Do you "accept" the Borg Queen?

[Shawnster]

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.

Can you explain what you mean, because I believe it to be the exact opposite. The Borg assimilated Picard specifically so they would have a unified face and voice to present to humanity. Picard was the face of the Borg for or to humanity. Picard spoke for the Borg and gave humanity someone to speak back to.

If he was the face of humanity to or for the Borg, he would have stayed human and not been assimilated. He would have been used by humanity and the Federation to speak for them to the Borg. At least, that is how I take your sentence.

Please clarify.

 

[tharpdevenport]

He was a face of humanity for the Borg, not 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.

Can you explain what you mean, because I believe it to be the exact opposite. The Borg assimilated Picard specifically so they would have a unified face and voice to present to humanity. Picard was the face of the Borg for or to humanity. Picard spoke for the Borg and gave humanity someone to speak back to.

If he was the face of humanity to or for the Borg, he would have stayed human and not been assimilated. He would have been used by humanity and the Federation to speak for them to the Borg. At least, that is how I take your sentence.

Please clarify.

The Borg said it themslves in the episode:

Your archaic cultures are authority driven. To facilitate our introduction into your societies, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.

He was the face of humanity for the Borg to help facilitate the assimilation. It's kind of like modern progressives -- they think if they just put the right face to it and say the right words, everybody will realize they've been the idiots all along.

On the other hand you have a face of the Borg for humanity, as we saw with 7 of 9. She spoke for the Borg and was a liason, while Picard spoke on behalf the Borg for humanity to get their acceptance. One was a face for humanity, ther other is just the Borg puttign their own guy forward to reiterate what they've already said.

 

[Shawnster]

The Borg said it themslves in the episode:



He was the face of humanity for the Borg to help facilitate the assimilation. It's kind of like modern progressives -- they think if they just put the right face to it and say the right words, everybody will realize they've been the idiots all along.

On the other hand you have a face of the Borg for humanity, as we saw with 7 of 9. She spoke for the Borg and was a liason, while Picard spoke on behalf the Borg for humanity to get their acceptance. One was a face for humanity, ther other is just the Borg puttign their own guy forward to reiterate what they've already said.

So we're saying the same thing only with different words. The Borg took Picard so that Picard could reprenset the Borg in dealing with humans.

(Which still shows how humancentric the writers are... but that's another topic)

 

[Emperor Norton]

If I have not mentioned it, I rationalize the Borg Queen as having been the last survivor of an earlier iteration of the Borg. A drone forced to become a collective of one, a "We" of "I", who then slowly rebuilt the Borg again. But that's just my headcanon.

 

[cultcross]

I see the Queen as the physical manifestation of the hive mind - 'the one who is many'. In First Contact this works (apart from the idea that killing the Queen kills all the other Borg, but, hey, they were running out of film time) and also helps with the idea that she can be anywhere at the same time, but on Voyager they portray her as a hierarchical leader instead, which she explicitly said she wasn't.

 

[DonIago]

Yeah, it kind of felt like the more they showed her on VOY the more human she became. Doesn't she even end up verbally ordering other drones around in one of her final appearances?

 

[Emperor Norton]

Yeah, it kind of felt like the more they showed her on VOY the more human she became. Doesn't she even end up verbally ordering other drones around in one of her final appearances?

It could be rationalized as that order being like the brain ordering the arm to move. A manifestation only.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I see the Queen as the physical manifestation of the hive mind - 'the one who is many'. In First Contact this works (apart from the idea that killing the Queen kills all the other Borg, but, hey, they were running out of film time) and also helps with the idea that she can be anywhere at the same time, but on Voyager they portray her as a hierarchical leader instead, which she explicitly said she wasn't.

Maybe she's gone rogue, a program that took on a "life" of it's own?

 

[STR]

BQ works not as an actual queen, but as a another method to assimilate. The Borg assimilated thousands of species, you think they didn't come across the concept of charisma or manipulation? She (at least as originally portrayed in FC) was exactly that. Just one specialized drone among many.

You'd never use psychology when you could simply brute force. But when the direct route is too costly, indirect becomes the most efficient route. The problems pile up if you take everything the Queen said to Data (or even Picard) at face value. Picard wasn't going to end up as anything other than a drone. Data was always going to be obsolete in the new order, but only after he unlocked the Enterprise and the Phoenix was destroyed.

As for Voyager, I can't comment. They took the "Borg Queen" idea and ran with it literally. Like a lot of Voyager, it was not the best route to take.

 

[Vandervecken]

Wouldn't the existence of the Borg Queen make the Borg more vulnerable? It's someone to talk to--and also someone to coerce, or even worse. For example--let's say the Borg had come to Sargon's planet (Return to Tomorrow) and came within range of those globes; well they'd probably bring the globes aboard a cube. I don't necessarily see one of them somehow possessing and invading the entire Collective, although that's another freaky thought. But surely possessing the Queen would have been within their power, and I can see a wily Henoch type getting within Queen range. Or, again, the prisoners of Mab-Bu VI (TNG, Power Play). Or the Zetarians. Any incorporeal entity capable of possessing others' corporeal forms and of suppressing or even evicting the rightful mentalities.

There have to be more of these. And the Queen presents a handle on the whole collective.

 

[Ghel]

Just for chuckles. . . perhaps the Borg Queen is some side effect of the issues caused by "Hugh." Granted, Picard "remembers" the queen from when he was assimilated, but he also still has Borg tech in his brain and still hears their "song." Perhaps it's a planted memory. That way the timeline looks like this... Borg are only interested in tech when we first meet them. At some point they assimilate a more "person-centric" race so that they are interested in assimilation more than tech by BOBW. Geordi and co meet Hugh and teach him, individuality, somehow bypassing whatever assimilation firewalls/filters protect the Borg from major changes. This leads to major disruption including Lore's band of misfits, but perhaps it causes trouble for the Borg on a wider scale, which can only be "solved" by pushing the individuality into one queen. Slowly, even this solution begins to backfire as the queen becomes more and more of a monarch rather than just a voice for the collective. (Of course, this is done from memory so could be slightly off.)
In a more real-world setting, the early Borg were simply a "force of nature" adversary similar to zombies. To continue to use them as an antagonist, creating a thinking, plotting mind behind the relentless waves was probably inevitable.