Star Trek 101: What is/are The Borg?

The Borg, a collective race of cyborgs, figure as a villain in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise, and in the 1996 motion picture Star Trek: First Contact. An episode of Enterprise was planned that featured the creation of the Borg Queen, but was never made because the series was cancelled.

The Borg have a collective consciousness ("the Collective") into which each member, or Drone, is linked. The Collective operates across subspace ensuring that each member receives instructions at all times. The Borg mission is to find and assimilate other races, and especially other technologies, into their ever-growing Collective.

Because of this constant assimilation of technologies, the Borg can upgrade technology without the process of trial and error used by normal species, and individual or group attachments to or interests in a way of doing things are simply not a factor. The Borg automatically discard an inefficient technology when they assimilate a better one.

The Borg first appear in the Next Generation episode "Q Who?" in which the omnipotent entity Q transports the Enterprise-D into Borg territory as an object lesson in vulnerability. In the third and fourth season Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is temporarily assimilated into the Borg as a specialized entity called Locutus, who can communicate with humans and speak for the Borg.

Picard-as-Locutus gave a face to the Borg, but the original idea of the Borg as a hive mind with no centralized hierarchy was altered more radically for the movie Star Trek: First Contact, which features a Borg Queen played by Alice Krige. On the one hand the Borg Queen concept carries out the insect metaphor of the Borg--individuals serve a collective with a "queen" the way bees or ants do--but chiefly the plotline was theatrical and gave other characters a Borg "person" with whom to interact. Seven of Nine, portrayed by Jeri Ryan on Star Trek: Voyager, was a Borg drone who escaped and regained individuality.

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