Star Trek: Picard season 2 casts Annie Wersching as the Borg Queen. Star Trek: TNG's captain Picard returned to the small screen in 2020 for a new adventure that blended updated storytelling values and thematic concerns with pure Star Trek nostalgia.
Though many an old school Trek fan complained about the direction things were taken in Picard, the show did well enough by Paramount's reckoning to earn a second season. Details about season 2's plot are scarce but it has been revealed that Patrick Stewart’s Picard will be joined by his old inter-dimensional nemesis Q (John de Lancie). Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan is also returning to bring some of that TNG flavor to Picard.
Now Variety reports that another old enemy of Jean-Luc’s is set to return for Picard season 2. The Borg Queen is back, with The Vampire Diaries’ Wersching taking on the role. Wersching is also known for roles in Bosch, Runaways, The Rookie and Timeless. And she voiced the character of Tess in the video game The Last of Us.
The character of the Borg Queen of course does not date back to the TNG TV era but was first introduced in the movie Star Trek: First Contact, with Alice Krige in the role. The weirdly sexual character later returned to menace Captain Janeway and company in the series Star Trek: Voyager with Susanna Thompson initially taking over the role, before Krige came back for the series finale. The Borg obviously are the Big Bads of the Star Trek universe, and though they featured in season 1 of Picard, they were not really the main antagonists. But with the arrival of the Borg Queen it seems the collective will take their place as the primary villains for season 2.
It remains to be seen exactly how the Borg and their queen become embroiled in the action in season 2 but it’s been teased that time travel will be involved. A time travel scenario would indeed be consistent with Borg behavior and capabilities as they used their ability to move through time to attack Earth in First Contact. The presence of Q and Guinan in season 2 lends more weight to the notion that time travel will become involved, as Q is a super-being capable of doing just about anything, while Guinan is a long-lived entity who has met Picard in more than one time period.
While a time travel scenario may make for an interesting way to shake things up in season 2, there’s also a sense that resorting to time travel is what movies and shows do when they have no ideas, or even worse, when they wish to erase previous story mistakes. Time travel has of course been used well in Star Trek, most notably in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But more often than not in Trek history, traveling through time has felt like a lame gimmick deployed by overworked writers in the absence of actual cleverness. But perhaps that won't hold this time, and Alex Kurtzman and company will have a truly memorable and fun time travel story in store for fans in Star Trek: Picard season 2.
Source: Variety