Why doesn't Captain Picard have a hair transplant? Hehehe...
Because by the 24th century, we've grown past being insecure and vain, supposedly? Or Picard's been through a lot and is now comfortable in his own skin (unlike Patrick Stewart, who was apparently going through a midlife crisis later in the series and into the films, and wanted to be an action hero and get the girl...).
Why does Picard (or anyone) need heart surgery? Can't they just put him in the transporter and have that fix him up when it's reassembling his molecules?
And if you die on an away mission with say a phaser hit, or some sort of foreign contaminate or poison - can't they put your body in the transporter and have the pattern revert to the last time you were alive?
I mean these things dis-assemble and re-assemble human bodies at the molecular level - surely they're programmable...
Well... Mostly it's a matter of dramatic tension. They'd used the transporter for magic fixes in TOS ("The Enemy Within, for example), and by TNG they didn't want it being a magical deus ex machina. A couple still snuck through, like when they used it to "fix" Pulaski's DNA to reverse her accelerated aging, or to beam Keiko's baby out of her and into Kira (seriously? That's the best way you can think of to explain Nana being pregnant?). But we also didn't understand death even as well as we do now, imperfect as
that is. I think the trickiest part would be keeping the brain intact. It won't matter if you replace dead heart muscle with live, or oxygen-starved cells with healthy, if the neural network has started to break down. Even though, supposedly, by the 24th century they've completely charted the brain and how it works, and the resuscitation device they tried on Tasha was a "neural stimulator", so we can presume the rest of her was in operable condition by the time they got her to sickbay...
...They also keep forgetting they have biostasis technology.
Here's my persistently unanswered question: Why wasn't Picard court-martialed (or at least an inquest held) following the events of "Q Who?"? *ticks off on fingers* He pissed off a nigh-omnipotent entity, who flung them out to a distant part of the galaxy, years at sustained maximum warp from the nearest Federation facility. He asked Guinan, his only resident expert on that part of the galaxy, what to do, and was told by her "start back now". Momets later, his next log entry starts with the very phrase "despite Guinan's warning", and he decides they're going to stick around for a while and have a look-see. When a Borg ship appears, he again asks her advice, she says "They're called the Borg. Defend yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you." Again he ignores her, keeps running scans and trying to contact them. Eventually, after they demonstrate being uninterested in talking to them by taking a core sample of the ship and losing eighteen crew in the process, Picard
finally decides to fight, and does significant damage to their ship. Does he finish it off? They've already demonstrated they can analyze and adapt to their weapons technology... No. He sends over an away team that discovers -- *gasp!* I think I'm gonna have a heart attack and die from not-surprise -- the ship is regenerating. All Picard's subsequent attacks have no effect and he has to call on Q to save their butts.
So yeah, I think Picard is complicit there at least four times over. :facepalm I have always hated stories that depend on the main characters being idiots. Now, granted one of the things they discover in that episode is that the Neutral Zone outposts they find destroyed half a season earlier were apparently destroyed by the Borg, so there's at least a scout ship already out their way, but they hadn't turned their resources toward this end of the galaxy yet -- until Picard caught their interest.
An unanswerable follow-up to this question is why they devolved the Borg in every subsequent appearance. They started out scary and relentless, and became lamer and lamer and more contradictions showed up. "When they come, they'll come in force. They don't do
anything piecemeal." Next incident? One ship. "No individuals" became "It has been decided a human voice will speak for us." "You're nothing to them. They're only interested in your ship, in it's technology" became "We will add your
biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us." and so on.
--Jonah
