Star Trek: 11 Things You Didn't Know About The Borg Queen

"All those voices talking at once. You must get terrible headaches."

As the Queen herself put it, "I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many". Far from being a contradiction in terms, the Borg Queen is instead probably the ultimate example of the majestic plural. The Queen is the only Borg to use the first person singular, and even has a distinct personality and emotions compared to the drones. She nonetheless maintains that "there is no 'me', only 'us'" and, so, in that sense, she is a Borg like any other and arguably is the (royal) 'we' of the Collective.

We have seen multiple different versions/copies of the Borg Queen over the years, leading to a lot of speculation as to just how this system of 'replacements' works, still largely unexplained in canon. The Queen was by Picard/Locutus' side on the cube headed to Sector 001 in The Best of Both Worlds ("Wolf 359 was an inside job!") and yet, despite that cube's destruction, was very much alive and assimilatin' during the events of First Contact.

Having dissolved in plasma coolant at the end of that movie, the Borg Queen nonetheless made a second appearance in the Star Trek: Voyager feature-length episode Dark Frontier. Alice Krige was unavailable to reprise the role for the episode and so Susanna Thompson, who had auditioned to play the Queen in First Contact, was hired.

Whilst this Voyager version was meant to be in the same line as Krige's incarnation, Thompson's Queen was also intended to be somewhat distinct. As Director Terry Windell commented in Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 1, issue 1, "Our Queen was obviously a different character, although she's still the Borg Queen". Thompson wore the same body suit as Alice Krige with only a few alterations made to fit, and the Queen's make-up got a bit of a re-touch. As Thompson noted, "They didn't want me to look as wet as Alice".

Thompson would play the Queen once more in the Voyager two-parter Unimatrix Zero, and Krige returned in the season finale Endgame. In season two of Star Trek: Picard, we would meet a different, but equally familiar, Borg Queen portrayed by the sadly missed Annie Wersching, and the character was then given a surprising twist by Alison Pill. Technically speaking, Seven of Nine was also the Borg Queen of her own mini-collective on the Artifact cube for a hot minute.

For her appearances in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, the Borg Queen was played by two people. Reprising the role, Alice Krige gave her immediately recognisable, deliciously devilish voice to the Queen, and it was Australian actress Jane Edwina Seymour who stood in on set with a tour de force, and bloody scary, performance as her body double.