Skip to main content

star trek - What happens if the Borg queen dies?


In the television series STG, Vogager and movies there has always been a Borg queen character. While the Star Trek wiki has plenty of information about the history of the character. I'm still unclear as to a couple of things regarding the queen.



  • Is the queen we see in the different shows and films all the same queen?

  • Could the Borg have more then one queen? or is it split into multiple hives?

  • Do the Borg replace a queen if she dies, and if so how is one selected?



Considering that the Borg is a collective mind. How could it be possible to single out a single drone to be either promoted to queen or assimilated into that role. That in my mind would conflict with the nature of a collective. Since the individual does not exist, then how can one be selected.


Borg Queen



Answer



The Borg Queen really can't die.


The Queen isn't so much an individual as the collective personality of the Borg. 'She' has actually been killed multiple times. It's nothing but an inconvenience - the body she inhabits and speaks through is just another drone. When she died at Picard's hands, the local Borg she had collected under her direct control became leaderless - at that point, she functioned as the central node of their limited Collective (those Borg were not joined with the Collective of the past - they were too far away).


It's possible, as I've speculated in other answers (which I will link, when and if I find them) that the Collective did not initially have a personality 'in charge' of it - the Queen references her species at some point. Now, though, it does. It's possible that all the 'bodies' the Queen wears are cloned (perhaps from her initial DNA) to give her a consistent face and form.


The destruction of the Queen's current body would not be a serious long-term problem for the Borg - there's no chance they would have survived this long if they made the mistake of not backing up their vital systems. Killing a single drone (even if the Queen is inhabiting it) won't kill the Borg, ever. What does occur is a temporary and local loss of cohesion - the Borg Queen seems to take over function as a local central node for nearby drones. This makes sense - she's usually well-defended, she doesn't take a physical body except when there's an urgent matter, she cuts the communication loop significantly by localizing the Borg network, and by having direct control over the local network, the Queen has all the data on the local situation immediately at hand. This is what she did in First Contact, since the time-traveling drones were cut off from the Collective she took over as the central node, essentially becoming the Collective for the Future-Borg (and new assimilations).


If you kill the Queen the Borg in the immediate vicinity will be cut off (briefly) from the Collective, until they can reestablish the connection. The Borg 110 light years away, in the process of assimilating a starship? They're not affected in the least.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l

the lord of the rings - Why is Gimli allowed to travel to Valinor?

Gimli was allowed to go to Valinor despite not being a ring bearer. Is this explained in detail or just with the one line "for his love for Galadriel"? Answer There's not much detail about this aside from what's said in Appendix A to Return of the King: We have heard tell that Legolas took Gimli Glóin's son with him because of their great friendship, greater than any that has been between Elf and Dwarf. If this is true, then it is strange indeed: that a Dwarf should be willing to leave Middle-earth for any love, or that the Eldar should receive him, or that the Lords of the West should permit it. But it is said that Gimli went also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel; and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him. More cannot be said of this matter. And Appendix B: Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf . And when that sh

fan fiction - Does the Interdict of Merlin appear in original Harry Potter canon?

In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky a concept called the ' Interdict of Merlin ' appears: (all emphasis added) Chapter 23: His hand on the doorknob, Harry Potter already inside and waiting, wearing his cowled cloak. "The ancient first-year spells," Harry Potter said. "What did you find?" "They're no more powerful than the spells we use now." Harry Potter's fist struck a desk, hard. "Damn it. All right. My own experiment was a failure, Draco. There's something called the Interdict of Merlin -" Draco hit himself on the forehead, realizing. "- which stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard's notes they won't make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another. I couldn't find any powerful spells that we had the instructions for but couldn't cast. But if you can't get them out of old books,