Movies - TV
The Idea For Star Trek’s Borg Queen Didn’t Come From The Show’s Writers
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
The Borg were first introduced on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (in the 1989 episode “Q Who”) and even made appearances when “Next Generation” moved into feature films.
Made of other species that had been kidnapped and assimilated into their collective, the Borgs’ minds were wiped and replaced with a singular, terrifying machine consciousness.
However, in “Star Trek: First Contact”, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise discover that the Borg don't have a group consciousness but are ruled by a malevolent, emotional Queen.
In the franchise’s oral history book, co-writer Brannon Braga revealed that the Borg Queen was invented by a Paramount executive named Jonathan Dolgen.
The Queen was a fun, slinky, terrifying movie monster, but she made the Borg less threatening; the previously single-minded cyborgs now had a leader one could negotiate with.
But this was why Dolgen invented the Queen. He felt the Borg were dull, amounting to little more than robot zombies, and needed a voice.
Braga recalled, “We thought, ‘S***, okay, it's like a hive. Like a bee colony. Let's make a queen,’ and it was probably the best invention we could have possibly come up with.”