10 Reasons Why Star Trek: First Contact Ruined the Borg

10. The Borg Queen

We€™ve danced around it long enough. Perhaps the worst villain in the history of Star Trek and the most unnecessary element of this film is the Borg Queen. I have nothing against Alice Krige or her portrayal of the Queen, but come on. The Queen is completely unnecessary. To recap some of the points made, she completely makes Picard€™s assimilation six years ago unnecessary as she would have filled that role herself, she negates the purpose of the collective and, worst of all, she wants to get it on with Data. That€™s right. I€™m going to say it here. Her entire purpose in this film was an excuse for Data to get his rocks off and use his €œfully functional€ abilities and all of the €œmultiple techniques€ he€™s been programmed with. Well, okay, I€™m being extreme. Let€™s look at it this way, though. In this film she takes the collective to a period of time where Earth has inferior technology in order to assimilate humanity in the past. She cares more about the crew than the technology and she turns down Picard€™s offer to join her as Locutus once again. All of this stacks up to being motivated, as Picard was motivated, by revenge. The Borg are emotionless. They don€™t get the urge for vengeance. To reduce them to simple vengeance is to introduce a weakness that they would have purged through assimilation by this point. The Borg Queen, in one film, negated all of the previous appearances of the Borg, made one of the best episodes of the series completely irrelevant and with her very existence retconned Next Generation€™s most menacing villain to the level of minor nuisance that Data can take care of in 0.68 seconds. Speaking of that, if Data could have put an end to this the whole time, then why didn€™t he? It seems to me that a lot of this film was bluster and needless action/violence in order to fill enough time to justify the ticket price. All in all, I€™ll stick with "The Best of Both Worlds" as the premiere Borg story and leave First Contact next to Total Recall in the category of terrible movies that I happened to enjoy anyway---because after all, I am a Star Trek fan and I love each of the Star Trek films in its own way. What do you think? Was First Contact the film that ruined the Borg? How does it stack up against other films and episodes of the franchise?
Contributor
Contributor

A paragon of all things geek, by day Adam repairs computers for kids grades K-12 who go to school online. By night he writes articles about (mostly) Star Trek for What Culture as well as working on several creative projects (http://maddeningmuse.blogspot.com) He lives in Ohio with his Polyamorous life partner and their three children.