When a Mommy Borg & a Daddy Borg love each other so much...........

The real most frightening and realistic way of viewing the Borg is as the writers. They are a collective who change what they think is the most important thing to focus on as the situation develops and they suck others in with them. They adapt themselves to fit the situation.

The Borg are cautious consumers. Agree, they need other species to grow their own technology because they do not 'evolve' on their own merits, and assimilating a biological species could introduce more harm than benefit.

The turning point being the Enterprise sliced section was probably the most pivotal enlightenment the Borg received. While many previous conquests offered new technology and a mono representation of a species. What they learned from the Enterprise and about the Federation was an 'assimilation' of many different species and blended technologies.

The Borg found one of their own! A Federation that adds technological distinctiveness to their own and including  'Biological' distinctiveness. Those lost 18 crewmen, were they all human?  Likely not. The Enterprise showed to the Borg that not only can technology be integrated into a collective, but different biology as well.

The hail mary was assimilating Picard. They assimilated a component that was able to manage a biologically distinct crew, along with a wealth of knowledge of the advantages of adding diversity. Picard was not only a captain, but also a scholar and this gave the Borg the next upgrade path to "we will assimilate other people's minds and add that knowledge too". Picard's leadership role also gave the Borg the mimicry that a collective can also have a single representative voice. Hence the introduction of a queen.

Here's the way I see it, that nursery Riker, Worf and Gordie walked into in Q Who was actually a maturation chamber, those babies weren't born to the Borg, they were taken and assimilated, Riker was just making assumptions based on the limited knowledge he had to hand. We saw an example of that in "Collective" when one of the maturation chambers on the crippled cube starts to fail, and there's an infant inside.

The first appearance, always.  No queen, no individuality, no mercy.
Another excellent video!!

They were genuinely more creepy in the original Q Who episode. What they became with the Borg Queen and other things was ridiculous.

Voyager being chased by a fleet of cubes out of no where till species 8472 showed up was pretty intense at the time.

I always thought it worked both ways. The borg are able to breed and create more of their own but they also assimilate too. It's part of what makes them dangerous. It's why they seem endless.

I think they didnt outright assimilate the enterprise the first time because they were still “Wary” about what technology or capabilities they could be hiding.

(Dont want a preemptive species 8472 incident)

They still had no clue how the enterprise was able to zip across the galaxy instantly.

But once they had Picard they understood us well enough to go “Oh ok lets try to roll over them”

The Borg probably did assimilate those 18 people. I like the theory that it was there devotion to their captain that made the Borg fixate on Picard. Because why else would they pick him as a spokesman? Nothing else in their previous encounter would have made them think that might actually work.

My headcanon on the queen is the borg assimilated a race with enhanced cognitive abilities and assigned them as data processing nodes and one member of the race learned to control that information and essentially took over the collective and now whenever a queen dies a new queen gets activated to replace her.

Connecting all the dots for us like this is awesome, even for a life long know-it-all fan like me.

In Enterprise 'Regeneration' they show the Borg using cutting beams to carve up another ship. Also in Voyager they show the Freed Borg Planet having the same 'Scoops' out of the ground as the New Providence Colony - Star Trek Borg shows even old style looking Borg can assimilate on site and even shows their internal heads up display from the point of view of the Drone.

Picard tells Hugh that they are going to assimilate the culture in “I-Borg”, when Hugh recognises Picard as Locutus. Hugh doesn’t question this directive. To a point, we could argue the change in the Borg’s behaviour is the characters simply learning more about them, but it definitely seems from the start that they weren’t interested in people until they assimilated Picard.

The version of the Borg that scares me the most is the one that we ourselves have already become without realizing it.  After all, most of us have tracking devices on us at almost all times and spend a good chunk of time doing repetitive tasks when we're not trying to take something over, just to name a few things.

it’s true Q Who didn’t establish Assimilation. Yet it’s a logical progression to assimilation. The Colonies lost in “Neutral Zone” wouldn’t be as much of a mystery if the Enterprise could beam down an away team and interview Farmer John, talking about Giant Cubes, Green lasers and Tractor beams. It would have been easier to understand than just a giant hole in the ground. The population has to be somewhere. It’s the Roanoke colony mystery. No graves or corpses makes it harder to understand than just the colony being destroyed.
For the Borg though you have just scooped up hundreds to millions of people depending upon size of the colony what happens to them? If they aren’t around to be interviewed then they have to be taken too. So what? sci-fi can come up with some rather nasty ideas but ultimately Assimilation makes the most sense and perhaps along the way they picked up a few prenatal infants.
Really the Borg are a race where the more we think we know for sure about them the more it’s really just our own conjecture.

I really loved the Q Who Borg , they were chillingly creepy and terrifying and mysterious, everything that Starfleet was established to explore and learn from. Giving the Borg a “face” diluted them I think.

The focus of the Borg queen always annoyed me. It took horror out of the equation. And got worse when a lone scout ship started tanking the Borg like they were nothing. Everything scary was lost by Voyager.

The Borg is basically  The bootstrap paradox in real time

Thank you! I've noticed this before but everyone seems to retcon it in their heads that the Borg were out to assimilate people from the start. Even when it happened to Picard it seemed like the exception, not the rule.