10 Things You Learn Revisiting Star Trek: First Contact For First Contact Day

To this day, the Borg Queen's entrance and introduction ranks as the greatest villain reveal in any of the Star Trek movies. It works on many levels. First, the audience hears only her voice coming from all around, the voice of the collective itself. We are left to sit with this for a while. Then, later in the film, Data observes the piping and hoses in the ceiling begin to move and the head and upper torso of the Borg Queen descends slowly, closer and closer to him before coming a rest in the waiting body, secured as clamps rise upward to pull the skin down into place.

It is both a highly creepy scene and one that is strangely sexual. This villain is more in control of her senses than any previous, fed by the experience of billions of drones around the galaxy. As she glides toward Data, she smiles and speaks in a sultry, seductive manner. We are the Borg she says. She goes on to help Data experience sensation as never before, offering flesh to touch and then her own lips to kiss. The scenes are dark, unsettling and undoubtedly sexy. Like the best villains that use their sexuality as a means of control, she seems to wrap Data around her little finger.

The Borg Queen would of course return in Star Trek Voyager, played by both Krige and Susanna Thompson - but it is here in this film that she is her most alluring, her most unsettling and her most evil. She is the Borg.