Exactly. IF they had made the queen nothing more than a "manifested spokesman", like Locutus or Seven of Nine, so Patrick Stewart could have someONE to "play" off of in his performance . . . it wouldn't be "SO" bad. But the Borg were SO much more "Alien", and thus TERRIFYING, without a "queen"! (or even a "face")
@@sharkdentures3247 agreed. I think that the idea behind the simple statement of, "We are the Borg" was to invoke the idea of "We are Legion, for we are many." The Borg were supposed to be an anonymous collective of cyborgs. You remove one individual Borg and it doesn't matter, there's ten billion or so more to replace it. It's literally the idea of, "We'll drown you in our own blood!" personified. Even if the Collective deemed it necessary to have an avatar speak for them, it could be a random drone picked for however long the Collective deemed it necessary before the drone was reset to factory settings.
Indeed!!! It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc. But they chose lazy writing and easy decisions, sent the Cube the "sleep" command and "won". But hey, all of that is just propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
The Queen as the “face of the Borg” renders unnecessary the whole reason they turned Picard into Locutus. If they had her to speak for them, they didn’t need Locutus.
She was not of the Federation, or of Earth. The Borg wanted someone known to everyone in the Federation who could speak on their behalf, to help make assimilation easier.
@@StarshipYorktown Just another dumb decision that watered down a truly awesome villian; curious if the suits were the ones who forced this nonsense through
My head cannon is that it was an adaptation as a result of the Hugh and Lore situation. Lore brought them back from chaos but when he was killed it left a gaping hole so, Borg being Borg, they filled it.
That was the role of "Locutus". And even that was a terrible plot idea. It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc. But they went with lazy writing, sent the Cube the "sleep" command and "won". But hey, all of that is just propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
@DavidBroome1978 I suspect that writers intended to make them a fascist monarchy. They didn't like their greatest villains being so useful to their own ideological enemies.
That would have been perfect. A mediator or some such. That would have preserved the mystery and opened doors for better stories later. It would have made more sense to the current story at the time as well.
The real big problem is even having the borg go back in time in the first place. Because think the borgs supposed to be so powerful yet somehow they have to used time tricks to assimilate humanity, and what to stop them again. why not simplely try again again? Only go back into in delta, and travel to eartj post ww3 Instead of alert the Federation, lose a cube and somehow give the heros a head up to follow through your time port, it should have been the founders or the bugs Conspiracy's going back in time to stop frist contact. I like frist contact, but the more you think about it, the more loopholes you find.
To Be Fair, when I first saw First Contact that is what I assumed she was, a Face to convince Picard to come back. They dont really show too many examples of people escaping being Drones and Locutus was already an anomaly with the otherwise Faceless Borg. Every other instance was the "We are the Borg" speech, but with Picard the Collective very clearly preserved some semblance of his individuality for... reasons that dont ever seem explained IMO. He was Locutus, not "Primary Adjuctant of Unimatrix 1701" or whatever other designations Borg only use when reluctantly interacting with individuals.
Great point. As a narrative device, the Borg Queen worked very well. As a retcon and as a means to defeat the Borg, she opens too many plot holes. Make her a new creation, and make the destruction of her and the rest of the drones the result of some other plan by Picard and Co., and not simply the result of the Queen dying, then that patches the two big logic holes.
I read the Star Trek TNG novel “Vendetta” when it came out in 1991. It was about a Borg invasion of Federation space, contained references to the original series, and had no Borg queen. It was an excellent book which explored several TOS storylines as well. No queen needed.
I remember that book well. The tie in to the doomsday/planet killer devices from TOS, the assimilation of a Ferengi, the implications of actually achieving warp factor 10 without a slingshot manuever. Honestly that was a great story. Even brought back Polaski and gave her and her ship something to do. Why Star Trek/Star Wars refuse to use their expanded universe is confusing and infuriating. You have spec scripts that have already been vetted by an audience. Sally forth!
Read several tng novels in the early two thousands, and was quite surprised how good Peter David's were. Especially because I had to read them in braille; me being a person of reduced visibility, which meant they went very slowly! Recently reread an audio version of Q squared and was amazed how good it was, methinks a reread of Vendetta is on the cards. Especially because I'm currently introducing my wife to Tng, and we just finished best of both worlds.
The one thing the Borg Queen did in "First Contact" was actually work as an inverse/foil to Data. That sub-plot where she was offering Data a simulacrum of humanity was really clever. Data's storyline, after all, had been his quest to gain humanity...and here he was tempted with it in a reverse form from the Borg (humanoids who sublimate their humanity through technology). And that little line where Data says he considered it...for what, .3 nanoseconds or something like that...an "eternity for an android"...was really an ace line. Too often we focus on the Picard/Queen dynamic, but really the Data/Queen thing was pretty good. But yeah...a "Queen" doesn't really work for the Borg. Unless, as someone else notes, it was a response to the Locutus adaptation they tried.
I agree the dymanic between the Queen and Data made for some good stuff, but overall what you gained isn't worth what you lost in the overall mystique and terror of the Borg. As you and others have pointed out, a truly clever writer probably could have pulled out some Locutus reference to explain her existence not as the Prime of the Borg, but rather as a tool somehow. But truly clever writers have always been a rare breed in Hollywood.
@@sigmacademy Something along those lines, sure that could work. Again if she filled a role similar to Locutus, more of a tool than a "leader" I think you still could have had those interactions with Data and kept the Borg largely intact. Oh well...
I hate the borg queen, that was the point where the borg went from scary enemy, to nerfed mob enemy. Remember, a single borg cube could wipe out a whole starfleet armada early on, now a single runabout can destroy multiple cubes at once and if you want to take out the borg quickly, simply go after the queen. It was a horrible decision, should have kept them how they were.
Wasn't Q's introduction to the Borg a message from the Q informing the Federation to prepare, not only for the Borg but the Dominion and other forces too? Maybe Starfleet listened by going ghostbusters on the development of new weapons, like the quantum torpedo.
The borg are good at adapting technology from species they assimilate. Humans, and some other federation members, are even better at adapting new technologies when they find a clue how it works. And then making innovations on top of the new principles. So it makes sense that the federation, finding debris from defeated borg, are going to advance quickly. This capacity to grow and adapt even scaring the Q on the long term.
@stephenshelton4267 Q was given more of a reality check to their pride than prepared. As q said, if you cannot take a bloody nose, I suggest that you return home and hide underneath your bed. it not safe out there.The galaxy is full of wonders beyond imaginations and horrors beyond your nightmare" And that's nothing even to mentions what's outside the Milky Way Galaxy has seen in the original series with the doomsday weapon and the aliens that could travel between galaxy and turn people into sugar cubes.
The Borg in their 2nd appearance were defeated by tricking them all into going to sleep at once. In their 3rd appearance, one was talked back to normal like a drug recovery. Their 4th had them overwhelmed by Hugh’s sense of self such that Lore could hijack the collective in state of crisis and suddenly they have individual identities. I think _Star Trek: First Contact_ did them good going back to something threatening and scary at least. Given them a focal point that can unify their mass thought seems like a rational idea. Maybe she’s from the species that generated the Borg from the start…🫤
Totally agree. The Borg never needed a spokeswoman to get the point across. They were the most threatening when they were just the perfectly adapting collective. You might even say that if you blew up a cube, and only a fingernail survived, you'd get a cube in short order again. They could've been like Stargate replicators, or the proverbial grey goo. Infinite trouble in a small package, no mercy, that made death irrelevant.
Exactly my thought. It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc. So many intelligent plot ideas, but Hollyweird chose lazy writing to get a 5min climactic showdown in their propaganda movie. Same as with GoT as another commentator here mentioned. I chose not watching that, cause I suspected the ending fail. Same as with "Lost". I watched the first episode, said: "Ok, obviously they are in purgatory. Might be interesting if the writing holds up". Reaction by J.J. Abrams? *!panic!* "denial* then total confusion and multiple seasons of garbage before the inevitable confirmation: "Yes, they were in purgatory all along". Seriously obvious when the guy sacrificed himself for his sister and "died" (read: got redeemed or rather, redeemed himself). Or when the one dude stood up from his wheelchair. Lazy Hollyweird writing and denial. Gonna watch an old western with John Wayne tonight.
I think the entire idea is that the Borg is kinda like a hidden threat. For one, Borg drone corpses are just itching to assimilate when switched on again, and nanoprobes are kind of a combo blessing/curse.
@factsoverfeelings1776 Disagree. Roddenberry's death, for awhile, freed the franchise from the storytelling shackles of his over-the-top utopianism, allowing for actual conflict among the crew and for the Federation to not follow the "perfect society lectures backwards aliens of the week how to be" trope. Roddenberry didn't even like Wrath of Khan, and tried to sabotage it by leaking Spock's death. Roddenberry had a great TV pitch. The franchise otherwise creatively succeeded in spite of him, not because of him.
@ Gene Roddenberry isn’t what made Star Trek work in the first place. It was Gene L. Coon and writers like Dorthy Fontana. We’ve seen what a pure Roddenberry Star Trek looks like with The Motion Picture and it sucked.
I like the idea of the Borg Queen being a misdirection. Create a, "central unit" so that the enemies go after this single target with all their might, only for it to be a trap, and to have a, "central intelligence" to never have existed in the first place. It's even more terrifying, because the collective itself would have created the Queen as a psychological weapon to trick its enemies. This means that The Borg woupdn't simply be cold and calculating, but truely creative and understanding of how its enemies work. Its intelligence would go from simple, "me cold robot zombie, me -eat- assimilate you" to something capable of outsmarting everyone.
I feel the same. When HR Giger mentioned how they reduced the alien to an insect / parasite they killed the whole mystery and darkness about it. Same happened with the Borg. Watered down a bigger thing in to a dumb villain.
JRRT said if you resolve one mystery create another. For example the tentacle creature guardian the Mines of Moria. Even Sauron has no idea what it is.
If they had maintained the original concept of the Borg as an insectoid species with a hive consciousness it could have required a different queen, but this might have also proven dangerous as it would be akin to both Legion and the Borg we get. The idea that a single "individual" has the knowledge/abilities of many and could easily challenge a single-minded/individual-minded life-form and forced them to adapt. The only thing the Queen really did was serve as a focal point to focus the "direction" of the Borg aboard the Enterprise, even if her role was esentially meant to serve as a counterpoint to both Picard's former "life" as Locutus and Data
Lost opportunity not just making the Queen an aberration in the system that broke off, with the quiet humor being it spun off from a simple miscalculation spooling into independent and violent consciousness. Serves as the villain for the movie, and gives some insight on how to permanently end the greater threat later.
Naaah, the Borg Queen was shit. Her character turned the Borg into nothing more than the typical "we've written ourselves into a corner, so now we need a way out" type of thing. She reduced the Borg from a cosmic horror level of threat into a villain of the week level of threat. Pathetic, really.
agreed. the borg were such a creepy foe, space zombies that let tech get away from the and were consuming people almost unconsciously. Almost tragic even. Unfeeling, unrelenting; they didn't care about you, they didn't seek vengeance, they were a force of nature. The queen created in the borg a sense of maliciousness that lessened them greatly. made them small and petty. (and don't get me started on the Picard show who converted the queen with a friendship is magic speech.)
Even without the Queen, they still could have had a "leader" Borg. Not in a controller type way, but a just a Borg drone that interacts constantly with Data and Picard, (perhaps a known assimilated crew member.) Imagine how much more menacing the opening monologue to Data could have been if it were spoke by the hive. Having the Queen "seduce" Data didn't help either. (Also, it doesn't make sense because only has a head and shoulders.) I think that moment did more damage to the menace of the Borg than any other.
Seduction isn't only physical, it can be any kind of temptation - power, flesh, money, influence, etc. Her offer was essentially a Faustian deal with Data.
@@sigmacademy Tempting Data with becoming "human" is actually a very strong plot point. My issue is how the Queen feels the need to physically "stimulate" him afterwards. When it comes to the Borg, I think about a terrifying hive mind living to serve only itself. Not... what the Queen did. It is (like the Queen) highly inconsistant with what's established and frankly laughable.
When I watched Star Trek as a kid and watched the Borg, I never imagined something like them would come to exist in real life. We now call these people "woke."
@@MrYerak5 Greta Thunberg. She has the same complexion as the queen too. Their obsession with destroying Israel is really on point with the Borg analogy. The borg want to destroy humanity, the woke want to destroy the jews first and then the west. They want communism and oppression. Thankfully the IDF is doing the heavy lifting keeping us safe
I suspect you could say for his knowledge; Picard was literally a mouthpiece for the collective, but it was his knowledge which made his assimilation necessary.
They needed a quisling to speak to the Federation, a human. Picard was forced to be that quisling which is why it was so traumatic for him. He was so helpless to stop them using him as a weapon to kill. Remember that scene in the Picard family vineyard with his brother Robert?
Not really. Locutus spoke for collective, not ruling the collective itself. Nor is Collective depend on Locustus. Consider Picard made contact with Q and Humanity history with powerful beings throughout Star Trek, it why Borg took notice of Humanity and somewhat Picard being respersented as humanity's spokesman to Q Also, Borg keeps pushing toward Earth, despite Locustus being kidnapped.
But don't the borg basically admit that in the show? At least tacitly, because they tell Picard that he's a special case implying that making him Lacutis is not something they normally do. IDK I'd have to go back and rewatch that episode.
@@bloodysimile4893 The reason a zombie-horde doesn't work as an antagonist in Star Trek is because the conflict in zombie fiction is between the survivors. The zombies are uninteresting. Roddenberry forbade conflict between crew members so it wasn't long before the the narrative potential was exhausted without Borg "personalities."
MARABUNTA! The Naked Jungle - 1954, Charlton Heston. Its about South American soldier ants. "...it's not a single insect, but a beast that's 2 miles wide and 20 miles long..."
Prior to First Contact, the Borg were this nigh unstoppable threat. They looked human or humanoid and walked with a purpose. They zombie-like in appearance, complete with unsettling body horror alterations. They were a glimpse into what was in store for humanity if we pushed technology to it's most logical conclusion; the death of the Individual. To us, the death of individuality is one of the scariest things we can think of. They were an unsettling antagonistic force, and using Picard as the "voice" against Starfleet added to that unsettling aura. In a sense, the perfect antagonist for Star Trek The Queen's introduction ultimately undermines this in a lot of aspects. No longer are they a collective hive mind that represents the death of the Individual, but drones that carry out the will of their queen. I get what they were going for, but the Bee analogy falls flat completely since even in a bee hive, the drones aren't mindless. It also undermines the need for Picard to have become Locutus since, according to First Contact, Alice Krige's Queen was on that very cube. Adding to the undermining, it would effectively negate Picard's Sleep command; the resulting backflow could've easily been undone by the Queen if she was around back then. All in all, the addition of the Borg Queen ultimately hurt the Borg. Instead of an unsettling antagonist who could've been a potential future for us, it became no more than a run-of-the-mill alien villain.
The sleep argument only works when you consider that deactivated Locutus was the mole for the Enterprise to use against the Borg, like an internal spy. Maybe even the Queen didn't know that system could be used against her and by the time she did, the Cube was already being destroyed. In short, by creating Locutus she won the fight against the armada, but she lost the Cube in the process later on via that same resource.
Never understood the Borg Queen. First off she seemed far to emotional and "human" to be in control of such a collective consciousness. It also heavily questions her control with how mindless the average borg acts. If some one with human intelligence exist why are your average borgs so dumb to ignore people boarding their ships in so many episodes? I always felt the Borg queen existed just to make an easy way to kill all the borgs in one shot.
The Irony is The Borg aren't stupid in the Episodes before The Queen, They Ignored Individuals Boarding Their Ship simply because the Boarders never posed s Threat to Them. The Worst They could do is Destroy The Cube, then The Rest of The Collective Learns How They did it and Adapts, making the Whole Stronger.
It's likely the Borg in the earlier episodes were based on the original concept of an insectoid species and thus ignored anything that wasn't an overt threat. In some cases with insects, unless another creature poses a defined threat or is identified as one (usually based on pheromones) then it's ignored and in some cases zombees have nearly destroyed bee hives due to the parasites making the infected bees act against the "good" of the hive. Given the distance between the J-25 Cube and the Queen's Unicomplex it's possible that either; A) the Queen didn't care if intruders came aboard as they didn't pose a threat, or B) she noticed but with so many other drones and vessels barely saw the Enterpirse-D's Away Team as a threat since they didn't actively do anything to pose a danger. Q even states; "they're not interested in you, they're interested in your technology" when Picard tries to speak to one of the Drones and the only time they appear "concerned" is after the first phaser strike does damage while the second is treated like a small scratch
@@andrewmalinowski6673 Which is why the Queen kind of ruins things. Because that same trick worked multiple times against the borg. I can see the view point from a collective perspective that any individual ship doesn't matter, but if something with akin to human emotions and logic is in control it seems stupid to waste resources like that. Especially since the borg seemingly have no way to replenish their numbers on their own as they are reliant on assimilating other species.
she might have sent a self destruct command to the drones because most of them at that point were picards crew and a final eff you to picard. but hay that's just in my head patching a plot hole.
My head cannon always leaned towards a self destruct command or even an automated system to prevent WORKING Borg being captured and reverse engineered to create effective countermeasures. Which seeing what future Janeway used, perhaps working on fortifying their biological weaknesses might have been a major oversight on the part of the Borg. It seems like an obvious issue.
I believe the Queen was a analogy to Davros of the Daleks. That was the first impression I had of the Borg Queen when I saw her character. She is a creator as much as a Queen if you examine the character closer. Great take on the movie by the way.
The irony of First Contact is they looked to zombie films for inspiration and yet all the best zombie movies treat them as a decentralized antagonist with no central "Zombie Leader" to shoot at.
Actually, the zombie movie that had The Mentalist star in it had a zombie leader, and several other zombie movies have shown zombies following the lead of other zombies, including the recent Zombie King and Queen of Las Vegas. It IS there, if you watch enough zombie movies.
The Night King ruined the white walkers in Game of Thrones. Having them being a hive mind that ends by defeating the original was so stupid. There wasn’t even a Night King in the ASOIAF books. Nor were the white walkers created by the children of the forest. They were a force of nature that was chaotic and scary. The Borg and White Walkers both were ruined turning them from unexplainable horrors to generic villains who had a top evil person.
Lazy writing and the need for a quick 5min fix in the climactic scene of a movie, In the real world, problems get solved by lots of hard work. But all of this is just Hollyweird propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
I think that is when the writer create such phenomenal enemy, just to later on make a fatal weakness like a "Panic Red Button" to escape from a dead-end.
It was assuredly the latter. Queens were just merely physical representations of the Hive mind. When we're first introduced to her, we see her Being "installed" into her complete robot body. And at the end of the movie all that was left of her was her Terminator skull and spine. There was nothing left of the skin that was transplanted over the skull. This tells he she is artificially produced. She's not just some random female who was assimilated and designated the queen. Otherwise they would have a more organic structure to their bodies like other drones do. And they all look alike (or are supposed to, other actresses playing them not withstanding). As for First Contact when the queen is destroyed the others die as well. We've seen it before. When a Drone is forcefully disconnected with the hive they have a self destruct system that activates. Given that the queen in FC is the only 24th century queen, she as the only hub for the other drone. Once she was gone the others followed suit. Why Hugh isn't was explained as a malfunction. Seven was purposely let go by the Queen as her plan to later capture Voyager so her self-destruct was deactivated.
Problem is, Picard survived the explosion of the Borg ship that assimilated him. The "all Borg die if their node is destroyed" rule already had an exception. The better call for First Contact would have just been to have whatever takes out the Queen to also take out the rest of her drones, not make their death the result of hers.
@@BuckyKronk Because Picard wasn't fully assimilated yet and he was to become the Queen's King of sorts. If you remember in the episode were Worf was jumping around alternate realities, the last one he ended up on was where Picard DIDN'T make it when the Borg cube exploded.
I think the character of the queen makes sense from an engineering standpoint. It makes things a lot easier if there's a central control unit. Given the borg's tendency towards efficiency to the point of stupidity, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense from the idea of many voices becoming one. The entire collective will, thought, and consciousness of the borg gets focused into one single unit.
I think it’s like Doctor Who baddies. They all start off unique and interesting, but do enough episodes about them and they eventually devolve into generic nonsense.
Aye, Species 8472 were such a great original creation. They should have been left behind in all their mystery. In my situation, I saw Scorpion Part I before moving to North Dakota and discovering no local stations were showing the series. I didn't get to Part II until I returned to the Pacific Northwest and started renting DVDs through Netflix in 2005, so I had a few years of suspense...
There is nothing wrong with making the hive mind a character in and of itself. It would have been just as effective for the hive mind to speak directly to Picard through a series of changing avatars. One is killed, another instantly emerges. That would have presented far more interesting and dangerous challenges to overcome than the standard supervillain narrative.
@@hanelyp1 Exactly. Or even physically engaging in the action. One falls another rises. Or even more than one, the collective consciousness split into multiple drones. "We are Legion, for we are many." Now that would have been terrifying.
If having an ever-changing villain to interact with Data and Picard, the best option (replacing the Queen) would be to utilize a form of holo-projection; almost taking from their Collective while offering a "familiar face." Data hears a soft hum, turns his head and sees a pale-skinned humanoid standing with her hands behind her back. "Who are you?" The humanoid stares and tilts her head slightly before smiling almost darkly. "I am Borg. We are Legion. The multitude. Your end." The humanoid says, speaking in the familiar multiple overlapping voices, spreading her arms and smiling as she gestures to the assimilated engineering core. "That is a miscontradiction, there is no singular Borg." The humanoid takes two steps forward before the appearance changes, becoming an assimilated-looking Andorian and reaches for his neck. "You are the contradiction, artificial yearning to be organic. You resist perfection. Resistance is futile, Cmdr. Data." The Andorian says, the overlapping voices nearly becoming malevolent in tone, while the fingers half-phase through Data's neck before the hand is pulled back.
Susanna Thompson was much scarier. Krige's Borg Queen always felt very childish, petty, and βτchy, like she wanted to lash out, out of spite. Where as Thompson's Borg Queen was cold, calculated, and you never knew what she would do next because of her demeanor.
The Queen's entire time travel plot in FC was petty; no longer are the Borg interested in the Federation's technology, they're happy to just wipe out its existence. Which begs the question, why?
Species 8472 wasn't humanoid, but the Borg wanted them so badly, they started a war over it. I often wonder what would've happened, if the Borg had come up against the Founders. Can you imagine a shape-shifting drone? Or one able to shape shift its technological components (was Odo's comm badge real, or did he create it, as with his 'clothing'?) to whatever was needed, in any situation? I guess they wouldn't need drones designated for specific tasks, anyone could do anything that was needed, anywhere, anytime.
@@lauranolastnamegiven3385 The Founders would only be assimilated with special nanoprobes, if at all. Remember, the original form of their people was a liquid.
The Borg should have had only the collective intelligence. If an anthropomorphic enemy was needed, it should have only been a construct, a mere conduit, as Marvel com 6:00 ics did in the late 60's- early 90's with the Kree Supreme Intelligence. It literally could create and operate through such constructs as needed, but ususlly chose to direct others.
I saw the queen as being a unintended side-effect of the borg’s evolution - to me she was a self-conscious spawned personality of the borg given a physical form, especially given how we see her body being created from mostly inorganic materials and smaller organic components as opposed to most borg who are organic beings given inorganic prosthetics and ‘upgrades’. We see her in flashbacks of picard’s in First Contact when he dreams of his assimilation experience, and he mentions her saying she was there and wanted a ‘counterpart’ when they created locutus instead of just creating a regular drone - I think she wasn’t actually there, at least not physically, she was just a forming sentience, and I think both she was the one responsible for him becoming locutus, but i think also as a result if that, of a borg individual being created among the collective as locutus, was also the collective created a physical body of the queen in response to the creation of locutus - like a sort of evolution or a viral reaction to the change in the collective. I also note that annie wershing’s version of the queen in picard season 2 makes reference to the ‘other’ queens, from other timelines, that she is not the same borg queen as the one we already had encountered, and that through some way, that the collective is connected outside of time, the different queens are somewhat aware of each other’s existence, so perhaps this too is another accidental ‘evolution’ and side effect of the borg collective consciousness, that it is not meant to do, but becomes as it evolves.
Technically, the Borg have time travel tech and they have been invading other dimensions as well? So that reference might have been referencing that, or the fact that the central Queen sent those on those missions, like in First Contact or before that, or Borg on time traveling missions from other timelines making contact with Prime timeline Borg, which neatly sidesteps the continuity issue of warning them about future Janeway as a threat.
Yes they wanted to have a central villain for Picard to interact with. I think it was a mistake. Just goes against everything we learned about the Borg throughout the show. Alice gives a great performance as the queen but it just goes against the canon
This is why bitcoin works. It's decentralized. The Borg queen is the opposite of the impact Locutus had. With Locutus you had to save Picard from assimilation. With the Borg queen you just had to kill her off like a typical villain. Evil Data had already been done with Lore after all.
The fake Borg "queen" ruined the whole mystique & awe of the Borg, especially in Voyager. She was bitchy, petty, foolish, and arrogant. Extremely Un-Borg-like. Glad they never did never an "origin story" for the fake "queen," because it would've been awful -- replete with a "bad dad" and bullying.
Decentralized Borg would make a much more interesting and scary villain, but for a big budget movie the concept would be too cerebral to connect with a mass audience. They picked the safe route by having a more traditional hero vs villain setup.
Not only should they have avoided the typical trope of adding a queen, but they should have assigned numbers to new borgs rather than names. Names carry a human connotation. A number makes the new "recruits" even less human. It's an impersonal designation. Just another number
Umm, the Borg DID use a numbering system for their members of their Collective. If anything, it was the Starfleet members that gave them names, in direct contradiction of the Collective, by allowing individuality, the biggest threat to the Collective - there was an entire episode about it where the Queen destroyed the "dream world" of some Borg because they dreamed of being individuals when they went into their recharging cycle.
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with the initial appearance of the Borg Queen (Star Trek: First Contact). Characters like Data, Lore, Locutus, the Borg Queen: they are all different variations on the same theme of being human vs being a sort of machine creature. It's all interesting sci-fi drama, and so with good writers, actors, directors and producers, they can make the concept work.
Exactly. It expanded their mystery and kept them interesting to the point they’re still talked about today. It’s a TV show, they had to have more depth to keep them watchable.
I remember seeing First Contact in the theater and thinking, “ oh man this Queen totally ruins the mystique of the Borg.” I think they created her as a way to communicate with the main villain, but that was also a dumbing down of the sci-fi narrative of Star Trek to the more action oriented films. Ultimately, even though I understand why they did it, I think it was a mistake.
First Contact should have been the last time we see the Borg except for: Seven of Nine (drop the rest of the Borg from Voyager altogether, especially the Borg alliance nonsense) and the singular appearance in Enterprise (flows from First Contact and completes a loop).
The Borg went through so many changes each time they appeared. The first time they appeared, in the 2nd season TNG episode "Q Who", they didn't even assimilate life forms. They just wanted technology. They would attack ships and colonies and just assimilate the technology to improve themselves. They reproduced on their own - we saw a "Borg nursery" with infant Borg. Then in the TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds", we saw that they could also assimilate human beings, when they assimilated Picard. But BoBW implies this was sort of a special case - they wanted Picard specifically to use as a communication channel with the Federation. The assimilation process is shown to be a slow, surgical procedure, not something that happens instantly with nanoprobes. Then in the movie First Contact, the Borg now regularly assimilate humans instantly using nanoprobes. They are basically now like sci-fi vampires. Their original form, as a cyborg collective interested only in technology, is now completely lost. They also have a Queen, making them completely different from their original incarnation, and much less alien and scary.
The Borg were better being a hive mind, nowhere centrally to destoy them. Borg Queen could have been a physical manifestation for the purposes of the First Contact mission only.
I think that's the most satisfactory explanation for the Queen in First Contact itself. Especially as they are thousands of lightyears from their core territory, not to mention hundreds of years in the past. There might be a "minimum viable collective" which can function as one mind, but below that number they need to bring a Queen online. The numbers they had on board the Enterprise might have been too small to operate effectively without one. Unfortunately, this is contradicted again by what we see in ENT: Regeneration, where some resurrected Borg found on Earth start assimilating like crazy and act completely normally, despite not having a connection to the main collective.
My understanding of it, is that all the Queens are just copies of the original, like the Omnius mind/machine leader from Dune. Unless they are all linked together, the one copy does not know what the other is doing, until they get to share info directly with each other, or upload that info to a central location, and that info gets broadcasted to all the other Queens. One copy can guess what another will do, since they all think the same, and given either receiving accurate info, or inaccurate info, which would throw an guesstimate off.
I did think at the time it seemed a bit naff and obvious to put a "queen" in there. However the movie itself wasn't too bad 🤷 I liked that data got to experience skin.
I like First Contact but have to view it as a guilty pleasure. It was the beginning of the end of the franchise. I fear it'll never recover. Doesn't take away from what we've had.
_Aliens_ has the same problem. Queen xenomorph is a cool video game boss monster loved by Millennials but it nerfs the creature from the first movie, turning it into an easily dispatched gigantic space ant. Weak sauce.
The Queen could have worked without changing the Borg, if it was portrayed instead for this specific instance that because there were so few drones around that beamed onto the Enterprise, they "adapted" a plan to have their best individual mind to direct them until they could either grow large enough, or link with the Borg of the 21st century with their beacon. Then you can have the Borg as they were when the film is over.
That reminds me of the episode of Voyager when Seven of Nine was stranded with a few other drones disconnected from the hive mind and she had to force them back into a micro collective until they could be reunited with the rest of the Borg
It seems to me that the concept of the Queen might have "sold" better if that disembodied voice you always heard during Borg encounters ("We are the Borg", "Resistance is futile", etc. etc.) had been female. Then at least we could have said, "Ohhh THAT'S who was behind all those creepy announcements!"
This is like in horror movies when the murderer/monster gets revealed. All sense of dread disappears. Now we have an identifiable foe and it becomes a good vs evil fight.
The Borg definitely should not have a singular leader. They are a collective. Everyone is a leader and a soldier. The queen would’ve been fine as a one off to show some Borg splinter cells regress their strength in favor of better intelligent tactics by putting more iq into a artificial humanoid.
In my mind, the Borg queen destroys the concept of the collective mind. Not hivemind, but mind. Completely alien and out of our reach to understand it. ⭐⭐⭐
"You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them the essence of what they are remains" Q This was done in First Contact so Voyager would have a villain. Ridiculous decision.
The only way the idea of a Borg Queen could have worked was if she was someone who took control of a certain portion of the Borg and ruled as a power-hungry Queen, until she's defeated and dragged into the Hivemind to become one of them.
Locutus in hindsight is also probably a misstep, but I'd argue they made it work for Best of Both Worlds. Obviously they wanted the emotional drama of Riker going against Picard and the terror and torture of Picard being assimilated regardless of how it affected Borg Cannon. But I think that they mostly (not entirely) pull it off 'in universe/cannon' too when the Collective explain to Picard how they're tailoring thier invasion to the nature of the beings they plan to conquer, a Mouth of Sauron as someone else in these comments referenced. Or Herald of Galactus if you prefer. It works well enough with that explanation that I don't think Locutus does nearly the same damage to the Borg that the Queen does, and could have given them a roadmap on how to make something like the Queen work without actually maker her the Queen.
The Aliens are the black goo. The black goo came from the Aliens. The Engineers did the same thing with the DNA of the Aliens that the scientists were doing in Romulus That's why we see an Alien in the mural on the Engineer ship.
simple piece of dialog. "Just as with Locutus, I will give you a single entity upon which to focus since your simple minds are unable to comprehend the undying vastness of the collective"
I haven't seen the more recent shows, but at the time I assumed that the Borg Queen was a tool or weapon created by the Borg consensus for the purpose of dealing with a unique threat (the federation). They needed a single point with more human traits to understand and interact with us. I anticipated that they would absorb or discard her when (if) the threat was over.
For a movie to succeed, they need to sell tickets. Lots of tickets. In order to cast a wide net, they need to dumb down the story so that casual fans can get onboard. Having the heroes face a wicked witch and her deadly minions is easy for an audience to understand.
Strongly agree with the title. I lost interest once the queen made an appearance, and they started calling the Borg a "hive." It totally did away with the whole concept of the Borg in the first place.
Right? They are more like a macro-virus. I mean ideally if some ship ran across a defunct borg somewhere and foolishly retrieved it. That vessel would probably be being converted into a new cube within a day, no "queen" necessary.
The use of the word hive is not really a big deal. If you learn anything about bees and ants you'll found out that their queen has no real power and that she to is just another servant to the hive or colony. She may be the most valuable servant; but a servant. There are even some species that have hives/colonies with multiple queens and they serve the collective will of the hive/colony. And that's what makes the Borg queen really stupid because she doesnt serve the collective of the hive mind that drives the borg. She has her own will like that of a human queen.
@@ImNtDead I don't give a screaming turkey squirt about how bees and ants do things. We're talking about the Borg, and it was never meant to be a hive.
@@syntaxusdogmata3333 the point is that the Borg work the same way. They are like a force of nature that follows a collective will which is a hive mind just like bees and ants. In fact if they kept the Borg more in line with how ants and bees work they would still be the same thing the were before "First Contact"; but instead they added the Borg queen character and screwed them over.
@@ImNtDead No, the point is the Borg didn't work the same way originally. There was no queen, be it a leader or slave or otherwise. It was never a hive until someone decided to change it.
The only way I could justify the Borg Queen within the “collective” was that each Cube had its own physical Queen, but all the Queens were a mini-collective of its own; virtually one Queen all over the place. That’s how the live queen in First Contact was as familiar to Picard as the dead queen from Best of Both Worlds. It’s the same person simultaneously inhabiting 100s of bodies.
The bug like nature of the Borg is understandable given they where initially going to be the parasitic aliens from Conspiracy before they decided to make them a new faction, similar to how the Romulans where brought in as overarching antagonists at the end of the first season after being isolationist due to the Ferrengi falling flat with audiences as antagonists, which was an easy retcon since the Romulans being a part of the Federation was never brought up on screen and the Klingons was simply retconned as them being allies rather then a member.
To be Far, The Klingons did Join The Federation as a Member, But Then Kira Nyress just Had to Know if Her Mother was Gul Dukat's Lover, went back in Time, and Altered History, so the First Seasons of The Next Generation are in a Slightly Different but Mostly Similar Timeline...
I like that Enterprise's episode Regeneration didn't try to shoehorn the Queen in. The Borg were left to be a terrifying force on their own, as they had been in their earliest appearances.
Before the Queen we had Locutus though ... A singular voice in a leadership role. Every hive needs a leader, a queen ... she wasn't the problem, the writing was. Especially in Voyager ... where we were asked to believe that a small Federation ship could survive multiple confrontations with Borg cubes, and even enter Borg controlled space. All great villains are often nerfed eventually, because the good guys have to win ...
Oh,I forgot about LOCUTUS,but,having Picard become a head borg rasied the stakes to another level and it became very personal for the crew of the Enterprise. How to defeat Locutus and the Borg threat,then how to get their captain back. Of course as we all now know Locutus was a way for Paramount to jettison Steward if he didn't want to renew his contract for TNG.
Indeed, but all the same I loved it, it deepened and humanized the borg, which only seemed to make them more terrifying, though I understand how it had the opposite effect for others
Which begs the question - if there is a Queen, then is there a King Borg? This guy is like a transformer BORG or a PLANET SIZED BORG or even a BORG the size of a Galaxy. Hey - they started it...
This, to me, is like talking about an insect 'queen' as if she controls the hive. You're confusing the imperfect metaphor for the thing itself and expecting the thing to act the way the metaphor does.
lol no if anything it compliments it. as theyre very similar. if it undermines it then the loucutus character is dumb... which it wasnt. it brought an extra layer of drama to the story
@BurntRAM you misunderstand. The whole purpose of Locutus was because the borg DIDN'T have a singular representative that could engage with humanity. That's the whole purpose of his creation. If they had a queen then locutus was redundant. They could have just used her. But they didn't, because she didn't exist and her introduction later on undermines his very purpose.
@@AngryDuck79 lol youre contradicting yourself. if the queen undermines locutus then why do they need locutus as a representative? like i said if you dont like the concept of them having a queen then you should also find locutus to be a dumb concept. the point this channel tried to make is that the borg are far scarier as a hive mind which isnt true because that wouldve gotten old fast. you needed to add an extra layer to this and locutus and the queen did just that. there was no need to nitpick at this but its youtube and these content factories will say rando bizaroo shit to fill the airwaves.
I remember when Voyager was live on TV and back then Voyager was really dying as a show. I see the introduction of the Borg and ultimately the Queen as a hail mary to save that show (which it did) but at the expense of explaining away all the mystery of the Borg and giving the Borg real scale and limits that are very much not as scary as not knowing.
I think the writers didn’t think it out. The borg as a collective mind should have been chaotic and instinctual, they all are self deluded and yelling over each other.
@ they kept changing their mind about how the Borg functioned. Think I Borg, or Survival Instincts. Each one kind of went a direction that didn’t exactly agree with the others. And the Borg queen was definitely a mistake. But First Contact wasn’t that great. Watched it the same day this video posted, coincidentally, and it’s kind of a pale shadow of the series. And they had to make decisions based on putting TNG on silver screen.
I think the Queen took away, but like you said Alice Kringe(?) played the part so well I can't imagine First Contact without her, plus it played a strong dynamic in Voyager as the Queen and Janeway played opposing mothers in a sense for Seven.
Completely disagree. Voyager gave the Borg depth and kept them relevant. If you don’t develop a species in a franchise they soon become very dull, like the Romulans. They had to be given more of a story as it’s a TV show and I think Voyager did it just right while keeping them intimidating and formidable. The stuff in Pic season 2 was truly the worst.
I’d like to believe the Queen is an avatar for the collective, but the writers would have been smart enough to write that into TNG. They were too lazy to think of a creative solution so they just said take this to the audience. I accepted it for First Contact but it became more and more of a convenient plot device and resulted in ruining the Borg, a force of nature you can’t bargain with or trust. It just is.
Precisely. The agenda before we knew it was an agenda. I find it interesting how people don't or can't seem to put it together, they just think the stuff popped up out of absolutely no where. Even one of my favorite movies of all time 'Alien', I find myself questioning today because it could obviously have served as the early steps in the process and I as well as many others, definitely may have fallen for it, right.
Most of the Borg, separated from the Collective did self-destruct in TNG but I believe it was the result of a sort of dead man’s switch in the signal that triggered the process. When they found Hugh, he was still connected but they put a dampening field over him which removed him from the collective but prevented triggering the self destruct command. Then when they released him, the collective regained contact, assessed him to be functional and allowed him to rejoin the Collective.
@@gildor8866 I doubt that the Borg queen was the reason for the sucess of First Contact. But on the other hand it surely was the beginning of the demystification of the Borg.
The idea of the collective within their Cubes throughout the Delta Quadrant slowly spreading everywhere was a such a great concept. However with the queen and the Unicomplex they became run of the mill bad guys with their big bad and layer.
The Borg being an homogeneous legion antagonist was way more terrifying than something akin to an insect colony.
Exactly.
IF they had made the queen nothing more than a "manifested spokesman", like Locutus or Seven of Nine, so Patrick Stewart could have someONE to "play" off of in his performance . . . it wouldn't be "SO" bad.
But the Borg were SO much more "Alien", and thus TERRIFYING, without a "queen"! (or even a "face")
@@sharkdentures3247 agreed. I think that the idea behind the simple statement of, "We are the Borg" was to invoke the idea of "We are Legion, for we are many." The Borg were supposed to be an anonymous collective of cyborgs. You remove one individual Borg and it doesn't matter, there's ten billion or so more to replace it. It's literally the idea of, "We'll drown you in our own blood!" personified. Even if the Collective deemed it necessary to have an avatar speak for them, it could be a random drone picked for however long the Collective deemed it necessary before the drone was reset to factory settings.
Indeed!!! It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc.
But they chose lazy writing and easy decisions, sent the Cube the "sleep" command and "won". But hey, all of that is just propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
They literally scale down the threat having a fatal weakness like that, while destroying the concept of collective minds. Stupid, just stupid.
IMO the Borg was already ruined when they humanized it way back in TNG, with the episode Hugh
The Queen as the “face of the Borg” renders unnecessary the whole reason they turned Picard into Locutus. If they had her to speak for them, they didn’t need Locutus.
She was not of the Federation, or of Earth. The Borg wanted someone known to everyone in the Federation who could speak on their behalf, to help make assimilation easier.
@@StarshipYorktown Just another dumb decision that watered down a truly awesome villian; curious if the suits were the ones who forced this nonsense through
just more hacktastic shitty writing from braga and moore. those guys suck ass. fucking talentless jerkoffs.
My head cannon is that it was an adaptation as a result of the Hugh and Lore situation. Lore brought them back from chaos but when he was killed it left a gaping hole so, Borg being Borg, they filled it.
The way I see it is that it was the Locutus experiment that gave the Borg the idea to have a queen or queens.
The queen should have been no more than an interface, a speaker for the collective ala the Mouth of Sauron.
That was the role of "Locutus". And even that was a terrible plot idea. It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc.
But they went with lazy writing, sent the Cube the "sleep" command and "won". But hey, all of that is just propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
@@donaldduck830 This. Star Wreck was ALWAYS socialist propaganda, and should be rejected.
Basically what Locutis was.
This, Locutus was the voice for humanity. She is the voice of the borg itself.
Nah. They should all be equal. They all speak for them all. How else would they be a collective?
The Borg are scarier without the Queen.
100%
They had no weakness.
I always say with the queen the Borg went from true communist collective to Soviet style communist
@DavidBroome1978 I suspect that writers intended to make them a fascist monarchy. They didn't like their greatest villains being so useful to their own ideological enemies.
Indeed, becasue you don't know what controls them. But Is also true that someone had to start the Borg civilization somewhere
@@jeffjones7108 OMG THIS
The Borg became just another alien nemesis with the introduction of the queen. They weren't unique anymore.
But damn those actresses had sexy sultry voices.
@@davidw5198 but damn grammar school me thought she was sexy cool 🤓
they became the laughing stock of the whole franchise, when janeway and her crew defeated them every second episode
@@Xingmeythe same thing happened with the daleks, especially when they introduced Davros
@@tgiacin435 - At Least Davros made Sense as even The Daleks need an Origin. The Borg Queen was Unnecessary to explain Anything about The Borg.
Easy fix for the Borg Queen in First Contact.
She should have been a new creation for Locutus, not a retcon.
Yes, that makes far more sense!
That would have been perfect. A mediator or some such. That would have preserved the mystery and opened doors for better stories later. It would have made more sense to the current story at the time as well.
The real big problem is even having the borg go back in time in the first place. Because think the borgs supposed to be so powerful yet somehow they have to used time tricks to assimilate humanity, and what to stop them again. why not simplely try again again? Only go back into in delta, and travel to eartj post ww3 Instead of alert the Federation, lose a cube and somehow give the heros a head up to follow through your time port, it should have been the founders or the bugs Conspiracy's going back in time to stop frist contact. I like frist contact, but the more you think about it, the more loopholes you find.
To Be Fair, when I first saw First Contact that is what I assumed she was, a Face to convince Picard to come back. They dont really show too many examples of people escaping being Drones and Locutus was already an anomaly with the otherwise Faceless Borg.
Every other instance was the "We are the Borg" speech, but with Picard the Collective very clearly preserved some semblance of his individuality for... reasons that dont ever seem explained IMO. He was Locutus, not "Primary Adjuctant of Unimatrix 1701" or whatever other designations Borg only use when reluctantly interacting with individuals.
Great point.
As a narrative device, the Borg Queen worked very well. As a retcon and as a means to defeat the Borg, she opens too many plot holes.
Make her a new creation, and make the destruction of her and the rest of the drones the result of some other plan by Picard and Co., and not simply the result of the Queen dying, then that patches the two big logic holes.
The existence of a Borg queen demonstrates that collectivism cannot work.
I read the Star Trek TNG novel “Vendetta” when it came out in 1991. It was about a Borg invasion of Federation space, contained references to the original series, and had no Borg queen. It was an excellent book which explored several TOS storylines as well. No queen needed.
I remember that book well. The tie in to the doomsday/planet killer devices from TOS, the assimilation of a Ferengi, the implications of actually achieving warp factor 10 without a slingshot manuever. Honestly that was a great story. Even brought back Polaski and gave her and her ship something to do. Why Star Trek/Star Wars refuse to use their expanded universe is confusing and infuriating. You have spec scripts that have already been vetted by an audience. Sally forth!
@@grifnizzle7197 Di$ney quite happily pilfered the defunct expanded universe though
@@SBx340 True, they just did it horribly. Careful what you wish for I guess
Read several tng novels in the early two thousands, and was quite surprised how good Peter David's were.
Especially because I had to read them in braille; me being a person of reduced visibility, which meant they went very slowly!
Recently reread an audio version of Q squared and was amazed how good it was, methinks a reread of Vendetta is on the cards.
Especially because I'm currently introducing my wife to Tng, and we just finished best of both worlds.
That was my first star trek novel and to this day remains my favorite 💯
They nerfed the Borg with this. And then Voyager just nerfed them more every time they were on screen.
Borg were already nerfed in TNG with Hugh, the Wesley Crusher of the collective.
@@mikavirtanen7029😂
I agree. They seemed more like AI without her.
Wahahm stronk. They had to have to most powerful alien easily outwitted by the stronk wahmhan agenda.
Voyager treated the Borg like they were nothing.
The one thing the Borg Queen did in "First Contact" was actually work as an inverse/foil to Data. That sub-plot where she was offering Data a simulacrum of humanity was really clever. Data's storyline, after all, had been his quest to gain humanity...and here he was tempted with it in a reverse form from the Borg (humanoids who sublimate their humanity through technology). And that little line where Data says he considered it...for what, .3 nanoseconds or something like that...an "eternity for an android"...was really an ace line. Too often we focus on the Picard/Queen dynamic, but really the Data/Queen thing was pretty good.
But yeah...a "Queen" doesn't really work for the Borg. Unless, as someone else notes, it was a response to the Locutus adaptation they tried.
I agree the dymanic between the Queen and Data made for some good stuff, but overall what you gained isn't worth what you lost in the overall mystique and terror of the Borg. As you and others have pointed out, a truly clever writer probably could have pulled out some Locutus reference to explain her existence not as the Prime of the Borg, but rather as a tool somehow. But truly clever writers have always been a rare breed in Hollywood.
They could have done that with the Collective.
@@grifnizzle7197 I always thought the physical manifestation of the Queen was meant to be a psychological manipulation tool used by the Borg.
@@sigmacademy Something along those lines, sure that could work. Again if she filled a role similar to Locutus, more of a tool than a "leader" I think you still could have had those interactions with Data and kept the Borg largely intact. Oh well...
I hate the borg queen, that was the point where the borg went from scary enemy, to nerfed mob enemy. Remember, a single borg cube could wipe out a whole starfleet armada early on, now a single runabout can destroy multiple cubes at once and if you want to take out the borg quickly, simply go after the queen. It was a horrible decision, should have kept them how they were.
Wasn't Q's introduction to the Borg a message from the Q informing the Federation to prepare, not only for the Borg but the Dominion and other forces too? Maybe Starfleet listened by going ghostbusters on the development of new weapons, like the quantum torpedo.
The borg are good at adapting technology from species they assimilate. Humans, and some other federation members, are even better at adapting new technologies when they find a clue how it works. And then making innovations on top of the new principles. So it makes sense that the federation, finding debris from defeated borg, are going to advance quickly. This capacity to grow and adapt even scaring the Q on the long term.
@stephenshelton4267 Q was given more of a reality check to their pride than prepared.
As q said, if you cannot take a bloody nose, I suggest that you return home and hide underneath your bed. it not safe out there.The galaxy is full of wonders beyond imaginations and horrors beyond your nightmare"
And that's nothing even to mentions what's outside the Milky Way Galaxy has seen in the original series with the doomsday weapon and the aliens that could travel between galaxy and turn people into sugar cubes.
Exactly. Such way to waste a cool concept. "They're just like ants you see".
The Borg in their 2nd appearance were defeated by tricking them all into going to sleep at once. In their 3rd appearance, one was talked back to normal like a drug recovery. Their 4th had them overwhelmed by Hugh’s sense of self such that Lore could hijack the collective in state of crisis and suddenly they have individual identities. I think _Star Trek: First Contact_ did them good going back to something threatening and scary at least. Given them a focal point that can unify their mass thought seems like a rational idea. Maybe she’s from the species that generated the Borg from the start…🫤
Totally agree. The Borg never needed a spokeswoman to get the point across. They were the most threatening when they were just the perfectly adapting collective. You might even say that if you blew up a cube, and only a fingernail survived, you'd get a cube in short order again. They could've been like Stargate replicators, or the proverbial grey goo. Infinite trouble in a small package, no mercy, that made death irrelevant.
Exactly my thought. It would have been awesome if, at the battle of Wolf 359, they had destroyed the Cube but the debris cloud held gazillions of nanoprobes which all could assimilate, so that they had to decontaminate everybody and everything involved, etc.
So many intelligent plot ideas, but Hollyweird chose lazy writing to get a 5min climactic showdown in their propaganda movie. Same as with GoT as another commentator here mentioned. I chose not watching that, cause I suspected the ending fail. Same as with "Lost". I watched the first episode, said: "Ok, obviously they are in purgatory. Might be interesting if the writing holds up". Reaction by J.J. Abrams? *!panic!* "denial* then total confusion and multiple seasons of garbage before the inevitable confirmation: "Yes, they were in purgatory all along". Seriously obvious when the guy sacrificed himself for his sister and "died" (read: got redeemed or rather, redeemed himself). Or when the one dude stood up from his wheelchair. Lazy Hollyweird writing and denial.
Gonna watch an old western with John Wayne tonight.
I think the entire idea is that the Borg is kinda like a hidden threat. For one, Borg drone corpses are just itching to assimilate when switched on again, and nanoprobes are kind of a combo blessing/curse.
Patrick Stewart ruined the franchise by wanting Picard to be an action hero, and later a depressed old man, or something.
Yup!
Star Trek was ruinewd when Gene Roddenberry died.
@factsoverfeelings1776 Disagree. Roddenberry's death, for awhile, freed the franchise from the storytelling shackles of his over-the-top utopianism, allowing for actual conflict among the crew and for the Federation to not follow the "perfect society lectures backwards aliens of the week how to be" trope.
Roddenberry didn't even like Wrath of Khan, and tried to sabotage it by leaking Spock's death.
Roddenberry had a great TV pitch. The franchise otherwise creatively succeeded in spite of him, not because of him.
@ Gene Roddenberry isn’t what made Star Trek work in the first place. It was Gene L. Coon and writers like Dorthy Fontana. We’ve seen what a pure Roddenberry Star Trek looks like with The Motion Picture and it sucked.
Hahaha. "Or something."
I like the idea of the Borg Queen being a misdirection. Create a, "central unit" so that the enemies go after this single target with all their might, only for it to be a trap, and to have a, "central intelligence" to never have existed in the first place. It's even more terrifying, because the collective itself would have created the Queen as a psychological weapon to trick its enemies. This means that The Borg woupdn't simply be cold and calculating, but truely creative and understanding of how its enemies work. Its intelligence would go from simple, "me cold robot zombie, me -eat- assimilate you" to something capable of outsmarting everyone.
I feel the same. When HR Giger mentioned how they reduced the alien to an insect / parasite they killed the whole mystery and darkness about it. Same happened with the Borg. Watered down a bigger thing in to a dumb villain.
It was the worst, exactly!
JRRT said if you resolve one mystery create another. For example the tentacle creature guardian the Mines of Moria. Even Sauron has no idea what it is.
@@darthkek1953 I always like how the tentacles were described; it wasn't even clear if they were a single creature or many.
@@darthkek1953 the Watcher in the Water was proper scary
If they had maintained the original concept of the Borg as an insectoid species with a hive consciousness it could have required a different queen, but this might have also proven dangerous as it would be akin to both Legion and the Borg we get. The idea that a single "individual" has the knowledge/abilities of many and could easily challenge a single-minded/individual-minded life-form and forced them to adapt.
The only thing the Queen really did was serve as a focal point to focus the "direction" of the Borg aboard the Enterprise, even if her role was esentially meant to serve as a counterpoint to both Picard's former "life" as Locutus and Data
Lost opportunity not just making the Queen an aberration in the system that broke off, with the quiet humor being it spun off from a simple miscalculation spooling into independent and violent consciousness. Serves as the villain for the movie, and gives some insight on how to permanently end the greater threat later.
Naaah, the Borg Queen was shit. Her character turned the Borg into nothing more than the typical "we've written ourselves into a corner, so now we need a way out" type of thing. She reduced the Borg from a cosmic horror level of threat into a villain of the week level of threat. Pathetic, really.
Exactly my thoughts, thank you!
agreed. the borg were such a creepy foe, space zombies that let tech get away from the and were consuming people almost unconsciously. Almost tragic even. Unfeeling, unrelenting; they didn't care about you, they didn't seek vengeance, they were a force of nature.
The queen created in the borg a sense of maliciousness that lessened them greatly. made them small and petty.
(and don't get me started on the Picard show who converted the queen with a friendship is magic speech.)
Even without the Queen, they still could have had a "leader" Borg. Not in a controller type way, but a just a Borg drone that interacts constantly with Data and Picard, (perhaps a known assimilated crew member.) Imagine how much more menacing the opening monologue to Data could have been if it were spoke by the hive.
Having the Queen "seduce" Data didn't help either. (Also, it doesn't make sense because only has a head and shoulders.) I think that moment did more damage to the menace of the Borg than any other.
Seduction isn't only physical, it can be any kind of temptation - power, flesh, money, influence, etc. Her offer was essentially a Faustian deal with Data.
@@sigmacademy Tempting Data with becoming "human" is actually a very strong plot point. My issue is how the Queen feels the need to physically "stimulate" him afterwards.
When it comes to the Borg, I think about a terrifying hive mind living to serve only itself. Not... what the Queen did. It is (like the Queen) highly inconsistant with what's established and frankly laughable.
The whole thing about getting past Borg drones if they dont think your a threat seems a bit silly if the queen can see everything.
You could do it if the drones don't see you, but that brings up another security issue - don't the Borg vessels have Internal Sensors?
When I watched Star Trek as a kid and watched the Borg, I never imagined something like them would come to exist in real life. We now call these people "woke."
Who is thier queen?
@MrYerak5
Saytan...
@MrYerak5 Kamala?
@@MrYerak5 Greta Thunberg. She has the same complexion as the queen too. Their obsession with destroying Israel is really on point with the Borg analogy. The borg want to destroy humanity, the woke want to destroy the jews first and then the west. They want communism and oppression. Thankfully the IDF is doing the heavy lifting keeping us safe
@@theghostofmaximumvolume3414 It's pronounced "Sateen.";)
For sure one of your top videos yet!
One could argue that the chaos introduced by Hugh allowed a strong willed drone to overtake the collective and spontaneously created the hierarchy.
But Picard says in First Contact that there was a queen on the cube in Best of Both Worlds.
Why did they need Locutus if they already had the queen to speak for them?
I suspect you could say for his knowledge; Picard was literally a mouthpiece for the collective, but it was his knowledge which made his assimilation necessary.
They needed a quisling to speak to the Federation, a human. Picard was forced to be that quisling which is why it was so traumatic for him. He was so helpless to stop them using him as a weapon to kill. Remember that scene in the Picard family vineyard with his brother Robert?
Because they didn't need the queen to speak for them, they need her to direct them.
I would agree that the Borg would have always been cooler without a central person/character. Wish we could go back and remove it from cannon.
The problem with letting hacks into your franchise without serious editorial control.
Elevating Picard to Locutus was already a betrayal of the collective ideal.
Not really.
Locutus spoke for collective, not ruling the collective itself. Nor is Collective depend on Locustus.
Consider Picard made contact with Q and Humanity history with powerful beings throughout Star Trek, it why Borg took notice of Humanity and somewhat Picard being respersented as humanity's spokesman to Q
Also, Borg keeps pushing toward Earth, despite Locustus being kidnapped.
That's actually a great point.
@@Clone42 but still a brilliant move for the show
But don't the borg basically admit that in the show? At least tacitly, because they tell Picard that he's a special case implying that making him Lacutis is not something they normally do. IDK I'd have to go back and rewatch that episode.
@@bloodysimile4893 The reason a zombie-horde doesn't work as an antagonist in Star Trek is because the conflict in zombie fiction is between the survivors. The zombies are uninteresting. Roddenberry forbade conflict between crew members so it wasn't long before the the narrative potential was exhausted without Borg "personalities."
MARABUNTA!
The Naked Jungle - 1954, Charlton Heston.
Its about South American soldier ants. "...it's not a single insect, but a beast that's 2 miles wide and 20 miles long..."
I LOVE that movie. And Eleanor Parker was smok'n.
Prior to First Contact, the Borg were this nigh unstoppable threat. They looked human or humanoid and walked with a purpose. They zombie-like in appearance, complete with unsettling body horror alterations. They were a glimpse into what was in store for humanity if we pushed technology to it's most logical conclusion; the death of the Individual. To us, the death of individuality is one of the scariest things we can think of. They were an unsettling antagonistic force, and using Picard as the "voice" against Starfleet added to that unsettling aura. In a sense, the perfect antagonist for Star Trek
The Queen's introduction ultimately undermines this in a lot of aspects. No longer are they a collective hive mind that represents the death of the Individual, but drones that carry out the will of their queen. I get what they were going for, but the Bee analogy falls flat completely since even in a bee hive, the drones aren't mindless. It also undermines the need for Picard to have become Locutus since, according to First Contact, Alice Krige's Queen was on that very cube. Adding to the undermining, it would effectively negate Picard's Sleep command; the resulting backflow could've easily been undone by the Queen if she was around back then.
All in all, the addition of the Borg Queen ultimately hurt the Borg. Instead of an unsettling antagonist who could've been a potential future for us, it became no more than a run-of-the-mill alien villain.
The sleep argument only works when you consider that deactivated Locutus was the mole for the Enterprise to use against the Borg, like an internal spy. Maybe even the Queen didn't know that system could be used against her and by the time she did, the Cube was already being destroyed. In short, by creating Locutus she won the fight against the armada, but she lost the Cube in the process later on via that same resource.
Never understood the Borg Queen. First off she seemed far to emotional and "human" to be in control of such a collective consciousness. It also heavily questions her control with how mindless the average borg acts. If some one with human intelligence exist why are your average borgs so dumb to ignore people boarding their ships in so many episodes?
I always felt the Borg queen existed just to make an easy way to kill all the borgs in one shot.
The Irony is The Borg aren't stupid in the Episodes before The Queen, They Ignored Individuals Boarding Their Ship simply because the Boarders never posed s Threat to Them. The Worst They could do is Destroy The Cube, then The Rest of The Collective Learns How They did it and Adapts, making the Whole Stronger.
It's likely the Borg in the earlier episodes were based on the original concept of an insectoid species and thus ignored anything that wasn't an overt threat. In some cases with insects, unless another creature poses a defined threat or is identified as one (usually based on pheromones) then it's ignored and in some cases zombees have nearly destroyed bee hives due to the parasites making the infected bees act against the "good" of the hive.
Given the distance between the J-25 Cube and the Queen's Unicomplex it's possible that either; A) the Queen didn't care if intruders came aboard as they didn't pose a threat, or B) she noticed but with so many other drones and vessels barely saw the Enterpirse-D's Away Team as a threat since they didn't actively do anything to pose a danger. Q even states; "they're not interested in you, they're interested in your technology" when Picard tries to speak to one of the Drones and the only time they appear "concerned" is after the first phaser strike does damage while the second is treated like a small scratch
@@andrewmalinowski6673 Which is why the Queen kind of ruins things. Because that same trick worked multiple times against the borg. I can see the view point from a collective perspective that any individual ship doesn't matter, but if something with akin to human emotions and logic is in control it seems stupid to waste resources like that. Especially since the borg seemingly have no way to replenish their numbers on their own as they are reliant on assimilating other species.
Writers often make a villain too perfect then have to fix it by revealing an inexplicable and fatal weakness.
she might have sent a self destruct command to the drones because most of them at that point were picards crew and a final eff you to picard. but hay that's just in my head patching a plot hole.
That is a good point. I like your fix for the plot hole.
My head cannon always leaned towards a self destruct command or even an automated system to prevent WORKING Borg being captured and reverse engineered to create effective countermeasures. Which seeing what future Janeway used, perhaps working on fortifying their biological weaknesses might have been a major oversight on the part of the Borg. It seems like an obvious issue.
I believe the Queen was a analogy to Davros of the Daleks. That was the first impression I had of the Borg Queen when I saw her character. She is a creator as much as a Queen if you examine the character closer. Great take on the movie by the way.
The irony of First Contact is they looked to zombie films for inspiration and yet all the best zombie movies treat them as a decentralized antagonist with no central "Zombie Leader" to shoot at.
Actually, the zombie movie that had The Mentalist star in it had a zombie leader, and several other zombie movies have shown zombies following the lead of other zombies, including the recent Zombie King and Queen of Las Vegas. It IS there, if you watch enough zombie movies.
@@sigmacademy Of course there are exceptions (all which was made after First Contact), but I did specify "all the best zombie movies."
The Night King ruined the white walkers in Game of Thrones. Having them being a hive mind that ends by defeating the original was so stupid. There wasn’t even a Night King in the ASOIAF books. Nor were the white walkers created by the children of the forest. They were a force of nature that was chaotic and scary. The Borg and White Walkers both were ruined turning them from unexplainable horrors to generic villains who had a top evil person.
Lazy writing and the need for a quick 5min fix in the climactic scene of a movie, In the real world, problems get solved by lots of hard work. But all of this is just Hollyweird propaganda Fairy Tales for adults. Don't forget to vote for the correct (not the right!!!) candidate next week, or Hollyweird will hate you even more.
I think that is when the writer create such phenomenal enemy, just to later on make a fatal weakness like a "Panic Red Button" to escape from a dead-end.
Imposing any kind of human logic or social structure upon an alien threat makes it less alien and threatening.
...and SKYNET from the terminator franchise ...and 'the machines' from THE MATRIX ...and
GRRM : the last thing we need is another Dark Lord
D&D : ah, so what you're saying is we need a Frost Lord
It was assuredly the latter. Queens were just merely physical representations of the Hive mind. When we're first introduced to her, we see her Being "installed" into her complete robot body. And at the end of the movie all that was left of her was her Terminator skull and spine. There was nothing left of the skin that was transplanted over the skull. This tells he she is artificially produced. She's not just some random female who was assimilated and designated the queen. Otherwise they would have a more organic structure to their bodies like other drones do. And they all look alike (or are supposed to, other actresses playing them not withstanding).
As for First Contact when the queen is destroyed the others die as well. We've seen it before. When a Drone is forcefully disconnected with the hive they have a self destruct system that activates. Given that the queen in FC is the only 24th century queen, she as the only hub for the other drone. Once she was gone the others followed suit. Why Hugh isn't was explained as a malfunction. Seven was purposely let go by the Queen as her plan to later capture Voyager so her self-destruct was deactivated.
Best defense I’ve heard. I agree!
Problem is, Picard survived the explosion of the Borg ship that assimilated him. The "all Borg die if their node is destroyed" rule already had an exception.
The better call for First Contact would have just been to have whatever takes out the Queen to also take out the rest of her drones, not make their death the result of hers.
@@BuckyKronk Because Picard wasn't fully assimilated yet and he was to become the Queen's King of sorts. If you remember in the episode were Worf was jumping around alternate realities, the last one he ended up on was where Picard DIDN'T make it when the Borg cube exploded.
I think the character of the queen makes sense from an engineering standpoint. It makes things a lot easier if there's a central control unit. Given the borg's tendency towards efficiency to the point of stupidity, it makes a lot of sense.
It also makes sense from the idea of many voices becoming one. The entire collective will, thought, and consciousness of the borg gets focused into one single unit.
They (eventually) cocked up the Borg just as they did in double quick time with 8472.
I think it’s like Doctor Who baddies. They all start off unique and interesting, but do enough episodes about them and they eventually devolve into generic nonsense.
Aye, Species 8472 were such a great original creation. They should have been left behind in all their mystery.
In my situation, I saw Scorpion Part I before moving to North Dakota and discovering no local stations were showing the series. I didn't get to Part II until I returned to the Pacific Northwest and started renting DVDs through Netflix in 2005, so I had a few years of suspense...
The Borg Queen added a lot to the Borg. Without her, they’re just derivative grunge Cybermen.
Finally, someone with sense.
Can't wait to your next video!
There is nothing wrong with making the hive mind a character in and of itself. It would have been just as effective for the hive mind to speak directly to Picard through a series of changing avatars. One is killed, another instantly emerges. That would have presented far more interesting and dangerous challenges to overcome than the standard supervillain narrative.
A spokesman being chosen for convenience, and replaced as needed.
@@hanelyp1 Exactly. Or even physically engaging in the action. One falls another rises. Or even more than one, the collective consciousness split into multiple drones. "We are Legion, for we are many." Now that would have been terrifying.
If having an ever-changing villain to interact with Data and Picard, the best option (replacing the Queen) would be to utilize a form of holo-projection; almost taking from their Collective while offering a "familiar face."
Data hears a soft hum, turns his head and sees a pale-skinned humanoid standing with her hands behind her back. "Who are you?" The humanoid stares and tilts her head slightly before smiling almost darkly. "I am Borg. We are Legion. The multitude. Your end." The humanoid says, speaking in the familiar multiple overlapping voices, spreading her arms and smiling as she gestures to the assimilated engineering core. "That is a miscontradiction, there is no singular Borg." The humanoid takes two steps forward before the appearance changes, becoming an assimilated-looking Andorian and reaches for his neck. "You are the contradiction, artificial yearning to be organic. You resist perfection. Resistance is futile, Cmdr. Data." The Andorian says, the overlapping voices nearly becoming malevolent in tone, while the fingers half-phase through Data's neck before the hand is pulled back.
Susanna Thompson was much scarier. Krige's Borg Queen always felt very childish, petty, and βτchy, like she wanted to lash out, out of spite. Where as Thompson's Borg Queen was cold, calculated, and you never knew what she would do next because of her demeanor.
The Queen's entire time travel plot in FC was petty; no longer are the Borg interested in the Federation's technology, they're happy to just wipe out its existence. Which begs the question, why?
I was always surprised that everything the board assimilated was humanoid. No other creatures. I never heard anybody discuss that
Species 8472 wasn't humanoid, but the Borg wanted them so badly, they started a war over it. I often wonder what would've happened, if the Borg had come up against the Founders. Can you imagine a shape-shifting drone? Or one able to shape shift its technological components (was Odo's comm badge real, or did he create it, as with his 'clothing'?) to whatever was needed, in any situation? I guess they wouldn't need drones designated for specific tasks, anyone could do anything that was needed, anywhere, anytime.
@@lauranolastnamegiven3385 The Founders would only be assimilated with special nanoprobes, if at all. Remember, the original form of their people was a liquid.
The Borg should have had only the collective intelligence. If an anthropomorphic enemy was needed, it should have only been a construct, a mere conduit, as Marvel com 6:00 ics did in the late 60's- early 90's with the Kree Supreme Intelligence. It literally could create and operate through such constructs as needed, but ususlly chose to direct others.
I saw the queen as being a unintended side-effect of the borg’s evolution - to me she was a self-conscious spawned personality of the borg given a physical form, especially given how we see her body being created from mostly inorganic materials and smaller organic components as opposed to most borg who are organic beings given inorganic prosthetics and ‘upgrades’. We see her in flashbacks of picard’s in First Contact when he dreams of his assimilation experience, and he mentions her saying she was there and wanted a ‘counterpart’ when they created locutus instead of just creating a regular drone - I think she wasn’t actually there, at least not physically, she was just a forming sentience, and I think both she was the one responsible for him becoming locutus, but i think also as a result if that, of a borg individual being created among the collective as locutus, was also the collective created a physical body of the queen in response to the creation of locutus - like a sort of evolution or a viral reaction to the change in the collective.
I also note that annie wershing’s version of the queen in picard season 2 makes reference to the ‘other’ queens, from other timelines, that she is not the same borg queen as the one we already had encountered, and that through some way, that the collective is connected outside of time, the different queens are somewhat aware of each other’s existence, so perhaps this too is another accidental ‘evolution’ and side effect of the borg collective consciousness, that it is not meant to do, but becomes as it evolves.
Technically, the Borg have time travel tech and they have been invading other dimensions as well? So that reference might have been referencing that, or the fact that the central Queen sent those on those missions, like in First Contact or before that, or Borg on time traveling missions from other timelines making contact with Prime timeline Borg, which neatly sidesteps the continuity issue of warning them about future Janeway as a threat.
Yes they wanted to have a central villain for Picard to interact with. I think it was a mistake. Just goes against everything we learned about the Borg throughout the show.
Alice gives a great performance as the queen but it just goes against the canon
I agree, great performances by Alice!
This is why bitcoin works. It's decentralized. The Borg queen is the opposite of the impact Locutus had. With Locutus you had to save Picard from assimilation. With the Borg queen you just had to kill her off like a typical villain. Evil Data had already been done with Lore after all.
The fake Borg "queen" ruined the whole mystique & awe of the Borg, especially in Voyager. She was bitchy, petty, foolish, and arrogant. Extremely Un-Borg-like. Glad they never did never an "origin story" for the fake "queen," because it would've been awful -- replete with a "bad dad" and bullying.
Stop giving them ideas
@@SansoHumar At this point I imagine the idea has been pitched a hundred times already
Oh God, don't speak this into existence!!! They're always listening!!!
Too late. I believe there is already a Borg origin story - a part of it was in a game, another one in a comic and a third variation in a novel.
Decentralized Borg would make a much more interesting and scary villain, but for a big budget movie the concept would be too cerebral to connect with a mass audience. They picked the safe route by having a more traditional hero vs villain setup.
Not only should they have avoided the typical trope of adding a queen, but they should have assigned numbers to new borgs rather than names. Names carry a human connotation. A number makes the new "recruits" even less human. It's an impersonal designation. Just another number
Umm, the Borg DID use a numbering system for their members of their Collective. If anything, it was the Starfleet members that gave them names, in direct contradiction of the Collective, by allowing individuality, the biggest threat to the Collective - there was an entire episode about it where the Queen destroyed the "dream world" of some Borg because they dreamed of being individuals when they went into their recharging cycle.
@sigmacademy They gave Locutis a name not a number
I disagree. There is nothing wrong with the initial appearance of the Borg Queen (Star Trek: First Contact). Characters like Data, Lore, Locutus, the Borg Queen: they are all different variations on the same theme of being human vs being a sort of machine creature. It's all interesting sci-fi drama, and so with good writers, actors, directors and producers, they can make the concept work.
Exactly. It expanded their mystery and kept them interesting to the point they’re still talked about today. It’s a TV show, they had to have more depth to keep them watchable.
I remember seeing First Contact in the theater and thinking, “ oh man this Queen totally ruins the mystique of the Borg.” I think they created her as a way to communicate with the main villain, but that was also a dumbing down of the sci-fi narrative of Star Trek to the more action oriented films. Ultimately, even though I understand why they did it, I think it was a mistake.
As do I.
Data expressed his confusion while being held prisoner by the Borg Queen. They lampshaded the problem through his dialogue with her.
Agree! I was quite disappointed and unpleasantly surprised when I saw her on the screen in "First contact"!
First Contact should have been the last time we see the Borg except for: Seven of Nine (drop the rest of the Borg from Voyager altogether, especially the Borg alliance nonsense) and the singular appearance in Enterprise (flows from First Contact and completes a loop).
@@LtFoodstamp exactly
The Borg went through so many changes each time they appeared. The first time they appeared, in the 2nd season TNG episode "Q Who", they didn't even assimilate life forms. They just wanted technology. They would attack ships and colonies and just assimilate the technology to improve themselves. They reproduced on their own - we saw a "Borg nursery" with infant Borg.
Then in the TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds", we saw that they could also assimilate human beings, when they assimilated Picard. But BoBW implies this was sort of a special case - they wanted Picard specifically to use as a communication channel with the Federation. The assimilation process is shown to be a slow, surgical procedure, not something that happens instantly with nanoprobes.
Then in the movie First Contact, the Borg now regularly assimilate humans instantly using nanoprobes. They are basically now like sci-fi vampires. Their original form, as a cyborg collective interested only in technology, is now completely lost. They also have a Queen, making them completely different from their original incarnation, and much less alien and scary.
The Borg were better being a hive mind, nowhere centrally to destoy them. Borg Queen could have been a physical manifestation for the purposes of the First Contact mission only.
I think that's the most satisfactory explanation for the Queen in First Contact itself. Especially as they are thousands of lightyears from their core territory, not to mention hundreds of years in the past. There might be a "minimum viable collective" which can function as one mind, but below that number they need to bring a Queen online. The numbers they had on board the Enterprise might have been too small to operate effectively without one.
Unfortunately, this is contradicted again by what we see in ENT: Regeneration, where some resurrected Borg found on Earth start assimilating like crazy and act completely normally, despite not having a connection to the main collective.
True, but it doesn't explain multiple Queens seen in bodies in Voyager, then.
I like the idea of each cube having a queen, setting up conflict, not just with Starfleet but within their own collective (other queens).
Ehh.... Makes it feel more like the Wraith from Stargate instead in that case.
My understanding of it, is that all the Queens are just copies of the original, like the Omnius mind/machine leader from Dune. Unless they are all linked together, the one copy does not know what the other is doing, until they get to share info directly with each other, or upload that info to a central location, and that info gets broadcasted to all the other Queens. One copy can guess what another will do, since they all think the same, and given either receiving accurate info, or inaccurate info, which would throw an guesstimate off.
Alice did a great job with the assignment from the producers. I lay this mistake at the producers’ feet…not the underrated actress.
Yes, Krige did admirably with the material she was given. She held tension and sold the part.
I did think at the time it seemed a bit naff and obvious to put a "queen" in there. However the movie itself wasn't too bad 🤷 I liked that data got to experience skin.
The Borg never needed a leader, the same with the Symbiotes in Marvel comics,they were both better when they were just a Hive mind.
Exactly Knull is damaging towards the symbiotes. Ruins them.
The Brood?
I like First Contact but have to view it as a guilty pleasure. It was the beginning of the end of the franchise. I fear it'll never recover. Doesn't take away from what we've had.
Having The Queen defeated the purpose of the Borg.
_Aliens_ has the same problem. Queen xenomorph is a cool video game boss monster loved by Millennials but it nerfs the creature from the first movie, turning it into an easily dispatched gigantic space ant. Weak sauce.
I liked the character because of the performance but I think the concept made little sense and detracted from the Borg.
I agree whole heartedly with this analysis.
The Queen could have worked without changing the Borg, if it was portrayed instead for this specific instance that because there were so few drones around that beamed onto the Enterprise, they "adapted" a plan to have their best individual mind to direct them until they could either grow large enough, or link with the Borg of the 21st century with their beacon. Then you can have the Borg as they were when the film is over.
Exactly
That reminds me of the episode of Voyager when Seven of Nine was stranded with a few other drones disconnected from the hive mind and she had to force them back into a micro collective until they could be reunited with the rest of the Borg
It seems to me that the concept of the Queen might have "sold" better if that disembodied voice you always heard during Borg encounters ("We are the Borg", "Resistance is futile", etc. etc.) had been female. Then at least we could have said, "Ohhh THAT'S who was behind all those creepy announcements!"
This is like in horror movies when the murderer/monster gets revealed. All sense of dread disappears. Now we have an identifiable foe and it becomes a good vs evil fight.
I think the Queen should have been a one off apperance... Seeing her as a Borg experiment !!!! They just didn't seem as scary as before....
The Borg definitely should not have a singular leader. They are a collective. Everyone is a leader and a soldier. The queen would’ve been fine as a one off to show some Borg splinter cells regress their strength in favor of better intelligent tactics by putting more iq into a artificial humanoid.
I've never been this early to a video! I'm so excited it is about Star Trek the Next generation!🎉
This is fascinating, I hadn't quite considered it.
The Borg Queen was a huge mistake and made no sense with what was previously established. Bad idea.
lol youre just adopting this guys take on it.
In my mind, the Borg queen destroys the concept of the collective mind. Not hivemind, but mind. Completely alien and out of our reach to understand it. ⭐⭐⭐
"You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them the essence of what they are remains" Q
This was done in First Contact so Voyager would have a villain. Ridiculous decision.
The only way the idea of a Borg Queen could have worked was if she was someone who took control of a certain portion of the Borg and ruled as a power-hungry Queen, until she's defeated and dragged into the Hivemind to become one of them.
@tjjordan4207 that's actually a scenario you could see happening with them. Almost akin to Lore taking over the group that were cutoff
I agree, but have to mention: The Borg wanted Locutus... so the Queen was not the first "unique" Borg we could see...
Locutus in hindsight is also probably a misstep, but I'd argue they made it work for Best of Both Worlds. Obviously they wanted the emotional drama of Riker going against Picard and the terror and torture of Picard being assimilated regardless of how it affected Borg Cannon. But I think that they mostly (not entirely) pull it off 'in universe/cannon' too when the Collective explain to Picard how they're tailoring thier invasion to the nature of the beings they plan to conquer, a Mouth of Sauron as someone else in these comments referenced. Or Herald of Galactus if you prefer. It works well enough with that explanation that I don't think Locutus does nearly the same damage to the Borg that the Queen does, and could have given them a roadmap on how to make something like the Queen work without actually maker her the Queen.
The Borg Queen RUINED the Borg
Just like the black goo ruined the Xenomorphs, Knull ruined the symbiotes, and the Night King ruined the white walkers.
The Aliens are the black goo. The black goo came from the Aliens. The Engineers did the same thing with the DNA of the Aliens that the scientists were doing in Romulus
That's why we see an Alien in the mural on the Engineer ship.
simple piece of dialog. "Just as with Locutus, I will give you a single entity upon which to focus since your simple minds are unable to comprehend the undying vastness of the collective"
The Queen(s) being a manifestation/avatar or control node of the collective would make sense to me
I am DEFINITELY on the "Borg didn't need a queen" side. And not just because I didn't particularly like the writing and acting of the character.
The Queen destroyed the unsettling menace and, paradoxically, the uniqueness of the Borg.
I haven't seen the more recent shows, but at the time I assumed that the Borg Queen was a tool or weapon created by the Borg consensus for the purpose of dealing with a unique threat (the federation). They needed a single point with more human traits to understand and interact with us. I anticipated that they would absorb or discard her when (if) the threat was over.
For a movie to succeed, they need to sell tickets. Lots of tickets. In order to cast a wide net, they need to dumb down the story so that casual fans can get onboard. Having the heroes face a wicked witch and her deadly minions is easy for an audience to understand.
There were already plenty of humans to fight against. Making the Borg human ruined them.
Strongly agree with the title. I lost interest once the queen made an appearance, and they started calling the Borg a "hive." It totally did away with the whole concept of the Borg in the first place.
Right? They are more like a macro-virus. I mean ideally if some ship ran across a defunct borg somewhere and foolishly retrieved it. That vessel would probably be being converted into a new cube within a day, no "queen" necessary.
The use of the word hive is not really a big deal. If you learn anything about bees and ants you'll found out that their queen has no real power and that she to is just another servant to the hive or colony. She may be the most valuable servant; but a servant. There are even some species that have hives/colonies with multiple queens and they serve the collective will of the hive/colony. And that's what makes the Borg queen really stupid because she doesnt serve the collective of the hive mind that drives the borg. She has her own will like that of a human queen.
@@ImNtDead I don't give a screaming turkey squirt about how bees and ants do things. We're talking about the Borg, and it was never meant to be a hive.
@@syntaxusdogmata3333 the point is that the Borg work the same way. They are like a force of nature that follows a collective will which is a hive mind just like bees and ants. In fact if they kept the Borg more in line with how ants and bees work they would still be the same thing the were before "First Contact"; but instead they added the Borg queen character and screwed them over.
@@ImNtDead No, the point is the Borg didn't work the same way originally. There was no queen, be it a leader or slave or otherwise. It was never a hive until someone decided to change it.
The only way I could justify the Borg Queen within the “collective” was that each Cube had its own physical Queen, but all the Queens were a mini-collective of its own; virtually one Queen all over the place.
That’s how the live queen in First Contact was as familiar to Picard as the dead queen from Best of Both Worlds. It’s the same person simultaneously inhabiting 100s of bodies.
The bug like nature of the Borg is understandable given they where initially going to be the parasitic aliens from Conspiracy before they decided to make them a new faction, similar to how the Romulans where brought in as overarching antagonists at the end of the first season after being isolationist due to the Ferrengi falling flat with audiences as antagonists, which was an easy retcon since the Romulans being a part of the Federation was never brought up on screen and the Klingons was simply retconned as them being allies rather then a member.
To be Far, The Klingons did Join The Federation as a Member, But Then Kira Nyress just Had to Know if Her Mother was Gul Dukat's Lover, went back in Time, and Altered History, so the First Seasons of The Next Generation are in a Slightly Different but Mostly Similar Timeline...
I like that Enterprise's episode Regeneration didn't try to shoehorn the Queen in. The Borg were left to be a terrifying force on their own, as they had been in their earliest appearances.
Before the Queen we had Locutus though ... A singular voice in a leadership role.
Every hive needs a leader, a queen ... she wasn't the problem, the writing was.
Especially in Voyager ... where we were asked to believe that a small Federation ship could survive multiple confrontations with Borg cubes, and even enter Borg controlled space.
All great villains are often nerfed eventually, because the good guys have to win ...
Oh,I forgot about LOCUTUS,but,having Picard become a head borg rasied the stakes to another level and it became very personal for the crew of the Enterprise. How to defeat Locutus and the Borg threat,then how to get their captain back. Of course as we all now know Locutus was a way for Paramount to jettison Steward if he didn't want to renew his contract for TNG.
Indeed, but all the same I loved it, it deepened and humanized the borg, which only seemed to make them more terrifying, though I understand how it had the opposite effect for others
Which begs the question - if there is a Queen, then is there a King Borg? This guy is like a transformer BORG or a PLANET SIZED BORG or even a BORG the size of a Galaxy. Hey - they started it...
This, to me, is like talking about an insect 'queen' as if she controls the hive. You're confusing the imperfect metaphor for the thing itself and expecting the thing to act the way the metaphor does.
Star Trek Online introduced a Borg King from an alternate timeline, not sure if it was from the Mirror Universe.
I always had my head Canon that Picards assimilation caused the Queen to come into existence.
The existence of a borg queen undermines the whole purpose of Locutus.
lol no if anything it compliments it. as theyre very similar. if it undermines it then the loucutus character is dumb... which it wasnt. it brought an extra layer of drama to the story
@BurntRAM you misunderstand. The whole purpose of Locutus was because the borg DIDN'T have a singular representative that could engage with humanity. That's the whole purpose of his creation. If they had a queen then locutus was redundant. They could have just used her. But they didn't, because she didn't exist and her introduction later on undermines his very purpose.
@@BurntRAMExactly! If you don’t develop a species then they soon get forgotten. Depth is what was needed and the Queen gave them this.
Not really. They did the same with 7 of 9, using a representative to show a ‘better’ humanity in the eyes of the Borg. It’s quite clever.
@@AngryDuck79 lol youre contradicting yourself. if the queen undermines locutus then why do they need locutus as a representative? like i said if you dont like the concept of them having a queen then you should also find locutus to be a dumb concept. the point this channel tried to make is that the borg are far scarier as a hive mind which isnt true because that wouldve gotten old fast. you needed to add an extra layer to this and locutus and the queen did just that. there was no need to nitpick at this but its youtube and these content factories will say rando bizaroo shit to fill the airwaves.
I remember when Voyager was live on TV and back then Voyager was really dying as a show. I see the introduction of the Borg and ultimately the Queen as a hail mary to save that show (which it did) but at the expense of explaining away all the mystery of the Borg and giving the Borg real scale and limits that are very much not as scary as not knowing.
I think the writers didn’t think it out. The borg as a collective mind should have been chaotic and instinctual, they all are self deluded and yelling over each other.
They did - the Cooperative episode.
@ they kept changing their mind about how the Borg functioned. Think I Borg, or Survival Instincts. Each one kind of went a direction that didn’t exactly agree with the others. And the Borg queen was definitely a mistake. But First Contact wasn’t that great. Watched it the same day this video posted, coincidentally, and it’s kind of a pale shadow of the series. And they had to make decisions based on putting TNG on silver screen.
I think the Queen took away, but like you said Alice Kringe(?) played the part so well I can't imagine First Contact without her, plus it played a strong dynamic in Voyager as the Queen and Janeway played opposing mothers in a sense for Seven.
It started to go wrong when they went to Voyager. 😕
Completely disagree. Voyager gave the Borg depth and kept them relevant. If you don’t develop a species in a franchise they soon become very dull, like the Romulans. They had to be given more of a story as it’s a TV show and I think Voyager did it just right while keeping them intimidating and formidable. The stuff in Pic season 2 was truly the worst.
I’d like to believe the Queen is an avatar for the collective, but the writers would have been smart enough to write that into TNG.
They were too lazy to think of a creative solution so they just said take this to the audience. I accepted it for First Contact but it became more and more of a convenient plot device and resulted in ruining the Borg, a force of nature you can’t bargain with or trust. It just is.
They always have to give the women something to do because .....you know ....
Precisely. The agenda before we knew it was an agenda.
I find it interesting how people don't or can't seem to put it together, they just think the stuff popped up out of absolutely no where. Even one of my favorite movies of all time 'Alien', I find myself questioning today because it could obviously have served as the early steps in the process and I as well as many others, definitely may have fallen for it, right.
Most of the Borg, separated from the Collective did self-destruct in TNG but I believe it was the result of a sort of dead man’s switch in the signal that triggered the process. When they found Hugh, he was still connected but they put a dampening field over him which removed him from the collective but prevented triggering the self destruct command. Then when they released him, the collective regained contact, assessed him to be functional and allowed him to rejoin the Collective.
The Borg queen was a realy dumb idea. But it shows you how stupid some Star Trek creatives already were long before JJ and Kurtzman.
That "dumb idea" worked pretty well in First Contact.
It was a mistake, not a wholesale orchestrated destruction of the franchise
@@gildor8866 I doubt that the Borg queen was the reason for the sucess of First Contact. But on the other hand it surely was the beginning of the demystification of the Borg.
The idea of the collective within their Cubes throughout the Delta Quadrant slowly spreading everywhere was a such a great concept. However with the queen and the Unicomplex they became run of the mill bad guys with their big bad and layer.