Borg Queen

Before the film Star Trek: First Contact (1996), the Borg exhibited no hierarchical command structure. First Contact introduced the Borg Queen, who is not named as such in the film (referring to herself with "I am the Borg. I am the Collective.") but is named Borg Queen in the closing credits. The Queen is played by Alice Krige in this film and in the 2001 finale of Star Trek: Voyager, "Endgame". The character also appeared in Voyager's two-part episodes "Dark Frontier" (1999) and "Unimatrix Zero" (2000), but was portrayed by Susanna Thompson. Whether or not these appearances represent the same queen is never confirmed. The queen was killed in both First Contact and "Dark Frontier", so there may be a total of three queens throughout the series. In First Contact, the Borg Queen is heard during a flashback of Picard's former assimilation, implying she was present during the events of "Best of Both Worlds".

The Borg Queen is the focal point within the Borg collective consciousness and a unique drone within the Collective, who brings "order to chaos", referring to herself as "we" and "I" interchangeably. In First Contact, the Queen's dialogue suggests she is an expression of the Borg Collective's overall intelligence, not a controller but the avatar of the entire Collective as an individual. This sentiment is contradicted by Star Trek: Voyager, where she is seen explicitly directing, commanding, and in one instance even overriding the Collective. The introduction of the Queen radically changed the canonical understanding of the Borg function, with the authors of The Computers of Star Trek noting "It was a lot easier for viewers to focus on a villain rather than a hive-mind that made decisions based on the input of all its members." First Contact writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore have defended the introduction of the Queen as a dramatic necessity, noting on the film's DVD audio commentary that they had initially written the film with drones, but then found that it was essential for the main characters to have someone to interact with beyond mindless drones.

Subject ID: 110274

More

Before the film Star Trek: First Contact (1996), the Borg exhibited no hierarchical command structure. First Contact introduced the Borg Queen, who is not named as such in the film (referring to herself with "I am the Borg. I am the Collective.") but is named Borg Queen in the closing credits. The Queen is played by Alice Krige in this film and in the 2001 finale of Star Trek: Voyager, "Endgame". The character also appeared in Voyager's two-part episodes "Dark Frontier" (1999) and "Unimatrix Zero" (2000), but was portrayed by Susanna Thompson. Whether or not these appearances represent the same queen is never confirmed. The queen was killed in both First Contact and "Dark Frontier", so there may be a total of three queens throughout the series. In First Contact, the Borg Queen is heard during a flashback of Picard's former assimilation, implying she was present during the events of "Best of Both Worlds".

The Borg Queen is the focal point within the Borg collective consciousness and a unique drone within the Collective, who brings "order to chaos", referring to herself as "we" and "I" interchangeably. In First Contact, the Queen's dialogue suggests she is an expression of the Borg Collective's overall intelligence, not a controller but the avatar of the entire Collective as an individual. This sentiment is contradicted by Star Trek: Voyager, where she is seen explicitly directing, commanding, and in one instance even overriding the Collective. The introduction of the Queen radically changed the canonical understanding of the Borg function, with the authors of The Computers of Star Trek noting "It was a lot easier for viewers to focus on a villain rather than a hive-mind that made decisions based on the input of all its members." First Contact writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore have defended the introduction of the Queen as a dramatic necessity, noting on the film's DVD audio commentary that they had initially written the film with drones, but then found that it was essential for the main characters to have someone to interact with beyond mindless drones.

Subject ID: 110274

Less