The Borg Queen is the organizing mind behind the Borg Collective. Like the queen of an insect hive, she controls and coordinates all of the drones throughout the collective. She is clearly distinguishable from common drones, having a more elegant appearance and possessing individual behaviour. Unlike drones, the queen is capable of expressing emotions and desires; she has shown to be lofty, seductive and ruthless, and is willing to do anything to protect and enhance the collective.
Creation[]
In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Dark Frontier", the Borg Queen states that she was originally a member of Species 125, indicating that the Borg have been led by different queens over the centuries and that they are assimilated from different races. The exact criteria for producing a queen is unknown, but it has been speculated that females from certain species possess a superior level of mental processing, allowing them to establish order amongst the chaotic chorus of the billions of voices within the collective.
Another possibility shown in the Pocket TNG novel "Resistance" is that the Borg select certain drones within the collective and have them upgraded via a "Royal Protocol", infusing the biological tissues with "royal jelly" and replacing the cybernetic machinery of the standard drone with the mechanical body of the queen.
History[]
Star Trek: First Contact[]
The first appearance of the Borg Queen was in the eighth Star Trek film, First Contact. In the year 2373, the Borg Queen personally led an invasion of Earth and destroyed several Starfleet ships as they approached the planet. Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E - defying Starfleet's orders - arrived to turn the tide of the battle and took command of the fleet. After a coordinated attack on a single section of the Borg's cube, the battle appeared to be over. However, a small sphere-shaped ship was launched from the cube just before it exploded.
The sphere created a temporal vortex and travelled back in time to 2063: the year that humanity made its first warp flight and made first contact with the Vulcans. The Borg intended to stop Zefram Cochrane's warp flight and assimilate humanity before they could ever become a threat, but the Enterprise-E followed them back through time and managed to destroy the sphere. Before the sphere's destruction, the Borg Queen and a contingent of drones transported to the Enterprise without being detected. First they took control of the engineering section and began to systematically assimilate the rest of the ship deck by deck.
Captain Picard and his crew attempted to halt the Borg's advance, but several crewmen were lost, including the android science officer Data. Data was captured and was interrogated by the queen personally, who attempted to access Data's neural net in order to decrypt the security codes that stopped her from taking control of the Enterprise's main computer. In order to subvert Data to her will, the queen had living tissue surgically grafted to parts of his body and face and was apparently able to seduce him. As well as to gain his knowledge, the queen also wanted a counterpart, a consort of sorts that would stand by her side and rule the Borg with her. She had tried to make Picard into that equal before by turning him into Locutus during the Borg's first invasion, but he had resisted and became just another drone.
When Picard tried to rescue Data, Data refused to go with him and obeyed the queen's command to stop the Enterprise's self-destruct sequence and decrypt the main computer. However, Data was not connected to the Borg collective mind and operated out of his own will, pretending to be loyal to the queen until he intentionally missed firing on Cochrane's warp rocket, the Phoenix. Revealing his betrayal, Data smashed one of the warp core's plasma coolant tanks which quickly flooded the engineering bay. All of the Borg who came into contact with the gas had their flesh components liquefied and Data immediately lost the skin that had been attached to him. Picard tried to remain above the gas and the queen tried to kill him, but Data then arose from the fog of coolant and pulled the queen down with him. As the queen's flesh melted off her, she screamed in rage and agony and all the Borg drones remaining on the Enterprise were killed by having their connection to the queen so forcibly severed.
After Picard vented the plasma coolant from the room, he plucked the Borg Queen's severed head from her inactive exoskeleton. The head still twitched with life, until Picard snapped the queen's spinal cord, ending her. Because the queen's death took place outside of her own timeline, no lasting damage was inflicted on the Borg back in the 24th century, and likely the collective would have activated another queen before sending one back through time.
Star Trek: Voyager[]
The crew of the USS Voyager discovered the existence of a Borg Queen after reviewing research data left behind by the Hansens, who had studied the Borg over a period of three years. When Voyager's crew were preparing to initiate a plan to board a damaged Borg ship to steal a transwarp coil, the Borg Queen contacted ex-drone Seven of Nine and offered her an ultimatum: rejoin the collective or Voyager will be destroyed. Seven decided to surrender to the Borg and remained on the sphere whilst Captain Janeway and the rest of the away team escaped to Voyager. The sphere then took her to the central Unicomplex in the heart of Borg space where she met the queen herself.
The queen revealed that Seven had been planted on Voyager deliberately in order to gain knowledge and experience from an individual perspective so that the Borg would have a new advantage the next time they attacked the Federation. She then kept Seven at her side as she led an invasion against the home planet of Species 10026, forcing Seven to aid them in their assault.
After they returned to the Unicomplex, the queen commanded Seven to help develop a biogenic weapon that could infect a planetary atmosphere with a Borg nanovirus. This weapon's first intended target was Earth. Seven refused to help the Borg assimilate her own race and the queen was prepared to turn Seven back into a drone. Before Seven's assimilation could be carried out, Captain Janeway and the Delta Flyer arrived in the system using the transwarp coil they had stolen. Janeway beamed aboard the Unicomplex and held the Borg Queen at gunpoint as the Flyer crew attempted to extract her and Seven of Nine. The rescue was successful, but the queen's diamond ship pursued the Flyer through transwarp. The Flyer managed to return to Voyager, which then unloaded a torpedo volley on the transwarp conduit's aperture, collapsing it. The Borg diamond was destroyed, but it is unknown if the queen was even aboard.
Over a year later, the crew of Voyager would confront the Borg Queen again as she oversaw the eradication of several mutant drones within the collective. These mutants were able to access a virtual reality within the collective called Unimatrix Zero where they could exist as their individual selves during their regeneration cycles. Kathryn Janeway and Seven of Nine intervened by encouraging the Zeroes to rebel against the collective and helped them to do this by developing a nanovirus that would let the Zeroes retain their individuality upon awakening from their regen cycles. Janeway, Tuvok and B'Elanna Torres were able to release the virus into the collective by intercepting a Borg tactical cube and letting themselves be assimilated. A neural suppressant allowed the three to remain individuals upon assimilation, and so the Borg Queen could neither control them or detect them.
With their Borg implants in place, the trio accessed the cube's central plexus and downloaded the virus, which instantly spread throughout the collective and freed thousands of drones. Tuvok's neural suppressant wore off and he succumbed to the queen's will, revealing Janeway's location. Janeway was captured and the queen demanded that she help scrub the virus from the hive-mind, and even commanded several Borg ships to self-destruct and kill the rebel drones aboard. Janeway told the queen to visit Unimatrix Zero herself if she was serious about negotiation. The queen did so, but was unimpressed and refused to back down. She threatened to release a modified version of the Zeroes' nanovirus into Unimatrix Zero that would kill all of the rogue drones unless they surrendered to the collective for re-assimilation.
Janeway was allowed to contact Voyager to propose this so-called compromise, but Commander Chakotay and Seven of Nine took a different approach: they warned the Zeroes and told them to leave Unimatrix Zero before the virus could be deployed. Seven then initiated a program to disrupt the interlink frequency to Unimatrix Zero, destroying the construct completely without sacrificing the Zeroes. The Zeroes remained free and Janeway, B'Elanna and Tuvok were rescued just before the Borg Queen initiated their cube's self-destruct system.
In the final Voyager episode "Endgame", the Borg Queen personally monitored Voyager as it attempted to breach a nebula concealing a Borg transwarp hub. She was approached by Admiral Janeway - a future version of Kathryn Janeway - who took her shuttle into Borg space and infiltrated the primary Unicomplex. Using a neural interface to communicate with the queen, the admiral offered the queen her future anti-Borg tech in exchange for allowing Voyager to use the transwarp network to return home to Earth. However, the queen had detected the admiral's hidden shuttle and beamed her into her central chamber. The queen assimilated the admiral, who had administered a neurolytic pathogen into her system prior to setting off from Voyager. The pathogen - introduced directly into the collective's nerve centre - quickly destabilized the hive-mind and began disrupting systems all throughout the Unicomplex and the Borg's fleet. The queen herself began to malfunction and her body began to fall apart. Her final command was for a sphere ship to pursue Voyager and destroy it before it made it home. The sphere failed and the Borg Queen perished as her Unicomplex self-destructed. With this defeat, the Borg were crippled, seemingly beyond recovery.
Star Trek: Picard[]
In the third season of Star Trek: Picard, it is revealed that the Federation have had no contact with the Borg since 2378, when Voyager had returned to Earth. In 2401, Admiral Picard and his former crew once again encounter the Borg, who had secretly been working with a group of rogue Changelings in an effort to destroy the Federation.
In the series' final episode "The Last Generation", Picard meets with the Borg Queen aboard her cube. This Queen had been reduced to a humanoid upper body fused to various mechanical tendrils extending from the walls. She revealed to Picard that the Collective had been nearly annihilated thanks to Admiral Janeway's neuralytic pathogen, but her consciousness survived in this body and sought to build a new Collective.
Throughout the third season, the Borg had been operating from behind the scenes, employing Vadic and her group of rogue Changelings in order to capture Jack Crusher, son of Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher. Prior to hunting Jack, the Changelings had infiltrated Starfleet and had made adjustments to the Federation's transporter technology, storing Borg genetic code retained from Picard during his time as Locutus. This code was now a standard part of all transporter technology within the Federation and would be incorporated into everyone who used a transporter. While not dangerous in and of itself, when Jack later confronted the Queen aboard her cube, he was connected to a beacon aboard the vessel which began transmitting the neural signal he had previously been using to take control of other individuals. This signal activated the dormant Borg DNA in every Starfleet officer under 25 years old, effectively assimilating them. Under the Borg's control, the assimilated officers began hunting and killing everyone who hadn't been affected by the signal.
Having taken control of all of Starfleet, the Borg Queen directed them in an assault against Earth. However, Picard and his old crewmates hijacked the restored USS Enterprise-D from the Fleet Museum, since it was not connected to the rest of the fleet and would not be vulnerable to the Borg's assimilation signal. The Enterprise found the Queen's ship hiding within the gases of Jupiter and Picard, Worf and Riker beamed aboard in search of Jack. When Picard found Jack, he had been transformed into Vox of Borg, the voice of the Collective, and was directing the actions of the assimilated fleet. The Queen declared to Picard that her new Borg would destroy the Federation just as they had destroyed her old Collective.
Picard attempted to disconnect Jack from the Borg beacon, but the Queen warned him that doing so would cause fatal neural shock in Jack. Instead, Picard severed a cable and plugged himself into the Collective hive-mind, his consciousness meeting with Jack's. Inside the Collective, Jack explained how he had felt different all his life and had wished to find purpose and belonging, and told Picard that he had found it with the Borg and wanted to stay with the Collective. Unwilling to let his son go so soon after meeting him, Picard decided that he would stay as well. This stirred Jack's familial emotions as he was unwilling to let his father sacrifice himself like this. Thus, Jack was able to disconnect himself from the Collective and Picard.
The Borg Queen became enraged by Jack's betrayal, but was in no state to do anything about it. While Picard and Jack had been linked to the Collective, the Enterprise had flown into the cube's superstructure and fired on the Borg's beacon, triggering a chain reaction that would destroy the vessel. Fortunately, the Enterprise appeared above the Queen's chamber just in time and transported Picard, Jack, Riker and Worf out before exiting the cube. The Borg Queen screamed in rage as the cube exploded around her, destroying her and ending the threat of the Borg once and for all.
Attributes and abilities[]
- Physiology - The genetic background of a Borg Queen probably differs between them since each was likely assimilated from a different race. The queens that have previously appeared have looked largely identical; everything below the collarbone has been discarded, the head and shoulders being the only parts of the original body left. The head, shoulders and spinal cord are housed in a robotic exoskeleton that has hooks in its collar that anchors the head in place. When regenerating, the queen's head is housed in a special compartment above her command chamber, and her body is disassembled and mounted on an assembly frame. When active, the frame reassembles the body and the queen's head is lowered into its cradle via a pair of tube-like cranes. Like all Borg, the queen's flesh is completely hairless. Her cortical implants are external, protruding from the back of her skull.
- Neural network - The Borg Queen manages all the trillions of voices from all the minds within the collective, deciphering specific messages and pinpointing exact locations anywhere in the galaxy in an instant. With a thought, she can issue commands to her drones, though she has been known to give verbal commands to drones in her immediate vicinity.
- Assimilation tubules - Though rarely in a position to use them, the Borg Queen has a pair of assimilation tubules built into her hand that release nanoprobes into a victim's bloodstream, rewriting their DNA and forming implants that allow her to seize control of them, adding their thoughts to the rest of the collective.
- Force-field generation - The Borg Queen is capable of conjuring force-fields within her immediate vicinity in order to prevent enemies from attacking her.