There’s a new Borg Queen coming to TV, but not if the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks has anything to say about it …
In Lower Decks Episode 208, “I, Excretus,” a consultant arrives on the U.S.S. Cerritos to run drills that require the lower deckers and bridge crew to swap duties. As part of this assignment, they take part in a raft of competitive holodeck “minigames” that find them dropped into familiar situations from across all eras of Star Trek. For example, the original series episode “The Naked Time” and its Next Generation follow-up “The Naked Now” — about an infection that spreads throughout the crew, erasing their inhibitions — gets replayed with the virtual Cerritos crew and finally, shall we say, delivers on the “naked” nomenclature in a pretty graphic way.
Aside from being a great example of the potential Lower Decks has for boldly exploring the Final Frontier from perspectives different from where any other medium has been able to go before, this plot device can also revisit adversaries like the Borg for Starfleet training and evaluation purposes. It’s something some crew members definitely take to more enthusiastically than others, as they struggle to get a perfect score before realizing their future depends on them being their mediocre selves …
As announced earlier this month at Star Trek Day, Annie Wersching will play the Borg Queen in next year’s second season of the live-action Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard. This after the role was defined in 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact feature film by Alice Krige, then it became Susanna Thompson’s in 2000’s Star Trek: Voyager two-part episode “Unimatrix Zero” before Krige took it up again in 2001’s VOY series finale “Endgame.”
But the creators and characters of Lower Decks have shown us already that they’re unrepentant fans of old-school Trek, and so they brought Krige back to once again play she who is “the beginning, the end, the one who is many.”
Maybe the actress wasn’t interested in returning in live action, or the timing just didn’t work out (I refuse to believe incapable, as much makeup and special effects are involved in the Borg Queen costume already), but at least we get to enjoy her dulcet, despotic tones in this form one more time.
