New Series Idea: Borg Origins / Rise of the Queen

No thanks to the Borg. I don't need their origins, their reappearance or new powers of the week.

As a basic concept for a new SF series I'm all on board.

 

Voyager kind of covered the end of the queen in the finale. Even in bringing up the idea, I wasn't a fan either of the concept of the Borg Queen when she was first introduced, because it was yet another "humanizing" of an alien species where you had the Queen of a stoic & detached Collective expressing very human concepts (affinity, anger, spite, etc.) in a way that made her sound like any one of Picard's exes.

At the same time, I think it could be a new way to remake her and the Collective in intriguing ways that also incorporate all the things we liked about them when we were first introduced to them by Q. Given that the Borg also tampered with time, the options are out there.

 

The Borg have a lot of potential but they also have a huge problem: if they are beaten easily by the folks they are trying to assimilate, they look like chumps. Their whole "thing" is their almost-invincibility. That's why it was so damaging to them when they were overused on TNG and especially VOY.

So having a story about the Borg before they were invincible - but on the path towards it - could be the solution. There must have been a time when the Borg were just an biotech experiment gone wildly wrong. Some researcher on some alien world thought they were onto something great and then it just spiraled badly out of control. Maybe that researcher became the first victim of her own experiment - the original Borg Queen.

The problem with the Borg Queen concept is that a key aspect of the Borg's "thing" is that they are almost invincible because they lack any central control you can attack. The diffuse nature of the Borg is the scariest part. But if the Queen were simply a character from the early days, she could help personify the Borg threat without undermining it.

And then the story is how things go from bad to worse.

 

Voyager, for better or for worse, came up with details that would prohibit that kind of storyline, which is why I laid mine out the way I did, but it's certainly not a bad idea. In Voyager, the queen said she had been assimilated by the Borg as a child as part of species 125.

 

Yet an episode of Enterprise was considered for season 5 which would have featured Alice Kreige as a med tech on Enterprise NX-01, who gets assimilated and became the Borg queen.

They'd have just ignored any details that conflict with the story they're trying to tell. Like how Discovery ignores lines from TOS: "Balance of Terror" and all of ENT: "Affliction"/"Divergence"

 

Well, sticking with the Queen's own explanation in Voyager for now, it would be a neat twist if there was Q involvement on both sides. Q formally introduced the Federation to the Borg by whisking away the Enterprise to the Delta Quadrant for a get-to-know-you, but what if he had also whisked away the pre-assimilated Queen to Earth when she was still a child, and the only love she had ever experienced was there, before being returned to the Delta Quadrant? This kind of link might have made her think twice about doing the usual armada assault depicted in episodes like "Dark Frontier." The Q factor could be a variable to consider, giving new meaning to his declaration to Janeway: that if not for him, the Federation would've been assimilated.