I'd rather there not be a Borg queen, but I can see why they introduced one - to answer the question of why the Borg so what they do and what gives them direction.
I haven't watched it since it aired, but Voyager seemed to indicate that every cube had a Queen on it and she could transfer herself to it should the need arise?
I found the introduction of the Borg Queen a really bad idea and IMO it is the start of the fall of the Borg as the Federation or indeed the Galaxy's biggest threat to civilizations. Oh I enjoyed First Contact as a TNG movie for a long time but now I am also starting to see the flaws in that. The Borg were somewhat restored in "Scorpion 1&2" but the decay continued again in "Dark Frontier" and subsequent Borg episodes, especially "Unimatrix Zero" and "Endgame" I prefer the TNG version, this nightmarish vision of technology and post humanism gone terrible wrong, an intelligence that thinks on such a different level, and that barely notices let alone acknowledges anything below it, and that sees other civilizations merely as resources to develop and collect. The only time it ever uses spokespersons is to directly communicate with you that your civilization is to be assimilated to service the Collective. I really have my doubt if this type of menacing Borg can ever be brought back as writers in general seem to have great difficulty using them. The latest Boldy Go comic series is just another example of someone not really getting the Borg.
Nope. The Borg were far more menacing as a faceless collective, an enormous object of dread. Borg cubes were more intimidating when they were so decentralized that they could still function even when mostly destroyed, instead of having that thingummy in the middle. (Or was that thingummy just in ST Elite Force? :-p)
Perhaps it's a little of both. Perhaps there is just one Queen for the collective, but she has 'avatars' on each cube, that can be killed without necessarily killing the queen herself. We see her body assembled on more than one occasion. We see evidence that the borg queen in Endgame can command multiple cubes. Picard is surprised in First Contact when he meets the queen he thought was destroyed because the cube she was on was. Then again, perhaps the entire question is moot. To paraphrase the queen's reply "we are small and think in such three dimensional terms".
The next time I have an itch for some awful-yet-hilariously-campy Trek, I clearly need to pass on season 1/2 TNG and stream some BQ Voy apperances instead. I don't think I've seen any of them since original airing. I remain impressed with the Queen in FC. Haaaaaaated the idea when I heard it, but they save it with a fantastic performance and absolutely perfect execution. It never should have worked, but it does. And then they had to go and push their luck...
Same here. The Borg were a force of nature driven by a collective mind and the odd compolsion to assimilate. Having a face for the Borg, in my opinion, was a lazy writer's way of over simplifying the Borg and giving the writer's more standard approaches to deal with and even solve them. If you drop the queen, how do you solve the problem of the Borg? The proposed program in "I, Borg" wasn't a gurantee, the Defiant -- designed for a Borg battle -- barely made it out of the battle in First Contact (in fact, if it hadn't been for Picard McGuffin tingly Borgsense, the Borg would have won), and there appears to be no grounds for reasoning with them. No there's a little bit of a challenge for the writers. Plus, over all, from designs to protrayal, I don't like what the Borg became from First Contacty through Voyager. I recall reading in a Star Trek magazine that a queen wasn't the original idea (one of several changed or nixed ideas for FC), but that the studio wanted a face to the enemy. Good writers can work with good material. For goodness sakes, we had an episode of "The Twilight Zone" that had a good portion with only one character, and then for another example on "Frasier" we had Niles' wife who got many jokes and eve nstorylines, all without never having been seen once. And as terrible as it is to remember, Shyamalan made a film trying to make trees and the wind scary. Or long ago we had Hitchcock make a film where birds were the protaganists and didn't speak at all.
Not sure how often you could use that before it feel apart at the seams though. It's scary but the danger is it would wear thin easily. That's exactly why I think TNG used the Borg sparsely, although even there they were never exactly silent. They had the automated voice, she became the more charismatic alternative, albeit in giving her the charisma they opened the door to imbuing the collective with a much more relatable personality which somewhat missed the point. I actually voted in favour of her but that was based on FC and not her subsequent appearances. Logically I tend to see her not as a leader or an avatar as such but the personification of the collective. It was an interesting concept on first presentation but in VOY it simply made the Borg seem less unique, less scary. Part of that was the writing, part the relative quality of performances, part simple repetition. Either way, with or without her the Borg should either have been used more sparingly, or with an overriding story arc over the course of the franchise. Use them less, or use them better.
That's where the studio made a crap decision, Borg with a face and a dialog is for big audiences who may not have seen the Borg before. Faceless Borg that won't have a discussion with you, that's TNG Borg. I guess the Borg wasn't a good villain for a movie? The Borg isn't apparently an enemy that can be used over and over again. And that's fine, because those few times they were around during TNG, it was good stuff.
Seems to me the way to use them more often would have been to make BOBW an extended arc, lasting over a few seasons, building the threat to a climax. Colonies disappearing, vague reports coming in, SF scrambling to make ready, populations starting to panic leading to civil unrest, political fallout throughout the federation, then the attack. What in fact happened was the two parter (some say three) we know and love was the climax but writers kept revisiting the idea, watering it down further each time.
Was that a reply to me, and if "Yes", I don't follow you -- could you explain? I don't know. Certainly not the way it was written, but a movie tying up the Borg might have been nice, but sadly Trek had to account for canon Voyager and all the shit they did with the Borg, so it would never really be final or tied up, or what ever was done, un-done in Voyager. The bad idea was to make Voyager, really.
Y main problem wasn't with the queen, or with reminding the audience that the drones hadn't been drones from birth, as it implied that Hugh was, but were mostly assimilated people who had once had regular lives. They would have got boring quickly if they'd remained as they did in the first episode where Q introduced them. What annoyed me most was their obsession with Species 5618 - humans. The queen had even told Seven of Nine that humans were nothing special with below average cranial capacity and musculature. So, why the priority given to assimilating us? My guess is that despite these flaws, humans, like the Borg, are highly adaptable, flexible, and versatile. It's like the Vulcan ambassador told the Starfleet admiral in Enterprise, that humans are not a one-note species like many others, who have one thing they really excel at, but suck at most everything else and are inflexible.
Partially, in that I get the scary silent nemesis thing but doubt that it could be maintained all that effectively over the long haul on it's own terms. It worked well in Q Who but even in BOBW we saw obvious signs of writers feeling the need to move away from it. Whether that's down to the quality if the writing or the concept having a limited lifespan is open to debate. If they were to be used more often I'd have preferred for them to be used as a plot point rather than outright adversary in any given episode, showing the farther effects of the Borg attacks, the effects on the wider galaxy, civil unrest, paranoia, planets ceding from the federation due to mistrust, etc.
Okay, I get you now. The thing is, it didn't need to work the long haul -- at the time it was just TNG, there was no indication D.S.9. was going to tackle it, and Voyager hadn't yet appeared. Plus, we can look back with foresight, knowing the show only lasted seven seasons, and the Borg rarely appeared, and even then some of the episodes were not Borg attacking Earth centric, like "I, Borg" and the two-part "Descent". Not only could they remain silent as an overall enemy, they did. Hugh was accidently findijg his humanity again, Descent had Lore re-wroking the Borg under his command, and I think that was it. I don't know what signs you are talking about -- the episode was jam-packed full of goodness with no signs of any struggle. The real question, I think, is what would have happened is Stewart had not signed on to continue and he was killed off -- what then with the Borg? I'm not opposed to some good writing that leads the Borg to communicate, I'm opposed to an overall face that leads the Borg and changes them. For all the Borg were, stood for, had aquired, and how long they'd been around, the Borg Queen was just another petty vindictive asshole -- just another cliched character with no depth of substance. Yes, that's a good idea. Plus it could have lead to more episodes and kept the Borg a silent force. The Borg went from an unrelenting force of nature that was cold and devoid of humanity, to a force that struggled to deal with Captain Janeway, relented, were more normalized and humanized and became a Halloween scare house with green lighting. All that was good about them as an opposing force, was drained from them much like the color of Picard's skin during "The Best of Both Worlds".
One of the best, my point is that Locutus was already a pretty big move away from the "faceless" force of nature
He was a face of humanity for the Borg, nto a face of the Borg for humanity, and it wasn't something they did to stray away, it wasn't Patrick Stewart was coming back, so they needed a way out.