10 Events That Changed Star Trek Forever

"I've been looking through the personal log entries of all the Starfleet Captains who encountered the Borg. I've gone over every engagement, [...] every battle, every skirmish... " ~ Captain Janeway, searching for insight into the Collective.

When it comes to fighting the Borg, you might just need to imitate the greats (or 'doing an Ensign Hickman,' as it is also known) if you don't want to end up with a cortical node. Before Janeway, fewer had had as much experience with the cybernetically-enhanced creatures as Captain Picard and his crew.

In The Next Generation episode Q Who, Mr "Next of Kin to Chaos" transported the Enterprise-D 7,000 lightyears across the galaxy to face an enemy the likes of which Starfleet and the Federation had never seen. The "pitiful adversaries," as Q put it, of the Romulans and the Klingons paled in comparison to the new threat that awaited them in the shape of a cube. Whilst there had been murmurings of their existence in the Federation prior to this incident, and indeed you can argue that human knowledge of them goes all the way back to First Contact in 2063 and the NX-01 skirmish in 2153, this was the first time a Starfleet vessel had met the Borg Collective proper (and made it out unassimilated).

The Hansens, with the little information they had at the time (presumably a good deal of it from the El-Aurian survivors of the Lakul ), set off to search for the Borg in 2347. They, however, followed a Borg cube into the Delta Quadrant and were assimilated in 2350, some 14 to 15 years before the destruction of various outposts along the Neutral Zone and the Enterprise-D's eventual encounter.

Arguably, no single adversary has had more of an impact on Star Trek than the Borg, as Captain Janeway once again put it, "... from the moment Q flung the Enterprise into the path of that first cube to the massacre at Wolf 359 [with an assimilated Picard/Locutus leading the attack]".

After that devastating battle, Starfleet developed its first ever warship, The Defiant, to fight them, the crew of the Enterprise-D hesitated over Hugh and hindered Lore, and Voyager's history with the Collective would fill this entire article, ending in that 'crippling' neurolytic knock-out. The Borg were also a predominant feature of Star Trek: Picard seasons one and two, and who knows what the ramifications of the Jurati/Borgati collective side-project, and the mahoosive transwarp conduit, will be. We might need an entire spin-off series to find out!

Let's also pause, here, to honour the wonderful Annie Wersching who sadly passed away in January 2023. We will remember her for her delightfully dastardly performance as the Borg Queen in Picard, and as Liana in Star Trek: Enterprise's season one episode Oasis.