So Shatner went to space and came back. Fucking legend.
Voyager had an interesting idea for the Borg with Unamatrix Zero. A lot more could've been done with the idea of how Borg perception differs from reality - like, what if their entire existence was an MMO or something to keep them docile? While they're doing horrible, genocidey things that terrorize the galaxy, the average drone's perception filters make him think he's the hero.
There were a few episodes where 7 of 9 would talk about her experience in the hivemind and there were a couple of POV-shots that were mostly just distorted fisheye vision and muffled sounds. What you describe wouldn't work with the whole hivemind thing, since the perception as a hero would necessitate a perception of a self. I mean, I'm not against it, there's a great flavor-text in the RPG rulebook for Degenesis, where some human mindslave to a mutant hivemind has a short glimpse of his nightmarish surroundings as they are before sinking back into the pleasant feverdream of his pheromone-busted delusions. It would make for a great plot, but not for the Borg, I think.
Unimatrix Zero was more of a naptime playground that some drones somehow jacked into to have a secret live apart from being drones, I always thought it felt kinda tacked on to explain how the Voyager can overcome the Borg by the end. I mean, 7 of 9 suddenly realizes that she was Annika Hanson in Unimatrix Zero all along... doesn't that go against her entire character concept of overcoming decades of being a drone and rediscovering her own humanity and individuality?
Anyway, the Borg could have gone deeper into bodyhorror I think. I recently saw a video where scientists put a piece of a rat's brain into a tiny robot that has basic perception. The robot could navigate the room, evade obstacles and it could be remote controlled. You can't even fathom the kind of dread I feel when I try to imagine what this would feel like if there was just the smallest bit of active perception and conciousness left. When just enough of you is left over to understand that you're a couple of neurons stuck in a nightmarish contraption, forced to react to input from the outside. The Borg could do something similar with their own drones:
After realizing that Borg drones can relapse into becoming individuals upon being seperated from their hivemind for too long, the Borg could do some really weird shit like literally removing a person's cerebrum, so there is nothing but a lizard-brain controlled by electronics and the wishes of the hivemind. This could only affect a small portion of new drones, but I feel there are so many possibilities to dive deeper into endless depths of hell that could be the Borg. They were always a bit goofy looking with their blinking rubber suits, random hoses and flappy claws on their arms. Maybe it could go a bit like the Godemperor in WH40K on his throne or the failed Robocops in Robocop 2. Only now it's and entire army of them.
I don't know why writers can't just let a villain be a villain. They always have to humanize and redeem them, always.
The Borg were awesome and terrifying as a totally alien mindset. A complete antithesis of humanity and thus almost unfathomable. But noooo, here's the Borg Queen and she's totally hot for Data and Picard. So stupid. All the mystery and fear is gone as the Borg are just another funny colored human. Such a waste of an iconic villain.
The less we know and understand a force like the Borg, the better they work. The things we can't understand or know are usually the things that fill us with the greatest terror and many times, knowing details makes something less nightmarish. With the Borg it's sort of really easy on one hand and really hard on the other.
On one hand, when you assume that they operate in a way to be incomrehensible to humans, simply cause all decisions happen on a scale way beyond human understanding, you can have them do seemingly random shit and go "Nah, you just don't get it. It makes perfect sense to them." and get away with it, but I think if their actions have a connecting red thread to hint at things, it works best, since it keeps the audience from getting on to you just doing random shit.
The hard part is to keep that red thread clear enough to make the audience understand that it isn't just random shit, but still so vague that beyond that, finding out what's going on is beyond their actual understanding. They know there is something to connect the dots, they just can't wrap their head around it.
Let me put it like this: From within their own "hivemind", time (and thus also space) is entirely irrelevant. Time only makes sense when your existence is limited, but the hivemind is for all intents and purposes eternal. They might make plans that span literal millions of years in scale, it doesn't matter to them. They might lose thousands of their ships and millions of drones, but what is that to a hivemind counting millions of ships and trillions of drones? It's a waste of resources to be avoided for sure, but their means of production could be virtually unlimited.
I'm not too keen on the queen, it makes the whole bee-hive thing seem a bit too on the nose. Adding the queen could be interesting, but it should serve a more signifcant point and it's dubious at best whether that's actually possible to pull off. In general, the kind of villain that the Borg are is anathema to Star Trek, since in order to really pull them off, the whole thing would need to be much more grimderp.
He should have stayed as a unknowable rogue, omnipotent and all powerful. Is he here to help? Is he just here to fuck with us? Who knows? Who can know as the Q are as beyond humanity as we are beyond ants. But wait! Here's Q pal'ing around with Vashj and letting Sisko punch him. Even better he's helping Janeway now and getting his wai-fu pregant cuz that's totally something a post-physcial being would do and showing humans how the Q are pretty much the same as them by getting bored of life and wanted to die. They completely destroy his importance, his menace and his mystery by dumb'ing him down to our level.
As has been said, Q is a Trickster and more in line with Greek gods that do weird shit to amuse themselves. Q could have taken a certain liking to Voyager simply cause it is a tiny little ship that ended up in a place where it doesn't belong and Q, who operates under circumstances and on a scale much like the Borg, just kinda took a liking to them.
You bring up ants and humans as an analogy to humans and Q, but think about it this way: How often have you taken a stroll through nature, strutting along a path not minding all the bugs that you might step on or who are disturbed by your presence? And then you come across a tiny beetle that somehow ended up on its back in the middle of the road. You pick it up carefully and put it somewhere safe before you continue to strut down the path. That's kinda what Q does with humanity. He's just farting around in space, stumbling over humanity and on a whim, he decides to fuck around with them to pass time.
The Borg's origin in that trilogy really angered people. That said, I wonder if "redeem" is the right word, more like "fundamentally transform to a higher state of being".
So, what is the origin story in that book?
I always imagined that the Borg used to be a humanoid species that was a bit too keen on the whole cyborg-transhumanism stuff, which escalated one way or the other into what we know and love as the Borg.
