In the sense of, if they were like insects in the way they thought. A queen makes sense. I also think she was one of the creepiest villains in Trek.
Do you "accept" the Borg Queen?
- Thread starter JesterFace
- Start date
True enough, but like I said with head canon I just assumed that not every Borg vessel has a Queen on it. The Borg were going to make a human - Picard - the unified voice for their Federation assimilation, the Queen wasn't really needed and the Federation wasn't so advanced that it required her full attention.
The problem comes with her scooby doo plans involving nanite bombs, time travel and other nonsense. You get away with it in the movies for obvious reasons, but when it becomes a regular thing it just becomes stupid as hell.
They needed a personification of the villain for the plot.
I think that if you took the Queen's dialog exactly as it was and had it being spoken by the entire collective as usual, it would have had a far better effect. Like, if you want to personify the Borg, play around with the entire collective being a single person: 5,000 drones all speak in unison and all say "I am the Borg" like they're all speaking with the same mind. You could even have the Queen still be there, but her lips never move and the collective is her voice.
Set the creep factor up to 11.
Or it could have been one drone speaking, moves off screen, another drone continues the sentence, then another Borg.
^ How would you have done the scene with the entire collective seducing Data with flesh and kissing him?
Well that would have been a dirty party 
I also didn't like the Queen, she took all the scariness away
I also didn't like the Queen, she took all the scariness away
Thematically in First Contact, a movie which unashamedly apes the Alien movies wherever possible, the Borg Queen makes sense. Every appearance after that diluted her impact and Krige's initial performance bit by bit until we were left with Just Another TV Villain.
Well, Picard serving as mouthpiece for the Borg didn't make any sense, either. How is a human face and personality needed to force an unconditional surrender and assimilation?
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Claiming that the Borg idea needed an individual to personify it, Locutus or a "queen", is to cancel out the whole idea of the Borg. The point of them is that it stamps out individuality. It's the utter, total enemy and opposite of individuality. Once it stops being that, it just becomes... more television. The idea is gutted. Maybe the general public who eats up "popcorn movies" would have had trouble with the Borg otherwise. Fine, don't use the Borg. FC was just a rerun of BoBW anyway, a less interesting version. Better yet, no ST movies at all. Worthwhile SF can't be dumbed down.
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One very irritating thing about the "queen" is that it's a metaphor gone crazy. The idea of the Borg was that of humanoids linked into a "hive mind". We often guess that something like this unites bees in a hive, which all cooperate as a unit. Fine. But the Borg aren't really bugs. That was a metaphor. Insect communities often have "queens", but saying the Borg have one makes it almost seem as if the writers were free-associating. Hmmm... hive mind... insects... a Queen! Let's give them a Queen!
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Claiming that the Borg idea needed an individual to personify it, Locutus or a "queen", is to cancel out the whole idea of the Borg. The point of them is that it stamps out individuality. It's the utter, total enemy and opposite of individuality. Once it stops being that, it just becomes... more television. The idea is gutted. Maybe the general public who eats up "popcorn movies" would have had trouble with the Borg otherwise. Fine, don't use the Borg. FC was just a rerun of BoBW anyway, a less interesting version. Better yet, no ST movies at all. Worthwhile SF can't be dumbed down.
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One very irritating thing about the "queen" is that it's a metaphor gone crazy. The idea of the Borg was that of humanoids linked into a "hive mind". We often guess that something like this unites bees in a hive, which all cooperate as a unit. Fine. But the Borg aren't really bugs. That was a metaphor. Insect communities often have "queens", but saying the Borg have one makes it almost seem as if the writers were free-associating. Hmmm... hive mind... insects... a Queen! Let's give them a Queen!
It was the other way around, though. The writers conceived of a literal bug hive first, and then cast humans to save money.
Yes, I know they started with the idea of literal insects. If they had actually made them insects, a Queen would have been more sensible. As it turned out, though, years after the Borg were created, a humanoid "hive mind" suddenly acquired a "queen", despite their not being insects.
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Good Star Trek avoids villains. It can't be dramatically satisfying to have the Borg conventionalized into a standard "villain" with a face and personality, unless one just likes easy, familiar melodrama. It's supposed to be ST, not Flash Gordon.
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However, once they had the Queen as a given, Voyager made do with that fairly well, better than Next Gen after BoBW, actually. If you really deal with the Borg well, dramatically and believably, then they destroy you. The moment Data put them to sleep in BoBW, it became clear that the only really interesting thing about them was that they were unstoppable. Then once you stop them, you screw up the idea. At least the Queen let the Borg limp along as an idea a little longer.
I can see the rationale behind having a SpokesBorg, though in that regard I think it might have been more satisfying if the Borg had come up with the idea of a "queen" (and I'm glad they never themselves referred to her as such(?)) after their experiment with Locutus went south. A learning experience, if you will.
That said, it would also make more sense to me if the SB was designed to appeal as much to its target audience as possible, so while a queen might make sense with regard to Picard and Data, I think it's regrettable that we never got a king with regards to Janeway and others...
...unless you want to read subtext into the notion of the Borg using a female avatar to attempt to seduce Janeway and Seven. I'm okay with this reading.
That said, it would also make more sense to me if the SB was designed to appeal as much to its target audience as possible, so while a queen might make sense with regard to Picard and Data, I think it's regrettable that we never got a king with regards to Janeway and others...
...unless you want to read subtext into the notion of the Borg using a female avatar to attempt to seduce Janeway and Seven. I'm okay with this reading.
I don't see it that way. We would still be having this conversation. Whether the Borg are physically insectoid is separate from the question of whether a queen - that is, a "leader" - should have been introduced. Remember, the "hive" and "queen" are just metaphors in-universe too. In fact the word "queen" wasn't even spoken until Voyager. She isn't like an actual insect queen - she doesn't mate with or give birth to drones, and isn't even a true individual or leader. I don't think she is inconsistent with the concept of the Borg. She is, at worst, unnecessary.
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Specifically, the shipboard plot really draws from Aliens...almost beat-for-beat.
Picard in the Borg set-up was perfect and terrifying. Picard mutilated.
The Borg Queen was fine but she just kinda came across as too human. Fancyin' Data, smooching Picard.. It's not really very alien is it? It should be like the Sheliak (obviously without the legalspeak).
The Borg Queen was fine but she just kinda came across as too human. Fancyin' Data, smooching Picard.. It's not really very alien is it? It should be like the Sheliak (obviously without the legalspeak).
I can accept the Borg Queen. Way I see it, when she says she is the collective, that's a literal truth at that time. The Borg then on the Enterprise in the 21st Century had no link with the Borg of that time, thus she was a "mobile collective" in that situation who presumably would've been deactivated once the connection to the 21stC Borg was made. That's part of the reason Picard destroys the interplexing beacon, because it left the single point of failure in the Queen.
When you get to Voyager though....eh. Maybe she was assembled as a counter-measure against Janeway and her unorthodox form of attacking Borg but I'm not gonna loose much sleep over that.
When you get to Voyager though....eh. Maybe she was assembled as a counter-measure against Janeway and her unorthodox form of attacking Borg but I'm not gonna loose much sleep over that.
Which is fine, Frakes was always upfront about that and it was done well so who doesn't like a little homage every now and then?
Same collective dialog, but only one oddly attractive drone going through the motions (or TWO! Bom chicka wah wah!)
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