Posted in: Paramount+, Star Trek, streaming, TV | Tagged: alice krige, patrick stewart, star trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Trek: First Contact, Terry Matalas

Star Trek: Picard Showrunner, Stewart Talk Krige's Borg Queen Return

Star Trek: Picard showrunner Terry Matalas & Sir Patrick Stewart discuss Alice Krige's return as the Borg Queen in the Paramount+ series.

As Star Trek: Picard officially wraps its final chapter on The Next Generation crew, it's fitting they close on their biggest rivals in the Borg. Whereas The Original Series made peace with their rival Klingons, the TNG crew took out presumably the last of their major threat established early during the syndicated series' original run while featuring the return of the Borg Queen with Alice Krige reprising her role from 1996's Star Trek: First Contact. Revealed initially in the penultimate episode, "Võx," we finally see her in full in the finale, "The Last Generation." Showrunner Terry Matalas & Sir Patrick Stewart discussed Krige's return.

Star Trek: Picard: The Original Borg Queen's Return

With Krige's debut in the Star Trek franchise in 1996, the Borg were largely an ominous voice in their encounters with the Enterprise-D until they decided to assimilate Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard and turn him into Locutus in the season three/four two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds." It wasn't until the second TNG film that the Borg Queen was officially introduced, and the film retroactively added the character in a flashback sequence while Jean-Luc was assimilated. Krige made one more live-action appearance as the character in the Voyager finale "Endgame" prior to her return on the Paramount+ series, which finds her seducing Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) into assimilation as her final key to conquering Earth.

"We have been keeping the Borg alive in the storyline throughout, so we knew we were going that way from the very beginning," Matalas told Entertainment Weekly. "We asked ourselves, 'What's the very worst thing Picard could go through?' It would be to watch his son become the Locutus, to watch his son go through the very worst thing that happened to him. That led to, 'What if some dormant part of that Borg experience was passed on inadvertently to his son?' Thematically that became about parents and their children and what we pass on. The story of legacy."

Matalas had Jane Edwina Seymour provide the physical body of the Borg Queen this time around while Krige provided her voice. The late Annie Wersching played the character in an alternate timeline in Picard season two. "One of the greatest pleasures was in rehearsing [with Speleers] and shooting the two-hander scenes that I had with him," Stewart recalls. "We had a great on-camera… 'relationship' isn't quite the right word, but vulnerability. I think that counted for a lot in bringing fresh emotions, fresh turbulence into these scenes." For more, including how Matalas constructed the Borg cube for the finale, comparing the set to Star Wars, the decision to spare Krige from undergoing the heavy makeup and body prosthetic, Stewart reuniting with Krige, and Krige's response to the Borg Queen's updated look, you can check out the interview here.

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