I'm sure this has been posed before, but could the Borg's beginnings be V'ger, and is Illia the Borg queen? I've never understood why so many people seem to scoff at the notion of a Borg and V'ger connection.
No, not at all. That makes no sense for quite a few reasons. One, the Borg have been around for thousands of years. Two, the Borg are a hybrid of the organic and technological; the Ilia probe was 100 percent mechanical, merely mimicking biological functions down to the microscopic scale. (Two-A, V'Ger had no conception that organic beings were even life at all, so the converse idea that the Borg created V'Ger is just as much a non-starter.) Three, V'Ger, Decker, and Ilia merged into an entity that transcended this plane of existence -- that left the universe as we know it because V'Ger had already learned all it could about this universe and craved new knowledge. There's absolutely no reason why that transcendent entity would return to corporeal existence and start assimilating biological life. That would be like expecting a full-grown adult to regress to the womb. The Borg and V'Ger have absolutely nothing in common beyond having something to do with artificial intelligence. Everything else about them is profoundly different. That's why people scoff at the idea -- because it just plain doesn't make sense. It's looking at a vague, superficial similarity and ignoring the enormous differences.
It's been posed before that the "machine planet" V'Ger mentioned was the Borg. If you want an interesting read on the orgins of the Borg, David Mack's Destiny Trilogy is an excellent read.
Which doesn't make sense, as I said. Why would a species whose core philosophy is the merger of the biological and organic build a probe that was completely devoid of any prior knowledge or understanding of organic life? Why would they have been so generous as to send that probe out with the means to fulfill its mission of gaining knowledge, rather than just assimilating its tech and calling it a day? Not to mention that V'Ger's technology was immensely more advanced and powerful than the Borg's. V'Ger was at the pinnacle of advancement that any entity in the corporeal universe was capable of reaching. It was just one step away from evolving to the level of the Organians or the Q. Expecting the Borg to create something that extraordinarily advanced is like expecting an ancient Egyptian bronzesmith to whip up a warp reactor. It's just lazy thinking. It's going, "Oh, look, this thing's a machine and that thing's a machine, so maybe they're related," and not bothering to do the actual analytical thinking that would reveal how monumentally nonsensical the idea is. You might as well assume that Andorians are actually peacocks because they're both blue.
I wholeheartedly agree with Christopher. The only reason why people make the comparison at all is because both the Borg and V'ger's creators are machine life, as if there's only one machine race in existence in all of Star Trek. That's like saying that Ford Mustangs and Toyota Corollas must be built by the same car manufacturers simply because they are cars. The need to link two completely different things together (that's called the small universe syndrome, in case you were wondering) is a very bad habit that many Trekkies tend to do (and some writers, as Peter David once linked the Borg with the Doomsday Machine, despite the fact that yet again they had nothing in common...)
Now, that wasn't so bad, because he said in Vendetta that the Doomsday Machine had been created to fight the Borg. Which is actually kind of plausible. (And it addressed a plot hole in the original episode -- if the DM needs to eat planets to power itself, how did it make the journey between galaxies? It actually made more sense in the book, since it was built just outside our galaxy for security reasons.) Where the small-universe syndrome came into play in Vendetta was when he linked the Doomsday Machine to the Preservers for no good reason. It wasn't even proven within the text; one character pulled the suggestion out of thin air, a pure guess with no basis, and from then on (and even in the eventual sequel) it was treated as gospel. Too many fans and writers treat the Preservers as the go-to Ancient Race, even though what's actually shown onscreen doesn't support it. Their one known act, resettling endangered Native Americans, would've had to be no earlier than the 1700s, since they wouldn't have been endangered before European settlement began in earnest; so the tendency to portray the Preservers as super-ancient, even millions or billions of years old, makes no sense. And they can't have been all that advanced or even that smart if their idea of "preserving" a population was to stick them in the middle of an asteroid field with only one deflector generator as a defense. If they were actually the godlike superrace often assumed, they could've surely found or built a safer planet. But the problem is that we know virtually nothing about the Preservers, and in the absence of actual information, speculation tends to run wild. The problem is that those speculations too often conflict with the evidence we do have.
Christopher, I wholeheartedly agree with all of your posts in this thread. I am against the idea of a V'Ger/Borg connection for the reasons you said, and I agree with you about the Doomsday Machine idea too.
Amusingly, the original episode had a lot of that, too. The very idea of the DDM being a vengeance weapon is a wild guess by Kirk, and Peter David demolishes that justifiably enough. But the thing about the beast coming from outside the galaxy is an equally wild proposition by Spock, and furthermore something he could not plausibly know from the evidence presented (as the episode goes to lengths to establish that only a visit by a starship can reveal the destruction of a star system, and there's no chance of the heroes performing statistically sufficient numbers of visits to count out points of origin within our own galaxy). Since our heroes clearly encounter these wondrous if murderous things only once in their lifetimes - or in a hundred or a thousand lifetimes - even wild theories can naturally go unchallenged. But I'd take anything "established" about space monsters in "Doomsday Machine", "Immunity Syndrome" or "Obsession" with a holdful of salt. (The beast from "One of Our Planets Is Missing" might be more confidently known as Spock at least had the chance to do some melding...) Timo Saloniemi
Read William Shatner's novel The Return, for a fun story that links (albeit very tenuously) V'Ger to the Borg. But not in the way you describe.
I remember that novel - an interesting approach to the issue, and one that is tied nicely into the main story.