Yes, but it works best with the original BORG concept, before they introduced the queen.
The BORG was originally described as a collective, and a collective doesn’t have rulers like a queen.
So I must admit I was a bit disappointed in the introduction of a BORG queen.
Still the BORG remain a very cool part of Star Trek.
Do we even know: does the Borg queen truly control the collective, or is she rather a manifestation of something still more deeply hidden?
Perhaps at the core of the core, it really is a collective? I suppose this like (edit: level) of argumentation is useless, like that thought experiment of glass mountains on the moon, but still I wonder.
It depends on who’s writing the episode. In First Contact she was implied to be an avatar of the Collective rather than an individual that controls it. Or possibly a gestalt consciousness formed as a byproduct of the Collective’s structure of interlinking minds. The VOY writers didn’t really get it, though, so she became a true individual on that show and in her future appearances.
She is very much in control. In unimatrix zero double episode, she commands self destruct of whole cubes just because one drone was not under her complete control, that’s how much she is afraid of any independent thought.
And how much control she has over the rest.
- “Suicide, now!”
- “Yes, mah queen”
Right, so she is like a program running with sudo permissions on a Unix machine. She holds the hidden, backdoor keys to control the thoughts of the mere “drones” below her, even as each ship itself had a singular authority (iirc?) who could do similarly for those “below” them. But what I mean is, what above moving back “up” that chain - does she likewise have hidden backdoor keys to control her thoughts, which she would not necessarily (or even likely) be aware of herself?
Each drone is a brain-cell of the collective brain, the Queen is the personality that eventually formed.
Oh… that’s very interesting. Is that from the lore? Was it on purpose? It doesn’t matter bc either way it’s fascinating to think about how the “corruption” of the original purpose lead to the masses being controlled by a central figure with absolute authority.
Or another way to say that is that their society itself evolved and adapted to face their external circumstances, but anyway somehow it always ends up with an elite cadre of illuminati-like figures on top, and everyone else is just an entirely disposable peon.
Which makes me wonder now about whether the ocean of changelings themselves has things like “rulers”.
