Krige: The Queen WAS the Borg
3 min readAlice Krige (Borg Queen) came to the conclusion that the Borg were only an extension of the Borg Queen after reading Stephen Hawking.
As reported byStar Trek Magazine, her search for just who the Borg Queen was led Krige to Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “I came to the conclusion that the Queen was the Borg. Is the Borg. The Borg is an extension of her,” explained Krige. “I had read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking beforehand, and in the course of trying to find out who she was, I went out and got a copy of the video. Somewhere in it he says the old adage, ‘Energy is not created or destroyed.’ And I thought of the Borg Queen. She’s been around since the beginning of time, since the Big Bang or whatever. And she is the energy source behind the Borg. She is just the physical manifestation of that energy.”Krige also spoke about her Borg Queen costume. “I had some interaction on the mask with Scott Wheeler, who also did my old age makeup for my character on Skin,” said Krige. “For the Borg Queen, there were only two things I asked him for. He had sculpted in eyebrows and I asked him to take them away. I thought it would give her a fixed expression. The shape of the eyebrows was like Cruella de Ville and I didn’t want that painted on my face. The other thing was that my mouth was quite red. In contrast to the color of my skin, my lips looked redder. It’s almost an optical illusion. They had made my skin so pale that it stuck out. And there was a point when they wanted to damp down the color of my mouth. They thought it was too red. And Scott and I hung in there to be allowed to use the color of my own mouth.”
While the Borg may not have quite been around since the Big Bang, a history of the menace from the Delta Quadrant is included in an article in Star Trek Magazine. The Federation first ran into the Borg earlier than the recorded first contact courtesy of Q.
“History records that the Enterprise NCC 1701-D’s encounter with the Borg in System J-25 in late 2365 was humanity’s first encounter with the Borg. History, unfortunately, is incorrect.”
“Humanity’s first encounter with the Borg occurred in April 2063, when the time-displaced Borg attempted to assimilate Earth and prevent humanity’s ‘First Contact’ with a passing Vulcan starship. A Borg sphere, detonated by the Enterprise-E’s quantum torpedoes, rained debris down on Earth below. Much of this debris burned up in Earth’s atmosphere upon reentry, but some pieces impacted with the planet’s surface.”
“Zefram Cochrane, the human developer of warp drive, mentioned cybernetic monsters in a famous speech at Princeton a year later, but the context for what he was describing was, at the time, unknown. Nearly a century later an Antarctic expedition in 2153 discovered some of this Borg wreckage. The wreckage still being active, several humans were assimilated into the Borg Collective, followed by an attempt for these new drones to rejoin the Collective in the Delta Quadrant. While Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise NX-01 intercepted the rogue starship and destroyed the drones, his crew had no idea what exactly they had encountered.”
“A century later, on Stardate 4722.1, the Enterprise NCC-1701 under James T. Kirk’s command encountered a mysterious starship at the edge of a wormhole. Aboard the starship were thousands of mutant humanoids, each displaying some degree of cybernetic modification who carried antigens that could infect others and alter them for cybernetic implantation. Led by a young woman, these mutants attempted to overrun the Enterprise and another starship that emerged from the wormhole. Ultimately, the mutants and their ship were destroyed, but escape pods, carrying mutants, fled into the wormhole, either into distant space or the distant past. Were these cybernetic mutants proto-Borg? Was the young woman a proto-Borg Queen…?”
Read the full interview in issue #20 of Star Trek Magazine – on sale now. Subscribe now
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