Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Borg

The Borg are Star Trek's most fearsome creation (sorry Klingons, sorry Khan), having conquered the franchise, if not the Alpha Quadrant, from cube one and Q. Since, the cybernetically enhanced species has sunk its tubules down so deep that you'd be excused for feeling at least a little assimilation weary, but even in their weakened last of The Last Generation, they still proved a formidable and thrilling enemy. 'Last' is no doubt not the end either, and not just because there's another, differently managed, Collective out there waiting at the gates. As we've seen before, only a handful of nanoprobes and/or a few frozen drones are needed for the Borg to begin again.

The Borg are equally what differentiated Star Trek: The Next Generation from its predecessor, with the assimilation of Jean-Luc as the turning point. History will never forget the name Locutus. They've also become a veritable pop-culture phenomenon in their own right — their 'culture' adapted to service all. Resistance has never been more expensive!

However, despite the Borg's primary goal to 'get everywhere,' reflected in their number of on-screen appearances over the years, our general knowledge of them remains fairly narrow. In other words, there's still a lot more left to assimilate. It would be prudent to set your phasers to a rotating modulation and take some of that neural suppressant The Doctor devised just in case. The desire to know more needn't end with a cortical node.

Head Writer/co-executive producer Maurice Hurley was firmly a part of the chaos and infighting that plagued the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but you can't reproach the man one thing — he (pretty much) invented the Borg!

As quoted in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, Hurley was unhappy with the "waste of time" Ferengi and so put his mind to concocting a new, properly menacing antagonist for the series. What he came up with was a (literal) race of insects, but that was far beyond the budget. Instead, insect became cyborg, a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism first used by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in an article in the September 1960 issue of Astronautics. Cyborg then became Borg.

Despite the changes, the now electrified species still held true to their entomological origins. As Hurley stated in Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages:

The Borg are a variation of an insect mentality. They don't care. They have no mercy, no feelings towards you. They have their own agenda and that's it. If all of them die getting there, they don't care.

Of course, as the Borg were developed further, the insect association would be made more explicit through terms such as 'drone,' 'hive mind,' and not least in the introduction of the Borg Queen bee (or ant if you prefer) in Star Trek: First Contact.

Speaking of insects…