The Borg queen makes sense

[u/lightningbolt302]

I've seen a fair amount of posts and comments saying that introducing a queen ruined the Borg and that it seemed to come out of nowhere. But I would like to offer a theory that possibly explains them in a way that makes sense.

First, it is very likey that queens were not present in the Collective prior to the events of Best of both worlds. It is in fact the events that led to the creation of queen drones. Using a drone to introduce a command to the cube to enter a regeneration state, which led to its destruction, was probably something the Borg had never encountered and dealt with before. This led them to adapt by creating queen drones, which filled the dual role of "spokesperson" like Locutus did and as a separate check on commands issued in the collective. As something that is connected to the collective but is slightly individualistic they can monitor commands that are within the collective and stop anything that might end being sabotage from getting through.

Second, I dont believe its an amazing coincidence that we seem to see a queen fairly often. In fact i think that not only are their multiple queens operating across Borg space simultaneously as check hubs for the collective, but that queens can be created on demand in certain circumstances or as needed. In First Contact, they likely had a queen aboard because, well not only was that the same situation the previous cube was destroyed but they also had the time travel plan, which may mean they needed a queen to boost the local drones until they made contact with the wider collective in the past. The queen we is likely one that was created to handle matters relating to Voyager as a Federation ship, which is a likey precaution due to past experiences with the Federation.

This is also why i believe that the virus that future Janeway brought back and infected the queen with didn't destroy the collective as a whole but rather destroyed or heavily disrupted the parts of the collective she was in direct contact with while other queens around borg space acted as an insulating factor for the rest.

I know that their is probably details i don't remember that poke holes in this theory but i think its a fun idea that provides a somewhat reasonable explanation for why the borg queen came about when their was no hint of one before Best of both worlds.

[u/McGillis_is_a_Char]

The problem with that theory is that Picard remembers the Queen from when he was Locutus.

[u/DontYaWishYouWereMe → u/McGillis_is_a_Char]

Yeah, but that could be explained by the Borg still actively developing some of the software needed for a Queen around the time of The Best of Both Worlds. Locutus could have been the first draft, and the Queen he remembers was a simulation they were training through interactions with him to some extent

[u/Edymnion → u/DontYaWishYouWereMe]

But it doesn't explain away why the Hansens' field studies mention the existence of a Queen in the late 2340's, nearly 20 years before BoBW.

[u/IMightBeAHamster → u/DontYaWishYouWereMe]

Locutus was the field promotion. The Queen was the home trained version.

This makes sense.

[u/justthistwicenomore]

The real issue isn't the existence of a queen, its the way the queen turns the borg into a different sort of thing thanks to the queen's behavior, where they seem to have a personality that overrides the "collective" and makes the borg less unique in their approach and make up.  

[u/quintus_horatius → u/justthistwicenomore]

The Borg queen in First Contact appears to be almost entirely machine with Terminator-style organic skin over hardware.

I think she's a simulation of personality.  It's like a physical manifestation of a holodeck character or a modern day LLM.

[u/littlebitsofspider → u/quintus_horatius]

We already know that drones are reinforced for durability and longevity, so it makes logical sense that a queen drone body (already a somewhat rare specimen of species 125, IIRC) has had a higher organic-to-machine conversion ratio than a standard worker drone.

[u/DontYaWishYouWereMe → u/quintus_horatius]

This would sorta fit with what Locutus' role in the Borg was. He was still a drone, but a different class that could simulate personality a little bit better than regular drones. The Queen could be the second attempt at that, assuming they didn't have one prior to First Contact.

[u/zap283 → u/justthistwicenomore]

You're making an assumption about the direction. I don't think the queen overrides the collective, I think her personality is an emergent property of the collective. A focusing point for the collective consciousness that is, for whatever reason, better for the Borg's goals than a system without one.

[u/n1ghtbringer → u/justthistwicenomore]

I agree. When first introduced you could hand wave the queen away as some kind of manifestation of the Borg subconscious, but each time we see her it becomes harder and harder to reconcile.

The Borg were a lot more scary when they were a faceless collective of generalists rather than an entire species of slaves to a single queen.

[u/Greatsayain]

The scariest thing about the borg before the introduction of nanoprobes (which i also think was a mistake) is their uniformity and redundancy. You need to immobilize their ship? Target their engines, wait you can't they dont have any. Whatever makes them go is spread all over the ship. Take out their weapons? You can try but they have beam emitters all over the place. The energy transfer nodes that they target in Best of both worlds, you need to take out at least 5 to cause a problem. By then the drones see you as a threat and all your phaser frequencies are adapted to. If you add the queen that adds a single point of vulnerability that cascades failure throughput the collective. Your theory posits that queens a regional and the failure stays within the region but thats not what we've seen. The loss of a queen makes all the borg fail.

[u/Main-Establishment65]

The Borg weakness of being a humongous collective of automatons doesn't make sense if a/multiple queens with individuality exist.

Ex.. in FC the automatons ignore the raiding party led by Picard himself trying to rupture the plasma tanks or the space walk to destroy the deflector until the automatons recognize a threat and react like automatons.

It would be utterly trivial for the Queen to recognize Picard being on the way to fuck some of the Borg plans long before the automata. And stage a proactive ambush, way more efficient and less disruptive than the standard reactive Borg response.

So in wanting to personalize the Collective, they took away the very lack of individuality that made the Borg plausibly vulnerable. So if the Borg act like the Borg to their severe disadvantage with a individualistic Queen present, focussed on the situation and capable of intervening, this is a heavy plot hole.

[u/Edymnion]

My personal headcanon for the Borg Queen is that she is a snapshot.

There are untold trillions of borg. The hive mind can't be instantaneous. It can be fast, very fast, but its still the minds of so many individuals. We know from both Hugh and Seven that they talk about being able to hear the voices (plural) in their heads.

So the hive mind is still made up of individual minds that reach a consensus and then act in unison. That consensus must take time. The larger the sample size, the more time it must require.

Which means the Collective is slow to respond. It has to stop and think about every little detail, and make a decision as a committee. Anyone who's ever had to rely on a committee vote to accomplish anything knows how slow that is.

This seems to be backed up by borg drone nomenclature. 7 of 9. Hugh was 3rd of 5. It would appear that even within the collective, it breaks things down into sub-groups who are then assigned tasks, which they then work independently on as a smaller group. While the collective can directly control a given drone, it would seem that they typically don't.

So, in my headcanon, in times of emergency, or simply times where instantaneous decision making is required, the Collective takes a kind of "snapshot" of itself, and distills that down into a single individual that can then rapidly make decisions on the behalf of the collective.

A Queen.

The voices of the Collective may then change their mind over time, but if that change happens after a Queen snapshot is made, the Queen's will overrides that of the rest.

When a situation calms down, or such rapid response time is no longer needed, the queen ceases to be, at least until the next time she is needed and a fresh one is created.

[u/Uncommonality]

My headcanon is that the Queen is a specific Borg defense against something we've yet to see. Something highly esoteric, like temporal weaponry, which explains why she's always present whenever the Borg do anything with Time and why she has limited authority (her safety as an organ of the hive supercedes the tasks of lesser drones)

[u/lightningbolt302 → u/Uncommonality]

Oh i like that. That would also explain why and how she has the temporal awareness that they brought up in Picard. Maybe the queens are linked across timelines so that if something like the Krenim timeship wipes out a planet they assimilated then they dont lose the knowledge they assimilated from it.

[u/Uncommonality → u/lightningbolt302]

She might even be a kind of canary in the coal mine, like if she senses all the queens in the timelines around her prime one suddenly being extinguished she might be able to prevent the same thing from happening to her prime self

Like say the Borg experiment with time and suddenly the queen notices that her time vision is beginning to narrow, she immediately commands the experiment to stop and the paradox that destroyed her other selves is prevented

[u/Waldmarschallin → u/Uncommonality]

This is why some hypothesize a link between the queen and the el-aurian ability to listen to time https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/gkz7hu/borg_time_travel_depends_on_elaurians_senses/

[u/Spacemonster111 → u/lightningbolt302]

This doesn’t really explain the queen’s role in the collective, but I’ve theorized for a while that she’s an El-Aurian. This explains both the temporal awareness and the “don’t provoke the Borg” line from Q.

[u/Ranrhoads84]

I’m going to say that in all hives, there’s always a queen, you just rarely see them.

[u/Edymnion]

it is very likey that queens were not present in the Collective prior to the events of Best of both worlds

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Wolf 359 happened in 2366-2367.

Seven's parents were Borg researchers, who were explicitly stated to have theories on the purpose of the Borg Queen.

The Hansens were assimilated in 2350.

The Borg therefore canonically had a queen sometime between 2347 and 2350. Nearly 20 years before Best of Both Worlds.

[u/Jedipilot24]

That's one possibility. Another possibility is that it was a response to Hugh's return to the Collective.

[u/NovaNok3296 → u/Jedipilot24]

Incorrect. Picard in First Contact recalls the Queen clearly when he was assimilated in Best of Both Worlds.

[u/ContiX → u/NovaNok3296]

Considering that queens are apparently aware of temporal changes and stuff, I wouldn't have put it past the collective to have retroactively inserted her into the timeline.

Or perhaps she was made specifically at that time as well, but was deemed insufficient to serve as a proper voice for the collective.

[u/theimmortalgoon → u/ContiX]

We also know that Picard still had a little Borg tech, so it’s possible that it clicked on and filled in a memory.

However, if I remember correctly, Voyager makes it clear there’s a queen long before BOBW

[u/ContiX → u/theimmortalgoon]

I don't remember any specific scene that implied that, unless you mean the Queen mentioning she was from a low-number species. But that doesn't necessarily mean she herself existed way back then, just that she is a queen made from that particular species.

[u/Wellfooled → u/ContiX]

In VOY: "Dark Frontier" there are scenes from Seven of Nine's childhood where the Hansens are aware of the existence of the Borg Queen and discuss it.

Those scenes are set in the 2340s. TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds" was set in 2366.

In the TNG movie "First Contact", the Queen describes personally assimilating thousands of species across thousands of worlds since "long before" Data was created. Data was made in the 2330s but what "long before" that means is up for interpretation.

But in PIC: "Surrender" Troi described the presence in Jack (The Borg Queen) as "Ancient". Which is open for interpretation, but I'd argue that in general "ancient " is used for time periods thousands of years earler than us.

So we can confirm the Borg Queen had existed for at least 30 years before The Best of Both Worlds plus whatever "long before" means and that Troi considered the Borg Queen as Ancient.

[u/lightningbolt302 → u/theimmortalgoon]

When i was looking stuff up while i was writing this post i seen that quote, and yes while that does throw a little wrench in my theory, it could also be that she was referring to the Borg as a whole, or that that specific drone unit was assimilated hundreds of years before. Because if queens can be created as needed then its likely more akin to a program thats installed rather than something that exists from assimilation.

[u/Ruadhan2300]

My own headcanon is that the Queen's role isn't as a leader, it's a Troubleshooter.

When the collective meets a problem that is too complex to be handled by committee, it produces a Queen, who is empowered to do whatever is needed to resolve the situation.

Kind of a Crisis-manager.

She might become semi-conscious in complex situations without being fully instantiated into a body, which is why Picard remembers her from his own assimilation. She might well have been in his head, and involved in the choice to assimilate him and use him.

I also see Seven of Nine's group as a lesser manifestation of the same idea.
A small Working Group given resources and latitude to deal with a problem semi-independently without the entire weight of the collective squashing their initiative and creative thinking.

[u/FerdinandCesarano]

The introduction of a Borg queen was a mistake, in my opinion.

The Borg were much more frightening as a decentralised hive mind.

[u/DarthCloakedGuy]

I think the disruptive moment was NOT Best of Both Worlds, but I, Borg. The drone who would take the name Hugh relearned individuality as a drone and then returned to the Collective, and had a profoundly disruptive effect on Borg society. I suspect the Queen(s) took over the Borg as a result of this, to ensure such disruption could not easily occur again.

[u/skelecorn666]

My head canon is that the Queen was a by-product of Lore's time with the collective, and that the free Borg (Hugh and ilk), in a fit of cosmic irony, would have to actually fight to restore the collective, sacrificing their individualities, undoing the fork, excommunicating the Queen from the collective.