnsign@reddit

Ok, but the nanites were more like the software at that point, not the hole conversion like later on.

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ChancellorWorf@reddit

Somewhere, a Borg surgeon is reading this and throwing his mask on the floor and exclaiming “we’re such a fool!”

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OpinionPutrid1343@reddit

What annoys me even more is that in the dream scene at First Contact they impaled his eye to remove it for an ocular implant which never has been shown.

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SatisfactionActive86@reddit

lots of dreams feature events that never happened

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OpinionPutrid1343@reddit

In this case though it was kind of s flashback dream. At least it looked like that.

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Optimaximal@reddit

He literally woke from the dream as his eye was impaled, although it turned out he was still dreaming.

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InquisitorPeregrinus@reddit

So many things about Picard's heart -- especially in the context of what Roddenberry et al. sifted into TNG S1/2 that got increasingly forgotten as the show and later series went on...

- They had thoroughly mapped the brain and people didn't get headaches any more.

- People didn't get rhinoviruses any more.

- In "Samaritan Snare", Picard referred to his heart as a 'replacement', and Wes asked if it was a parthenogenetic implant, which Picard confirmed. Which is essentially a fancier way of saying 'cloned' or regrown (remember the pill McCoy had the dialysis patient swallow that caused her to grow a new kidney).

- Crusher was able to repair the advanced cardiomyopathy Ralph Offenhouse died from, as well as the conditions the other two cryonauts died from -- and rescusitate them with no loss of cognitive ability.

Picard's heart was damaged and needed to be replaced. The specifics of how the base-side medical facility handled the immediate crisis isn't known. Stasis has been a thing since the films, that never gets talked about. But they replaced his heart with a genetically-identical copy, which implies both biological rather than artificial as well as some form of cloning. Maybe that's something transporters or specialized medical (quantum resolution) replicators can be used for -- I don't know. We didn't see any indication the Borg replaced biological hearts, regardless of the other organs replaced or augmented. When they went through the Weird Space Anomaly of the Week and got turned into teenagers, no issue with Picard's heart there, as -- at the time -- if anyone remembered he didn't have his original heart, someone might have remembered it wasn't a mechanical object.

But then "Tapestry" borked that. Ah, well... Not the first continuity gaffe in Trek. Certainly not the last.

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EntrepreneurPlus7091@reddit

They probably saw it as better than the organic one.

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RangerMatt76@reddit

I thought that the defective heart was replaced when Wesley went with Picard in the shuttle so he could take his Starfleet entrance exams.

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l008com@reddit (OP)

Home of the famous "Wesley doesn't know how doors work" scene

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AnyImpression6@reddit

Here's the thing: Tapestry is a great episode, so who gives a shit?

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AllPowerfulQ@reddit

I gave Picard a second chance. Borg are Borg. Even though he had been given a borg heart without his connection to the collective which had been severed, the heart wouldn't have functioned correctly. Also, such a heart might have nanoprobes that, if active, might have started to reassimilate him.

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Cyclone159@reddit

This reads like a trump tweet.

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porntrek_86@reddit

Maybe it wasn't so primitive, drones probably have all sorts of native tech in their bodies. Tattoos etc too, as long as they get the job done. Also could have been compromised and that's why it fails.

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amglasgow@reddit

I thought for sure Tapestry was in S2. Nope, that's weird. I seem to remember Dr. Pulaski being the one who did his surgery.

There wasn't anything wrong with his artificial heart. He was blasted with a plasma bolt or something that caused it to temporarily stop working, but they got it working again.

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nezhnogaymer@reddit

(1) The nanoprobes rendered it functionally obsolete by taking over important biological systems

(2) His time as Locutus may have been too short for it to be prioritized for upgrade

(3) His Starfleet-medical-issued artificial heart may have already met a threshold of advancement or basic utility

(4) The writers may have overlooked it

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Simple_Flounder@reddit

Picard never liked being a Borg. His heart just wasn't in it...

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ArraysStartWith1@reddit

Oh i see what ya did there, a reference to Soran/Geordi. Nice

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HyrinShratu@reddit

Even if they had, him not being fully Borgified means that the Borg heart may not have worked properly once he was disconnected, so they probably had to put a new prosthetic in anyway.

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CromulentDucky@reddit

They didn't replace his arm. They gave him a fancy glove. They were in a hurry so didn't do the full borg thing.

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StickOnReddit@reddit

At time of Borgification he had just had the old one replaced recently (the episode Samaritan Snare, which seems to be remembered more for the Pakled plot and less the introduction of Picard's artificial heart), so it was likely not a high priority item for them to go in and upgrade as it was still "under warranty" in a manner of speaking

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Gummies1345@reddit

I mean he already had a badass heart. A artificial one that saved him from a Romulan Disruptor blast. The Borg may have learned a thing or two from his heart. Lol

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WallyMcBeetus@reddit

The Borg didn't know about the artificial heart because that was three seasons in the future.

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Prudent_Leave_2171@reddit

(Parental Warning: The below statement is a satirical example of head canon gone awry. AKA, it’s utter BS. Read at your own discretion.)

Ah, well, ya see, it ultimately didn’t happen. In the original timeline, Picard died on the table and had his little Q review of his early life, leading Q to be like “alright, ya got moxy, kid. Imma take care of you.” So To fix it, Q had to go back and make the events of “Q Who” happen, so the Borg would replace his mechanical heart. The entire Borg v. Federation thing only happened so Q could get the Borg to fix Picard for that moment.

Thank you for your time.

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Sad-Working-9937@reddit

Well if you want "satirical example of head canon gone awry" halfway through Picard Season Two, I figured this;

Its established that the Q can die when in human form, so I thought the the Borg had assimilated a (human) Q, and were invading the Continuum. Then The Q changes history and has Humanity wipe out the Borg for them, but "our Q" (Delancy) does his typical Q mischief and makes Picard remember the other history and gives him a chance to find another solution.

I still that would have been a better plot than the "Q just needed a hug" that (I couldn't believe) they wrote.

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