What’s Up With The Borg?
The final shot of the first episode of Picard reveals that the “Romulan Reclamation Site” is actually a ravaged Borg cube ship. If you’re not super familiar, the Borg are a race of cybernetic beings that combine organic beings with technology, in an endless pursuit of becoming “perfect.” When they encounter other races, they usually conquer and assimilate them, forcibly incorporating those races’ genetics and technology into the Borg race. Here’s a big rundown on everything you need to know about the Borg, their history, and Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine.
Suffice it to say the Borg have attempted to conquer the Federation on more than one occasion, but while the battles have been devastating, the Borg hasn’t succeeded, largely thanks to the Enterprise and its crew.
Nowadays, the Borg are a seriously diminished threat. They popped up several times in Star Trek: Voyager, where we saw them fighting a losing war against a race they referred to as Species 8472. That war devastated the Collective, and other events that involved Voyager also helped some drones to break free of the Borg Collective and start a resistance from within. At the end of the series, Voyager dealt another serious blow to the Borg by introducing a virus into the Collective and blowing up one of the Borg’s “transwarp hubs.” The Borg Queen was killed (again) in that explosion.
We’re not sure what the state of the Borg is in the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, but it seems like one of the greatest threats to the Federation is still dealing with those major setbacks–at least for now.