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

Star Trek: Picard introduced us to a very different Borg Queen from the beginning of its second season. Looking more like she's about to work the runway and read you for filth than rumble your resistance, this queen — who had fused with Dr Agnes Jurati — was looking for peaceful cooperation with the Federation to prevent destruction of galactic proportions.

This wasn't the first time we'd seen a different sort of Borg in Trek history, however. In the Voyager season three episode Unity, Chakotay (and may-as-well-have-been-a-red-shirt Ensign Kaplan) come across a group of ex-Borg who, by the end of the episode, have formed a new kind of hive mind amongst themselves called 'the Co-operative' so they can get along with their rowdy neighbours.

Unity was also the first episode to show that the Borg as a whole had survived the destruction of their Queen in First Contact, which wasn't a given at the time. As reported in Star Trek Monthly, issue 24, there was debate as to whether the Borg should return at all after First Contact, with the film's co-writer Ronald D. Moore believing the death of the Queen and the other drones should have marked the end for the entire Collective.

And then along came Terry Matalas. What he had teased on Twitter in May 2022, he gave us in April 2023. At the climax of season three of Star Trek: Picard, we meet the Borg and their Queen very much post-Endgame, still crippled from The Janeways’ neurolytic pathogen. In the Picard finale The Last Generation, it is the Queen herself who states to Picard,

Until recently, there was no Collective left. There was only I. […] [Y]ou left us, poisoned. No worlds to consume, no roads by which to return. Just the cruelty to die by starvation and age.

In a similar manner to Annie Wersching's season two version, this Queen is tethered in dismembered form, reduced to draining the life out of her few remaining drones to survive, even consuming their necrotic tissue in this horror show that sends chills down the spine. “This place is a tomb,” Riker notes ominously.

With the help of the changelings, who also “shared the anger of a generation lost to Starfleet,” the Queen was seeking retribution and rebirth, “to take everything back from those who live like shattered glass”. The Queen created a new collective by assimilating the children of Starfleet through their genes. It’s all about the organic tech now, dude, and probably a lot of Instagram and TikTok too! With the Queen’s progeny Vōx at the helm of the hive, these Gen Z Borg are no longer just about assimilation, but annihilation!