Star Trek: Picard Gives The Borg A Terrifying New Multiversal Power
This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 2.
Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 2 gives the Borg Queen a terrifying new power. The Borg have long been considered one of Star Trek's most terrifying foes. They are implacable and relentless, and their only goal is to assimilate everything and everyone they meet. "We are the Borg," they declare to their victims. "Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile."
Star Trek: Picard is finally showing the potential of the Borg. The ruthless aliens tricked Jean-Luc Picard and other potential enemies to a temporal anomaly, where they used the USS Stargazer's Borg circuits as a Trojan horse to take down an entire Federation armada. Picard and his friends would have died if not for the intervention of the quasi-omnipotent being named Q, who dragged them into an alternate timeline for his own inscrutable reasons. Ironically, the Borg Queen of this dystopian reality may be Picard's best chance to put things right - because of a new power introduced in Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 2.
To the surprise of Picard and his crew, the Borg Queen was the only one aware Q had created an alternate timeline. It seems the Borg Queen possesses what the show calls "a kind of transtemporal awareness" that bridges into adjacent times and realities. The Borg Queens are able to communicate with one another across the multiverse, and through this transtemporal awareness this timeline's Borg Queen sensed history had been rewritten.
The Borg Queen's new power is a useful one - but it's also deeply disturbing, because it suggests the Borg really are a lot more dangerous than anyone previously believed. If the Borg are indeed attuned to the multiverse, then the Queen is able to sense countless parallel dimensions, potentially allowing her to foresee enemy strategies and adapt even before they are initiated. In functional terms, this means it is almost impossible to triumph in almost any encounter with the Borg Queen.
Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 1's Borg Queen seemed to be a time traveler herself, originating from some distant future timeline. If that is indeed the case, her multiversal awareness would have allowed her to carefully choose the right point in the timeline to change - explaining why she so easily manipulated all her greatest potential threats into the same place and eliminated them in one fell swoop. Fortunately, Q's power defies the laws of time and space, meaning she didn't expect his intervention; and Star Trek: Picard season 2 may well ultimately confirm Q is far greater than even the Borg's new multiversal power.