As the first solo film featuring the crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation, First Contact finds the USS Enterprise-E following the Borg back to April 4, 2063. The Borg have gone back in time to prevent “first contact,” the day that Cochrane’s inaugural warp drive flight catches the attention of the Vulcans, making way for Starfleet and the Federation.
Cochrane, Trek fans know, was a legendary figure in the mythos long before he showed up in the film looking like the jolly farmer from Babe. He originally appeared in the season 2 Original Series episode “Metamorphosis,” played by Glenn Corbett. There, Kirk and Spock find Cochrane restored to youth and alive for centuries thanks to an entity called “the Companion.” Though lovelorn, this Cochrane has the dignity and optimism that meets Kirk and Spock’s expectations, a true hero who led humanity into the future.
Not so when the Enterprise-E away team meet Cochrane in 2063. The ever-awkward Reginald Barclay isn’t the only one whose hero worship freaks out Cochrane. La Forge exacerbates things when he rhapsodizes about attending Cochrane High School and the impressive statue that humans will later construct, one 20 meters high and featuring the doctor looking to the sky with inspiration. Cochrane realizes the irony at work. Apparently he inspires the world. But he can’t even inspire himself. The more that La Forge et al. tell Cochrane about the man he’ll be come, the more the man he is shrinks away. In fact, it takes a phase blast from Riker to prevent Cochrane from abandoning the project altogether and running away.
He sees the vast gap between the future described by Riker and the world in which he lives. Instead of working to bridge it, Cochrane collapses.
A Communal Effort
Cochrane’s response actually makes a lot of sense. It’s not just that the world described by the Starfleets sounds too good to be true. It’s that they make it sound like it all came from him, that he was the one thing that changed it all. Cochrane’s right to fear such individualist hero worship. No one person could shoulder such a responsibility, even one as brilliant as him.
Yet the actual Cochrane plot in First Contact shows that, in fact, he didn’t do it alone. Even if they don’t get lines, background characters in the Earth scenes show a crowd of people at work, actually enacting Cochrane’s designs. In a fun bit of time look paradox shenanigans, La Forge asks Cochrane to confirm a part of the Phoenix, implying that maybe La Forge got the idea from something he read in the future about what he would actually do in the past, even if the textbooks credited it to Cochran.