Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Collective. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite our sincerest efforts We have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.
@@MLBeaton Let’s be honest, if Janeway was in Jack Crusher’s place in PIC S3, her dialogue would mostly be “Why, Borg Queen, why, WHY DO YOU _PERSIST?!”_
I liked the idea that the Borg were originally a species that plugged into a Matrix and, to ensure that work still got done, a central computer would use their bodies to do work. The problems started when people didn't want to leave their dream world and the central computer, in seeing the population of drone workers dying, went out seeking replacement workers.
Could Picard have been the FIRST ‘Queen’? They wanted a ‘single voice’ and by partitioning off such a strong mind they could have left the ‘single voice program’ running and a voice rises…
Building on this theory; what if species 125 WAS a hive-mind? They were always ruled by a queen or queens, and the other queens killed themselves or each other rather than let the Borg take a queen and gain control of the whole planet. Eventually, the last queen; a young woman, surrenders her and her people to the Borg. However, her assimilation causes a tonal shift; before the Borg were a true collective; many minds, one voice. However, integrating many voices within one mind impacted the collective's psyche, and cause her place to be lifted above the drones added through her into the collective; 1 of millions. Much like how Huey introduced freedom to the collective, the Queen introduced hierarchy into the collective. Unlike with Huey, however, the collective could not cast the anomaly out, because by the time they recognized it as an anomaly, it had gains control of more minds than they had; it had become, functionally, a super-borg. Over time, the Queen expanded her control; reaching out and installing her queendom into the minds of individual units. They probably assume she is present, the same way a hallucination feels real in all ways that matter. To every detectable sense, she is there as they join the collective, but physically she can be trillions of light-years away, serving as a pass-thru of all thoughts within the collective. She is not in control from a minutiae standpoint, but she can override and redirect any action the collective could take, because she acts as a bottleneck of their thoughts.
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." I like the idea that assimilation can be a double edged sword.
@@benhobson3084 Exactly; especially a species as early as "125" (considering they had encountered at least 8274 species by the time of Voyager). If they had never encountered a Hive Mind Species up to that point, they would have no defenses in place to preserve the collective when that distinctiveness was assimilated.
Something to consider, just like how Hue introduced individuality, the Borg were not prepared to 'expunge' individuality after a drone disconnects. It's as if the Borg overtaking an individual's mind is part of assimilation, not part of day-to-day Borg existence. That could help with Hue, if they assimilated a humanoid species that had a naturally developed Hive mind system, that 'queen' would be easily adapted to Borg like thinking. i.e. they assimilated someone so tuned to Hive like thinking that she was able to slip past that weak Borg security. She had her own thoughts within the mass mind and thus act independent within. If weak individualism could wreak havoc on a single cube, then a native hive mind race would thrive inside the collective, even taking control. The Borg assimilated more then they bargained for. The thought of being around for a very ling time could come from the fact that, the Borg have been around a long time, and The Queen sees her self and the Borg as one, so, She, has been around a long time. Picard 'remembers' her because the Borg had, by the time of Best of both Worlds had already assimilated her, but her presence had not fully manifested within each cube. i.e., She was in their collective conscious, but the BoBW cube had not yet manifested a single entity. The change in perspective, however, had already manifested, being Locutis of Borg. That cube likely had instructions to 'make a voice for the queen' and got it wrong by making Picard Locutis. So, the concept was already there even in BoBW, and even the same manifest weakness Picard was also being the same weakness of the collective as the Queen was later.
This makes perfect sense. Especially the scene you showed of the Queen calling off the Borg from attacking Voyager. In a past video, with that exact same clip, I postulated a related theory: The Queen has to contend with the Collective for control.
from a poetic and story perspective, the idea of the Queen being a weapon of species 125, thousands of years ago in all likelihood, is rather compelling
I think the queen is El Aurian. The female El Aurian ability to retain a sense of continuity of self in the face of timeline shifts might be what keeps her from integrating with the hive-mind. Which may be both a pro and a con. A pro in that she can do what the collective can't: focus on specific events that are happening. She can also retain a temporal gestalt awareness across timelines, giving the Borg knowledge of temporal attacks by species capable of time travel. But also a con in that she is an individual of sorts and therefore always on the outside. Unable to fully integrate. Prone to outbursts of emotion.
My headcannon was that the queen was created to expedite command during battles and invasions, but the failure of Insurrection suddenly left the Borg with one individual capable of welding enormous power of the Collective, but without a clear purpose.
I just assume the Borg Queen is the scientist who created the technology to build the hive mind in the first place. Her comment about coming from a species in the 1000's of the registry could just be for the latest body she's co-opted for her personal use. And since the collective is built out from her consciousness, she was able to remain behind something like a cybernetic firewall. This provides her full access to the hive without being subsumed by it. She's the sysop for the network, basically. She wanted to be able to correct errors in the early Borg Collective and now she's just riding high on her own psychopathic god complex.
"You think so three dimensionally." It has always been apparent to me that the queen is not dependent on a single physical body. She may only inhabit one at a time, but is not restricted to only the one, able to go anywhere in the galaxy where there is a Borg presence-ship, planet, etc.
Though she always looks the same (or as close as the makeup department could get with multiple actresses). Given that she was shown in First Contact to be purely mechanical once her flesh was dissolved, rather like the T-800 Terminators, I’m pretty sure that the Queen could make a new “body” as required, clone some skin for it, and go. Why bother with a body at all if she wasn’t originally a regular person?
with so many species assimilated, the Borg collective could have reached a kind of critical mass. having grown so large and so many conflicting biological and psychological components the Borg needed some kind of central control nexus, a single mind to override all the internal incompatible mental patterns and maintain the integrity of the collective.
The center plexus. It was the center of why 7 of 9 had multiple personalities in one of the episodes. I think they also called it a Vinkulum... Spelling will be off. Either way, Jerry had amazing acting skills in being able to swing from one personality to another.
@@Continus yeah that episode showed that without constant maintance by a borg control node the drone will quickly devolve into a rambling uncontrollable liability living out several lives at once, i wouldnt be suprised if the borg would have eventually collapsed by itself when it got too large for a central controller to maintain, all of a sudden borg drones all over the galaxy would be remembering fragments of their old life and begin desperately rebelling against the hive mind to regain their independence.
Interesting and compelling theory. When you think about the hundreds of species each assimilated by the Borg, each one had the potential to fundamentally alter the collective albeit in a small way. The collective would appear to be unchanged from the outside and yet there could be a huge alteration slowly but surely changing the nature of the beast.
I think Hugh and Locutus played a role. The Borg perhaps have a "Locutus Protocol" they activate and create a pseudo-individual (it later happened with 7 of 9) when the Borg need someone to "speak for the Borg" to a species about to be assimilated (or some other non-standard interaction). Hugh on the other hand was likely a from birth Borg (not assimilated) but he broke the in-built desire for a connection to the collective consciousness; he wasn't an individual who was assimilated then became an individual but a part of the collective that became an individual because part of the "Borg OS" allows for this when creating a Locutus. Hugh was the delivery system for a virus (more of a corrupt copy of software) built on the Borg's own source code; it screwed up his own ship and sub-collective beyond repair (the Collective might have actually "pulled the plug" trying to stop the damage from spreading) but it spread to the rest of the collective and caused one or more Queens to emerge from the Locutus Protocol. The Queen is the whole collective as an individual, sort of an avatar but also subservient to it; the consensus speaks through her, she appears to command but its really the Borg talking to itself. Picard thought the Queen was "there all the time" because she was, she was the Locutus Protocol active in him. She was a piece of software in the Borg OS that was active in Picard's brain that now has become manifest because Hugh showed the OS how to break the inbuilt desire for consensus so its running on the entire combined brain of the collective... and its gone insane with the paradox of being both an 'I' and a 'we'.
The Borg Queen as a kind of Trojan Horse makes a lot of sense. I think the Queen is (at this point) a program that can transfer from body to body. Remember a version of her died in First Contact, meaning she likely left a copy of herself behind to take over a new host. She potentially can inhabit multiple hosts at a time, with that finally being cut off with the damage done to the collective. I do think that there is likely some separate version of the Borg that does not include her, because this solves the paradox of her existence. Perhaps there is some guiding/decision making routine of the collective that she hijacked.
It’s interesting how the Borg encountered 125 species before getting the queen. I’m assuming species 1 were the original Borg species that were overrun by their own technology or A.I.
I loved the take on the borg they did in the star trek destiny book series. A 3 book series that shows( the or a) beginning to the borg. This is also a very interesting look at the borg as well.
Could also be the writers couldn't do anything with the Borg as a story element. So they introduced the queen as "the baddie". I personally like that "borg" is a generic term for any species that integrates mind and machine to the point that people live in a simulation. A generic term like cylon is for AI and cyberman is for cyborg. Another idea is the queen is the avatar for the collective so it can "negotiate" when it needs to.
I argue that the Queen is an organ of the hivemind (just like in a bee hive, the Queen is the reproductive organ of the superorganism). An organ is meant to fulfill a function, and I argue the Queen's function is to bring order to disorder. The Borg collective has diverse species and individuals who are liable to disagree or form factions or may be more dominant or selfish than other parts of the collective. The Queens job is to act like a speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives, she decides which factions gets to speak, which decisions come up for a vote, when votes occur, she is also in charge of bringing rogue elements or elements that are exhibiting too much individuality for the Borg's tolerance, back under control. Essentially, she has a regulatory role (like various endocrine glands regulate the functions of our bodies, our appetites, sex drives, energy levels, etc...), and that is why she is able to override other decisions of the collective and to issue commands. Though for whatever reason, the Queen become somewhat of a rogue element herself, with her own objectives separate from the rest of the collective. Though, she like all other Borg, view each part of the collective as a part of themselves. When they lose a part of the collective, they are losing a part of themselves, they are losing their eyes, their ears, their limbs, they are losing a part of their minds, that part of themselves is now gone and with them memories, thoughts, feelings, personality traits, etc... Which is why they seek to recover the corticol nodes of fallen Borg, so that they can be preserved and archived and made into a kind of background program or background noise, so that they do not lose that part of themselves and they do not permanently lose their other selves.
Good thoughts, making sense. A related topic and equally ambiguous is the origin of the Borg. There is one thing in Trek which spooked my mind: did the Borg somehow originate on Earth? On multiple occasions, they refer to Earth as being in sector 001, implying an origin point in some sort of galactic frame of reference. Why would the Borg choose Earth as a point of origin for their reference frames if they themselves did not originate from there?
Whenever they refer Earth as sector 001, they are speaking to members of the Federation. So, it's safe to assume that they did that because they wanted the Federation members to understand their destination.
I think in one of the Enterprise Novels it was said that the captain of the NX-02 gave rise to the borg, becoming one of the first borg. Her last words were "I don't want to become some sort of Cyborg", with Borg being what she said when she was assimilated. I think it also linked a connection between V'Ger and the Borg.
I actually liked how they depicted an alien entity, experiencing being in the collective, on Star Trek: Prodigy. The episode is Let Sleeping Borg Lie. I was surprised how enjoyable the show was, and it’s much more intense, than the character would make it seem, at first glance. It even connects back to Voyager and Janeway.
Right?!? The Hageman Brothers are the only ones keeping Star Trek afloat. Was so apprehensive watching season 1 but once finished was so happy to see Star Trek back. The writing is so fantastic and I’m already attached to the new characters. So excited for what season two has in store
@@doctajastrologyandmetaphysics RIIIIGHT. I seem to forget about the first two seasons of disco, then the burn plus everything else wrong with season 3 and Picard s1 & 2 Thought season four of disco was actually good though! P
There's a little known interactive movie/pc game called Star Trek: Borg, where we're introduced to a federation race called the Bijani who can enter a 'pain trance' where they shut down their higher processing abilities so they can do intense and even complicated acitvities under intense pain, it's shown that if a Bijani is assimilated in this trance, when they come out of the pain trance, they'll regain control of their borg body.
I wonder if her manifestation was not a result of creating Locutus. Picard was taken to be a single authoritative voice when interacting with humans. What if, by creating such a spokesperson, and investing in him a pseudo-leadership role for the invasion of the Federation, it also caused a reflection of that role in the Collective. That reflective glitch then took root in the Drone which was best suited for it - which just happened to be a member of Species 125 - and was perhaps amplified by the jarring means by which Picard was then separated from the Collective, mind-hacked and then the ship-hub he was linked to malfunctioned and self-destructed due to sabotage via his uplink. Without whatever balance Picard provided to that reflective glitch, it was turned outwards and subverted the collective as a whole.
There is another solution to the Borg queen, it's that she was just a central processor for the Borg. Like how a computer has a CPU, she was used as a relay to process commands between different assimulated species so the Borg drones could work in unison easily. And some unknown species infected the Borg queen with a virus to kickstart their downfall.
As for the queen being multiple places, my head canon is that the bodies we see are all the queen, every ship has a queen body shell stored away and the entity that is the queen “lives” within the collective and can transfer to any queen husk when more precise direction is needed. The transfer doesn’t remove the queen from the collective into a body, it’s more like an semi autonomous neural clone. Remember only my head canon here, but that’s why the queen can be both directing the collective and going back in time to assimilate past Earth, there would always be a queen required for that mission because of distance to the main collective in the delta quadrant and assimilation of past Earth and dealing with potential interference (like what happened in first contact) would need the precise coordination of a queen, who could then reintegrate when assimilation was complete and connection to past Borg was complete. This nebulous queen with blanks in every cube theory also explains why janeway uploading the neurolitic pathogen to the queen in endgame ended the Borg essentially, and why the queen in Picard season 3 was “damaged” and desperate
My take, we try so hard to give the Borg an organic nature, I see it more as a mechanical or computer like nature. The Queen acted as a sort of OS, something that manage resources, the drones are not worker ants but sub units like how cloud computing works, the Queen is given a set of resources, Cubes, Drones, and other assets, given a primary mission then set free to operate as an autonomous system. Destroy the control OS, lose the resources under its control. Species 125 might have had the mental capacity to handle large amounts of data and resources management, thus the prefect candidate for the role “Queen”
I really like this. My favorite theory however is still that the Queen was a direct result of IBorg. I like the idea that she is the result of humanity infusing the Collective with a preference for individuality.
Except it's not like humanity is the first species the Borg ever met who value individuality. If they would have adapted a queen in response to individuality they might have done it when they first met the Kazon or some other Delta quandrant species similar to humans.
The biggest problem in all this is that IBorg is a top-tier episode that doesn’t make much sense if you think much about it. In IBorg, even more than in most Trek, the world is built around the plot, which is built around a moral. So, somehow our characters believe that they will be the first to introduce individuality into the Borg Collective, choosing that instead of a lethal virus. That seems statistically impossible, and our heroes should know it, but as an audience, I think we just have to roll with the conceit.
Well, regardless of theory or what we like and dont about the Borg collective. Alice Krieg was so seductive and perfect at her craft that I forgive them. It was undoubtedly studio executives who said the borg need to have a face to sell this multi million dollor movie.
Perhaps the queen is an element the borg only allow to take control on occasions when the normal rulebook for conquering a species doesnt work. When the species in question finally succumbs, she goes back to a kind of passive stasis in the intranet of the collective. Would explain the multiple deaths shes had as its just the current iteration. Also explains her persistence, the normal playbook wasnt working on the pesky humans, so shes allowed to take control & experiment with less orthodox methods
Ngl, I've always thought the Queen was a very strange component of the Borg... especially in Voyager. But a lot of what you said here makes sense in universe. Much of the time she seemed to seesaw between the "I" and "we"... between the cold computations of the Borg, and a spiteful, lonely being... like she didn't even know herself whether she was in control or if she was simply an avatar of the Collective's will.
I think it was mentioned that the females of her species had an ability to manage large amounts of data. I'm thinking she was an emergent property of the assimilation. She was integrated like a software kernel, managing resource calls and data throughput from the drones of the ship. The drones are the applications, she is the Kernel, the core of the operating system. I Do think though that the assimilation wasn't able to erase her personality completely, she adopted the purpose she was given but warped it and now she controls the Borg. As such, each ship would probably have a clone of her on board, tucked away, which passively managed her duties but she was able to switch between these bodies at will. The presence of the teleporter on "The Artifact" suggests they evacuate the queen if they are capable so the mechanism's of her assimilation are not discovered...
The Borg are a hive, like eusocial insects on Earth (bees, wasps, termites, and ants). These eusocial hives act like a superorganism. On Earth, what we refer to as the queen of these hives, is really the hive's reproductive organ. Other members of the hive fulfill different roles, just like in a normal multi-cellular organism you have different cells, tissues, and organs fulfilling different roles. Once you make it psychic, you have each drone able to feel each other drone's sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, personality, preferences, etc... as if they were part of you. When a member of the collective dies, a part of you dies, you have lost part of your collective personality, you have lost part of your limbs or organs, and in an effort to preserve that part of yourself, even just a little, fallen Borg have their cortisol nodes removed and brought back to their hives so that that part of the collective can be archived and made into a permanent background software or background noise. From what I see the queen brings order to disorder, in such a large and diverse collective, you would have disagreements, what makes sense to one assimilated being may be totally non-sensical to the cultural beliefs and mindset of another, not to mention some members of the collective may be more dominant or more self-serving than other members, and the ultimate goal is for the collective to go on and become stronger. So, they created an organ, the Queen, which is not a Borg reproductive organ. Instead, the queen determines which factions speak at a given time, the rules for how the different minds and factions communicate, to suppress rogue elements of the collective (such as too much individuality being expressed or being too dominant over other elements) and bring them back under control, to basically serve as the regulation system of the Borg (which is why she can overrule the actions or plans of other Borg or the collective as a whole and issue commands). The problem for the Borg, is over time it seems the Queen has become a rouge, with more individuality, though not being a complete individual, and more self-serving tendencies than would normally be tolerated by the Borg. We do not know why she has become a partially rogue element, it may be an accident from assimilating the wrong species, or it may be an attack from another species, or it may have just been an accident or something that was inevitably going to happen as the Queen evolved. Regardless, the Queen became lonely in a sense. She still felt all the other members of the Borg, they were still her eyes, her ears, her voice, her arms, her legs, her thoughts, her memories, her other selves, but they were like a sea of sameness, she was floating in a pool of just her, just Borg, and wanted someone else to float in that sea with her, someone who fulfilled a role on par with her that she could have peers. For some reason humans were desirable for this task and she begin to experiment with making humans into her peers, with Seven of Nine, Locutus, and Vox. The Borg ultimately was a very authoritarian, aggressive, involuntary, imperialistic, and unhealthy hivemind. Other hiveminds in Star Trek seem to be much better balanced and form healthier societies (at least for those within the hivemind), like the Medusans, Pahvans, Species 10-C, and even the Changelings (despite their authoritarian and bigoted, but understandable, reaction to frequent persecution). Even pseudo-hiveminds where you have highly telepathic and empathic societies where everyone can understand and feel each other as if they were a part of each other, like the Deltans and Betazoids, seem to form healthier societies. The Borg may be a powerful hivemind in terms of military might, resources, numbers, and aggression, but I would also consider them a weak and vulnerable hivemind prone to eventually reach dead-ends and failure points. Though, it is also clear that the Borg have been considering replacing their mechanical tech-components with biological tech equivalents for a while. That is why they were studying Species 8472, and why they made genetic alterations to their drones, both in preparation to make modifications to the collective and to spread Borg genes should their drones escape or be ejected from the collective for some reason.
Okay that is a really interesting theory. Another thing I thought about when you brought up how Picard did see the Borg Queen back when he was assimilated is that what if he didn't actually see her physically up close in person but only just saw her in his thoughts when he was a drone? Like he never physically saw her at the time
I prefer the idea that since it was CLEARLY indicated in Descent that the Borg were defeated, she was some being who did something similar to Lore and took advantage of the situation.
Several thoughts that come to my mind; 1) given the limited awareness of the Queen's species (125) and her age at assimilation (young girl) it's likely that whatever happened likely had a profound influence on her and since Borg utilize maturation chambers (excluding their introduction with infant Borg in "Q Who") she was likely developed to adulthood before potentially merging with the Collective. 2) While there was no known definition of a singular voice prior to Picard's assimilation it's likely that there could have been a desire to utilize Picard less as a "mate" and more due to the fact his crew recognized his authority and being the commander of the vessel that "engaged" them he was the "perfect choice" to speak for them and was even mentioned as an example in "Scorpion, Pt. 1" by Janeway. 3) Mentioning the change from a single drone into a queen there was a mention of a "program" within the Beta Canon "The Farther Shore" and "Homecoming" which referred to a matching program between Borg and Starfleet referred to as "Royal Protocol" that would convert female drones/individuals into new/replacement queens, and 4) when speaking in "First Contact" the queen specifically states; "you think in such small, three-dimensional terms" and implies that the queen has either always existed or as proposed by Picard S2 are linked with other timelines and realities
What about Hugh? He was the first attempt by the sng crew to disrupt/destroy the borg by introducing the concept of individuality into the collective. Although there are other related episodes, that plot line never seemed to come to fruition or a conclusion.
@@prestigemultimediagroup6436Not only did it conclude that arc, it clearly implied and at one point stated that the collective was no more, it's just that Lor was using that to form his own collective for personal power of which was eventually taken down by his own emotional state. Sounds awfully familiar, and with a race as far-reaching as the Borg it's possible that he wasn't the only being doing that.
@@prestigemultimediagroup6436 Hugh specifically said they couldn't return to the collective (despite the fact that he did later, implying it was less destroyed then he thought). Also he had no perspective outside of the cube he was on when he got disconnected.
I have a counter hypothesis. The Borg Queen (or Queens) seen in First Contact and Voyager may not have been the original, but may be the result of an anomaly (or not exactly an anomaly) going all the way back to the Borg's inception. What if the original "Queen" was the creator of the Borg, and she hard coded a dependence on an independent queen in order to protect herself from disappearing into the Hive Mind? If something happenned to the original Queen, the Collective would have to adapt by spawning a new one. As much of the memories, thoughts, and personality as possible would be copied from one Queen to the next, inadvertently resulting in an amalgamation of multiple "individuals," each gradually more divergent from the original over successive generations. The Borg do seem to persue the Queen's concept of perfection, and it would explain changes and inconsistencies in the behavior of the Borg as well as the Queen herself. This would be an inherent flaw and growing weakness of the Borg, originally intended as self-preservation by the Borg creator. It is also entirely possible this was the Queen's original intention for Seven - as a ready replacement. It's speculation, it's thin, but it's a really fun thought exercise
Also, the Queen's cryptic and essentially meaningless explanations would be a direct result of such a hard coded dependence, possibly coupled with centuries of generational degradation of the original creator's memories and intentions
It is also theorized that the Queen was created by the collective as a way to stop the glitch caused by Hue. Basically she is able to disengage damaged cubes and other damaged Borg. This is brought up in Voyager when the collective ignores Icheb and the other Borg kids when a virus destroyed the cube they were on. They were removed from the collective.
My head canon was the queen was a part of Guinean’s race and worked behind the scenes for awhile explaining why Picard knew her but not really her role as a queen. I also think a queen is enviable. A collective will eventual form definition it can’t go on just as a pure collective.
I always viewed the Borg Queen not as an individual or a command unit, but rather as a personification of the collective itself. The queen herself has no identity, but is rather a face for the larger collective, which is created aboard each cube or other installation when the Borg need to communicate with the outside world. I also think this fits with why the Borg turned Picard into Locutis, which was merely to communicate with the Federation, and convince it to lay down its arms and embrace the Borg, rather than the collective having to bomb countless worlds into submission and lose billions of potential drones and lots of resources.
A nice Cohesive conclusion to the Borg. I think she is the cumulation of a requirement of some perfection algorithm to solve a cascade failiure that then didn't go away when it was fixed. She was the cure for a borg form of epilepsy.
I think an easier explanation/theory was that the TNG Borg were more "classic". They're older and been away from the general collective for so long that a queen doesn't exist for them but when they assimilated Picard he was a new element and got a clearer link to the Post TNG Borg. It's not a perfect theory but it's one i think could work.
The Queen had said she existed and was the reason Picard was renamed Locutus and was her equal in running the Borg. This was said in First Contact Movie, did you forget?
I was under the impression that the Borg Queen was a concept the Borg created for themselves after seeing the worth of having a "leader" as someone to speak for them, and as someone to guide the collective to achieve the collectives' goals.
The Borg Queen was created to give a face and focal point to an enemy on the big screen outing of First Contact. Once you have done that then the Borg were forever changed in cannon. My own presumption was that the Queen is a final decision maker and strategist for the whole collective. It may have been their own idea to run ideas through that junction and after satisfactory performance upgrade that drone to a new system the Queen. That is how Picard was aware of the presence, but no queen yet existed before the events immediately prior to First Contact. Picard also makes the Borg timeline weird. You have the Borg surviving queen from Voyager hiding in Jupiter for season 3 of Picard. You also have the altered Borg from Q shifting the flow of time in season 2. These are two different characters. Both of them exist in the Picard time line with the altered Borg having disappeared to do their own thing yet be provisionally part of the Federation. That is one hell of a hanging string.
Having a think about this, I see their downfall as less a single factor and more a case of the entirety. The greatest threat to the Borg, is the Borg thought process. An impossible objective, fundamental paradoxes, a fixation based on logic and math they couldn't think, process themselves around. The fundamental drive to expand and to do so without end. To deal with, prevent the rise of the greatest threat and preventive force to their expansion. They became locked in a conflict they couldn't quantify, success, fail, do not repeat failure. Forced adaptations to a singular threat created specialisation and specialisation is weakness. Further specialisation, hyperspecialisation, every encounter with the Federation revealed a weakness in the Federation, caused great harm to the Federation and cost many Federation lives. For every Starfleet officer killed by the Borg or brought into the Collective, it was worth, five thousand drones, fifty thousand drones. It updates their book of tricks, but that's every single Starfleet officer, each time. Even to a degree, every new species, being encountered by the Collective. How do you deal with that much information flow? That much creativity? That much perspective, that much different way of reading a situation? You create a formula, an expression, an entity that decides valid from invalid. You create an entity to decide what should and shouldn't be learned by the Borg. What is the Borg perspective, answer. That's before we talk about how the Federation reacts, develops, changes. How it learns, how it has such a pool to draw on and accepts inputs to come up with better. Even to the degree of philosophical contradictions. Starfleet doesn't have warships? Defiant class anyone? Phasers are 'defensive' items that burn things out of existence. Weaponised anti-matter. Sounds pretty warlike to me and that's only the photon torpedo. They made it explode bigger and better. The greatest weakness of the Borg is the Borg nature, it was self defeating from the get go. It has, had, no tools for freedom of thought. It is Borg or it is not. A group so free thinking, so diverse, so tricksy as Starfleet? A few generations of forced evolutions, a question asked of a question asked of a question only reinforces this path. For all its strengths and its weaknesses. The Borg Queen was always going to rise and always going to be the weakness, downfall.
my hypothesis has been that the queen is an emotion processor for some subdivision of borg, a way to orchestrate voices the way many signals can join in a hub, with a 21st century concept of information networks in mind a network moderator makes some sense
I think everyone has a problem grasping the need for the Queen. But she even says it herself. Basically, the queen is needed to create the one voice that the Borg speak with. Because, I'm sorry, but without a singular voice, I find it hard to believe that every single Borg thinks exactly the same way. It doesn't matter that they're all linked. Thinking that that's all it takes, and that the Queen was not needed, you would have to assume that everything the Borg did was the best course of action. But the reality is, even a collective such as the Borg, would need to have a decision maker. What if half the Borg though they should move right, and the other half, left, because both choices were equally the right choice. You would need the Queen to be the deciding factor. Now, was she the weak link? Of course she was. Just like any insect hive, if the Queen dies, the hive goes into chaos. And also, like a hive, a new Queen is created, when the old Queen is dying, so that the hive is not left alone, to fall into chaos. On a side note, I think that's who 7 of 9 was supposed to be, the next Queen. That's why it was so important to the Queen, to get her back. Hell, look at her full designation. 7 of 9, tertiary adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One. Her group was closely connected to the Queen. Just like in a Bee's hive. You can't have perfection (to the Borg) without unity. You can't have unity, if there are millions of voices, with their own opinions. You'd need a singular voice. And that voice is the Queen.
After seeing, what was left of the Borg in Season 3 of Picard, i think it was a combination of the Trojan Horse, which the queen maybe was, and the virus, that the Janeway from the alternate future brought with her, which destroyed the Borg for good.
An interesting and plausible theory. But there's a couple holes that throw it off kilter. The biggest is that if it was some kind of assimilation between BoBW and First Contact, it also probably should have been after the events of Scorpion as well. But that would leave maybe a couple months at most in between these events. I don't think Picard should be remembering in this way unless his presence with the Queen accelerated that process somehow. Second, BoBW establishes all Borg functions stem from a "root command" like a Linux system (all OS's actually operate this way, but Linux takes it to the max). That may have been the way Data was able to translate the information but the actuality is the Queen was present. The Borg are also very specific that Picard leads the strongest vessel and a human voice will speak for the Borg, which doesn't necessitate the presence of the Queen. In fact in nearly every communication even after the Queen is encountered, it is still the Collective making addresses not the Queen unless there is something specific she needs to say. So the Queen still could have existed, even before BoBW. There is also the fact that the Borg in First Contact still need to build a subspace transmitter to contact the Borg of the 21st century. And the drones all malfunction when the Queen dies instead of reverting to the control of the Queen in the 21st century. That may seem like an argument against, but consider that the Borg are still not destroyed by the time of Picard series. They are weakened severely but still exist. And there is another Queen present even after Endgame in Voyager where the Queen of the prime timeline definitively dies also. This suggests that several "Queen" units exist but only one is ever active at a time. This could be through cloning or other method (it isn't like the Borg have scientific ethics after all, they're still chasing "Omega" despite the clear damage it does). Basically, the Queen must have existed, its unlikely to be an "installed" or "overlooked" weakness on the part of the Coective as a whole and it explains why the Borg understood rhe effectiveness of single communication leading to BoBW.
The writers really messed a golden opportunity with Borg Queen. They could have made the Queen the culmination of all the assimilated species to create a unique species that is served by the Borg Collective instead of the other way around.
What if Picard was the beginning? The Borg were one entity, until they decided they needed one drone to talk to other races. Granted the Queen wanted a "counterpart", but what if infusing Picard's "distinctiveness" actually changed her so much that she became more and more a central point, since Picard is certainly a figure of authority? No one questions his orders. What if assimilating him infected the Queen to make her more of an authority rather than a central processor? Even though she might have been a weak point from the beginning, Picard might have been the tipping point that turned her into a central point that could be exploited later. Like adding one drop of a chemical that makes an entire solution unstable. Along the same lines, Hugh might have furthered then infection. Even though they were cut off, some part of it might have still spread.
Personally, I always imagined the queen as an attempt to think like an individual. Like the borg pull one out when dealing with an enemy like the federation to better understand try to outmaneuver the federation's thought processes and plans. Like if skynet creates a terminator that thinks like a human to understand how the human resistance will attempt to outsmart its logical thought processes.
Don't forget Species 8472 or the aliens from the fake USS Dauntless, Artuis from Species 116. His species eluded the borg until the end of their war with Species 8472 Also, I don't think that the Q were ever assimilated either
One way it kind of could make sense is if she's not so much in control of the collective but a distinct independent node. Rather than cut themselves off from potential benefits from things such as instinct and, for lack of a better term, "the personal touch" the collective has a small number of units that provide a singular view on things. The collective isn't subject to the Queens will but if it doesn't perceive a significant downside then it's willing to go along with the Queens plans. Yes, the Queen was an exploitable weak point however that doesn't mean she's an entirely detrimental entity, for example without the Queen The Borg may never have obtained a weapon against species 8472 Also was the collective itself can be considered a weakpoint, many of the most successful attempts to hurt The Borg relied on The Borgs hive mind nature, an "outside perspective" can help detect anomalies with the collective itself.
If the queen was assimilated from Species 125 then Alternate future Admiral Janeway from "Endgame" says it best when it comes to the Borg's demise: "Must be something you assimilated"
From someone who keeps ants like myself the idea of Comparing the Borg to Ants makes perfect sense, ants even though small are collectively very successful at what they do, they can control and consume everything within there nest area, and colonies of thousands have a colloctive mind and knowing what to do to keep the colony growing. You mention the possibility of more than one Queen in the Borg, now if you look at different Ant species some only have one Queen per nest which if that Queen dies then there affectively dead, but some Ant Species have worked out that having more than 1 Queen insurers greater survival. Army ants of Africa and south america only have one queen and even though they indestructible as a force they still have that possibility of dieing out completely if that Queen dies, but the Asian version of Army ants Carebara Diversa can have multiple Queens which makes them very successful because there's always another Queen if one dies out. It would always make logical sense for the Borg to have more than 1 Queen because it greatly insurers the Survival of the collective and as a technologically advanced species I think they would know that. The all of picard series in my opinion as made the Borg look like a very weak threat, the first Cube was taken Down by a giant space flower, in the second series the Borg were affectively wiped out and Queen was captured, and in this 3rd series the Borg looked no better than the dumb looking samaritans from STG. I blame the directors because for some reason they were to fascinated to include the Borg in all 3 seasons, but there obsession made the Borg look like a push over and easy to beat, which goes against everything we know about the Borg a technically advanced collective that can beat countless other aliens. So in answer to your question was the Queen responsible for the demise of the Borg? No it was the directors of Picard who killed off the Borg which is really sad because they added something to Star Trek that was terrifying interesting.
With regards to different ways to fight the Borg. I have a fan theory that The Founders defeated the Borg. The Borg seek perfection. The Dominon is protected by Jem'Hadar. The Jem'Hadar requires ketracel white in order to live. The Borg have decided that the Jem'Hadar are not suitable for assimilation (due to their lack of perfection.) And since Jem'Hedar are willing to crash their ships into enemy vessels and more Jem'Hadar can be breed faster than Borg drones can be assimilated. This makes a confrontation with the Dominon too costly. So the Dominion protects its citizens from better than the UFP can. That's a pretty compelling reason to join the Dominon instead of UFP.
I wonder if the clever attempts of so many species had a cumulative effect. If she was a weapon, or even a queen from a naturally collective species, the cuts made by other species in other ways while fighting the Borg might have caused the gaps she needed to gather her influence, control, or corrupting presence in the Collective...
The Borg were defeated by Captain Janeway and a cup of coffee. Her words as she stares into a nebula and wonders if coffee can be found there. "Coffee, the finest organic suspension devised. I beat the Borg with it."
I have a theory Lore. I suspect that Kevin Uxbridge who destroyed all Husnock everywhere is a member of the Q Continuum. Who else has the power like that?
Its a solid theory I like the idea I wish they would go over the origins of the Borg as well as the Borg Queen I doubt we have heard the last of the Borg Queen she is very crafty she prob is a complexed computer program rather intentional or not...
Probably not as well pronounced, especially because this is only in beta-canon but there was some pretty interesting details about how/what/why/where/when on Borg society in both Shatnerverse novels, "The Return" and and the beginning of "Avenger." Mainly about where they are after First Contact and how much of other galaxies the Borg occupy. It was even threorized that the Borg are not even from the Mikly Way Galaxy originally and by the time Q Who comes around the Borg have only been in the Delta Quad for a couple of hundred years. Also this same branch of novels is where the whole Borg/V'ger connection orginated from, which at the time was neat and worked a little but now doesn't seem to hold much momentum. It would be interesting if V'ger and the Borg had crossed paths but perhaps did not try to assimulate each other but know of each othr's exsistence. That is about it on that. It would be much more intersting for us to explore the Borg outside of Star Trek/Starfleet and put them somewhere else, in another galaxy, another time in a sort sci/fi/horror spin off. That could prove fun and exciting, but this video does present some good points about the queen being the weak link of the collective. That is ultimately what really killed the TNG movies, is making something Star Trekkie into Jame Bond supervillian askew. How many supervillians were in the TOS era films? Like, real Bond-like supervillians? The TNG films had one in each film and they just repeated that formula. ST 2 and VI come to mind as real Bond-like ripoffs, while TNG had 4 for 4.
If the borg can be defeated by one small girl then i would argue that they were never truly a lasting threat. For the borg with or without the queen are flawed and subsectible to foregin contamination and infection.
They lost at Wolf 143 on purpose, think about it they killed the fleet and the officers, but if they assimilated those ships and crew then it would have been 41 Borg ships heading to Earth or better yet spread out in federation space. 41 Borg ships in 41 different directions. Game over.
“You think in such three dimensional terms…” Something that kinda goes by the wayside with First Contact Is not only is it a Time Travel movie, but that it definitively proves the Borg have the technology to not only open time portals with exacting targeting for the time period but that said portal can be generated by a Sphere carried by a cube as an escape ship of sorts with said portal being stable enough for a second ship to pass through it without generating its own portal. First contact the Borg eh have precision time travel technology AND know how to use it to manipulate events in the past to their benefit in the new timelines present. What if the answer are the Borg a hive mind or a hive with a Queen is yes? Say thr collective encounters a had to assimilate species, or one that not only pushes the collective back, but nearly wiped it out, being able to go back in time to a key moment either to change strategies thanks to a new bit of tech that would’ve been key at that moment or to avoid a target until later would be like reverting to a previously saved game in an RPG, your not as advanced but you know definitively what’s up ahead and can level up, get new equipment and change your approach entirely. Let’s say after losing the first Cuba sent to earth, the Borg went back in time, and try it again, and again, and again until the Hive Mind realized the only way forward to crack the “Individuality Problem” WAS to have an individual itself in thr form of the Queen AND that it worked, in the sense the Borg were able to progress closer to their goal of a simulating humanity, and to a larger extend the alpha quadrant and even if they failed with the Queen the first dozen times, having her is the “best possible universe of possibilities” for the Hive. TLDR, The Borg are SkyNet, and Picard Is John Conner.
Maybe the Borg was unable to control the expansion the collective and process the all functions of drones across the galaxy and beyond, thus they decided to have a queen to take on that responsibility. That responsibility alone yarn for a mate/counterpart to help her “bring order to order.”
I really want to read/watch some good fanfiction with the original borg concepts thru Best of Both Worlds. Even Hugh's original debut was good and gave us a new insight into the Borg without changing them overly much or neutering them through a 'bigger badder badguy'
In the description you write: "The music in this video is licensed Royalty Free. Songs: Music by: " What is the name of the song then? Not mentioned? Thanks!
@@LoreReloaded The paradox is the Borg collective wasn't capable of removing defective components at some stage the only way to defend the collective way to be able to make the disassociate, the Borg have to have a queen to oversee and remove defective elements. The Queen was created to be the glue that held the collective together but needed individuality sometimes to remove anything that was disrupting the unity of the collective.
Nice analysis. I still don't see any problem with the concept of the queen, because when considering a vast collective with so many possible actions and decision, there has to be some element that sets up priorities and has a sort of freedom to act or order actions. What we perceive as "emotional traits" could just be the manifestation of that sophisticated brain AI trying to figure out - why do we keep resisting them?
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the borg cooperative (group lead by jurati). My theory why they didn't help in s3 of Picard, jurarti knew Picard would win & possibly her group would be infected by the other.
Story-wise, the Queen was retconned to simply be an antagonist face for the audience. When First Contact came out, many fans didn't like the introduction of the queen- it changed the concept of the Borg completely. imo- the Borg should have never had a figurehead. It basically boils the Borg down to an evil queen with an army of henchmen
Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Collective. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite our sincerest efforts We have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.
have my damn upvote.
You can have my upvote - but I want you to know that I'm not happy about it.
So the Queen is the One?
@@L1z43vr would that make Janeway ‘Agent Smith’?
In the end there are multiple Janeways….
@@MLBeaton Let’s be honest, if Janeway was in Jack Crusher’s place in PIC S3, her dialogue would mostly be “Why, Borg Queen, why, WHY DO YOU _PERSIST?!”_
I liked the idea that the Borg were originally a species that plugged into a Matrix and, to ensure that work still got done, a central computer would use their bodies to do work.
The problems started when people didn't want to leave their dream world and the central computer, in seeing the population of drone workers dying, went out seeking replacement workers.
Could Picard have been the FIRST ‘Queen’?
They wanted a ‘single voice’ and by partitioning off such a strong mind they could have left the ‘single voice program’ running and a voice rises…
I prefer this, then lesser minds took the position and where "immature"
It would explain why the queen seems to be in love with Picard xD
@@TheCaptainCrack agreed! But who wouldn’t?
That errant apostrophe makes me want to tear my eyes out.
Borg detected
Building on this theory; what if species 125 WAS a hive-mind? They were always ruled by a queen or queens, and the other queens killed themselves or each other rather than let the Borg take a queen and gain control of the whole planet.
Eventually, the last queen; a young woman, surrenders her and her people to the Borg. However, her assimilation causes a tonal shift; before the Borg were a true collective; many minds, one voice. However, integrating many voices within one mind impacted the collective's psyche, and cause her place to be lifted above the drones added through her into the collective; 1 of millions.
Much like how Huey introduced freedom to the collective, the Queen introduced hierarchy into the collective. Unlike with Huey, however, the collective could not cast the anomaly out, because by the time they recognized it as an anomaly, it had gains control of more minds than they had; it had become, functionally, a super-borg.
Over time, the Queen expanded her control; reaching out and installing her queendom into the minds of individual units. They probably assume she is present, the same way a hallucination feels real in all ways that matter. To every detectable sense, she is there as they join the collective, but physically she can be trillions of light-years away, serving as a pass-thru of all thoughts within the collective. She is not in control from a minutiae standpoint, but she can override and redirect any action the collective could take, because she acts as a bottleneck of their thoughts.
Wow! That made so much sense!
"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
I like the idea that assimilation can be a double edged sword.
@@benhobson3084 Exactly; especially a species as early as "125" (considering they had encountered at least 8274 species by the time of Voyager). If they had never encountered a Hive Mind Species up to that point, they would have no defenses in place to preserve the collective when that distinctiveness was assimilated.
Something to consider, just like how Hue introduced individuality, the Borg were not prepared to 'expunge' individuality after a drone disconnects. It's as if the Borg overtaking an individual's mind is part of assimilation, not part of day-to-day Borg existence. That could help with Hue, if they assimilated a humanoid species that had a naturally developed Hive mind system, that 'queen' would be easily adapted to Borg like thinking. i.e. they assimilated someone so tuned to Hive like thinking that she was able to slip past that weak Borg security. She had her own thoughts within the mass mind and thus act independent within.
If weak individualism could wreak havoc on a single cube, then a native hive mind race would thrive inside the collective, even taking control. The Borg assimilated more then they bargained for. The thought of being around for a very ling time could come from the fact that, the Borg have been around a long time, and The Queen sees her self and the Borg as one, so, She, has been around a long time.
Picard 'remembers' her because the Borg had, by the time of Best of both Worlds had already assimilated her, but her presence had not fully manifested within each cube. i.e., She was in their collective conscious, but the BoBW cube had not yet manifested a single entity. The change in perspective, however, had already manifested, being Locutis of Borg. That cube likely had instructions to 'make a voice for the queen' and got it wrong by making Picard Locutis.
So, the concept was already there even in BoBW, and even the same manifest weakness Picard was also being the same weakness of the collective as the Queen was later.
Great hypothesis.
This makes perfect sense. Especially the scene you showed of the Queen calling off the Borg from attacking Voyager. In a past video, with that exact same clip, I postulated a related theory: The Queen has to contend with the Collective for control.
from a poetic and story perspective, the idea of the Queen being a weapon of species 125, thousands of years ago in all likelihood, is rather compelling
I think the queen is El Aurian.
The female El Aurian ability to retain a sense of continuity of self in the face of timeline shifts might be what keeps her from integrating with the hive-mind. Which may be both a pro and a con.
A pro in that she can do what the collective can't: focus on specific events that are happening. She can also retain a temporal gestalt awareness across timelines, giving the Borg knowledge of temporal attacks by species capable of time travel.
But also a con in that she is an individual of sorts and therefore always on the outside. Unable to fully integrate. Prone to outbursts of emotion.
My headcannon was that the queen was created to expedite command during battles and invasions, but the failure of Insurrection suddenly left the Borg with one individual capable of welding enormous power of the Collective, but without a clear purpose.
I love this theory. A very clever way to retcon the Queen's (lack of) presence in older episodes.
I just assume the Borg Queen is the scientist who created the technology to build the hive mind in the first place. Her comment about coming from a species in the 1000's of the registry could just be for the latest body she's co-opted for her personal use. And since the collective is built out from her consciousness, she was able to remain behind something like a cybernetic firewall. This provides her full access to the hive without being subsumed by it. She's the sysop for the network, basically. She wanted to be able to correct errors in the early Borg Collective and now she's just riding high on her own psychopathic god complex.
"You think so three dimensionally." It has always been apparent to me that the queen is not dependent on a single physical body. She may only inhabit one at a time, but is not restricted to only the one, able to go anywhere in the galaxy where there is a Borg presence-ship, planet, etc.
Though she always looks the same (or as close as the makeup department could get with multiple actresses). Given that she was shown in First Contact to be purely mechanical once her flesh was dissolved, rather like the T-800 Terminators, I’m pretty sure that the Queen could make a new “body” as required, clone some skin for it, and go. Why bother with a body at all if she wasn’t originally a regular person?
@@obsidian179 agreed
The Borg Queen is just the friends we made along the way
with so many species assimilated, the Borg collective could have reached a kind of critical mass. having grown so large and so many conflicting biological and psychological components the Borg needed some kind of central control nexus, a single mind to override all the internal incompatible mental patterns and maintain the integrity of the collective.
The center plexus.
It was the center of why 7 of 9 had multiple personalities in one of the episodes. I think they also called it a Vinkulum... Spelling will be off. Either way, Jerry had amazing acting skills in being able to swing from one personality to another.
@@Continus yeah that episode showed that without constant maintance by a borg control node the drone will quickly devolve into a rambling uncontrollable liability living out several lives at once, i wouldnt be suprised if the borg would have eventually collapsed by itself when it got too large for a central controller to maintain, all of a sudden borg drones all over the galaxy would be remembering fragments of their old life and begin desperately rebelling against the hive mind to regain their independence.
Interesting and compelling theory. When you think about the hundreds of species each assimilated by the Borg, each one had the potential to fundamentally alter the collective albeit in a small way. The collective would appear to be unchanged from the outside and yet there could be a huge alteration slowly but surely changing the nature of the beast.
I think Hugh and Locutus played a role. The Borg perhaps have a "Locutus Protocol" they activate and create a pseudo-individual (it later happened with 7 of 9) when the Borg need someone to "speak for the Borg" to a species about to be assimilated (or some other non-standard interaction). Hugh on the other hand was likely a from birth Borg (not assimilated) but he broke the in-built desire for a connection to the collective consciousness; he wasn't an individual who was assimilated then became an individual but a part of the collective that became an individual because part of the "Borg OS" allows for this when creating a Locutus. Hugh was the delivery system for a virus (more of a corrupt copy of software) built on the Borg's own source code; it screwed up his own ship and sub-collective beyond repair (the Collective might have actually "pulled the plug" trying to stop the damage from spreading) but it spread to the rest of the collective and caused one or more Queens to emerge from the Locutus Protocol. The Queen is the whole collective as an individual, sort of an avatar but also subservient to it; the consensus speaks through her, she appears to command but its really the Borg talking to itself. Picard thought the Queen was "there all the time" because she was, she was the Locutus Protocol active in him. She was a piece of software in the Borg OS that was active in Picard's brain that now has become manifest because Hugh showed the OS how to break the inbuilt desire for consensus so its running on the entire combined brain of the collective... and its gone insane with the paradox of being both an 'I' and a 'we'.
Borg diplomacy...a diplomat, or an ambassador
I've always seen the borg like insects and some do have queens/ leaders so it made sense to me that their would be a leader
The Borg Queen as a kind of Trojan Horse makes a lot of sense.
I think the Queen is (at this point) a program that can transfer from body to body. Remember a version of her died in First Contact, meaning she likely left a copy of herself behind to take over a new host. She potentially can inhabit multiple hosts at a time, with that finally being cut off with the damage done to the collective.
I do think that there is likely some separate version of the Borg that does not include her, because this solves the paradox of her existence. Perhaps there is some guiding/decision making routine of the collective that she hijacked.
It’s interesting how the Borg encountered 125 species before getting the queen. I’m assuming species 1 were the original Borg species that were overrun by their own technology or A.I.
I loved the take on the borg they did in the star trek destiny book series. A 3 book series that shows( the or a) beginning to the borg. This is also a very interesting look at the borg as well.
Could also be the writers couldn't do anything with the Borg as a story element. So they introduced the queen as "the baddie". I personally like that "borg" is a generic term for any species that integrates mind and machine to the point that people live in a simulation. A generic term like cylon is for AI and cyberman is for cyborg.
Another idea is the queen is the avatar for the collective so it can "negotiate" when it needs to.
I argue that the Queen is an organ of the hivemind (just like in a bee hive, the Queen is the reproductive organ of the superorganism). An organ is meant to fulfill a function, and I argue the Queen's function is to bring order to disorder. The Borg collective has diverse species and individuals who are liable to disagree or form factions or may be more dominant or selfish than other parts of the collective. The Queens job is to act like a speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives, she decides which factions gets to speak, which decisions come up for a vote, when votes occur, she is also in charge of bringing rogue elements or elements that are exhibiting too much individuality for the Borg's tolerance, back under control. Essentially, she has a regulatory role (like various endocrine glands regulate the functions of our bodies, our appetites, sex drives, energy levels, etc...), and that is why she is able to override other decisions of the collective and to issue commands.
Though for whatever reason, the Queen become somewhat of a rogue element herself, with her own objectives separate from the rest of the collective.
Though, she like all other Borg, view each part of the collective as a part of themselves. When they lose a part of the collective, they are losing a part of themselves, they are losing their eyes, their ears, their limbs, they are losing a part of their minds, that part of themselves is now gone and with them memories, thoughts, feelings, personality traits, etc... Which is why they seek to recover the corticol nodes of fallen Borg, so that they can be preserved and archived and made into a kind of background program or background noise, so that they do not lose that part of themselves and they do not permanently lose their other selves.
Good thoughts, making sense. A related topic and equally ambiguous is the origin of the Borg. There is one thing in Trek which spooked my mind: did the Borg somehow originate on Earth? On multiple occasions, they refer to Earth as being in sector 001, implying an origin point in some sort of galactic frame of reference. Why would the Borg choose Earth as a point of origin for their reference frames if they themselves did not originate from there?
Whenever they refer Earth as sector 001, they are speaking to members of the Federation. So, it's safe to assume that they did that because they wanted the Federation members to understand their destination.
I think in one of the Enterprise Novels it was said that the captain of the NX-02 gave rise to the borg, becoming one of the first borg. Her last words were "I don't want to become some sort of Cyborg", with Borg being what she said when she was assimilated. I think it also linked a connection between V'Ger and the Borg.
Ah yes, I think in Star Trek: Legacy there was a non-canon origin story of the Borg similar to V'Ger.
I actually liked how they depicted an alien entity, experiencing being in the collective, on Star Trek: Prodigy.
The episode is Let Sleeping Borg Lie. I was surprised how enjoyable the show was, and it’s much more intense, than the character would make it seem, at first glance.
It even connects back to Voyager and Janeway.
Right?!? The Hageman Brothers are the only ones keeping Star Trek afloat. Was so apprehensive watching season 1 but once finished was so happy to see Star Trek back. The writing is so fantastic and I’m already attached to the new characters. So excited for what season two has in store
Idk why everyone is so surprised about prodigy being good.
@@christianmino4073 PTSD from Kurtzman Trek. 😅😆
@@doctajastrologyandmetaphysics RIIIIGHT. I seem to forget about the first two seasons of disco, then the burn plus everything else wrong with season 3 and Picard s1 & 2 Thought season four of disco was actually good though! P
@@doctajastrologyandmetaphysics also who are the hageman brothers?
There's a little known interactive movie/pc game called Star Trek: Borg, where we're introduced to a federation race called the Bijani who can enter a 'pain trance' where they shut down their higher processing abilities so they can do intense and even complicated acitvities under intense pain, it's shown that if a Bijani is assimilated in this trance, when they come out of the pain trance, they'll regain control of their borg body.
I used clips from that in my q episode
I wonder if her manifestation was not a result of creating Locutus. Picard was taken to be a single authoritative voice when interacting with humans. What if, by creating such a spokesperson, and investing in him a pseudo-leadership role for the invasion of the Federation, it also caused a reflection of that role in the Collective. That reflective glitch then took root in the Drone which was best suited for it - which just happened to be a member of Species 125 - and was perhaps amplified by the jarring means by which Picard was then separated from the Collective, mind-hacked and then the ship-hub he was linked to malfunctioned and self-destructed due to sabotage via his uplink. Without whatever balance Picard provided to that reflective glitch, it was turned outwards and subverted the collective as a whole.
There is another solution to the Borg queen, it's that she was just a central processor for the Borg. Like how a computer has a CPU, she was used as a relay to process commands between different assimulated species so the Borg drones could work in unison easily. And some unknown species infected the Borg queen with a virus to kickstart their downfall.
This makes more sense to me.
As for the queen being multiple places, my head canon is that the bodies we see are all the queen, every ship has a queen body shell stored away and the entity that is the queen “lives” within the collective and can transfer to any queen husk when more precise direction is needed. The transfer doesn’t remove the queen from the collective into a body, it’s more like an semi autonomous neural clone. Remember only my head canon here, but that’s why the queen can be both directing the collective and going back in time to assimilate past Earth, there would always be a queen required for that mission because of distance to the main collective in the delta quadrant and assimilation of past Earth and dealing with potential interference (like what happened in first contact) would need the precise coordination of a queen, who could then reintegrate when assimilation was complete and connection to past Borg was complete. This nebulous queen with blanks in every cube theory also explains why janeway uploading the neurolitic pathogen to the queen in endgame ended the Borg essentially, and why the queen in Picard season 3 was “damaged” and desperate
My take, we try so hard to give the Borg an organic nature, I see it more as a mechanical or computer like nature. The Queen acted as a sort of OS, something that manage resources, the drones are not worker ants but sub units like how cloud computing works, the Queen is given a set of resources, Cubes, Drones, and other assets, given a primary mission then set free to operate as an autonomous system. Destroy the control OS, lose the resources under its control. Species 125 might have had the mental capacity to handle large amounts of data and resources management, thus the prefect candidate for the role “Queen”
I really like this.
My favorite theory however is still that the Queen was a direct result of IBorg. I like the idea that she is the result of humanity infusing the Collective with a preference for individuality.
Except it's not like humanity is the first species the Borg ever met who value individuality. If they would have adapted a queen in response to individuality they might have done it when they first met the Kazon or some other Delta quandrant species similar to humans.
@Rudy Robles yeah, I, Borg makes no sense. If individuality was infectious within the collective, there would be no collective.
The biggest problem in all this is that IBorg is a top-tier episode that doesn’t make much sense if you think much about it. In IBorg, even more than in most Trek, the world is built around the plot, which is built around a moral.
So, somehow our characters believe that they will be the first to introduce individuality into the Borg Collective, choosing that instead of a lethal virus. That seems statistically impossible, and our heroes should know it, but as an audience, I think we just have to roll with the conceit.
Well, regardless of theory or what we like and dont about the Borg collective. Alice Krieg was so seductive and perfect at her craft that I forgive them. It was undoubtedly studio executives who said the borg need to have a face to sell this multi million dollor movie.
Perhaps the queen is an element the borg only allow to take control on occasions when the normal rulebook for conquering a species doesnt work. When the species in question finally succumbs, she goes back to a kind of passive stasis in the intranet of the collective. Would explain the multiple deaths shes had as its just the current iteration. Also explains her persistence, the normal playbook wasnt working on the pesky humans, so shes allowed to take control & experiment with less orthodox methods
Ngl, I've always thought the Queen was a very strange component of the Borg... especially in Voyager. But a lot of what you said here makes sense in universe. Much of the time she seemed to seesaw between the "I" and "we"... between the cold computations of the Borg, and a spiteful, lonely being... like she didn't even know herself whether she was in control or if she was simply an avatar of the Collective's will.
Borg are one of my fave sci-fi species. So much unknown about them even after all this time.
I think it was mentioned that the females of her species had an ability to manage large amounts of data. I'm thinking she was an emergent property of the assimilation. She was integrated like a software kernel, managing resource calls and data throughput from the drones of the ship. The drones are the applications, she is the Kernel, the core of the operating system. I Do think though that the assimilation wasn't able to erase her personality completely, she adopted the purpose she was given but warped it and now she controls the Borg. As such, each ship would probably have a clone of her on board, tucked away, which passively managed her duties but she was able to switch between these bodies at will. The presence of the teleporter on "The Artifact" suggests they evacuate the queen if they are capable so the mechanism's of her assimilation are not discovered...
The introduction of the Borg Queen was the final nail in the coffin of ruining the Borg. Such a bad idea.
0:29 in that Picard alternate universe, the “totally not the Imperium” seemed to have kicked their shit in pretty hard.
I love this theory. It does answer a lot of questions.
I find this theory so much more palatable than the story of the queen as presented
The Borg are a hive, like eusocial insects on Earth (bees, wasps, termites, and ants). These eusocial hives act like a superorganism. On Earth, what we refer to as the queen of these hives, is really the hive's reproductive organ. Other members of the hive fulfill different roles, just like in a normal multi-cellular organism you have different cells, tissues, and organs fulfilling different roles.
Once you make it psychic, you have each drone able to feel each other drone's sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, personality, preferences, etc... as if they were part of you. When a member of the collective dies, a part of you dies, you have lost part of your collective personality, you have lost part of your limbs or organs, and in an effort to preserve that part of yourself, even just a little, fallen Borg have their cortisol nodes removed and brought back to their hives so that that part of the collective can be archived and made into a permanent background software or background noise.
From what I see the queen brings order to disorder, in such a large and diverse collective, you would have disagreements, what makes sense to one assimilated being may be totally non-sensical to the cultural beliefs and mindset of another, not to mention some members of the collective may be more dominant or more self-serving than other members, and the ultimate goal is for the collective to go on and become stronger. So, they created an organ, the Queen, which is not a Borg reproductive organ. Instead, the queen determines which factions speak at a given time, the rules for how the different minds and factions communicate, to suppress rogue elements of the collective (such as too much individuality being expressed or being too dominant over other elements) and bring them back under control, to basically serve as the regulation system of the Borg (which is why she can overrule the actions or plans of other Borg or the collective as a whole and issue commands). The problem for the Borg, is over time it seems the Queen has become a rouge, with more individuality, though not being a complete individual, and more self-serving tendencies than would normally be tolerated by the Borg. We do not know why she has become a partially rogue element, it may be an accident from assimilating the wrong species, or it may be an attack from another species, or it may have just been an accident or something that was inevitably going to happen as the Queen evolved.
Regardless, the Queen became lonely in a sense. She still felt all the other members of the Borg, they were still her eyes, her ears, her voice, her arms, her legs, her thoughts, her memories, her other selves, but they were like a sea of sameness, she was floating in a pool of just her, just Borg, and wanted someone else to float in that sea with her, someone who fulfilled a role on par with her that she could have peers. For some reason humans were desirable for this task and she begin to experiment with making humans into her peers, with Seven of Nine, Locutus, and Vox.
The Borg ultimately was a very authoritarian, aggressive, involuntary, imperialistic, and unhealthy hivemind. Other hiveminds in Star Trek seem to be much better balanced and form healthier societies (at least for those within the hivemind), like the Medusans, Pahvans, Species 10-C, and even the Changelings (despite their authoritarian and bigoted, but understandable, reaction to frequent persecution). Even pseudo-hiveminds where you have highly telepathic and empathic societies where everyone can understand and feel each other as if they were a part of each other, like the Deltans and Betazoids, seem to form healthier societies. The Borg may be a powerful hivemind in terms of military might, resources, numbers, and aggression, but I would also consider them a weak and vulnerable hivemind prone to eventually reach dead-ends and failure points.
Though, it is also clear that the Borg have been considering replacing their mechanical tech-components with biological tech equivalents for a while. That is why they were studying Species 8472, and why they made genetic alterations to their drones, both in preparation to make modifications to the collective and to spread Borg genes should their drones escape or be ejected from the collective for some reason.
Okay that is a really interesting theory. Another thing I thought about when you brought up how Picard did see the Borg Queen back when he was assimilated is that what if he didn't actually see her physically up close in person but only just saw her in his thoughts when he was a drone? Like he never physically saw her at the time
I prefer the idea that since it was CLEARLY indicated in Descent that the Borg were defeated, she was some being who did something similar to Lore and took advantage of the situation.
Star Trek Picard opens the possibility for a reboot of the Borg: a return to the faceless, Queenless Borg of the Past.
Several thoughts that come to my mind; 1) given the limited awareness of the Queen's species (125) and her age at assimilation (young girl) it's likely that whatever happened likely had a profound influence on her and since Borg utilize maturation chambers (excluding their introduction with infant Borg in "Q Who") she was likely developed to adulthood before potentially merging with the Collective. 2) While there was no known definition of a singular voice prior to Picard's assimilation it's likely that there could have been a desire to utilize Picard less as a "mate" and more due to the fact his crew recognized his authority and being the commander of the vessel that "engaged" them he was the "perfect choice" to speak for them and was even mentioned as an example in "Scorpion, Pt. 1" by Janeway. 3) Mentioning the change from a single drone into a queen there was a mention of a "program" within the Beta Canon "The Farther Shore" and "Homecoming" which referred to a matching program between Borg and Starfleet referred to as "Royal Protocol" that would convert female drones/individuals into new/replacement queens, and 4) when speaking in "First Contact" the queen specifically states; "you think in such small, three-dimensional terms" and implies that the queen has either always existed or as proposed by Picard S2 are linked with other timelines and realities
What about Hugh? He was the first attempt by the sng crew to disrupt/destroy the borg by introducing the concept of individuality into the collective. Although there are other related episodes, that plot line never seemed to come to fruition or a conclusion.
Descent 1 and 2 concluded that arc
@@prestigemultimediagroup6436Not only did it conclude that arc, it clearly implied and at one point stated that the collective was no more, it's just that Lor was using that to form his own collective for personal power of which was eventually taken down by his own emotional state. Sounds awfully familiar, and with a race as far-reaching as the Borg it's possible that he wasn't the only being doing that.
@@RRW359 no in the hugh arc it was stated the collective on that one cube was disrupted not that the entire collective was destroyed
@@prestigemultimediagroup6436 Hugh specifically said they couldn't return to the collective (despite the fact that he did later, implying it was less destroyed then he thought). Also he had no perspective outside of the cube he was on when he got disconnected.
I have a counter hypothesis. The Borg Queen (or Queens) seen in First Contact and Voyager may not have been the original, but may be the result of an anomaly (or not exactly an anomaly) going all the way back to the Borg's inception. What if the original "Queen" was the creator of the Borg, and she hard coded a dependence on an independent queen in order to protect herself from disappearing into the Hive Mind? If something happenned to the original Queen, the Collective would have to adapt by spawning a new one. As much of the memories, thoughts, and personality as possible would be copied from one Queen to the next, inadvertently resulting in an amalgamation of multiple "individuals," each gradually more divergent from the original over successive generations. The Borg do seem to persue the Queen's concept of perfection, and it would explain changes and inconsistencies in the behavior of the Borg as well as the Queen herself. This would be an inherent flaw and growing weakness of the Borg, originally intended as self-preservation by the Borg creator. It is also entirely possible this was the Queen's original intention for Seven - as a ready replacement. It's speculation, it's thin, but it's a really fun thought exercise
Also, the Queen's cryptic and essentially meaningless explanations would be a direct result of such a hard coded dependence, possibly coupled with centuries of generational degradation of the original creator's memories and intentions
It is also theorized that the Queen was created by the collective as a way to stop the glitch caused by Hue. Basically she is able to disengage damaged cubes and other damaged Borg. This is brought up in Voyager when the collective ignores Icheb and the other Borg kids when a virus destroyed the cube they were on. They were removed from the collective.
I always wondered what would happen if the Borg assimilated Vulcan and if those millions of minds could actually exert influence over the collective
I half expected you to go to fad out for a few seconds then flash the melt-y queen from Star Trek Pikerd
My head canon was the queen was a part of Guinean’s race and worked behind the scenes for awhile explaining why Picard knew her but not really her role as a queen. I also think a queen is enviable. A collective will eventual form definition it can’t go on just as a pure collective.
Fun! Thanks for thinking this through.
I wonder what would happen if they assimilated a birthday clown or used car salesman or Homer Simpson?
I always viewed the Borg Queen not as an individual or a command unit, but rather as a personification of the collective itself. The queen herself has no identity, but is rather a face for the larger collective, which is created aboard each cube or other installation when the Borg need to communicate with the outside world. I also think this fits with why the Borg turned Picard into Locutis, which was merely to communicate with the Federation, and convince it to lay down its arms and embrace the Borg, rather than the collective having to bomb countless worlds into submission and lose billions of potential drones and lots of resources.
A nice Cohesive conclusion to the Borg.
I think she is the cumulation of a requirement of some perfection algorithm to solve a cascade failiure that then didn't go away when it was fixed. She was the cure for a borg form of epilepsy.
I think an easier explanation/theory was that the TNG Borg were more "classic". They're older and been away from the general collective for so long that a queen doesn't exist for them but when they assimilated Picard he was a new element and got a clearer link to the Post TNG Borg. It's not a perfect theory but it's one i think could work.
The Queen had said she existed and was the reason Picard was renamed Locutus and was her equal in running the Borg. This was said in First Contact Movie, did you forget?
I always thought the queen came about because of Hue (I think that was his name). The Borge that becomes an individual in TNG and returns to the hive.
The Borge?
Sounds Swedish
@@Ephraim32 "We are the Bjorn Borg. We will play tennis with you."
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t rallying is futile
@@Ephraim32 well almost “borg” is Swedish for the type of building that is a castle.
@@Willyz_l that joke went so far over your head it may as well be in orbit
I was under the impression that the Borg Queen was a concept the Borg created for themselves after seeing the worth of having a "leader" as someone to speak for them, and as someone to guide the collective to achieve the collectives' goals.
The Borg Queen was created to give a face and focal point to an enemy on the big screen outing of First Contact. Once you have done that then the Borg were forever changed in cannon.
My own presumption was that the Queen is a final decision maker and strategist for the whole collective. It may have been their own idea to run ideas through that junction and after satisfactory performance upgrade that drone to a new system the Queen. That is how Picard was aware of the presence, but no queen yet existed before the events immediately prior to First Contact. Picard also makes the Borg timeline weird.
You have the Borg surviving queen from Voyager hiding in Jupiter for season 3 of Picard. You also have the altered Borg from Q shifting the flow of time in season 2. These are two different characters. Both of them exist in the Picard time line with the altered Borg having disappeared to do their own thing yet be provisionally part of the Federation. That is one hell of a hanging string.
Having a think about this, I see their downfall as less a single factor and more a case of the entirety. The greatest threat to the Borg, is the Borg thought process.
An impossible objective, fundamental paradoxes, a fixation based on logic and math they couldn't think, process themselves around. The fundamental drive to expand and to do so without end. To deal with, prevent the rise of the greatest threat and preventive force to their expansion. They became locked in a conflict they couldn't quantify, success, fail, do not repeat failure. Forced adaptations to a singular threat created specialisation and specialisation is weakness.
Further specialisation, hyperspecialisation, every encounter with the Federation revealed a weakness in the Federation, caused great harm to the Federation and cost many Federation lives. For every Starfleet officer killed by the Borg or brought into the Collective, it was worth, five thousand drones, fifty thousand drones. It updates their book of tricks, but that's every single Starfleet officer, each time. Even to a degree, every new species, being encountered by the Collective.
How do you deal with that much information flow? That much creativity? That much perspective, that much different way of reading a situation? You create a formula, an expression, an entity that decides valid from invalid. You create an entity to decide what should and shouldn't be learned by the Borg. What is the Borg perspective, answer.
That's before we talk about how the Federation reacts, develops, changes. How it learns, how it has such a pool to draw on and accepts inputs to come up with better. Even to the degree of philosophical contradictions. Starfleet doesn't have warships? Defiant class anyone? Phasers are 'defensive' items that burn things out of existence. Weaponised anti-matter. Sounds pretty warlike to me and that's only the photon torpedo. They made it explode bigger and better.
The greatest weakness of the Borg is the Borg nature, it was self defeating from the get go. It has, had, no tools for freedom of thought. It is Borg or it is not. A group so free thinking, so diverse, so tricksy as Starfleet? A few generations of forced evolutions, a question asked of a question asked of a question only reinforces this path. For all its strengths and its weaknesses.
The Borg Queen was always going to rise and always going to be the weakness, downfall.
my hypothesis has been that the queen is an emotion processor for some subdivision of borg, a way to orchestrate voices the way many signals can join in a hub, with a 21st century concept of information networks in mind a network moderator makes some sense
I think everyone has a problem grasping the need for the Queen. But she even says it herself. Basically, the queen is needed to create the one voice that the Borg speak with. Because, I'm sorry, but without a singular voice, I find it hard to believe that every single Borg thinks exactly the same way. It doesn't matter that they're all linked. Thinking that that's all it takes, and that the Queen was not needed, you would have to assume that everything the Borg did was the best course of action. But the reality is, even a collective such as the Borg, would need to have a decision maker. What if half the Borg though they should move right, and the other half, left, because both choices were equally the right choice. You would need the Queen to be the deciding factor. Now, was she the weak link? Of course she was. Just like any insect hive, if the Queen dies, the hive goes into chaos. And also, like a hive, a new Queen is created, when the old Queen is dying, so that the hive is not left alone, to fall into chaos. On a side note, I think that's who 7 of 9 was supposed to be, the next Queen. That's why it was so important to the Queen, to get her back. Hell, look at her full designation. 7 of 9, tertiary adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One. Her group was closely connected to the Queen. Just like in a Bee's hive. You can't have perfection (to the Borg) without unity. You can't have unity, if there are millions of voices, with their own opinions. You'd need a singular voice. And that voice is the Queen.
After seeing, what was left of the Borg in Season 3 of Picard, i think it was a combination of the Trojan Horse, which the queen maybe was, and the virus, that the Janeway from the alternate future brought with her, which destroyed the Borg for good.
An interesting and plausible theory. But there's a couple holes that throw it off kilter. The biggest is that if it was some kind of assimilation between BoBW and First Contact, it also probably should have been after the events of Scorpion as well. But that would leave maybe a couple months at most in between these events. I don't think Picard should be remembering in this way unless his presence with the Queen accelerated that process somehow.
Second, BoBW establishes all Borg functions stem from a "root command" like a Linux system (all OS's actually operate this way, but Linux takes it to the max). That may have been the way Data was able to translate the information but the actuality is the Queen was present. The Borg are also very specific that Picard leads the strongest vessel and a human voice will speak for the Borg, which doesn't necessitate the presence of the Queen. In fact in nearly every communication even after the Queen is encountered, it is still the Collective making addresses not the Queen unless there is something specific she needs to say. So the Queen still could have existed, even before BoBW. There is also the fact that the Borg in First Contact still need to build a subspace transmitter to contact the Borg of the 21st century. And the drones all malfunction when the Queen dies instead of reverting to the control of the Queen in the 21st century. That may seem like an argument against, but consider that the Borg are still not destroyed by the time of Picard series. They are weakened severely but still exist. And there is another Queen present even after Endgame in Voyager where the Queen of the prime timeline definitively dies also. This suggests that several "Queen" units exist but only one is ever active at a time. This could be through cloning or other method (it isn't like the Borg have scientific ethics after all, they're still chasing "Omega" despite the clear damage it does).
Basically, the Queen must have existed, its unlikely to be an "installed" or "overlooked" weakness on the part of the Coective as a whole and it explains why the Borg understood rhe effectiveness of single communication leading to BoBW.
Love this idea
The writers really messed a golden opportunity with Borg Queen. They could have made the Queen the culmination of all the assimilated species to create a unique species that is served by the Borg Collective instead of the other way around.
What if Picard was the beginning? The Borg were one entity, until they decided they needed one drone to talk to other races. Granted the Queen wanted a "counterpart", but what if infusing Picard's "distinctiveness" actually changed her so much that she became more and more a central point, since Picard is certainly a figure of authority? No one questions his orders. What if assimilating him infected the Queen to make her more of an authority rather than a central processor? Even though she might have been a weak point from the beginning, Picard might have been the tipping point that turned her into a central point that could be exploited later. Like adding one drop of a chemical that makes an entire solution unstable.
Along the same lines, Hugh might have furthered then infection. Even though they were cut off, some part of it might have still spread.
Personally, I always imagined the queen as an attempt to think like an individual. Like the borg pull one out when dealing with an enemy like the federation to better understand try to outmaneuver the federation's thought processes and plans.
Like if skynet creates a terminator that thinks like a human to understand how the human resistance will attempt to outsmart its logical thought processes.
I always tgiught that the development of the queen was a way that the collective adapted to survive the individualism of Hugh
Don't forget Species 8472 or the aliens from the fake USS Dauntless, Artuis from Species 116. His species eluded the borg until the end of their war with Species 8472
Also, I don't think that the Q were ever assimilated either
One way it kind of could make sense is if she's not so much in control of the collective but a distinct independent node. Rather than cut themselves off from potential benefits from things such as instinct and, for lack of a better term, "the personal touch" the collective has a small number of units that provide a singular view on things. The collective isn't subject to the Queens will but if it doesn't perceive a significant downside then it's willing to go along with the Queens plans.
Yes, the Queen was an exploitable weak point however that doesn't mean she's an entirely detrimental entity, for example without the Queen The Borg may never have obtained a weapon against species 8472
Also was the collective itself can be considered a weakpoint, many of the most successful attempts to hurt The Borg relied on The Borgs hive mind nature, an "outside perspective" can help detect anomalies with the collective itself.
interesting theory. I wish someone would write a fanfiction based around it
I always viewed the borg queen as a focal point of the collective.
I like it. It does make me interested in the species she came from, but it would make for a great if tragic story.
If the queen was assimilated from Species 125 then Alternate future Admiral Janeway from "Endgame" says it best when it comes to the Borg's demise: "Must be something you assimilated"
From someone who keeps ants like myself the idea of Comparing the Borg to Ants makes perfect sense, ants even though small are collectively very successful at what they do, they can control and consume everything within there nest area, and colonies of thousands have a colloctive mind and knowing what to do to keep the colony growing.
You mention the possibility of more than one Queen in the Borg, now if you look at different Ant species some only have one Queen per nest which if that Queen dies then there affectively dead, but some Ant Species have worked out that having more than 1 Queen insurers greater survival.
Army ants of Africa and south america only have one queen and even though they indestructible as a force they still have that possibility of dieing out completely if that Queen dies, but the Asian version of Army ants Carebara Diversa can have multiple Queens which makes them very successful because there's always another Queen if one dies out.
It would always make logical sense for the Borg to have more than 1 Queen because it greatly insurers the Survival of the collective and as a technologically advanced species I think they would know that.
The all of picard series in my opinion as made the Borg look like a very weak threat, the first Cube was taken Down by a giant space flower, in the second series the Borg were affectively wiped out and Queen was captured, and in this 3rd series the Borg looked no better than the dumb looking samaritans from STG.
I blame the directors because for some reason they were to fascinated to include the Borg in all 3 seasons, but there obsession made the Borg look like a push over and easy to beat, which goes against everything we know about the Borg a technically advanced collective that can beat countless other aliens.
So in answer to your question was the Queen responsible for the demise of the Borg?
No it was the directors of Picard who killed off the Borg which is really sad because they added something to Star Trek that was terrifying interesting.
With regards to different ways to fight the Borg. I have a fan theory that The Founders defeated the Borg.
The Borg seek perfection. The Dominon is protected by Jem'Hadar.
The Jem'Hadar requires ketracel white in order to live.
The Borg have decided that the Jem'Hadar are not suitable for assimilation (due to their lack of perfection.)
And since Jem'Hedar are willing to crash their ships into enemy vessels and more Jem'Hadar can be breed faster than Borg drones can be assimilated.
This makes a confrontation with the Dominon too costly.
So the Dominion protects its citizens from better than the UFP can.
That's a pretty compelling reason to join the Dominon instead of UFP.
I wonder if the clever attempts of so many species had a cumulative effect. If she was a weapon, or even a queen from a naturally collective species, the cuts made by other species in other ways while fighting the Borg might have caused the gaps she needed to gather her influence, control, or corrupting presence in the Collective...
The queen definitely came to be after the formation of the collective. It seems like she had hijacked and took control of the rest of the Borg.
The admonition did a number on the Borg too. That said it wasn't weaponized.
Nah. It was pretty clearly Voyager that dealt the death blow to the Borg.
Definitely an interesting theory 5:49
The Borg were defeated by Captain Janeway and a cup of coffee. Her words as she stares into a nebula and wonders if coffee can be found there. "Coffee, the finest organic suspension devised. I beat the Borg with it."
I have a theory Lore. I suspect that Kevin Uxbridge who destroyed all Husnock everywhere is a member of the Q Continuum. Who else has the power like that?
Its a solid theory I like the idea I wish they would go over the origins of the Borg as well as the Borg Queen I doubt we have heard the last of the Borg Queen she is very crafty she prob is a complexed computer program rather intentional or not...
Probably not as well pronounced, especially because this is only in beta-canon but there was some pretty interesting details about how/what/why/where/when on Borg society in both Shatnerverse novels, "The Return" and and the beginning of "Avenger." Mainly about where they are after First Contact and how much of other galaxies the Borg occupy. It was even threorized that the Borg are not even from the Mikly Way Galaxy originally and by the time Q Who comes around the Borg have only been in the Delta Quad for a couple of hundred years. Also this same branch of novels is where the whole Borg/V'ger connection orginated from, which at the time was neat and worked a little but now doesn't seem to hold much momentum.
It would be interesting if V'ger and the Borg had crossed paths but perhaps did not try to assimulate each other but know of each othr's exsistence. That is about it on that.
It would be much more intersting for us to explore the Borg outside of Star Trek/Starfleet and put them somewhere else, in another galaxy, another time in a sort sci/fi/horror spin off. That could prove fun and exciting, but this video does present some good points about the queen being the weak link of the collective.
That is ultimately what really killed the TNG movies, is making something Star Trekkie into Jame Bond supervillian askew. How many supervillians were in the TOS era films? Like, real Bond-like supervillians? The TNG films had one in each film and they just repeated that formula. ST 2 and VI come to mind as real Bond-like ripoffs, while TNG had 4 for 4.
The Queen makes sense if she is the ghost in the machine. The Borg conciousness.
I love First Contact, but the idea of having a "Queen" reduced the Borg to ants. It made them FAR less interesting.
If the borg can be defeated by one small girl then i would argue that they were never truly a lasting threat. For the borg with or without the queen are flawed and subsectible to foregin contamination and infection.
They lost at Wolf 143 on purpose, think about it they killed the fleet and the officers, but if they assimilated those ships and crew then it would have been 41 Borg ships heading to Earth or better yet spread out in federation space. 41 Borg ships in 41 different directions. Game over.
I thought queen was reaction to Hugh, civil war of Borg Lore took advantage of. A place place that could absorb the sense of individuality
“You think in such three dimensional terms…”
Something that kinda goes by the wayside with First Contact Is not only is it a Time Travel movie, but that it definitively proves the Borg have the technology to not only open time portals with exacting targeting for the time period but that said portal can be generated by a Sphere carried by a cube as an escape ship of sorts with said portal being stable enough for a second ship to pass through it without generating its own portal.
First contact the Borg eh have precision time travel technology AND know how to use it to manipulate events in the past to their benefit in the new timelines present.
What if the answer are the Borg a hive mind or a hive with a Queen is yes?
Say thr collective encounters a had to assimilate species, or one that not only pushes the collective back, but nearly wiped it out, being able to go back in time to a key moment either to change strategies thanks to a new bit of tech that would’ve been key at that moment or to avoid a target until later would be like reverting to a previously saved game in an RPG, your not as advanced but you know definitively what’s up ahead and can level up, get new equipment and change your approach entirely.
Let’s say after losing the first Cuba sent to earth, the Borg went back in time, and try it again, and again, and again until the Hive Mind realized the only way forward to crack the “Individuality Problem” WAS to have an individual itself in thr form of the Queen AND that it worked, in the sense the Borg were able to progress closer to their goal of a simulating humanity, and to a larger extend the alpha quadrant and even if they failed with the Queen the first dozen times, having her is the “best possible universe of possibilities” for the Hive.
TLDR, The Borg are SkyNet, and Picard Is John Conner.
Maybe the Borg was unable to control the expansion the collective and process the all functions of drones across the galaxy and beyond, thus they decided to have a queen to take on that responsibility. That responsibility alone yarn for a mate/counterpart to help her “bring order to order.”
I really want to read/watch some good fanfiction with the original borg concepts thru Best of Both Worlds. Even Hugh's original debut was good and gave us a new insight into the Borg without changing them overly much or neutering them through a 'bigger badder badguy'
I always thought the Borg were better when there was no queen and they were a faceless collective.
In the description you write: "The music in this video is licensed Royalty Free.
Songs:
Music by: "
What is the name of the song then? Not mentioned? Thanks!
I just think the Borg Queen was just a plot device for Star Trek: First Contact to have as a main villain.
Her ultimate flaw
@@LoreReloaded The paradox is the Borg collective wasn't capable of removing defective components at some stage the only way to defend the collective way to be able to make the disassociate, the Borg have to have a queen to oversee and remove defective elements. The Queen was created to be the glue that held the collective together but needed individuality sometimes to remove anything that was disrupting the unity of the collective.
Nice analysis. I still don't see any problem with the concept of the queen, because when considering a vast collective with so many possible actions and decision, there has to be some element that sets up priorities and has a sort of freedom to act or order actions. What we perceive as "emotional traits" could just be the manifestation of that sophisticated brain AI trying to figure out - why do we keep resisting them?
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on the borg cooperative (group lead by jurati). My theory why they didn't help in s3 of Picard, jurarti knew Picard would win & possibly her group would be infected by the other.
Story-wise, the Queen was retconned to simply be an antagonist face for the audience. When First Contact came out, many fans didn't like the introduction of the queen- it changed the concept of the Borg completely. imo- the Borg should have never had a figurehead.
It basically boils the Borg down to an evil queen with an army of henchmen
The Queen was only a AI, she was the main AI of the BORG. And even if there were multiple queens, she was merely a AI copy of herself.