When the Borg First Appeared, Nobody Said Assimilate: How Star Trek Kept Rewriting What the Borg Want

When the Borg showed up in Star Trek for the very first time, nobody said the word assimilate. Not once. I went through the whole episode, and when they finally do say what they want, it isn't you at all. It's your ship.

Everybody knows the Borg want to assimilate you. "Resistance is futile." But what the show says they want, on screen, keeps moving, and by the end of this piece I'll show how I think the Borg ended up right back where they started, in the creepiest room of their original episode.

The Neutral Zone set up the Borg a year before Q Who

Let's go back to 1989. The Next Generation, season 2, "Q Who." Q is annoyed with Picard, so he snaps his fingers and throws the Enterprise so far across the galaxy that getting home at maximum warp would take "two years, seven months, three days, 18 hours." Out there, the crew finds a planet that has been stripped. Something, in the crew's words, "just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet."

Then comes the line that tells you this was set up ahead of time: "It is identical to what happened to the outposts along the Neutral Zone." As far as the show is concerned, the Borg's real first appearance isn't "Q Who." It's the season 1 finale, "The Neutral Zone," a year earlier.

In that episode, Federation outposts and Romulan outposts are disappearing. When the Enterprise reaches one of them, the report is that the outpost was not just destroyed, and that it is as though some great force just scooped it off. By the end, both sides realize "entire outposts on both sides have been carried off." No name, no cube, no drones. Just something big taking the hardware and leaving.

In Q Who, the Borg wanted the Enterprise and took eighteen crew along with the hardware

Then the cube shows up, and Guinan knows what it is. "My people encountered them a century ago. They destroyed our cities." She gives it a name: "They're called the Borg." A drone then beams into main engineering, ignores everybody and starts looking over the engines. Picard tries to talk to it, and Q, standing right behind him, laughs at him. He tells Picard he is nothing to the drone, that it isn't interested in his life form. "He's just a scout, the first of many." It is there to analyze their technology.

Then the cube hails them: "We have analyzed your defensive capabilities." Not your people. Your defenses. And then the cube does something the Borg pretty much never do again. It cuts a chunk out of the saucer. Sections 27, 28 and 29, decks 4, 5 and 6, gone. The report comes back that eighteen people were in that section and are missing. They didn't assimilate them. They took them along with the hardware.

In the conference room, Guinan tells them what she knows, and Q, sitting off to the side with his feet up, finishes the thought. "The Borg is the ultimate user." He adds that they are not interested in political conquest, wealth or power as the crew knows it, only in the ship and its technology, which they have identified as something they can consume. In 1989, the Borg are a hungry machine that eats technology, and people are just what happens to be standing next to it.

The Q Who nursery revealed that the Borg have babies

Riker then leads an away team over to the cube, and they walk into a room the show almost never went back to. They have entered what appears to be the Borg nursery. From the look of it, the Borg are born as a biological life form, and almost immediately after birth they begin receiving artificial implants.

The Borg have babies. I always thought that was the creepiest thing in the episode, and the show mostly left it alone after that. Hold on to that room, because it comes back later in ways that change what it means.

The Best of Both Worlds made the Borg want biology, and only Part 2 says assimilate

In 1990, "The Best of Both Worlds" has the Borg finally come for the Federation. In Part 1 they hail the Enterprise and demand something nobody saw coming. They want Picard. Personally. Somebody on the bridge says exactly what you're thinking: that they thought the Borg weren't interested in human life forms, only their technology. That's the show catching its own rule change, out loud, a year later.

Then the Borg give the speech everybody quotes. "Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours." Biological. That word is new. Now they want what's inside the people. By the end of Part 1, Picard is standing on the cube in black armor saying, "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile."

And here's the bit I love. Even in Part 1, with all of that, nobody says assimilate. The word finally shows up in Part 2, when Locutus starts talking about "assimilating your culture," and then, "Your people will be assimilated as easily as Picard has been." So the most famous verb in Borg history first appears in 1990, in the second half of a cliffhanger. It took them a while.

First Contact gave the Borg a Queen because a scene needed someone to talk to

Then came First Contact in 1996, and this is where the Borg change shape completely, because now there is a Queen. Data is strapped to a table and a voice says, "I am the Borg." Data calls that a contradiction, since the Borg have a collective consciousness with no individuals. She answers, "I am the beginning, the end. The one who is many." When Data asks if she is their leader, she says, "I bring order to chaos."

Data pushes back that the Borg do not evolve, they conquer. Her reply is that by assimilating other beings into the collective, they are bringing them closer to perfection. By 1996 there is somebody in charge, and what she's after is people. First Contact also gives us the version of assimilation everybody pictures now: two little tubes that pop out of a drone's hand and inject you, and your skin goes gray in seconds. That's First Contact and Voyager. Before that, you got abducted, or you got Locutus.

There is a pretty simple reason for the Queen. The writers, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, have said on the movie's commentary that they wrote it with just drones at first, then realized the characters needed somebody to actually talk to. Mindless drones make bad conversation. Fair enough. But it means the Borg got a leader because a scene needed a second person in it.

Voyager made assimilation the only way the Borg understand anything

Voyager picked the Borg up and ran with them, and the rules kept moving. In "Scorpion" in 1997, the Borg finally meet something they can't beat, Species 8472, and the crew works out why: "That's why the Borg can't assimilate them." Then comes my favorite line about the Borg in all of Voyager: "And what they can't assimilate, they can't understand." Next to "Q Who," that's a complete flip. In 1989 a drone walks around engineering to analyze your technology. By 1997, assimilation is the only way the Borg understand anything at all.

Voyager then went back to the nursery, sort of. In "Dark Frontier" we get the Hansens, Seven of Nine's parents, out on a little ship called the Raven, studying the Borg up close years before "Q Who." Their daughter, little Annika, asks her dad the question I've been asking throughout this piece: do the Borg have kids too? Nobody knows. That's a great line, because ten years earlier Riker stood in a Borg nursery and told us.

Then in season 6, "Collective," there are Borg kids again, in "maturation chambers." Except these kids weren't born Borg. One of them is told flat out, "You were abducted and assimilated." The nursery from "Q Who" is still there, it's just full of stolen children now. The show kept the room and changed what it meant.

Enterprise's Regeneration gave the Borg Earth's address in Archer's time

In 2003, Enterprise went back and rewrote where they came from, at least for us. In "Regeneration," a research team in the Arctic digs up some frozen bodies with "cybernetic implants," the wreckage from First Contact, and you can guess how that goes. Doctor Phlox is attacked and says it exactly: one of the aliens injected him with some sort of tubules. The drones take a ship, and when they hail Archer, it's "Resistance is futile." Nobody ever says the word Borg. They don't know what they're looking at.

Then there's the ending. Before they're stopped, the drones send a message, and the crew works out that it's coordinates, sent "somewhere deep in the Delta Quadrant." It would take "at least 200 years" to get there, and the crew wonders whether they've only postponed the invasion until the 24th century. So in 2003 the show quietly answered a question nobody had asked in 1989. Q didn't introduce us to the Borg. They'd had our address since Archer's time. Honestly, I love it when Enterprise does this, even when it means rewriting the Borg's first contact with humanity three different times.

Picard season 2 had the Borg ask to join the Federation, and season 3 hid Borg DNA in the transporters

In 2022, Picard season 2 broke the rules in the other direction. A Borg ship shows up asking for something. "An entreaty to join the Federation?" Somebody on the bridge says what everyone's thinking: "Picard, the Borg consume, they assimilate." By the end of the season it's real, and the Borg tell Starfleet, "We request provisional membership in the Federation." The Borg, asking nicely.

Then in 2023, Picard season 3 changed the rules again. The Borg didn't need tubes anymore. The crew finds out why Picard's son Jack can hear the collective: all Borg undergo genetic alterations so their bodies can communicate with their cybernetic components, and new genetic code was written and stored inside Picard. He passed it on. They then learn that "Borg-altered DNA" was put "into the transporter system," so it gets added to "everyone who steps inside a transporter." It only takes in people under 25, because that's when the frontal cortex stops developing.

So one day every young officer in Starfleet turns at once. "Fleet-wide assimilation complete." No drones grabbing anybody, no tubes. Just a transporter. In the finale the Queen tells Picard herself that the future of the Borg does not lie in assimilation but evolution. The Borg then spell out what's changed: they have no need to devour raw materials or consume flesh or metal, now that they can reproduce and procreate, with "a new generation of Borg, born with a single purpose."

Did the Borg change, or did we just learn more about them?

Now, the objection. Some will say the Borg didn't change, we just learned more about them over time. That's partially right. Guinan already says in 1989 that the Borg "destroyed our cities" and scattered her people, so the bad stuff was always happening off screen.

But look at what the show says they want, on screen, every time, and it keeps moving. The ship. Then your biology, and the show admits that's a change. Then everyone. Then Earth's address. Then a seat in the Federation. Then your DNA.

My theory: the Borg came full circle to the Q Who nursery

This last part is mine, not the show's. I think the Borg ended up right back where they started. In "Q Who" they were born in a nursery. In Picard they're talking about a new generation of Borg, born. Thirty four years and more rule changes than I can count, and they came full circle to the creepiest room in the original episode.

I can't tell you anybody planned that. I don't think anybody did. But it's there. Personally, the version that scares me most is the one that ignored Picard in his own engineering room. Being ignored by something that powerful is worse.

Which version of the Borg scares you the most: the 1989 cube that just wants your ship and doesn't even care that you're in it, the Queen, or the version that's already in your DNA without you knowing it?