from which Benjamin Sisko makes a lucky escape with his son but loses his wife, who is killed when the ship is dealt a death blow by the Borg cube.

In "The Drumhead", a later episode of TNG's fourth season, AdmiralNorah Satie states that the loss at Wolf 359 was thirty-nine starships and nearly eleven thousand lives. While Shelby estimates, in this episode, that the fleet will be back up in "less than a year" after the battle, Starfleet continues to prove shorthanded all the way up to and including Season 5's "Redemption II".

Worf and Miles O'Brien recall the events of this episode in DS9's own fourth season premiere, "The Way of the Warrior". O'Brien tells Worf that he thought they would all end up assimilated, like Picard, whileWorf claims that he never doubted that they would succeed.

In VOY: "Death Wish", it is revealed that, during the final battle, the Enterprise-D truly was the Federation's last line of defense, as Q explicitly states that – had Quinn not saved an ancestor of Riker's during the American Civil War, Commander Riker wouldn't have been around to devise his brilliantly unique strategy. As a result, the Borg would've surely assimilated the Federation.

The seventh season outing "Parallels" showed two different outcomes of the battle via different quantum realities due to Worf's encounter with a quantum fissure. The first was that the Enterprise successfully destroyed the Borg cube but could not rescue Picard, resulting in his death. The second was that the Enterprise failed to stop the cube and the