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Is the Borg a collective?


GhostShadow
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The collective onsciousness of the Borg is well suited to their ideal of order and, above all, perfection. The purpose of the Queen in the collective is to maintain order and continuity among the billions of voices, much like the conductor of an orchestra. The borg, like the orchestra, although perfectly capable of functioning without the queen (conductor), work much better as a qroup with the added guidance. Its not exactly the same (obviously) but provides a good basis. You get the idea...

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I've always seen The Borg as the exact same thing as an Ant colony. The Borg pretty much fend for themselves, amongst themselves, but ultimatelly obey the queen when needed.

 

here's an article about ants and their collective state. pretty interesting read, when you replace the word 'ant' with 'borg', lol

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I thought of the Borg as sort of a distributed system right up to the point where they threw in a Queen... even Locutus was more of a figurehead representative and source of understanding for federation tactics than a real Borg 'commander'. I think it was a mistake on the writers' parts to make the Borg have a Queen...

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I've always seen The Borg as the exact same thing as an Ant colony. The Borg pretty much fend for themselves, amongst themselves, but ultimatelly obey the queen when needed.

 

here's an article about ants and their collective state. pretty interesting read, when you replace the word 'ant' with 'borg', lol

 

I agree. Think "bees" as well. After all, the collective was at times refered to as the "hive"...and the expression "the hive mind" was also used.

 

c4 B)

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The Borg was a collective when first created in TNG season 2 - and pretty much through out TNG run. But then First Contact introduced the principle of the Borg Queen, and that is where I think it went wrong.

 

I can understand that you can have a representative of a collective - such as Locutus or Seven of Nine, but the Borg Queen doesn't make sense in my mind.

"I bring order to chaos - I am the Borg"

 

I am wondering if this is another element of how the Borg evolved - as Seven of Nine mentions in Scorpion I think, that many of the Borg's records from a previous time was lost.

 

I wonder that if the Borg Queen was an attempt to stop the Borg by a race, which ended up being assimilated?

 

Either way though I really dislike the concept of the Borg Queen - it’s a failing I think of the TNG movies - in each movie they had to have an individual that Captain Picard had to play off against.

 

In Generations it was Soran

First Contact - Borg Queen

Insurrection - Ad'har Ru'afo

Nemesis - himself/Shinzon.

 

At least with TOS movies - they were a little more imaginative

The Motion Picture - a transformed space probe - VGER

The Wrath of Khan - Khan - although that actually referred to an earlier ep of TOS, and brought a small character and made him even bigger.

The Search for Spock - Klingons, Genesis planet

The Voyage Home - a Space probe

The Final Frontier - Sybok/alien floating head

The Undiscovered Country - which had a more epic story line and only focussed on General Chang towards the end,

 

But every TNG movie - had to have a lead enemy character to play off against - which is why I think they got worse after First Contact - they fundamentally became repeats of themselves.

 

I still think that the Undiscovered Country is the best Trek film by far. It has so many elements to it.

 

Anyway back to the point - the Borg are completely different from their first conception - and Voyager only went on to destroy the race even more.

 

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The way I see it, the "queen" is simply an embodiment of the Borg collective. A centralized location through which all thoughts are relayed. She is not, as the name "queen" implies, an individual who controls them, but rather, she IS them. The name "queen" is, I think, given to her only because it fits with the bee-related terminology which is always used when referring to the Borg.

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That's the thing about collectives... they ARE their own embodiment. They don't need a leader, or a centralized focus of existance. In introducing a 'queen', they lost the redundant decentralization of a collective, imho... and why would the Borg need a physical embodiment of the whole, anyways, when the whole collective IS the embodiment of the Borg? If they had stuck with the original concept of the Borg, a 'queen' would have been meaningless, redundant, and unnecessary. The We of the Borg really doesn't need an I... that was their strength, last I checked.

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Except that, according to Trek canon, it was NEVER that way. There was always a queen (and we, like those of the Federation, were simply led to believe otherwise), and the task for us, as fans, is to figure out how that works. I say that the collective is all the interconnected thoughts of all the Borg, intermingling and interacting with one another. However, much like with a computer, there is a central processor: the Borg Queen. She doesn't control the collective, but is rather the conduit through which it is all passed. Now, a more intersting question is whether there is more than one queen. We know that there have been at least two (the queen in First Contact, and the one from Voyager), but is there one created upon the death of another, or are there many of them at once?

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WAS there always a queen, or has revcon struck again? (revcon = "Reverse Continuity"... what is changed not only wasn't changed, but was always that way.)

 

That's just my point. When they say in Fairst Contact that there is a queen, then there always was a queen, and we just didn't know about it. They didn't actually change anything, because at no time were we told that there WASN'T a queen...

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I understand where the question is coming from. Why have a collective mind and then have a deciding one? If the BORG are one mind, then why do they need another to make the decisions? They don't need a concience, which is the only thing we have outside our brains to help us with decisions. However, I believe that if the BORG were real, the Queen would be there to solve the problem of single mindedness. This is probably not the case, as it is likely she is actually there so that the enemy of the Federation can have a character with... well character and personality to interact with the captain of enterprise and help explain the BORG plans to the audience.

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she "brings order to chaos" whatever that means.

 

I just think that whilst First Contact done a really nice job of "beefing" up the Borg effects wise - the notion of the Borg queen kind of destroys the premise of the Borg.

 

You could argue that Locutus was the Borg's response from assimilating humans in to the collective. The whole queen notion just rattles my cage. Not sure about you but I found the Borg in TNG far more interesting then those in VOY.

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I looked up collective on Dictionary.com and it said; "Of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group: a collective decision."

 

"acting as a group" this dosen't say any thing about a queen/leader/dictator/president or any thing like it. So I think that mabe the writers made a honest mistake...

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The Collective is an amorphous group by definition incapable of individual interaction. They needed a Borg character able to interact with the captain and/or crew on a personal level as a plot device. Whether or not you like the explanation, that is the only purpose of the Borg Queen.

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