In “First Contact,” the suggestiveness of the Borg Queen’s interactions with Brent Spiner’s iconic Starfleet android ranges from less-than-subtle to borderline “50 Shades of Data.” It’s pretty clear from the beginning that she’s working him. When he tells the Borg Queen he questions her motives, she leans in seductively, telling him, “That is because you haven’t been properly … stimulated yet.” Suddenly overcome by a wave of strong sensation, Data gasps, “You have … reactivated my emotion chip.” When the he realizes Queenie has been grafting human skin on his arm, she blows on it, causing him to gasp in delight. “Was that good for you?” she asks.
And according to the Borg Queen herself, she’s not just playing Data with a promise of IRL cybersex — she genuinely likes him. As Alice Krige explained in Mark A. Altman’s “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years,” one whiff of Data’s positronic pleasure machine and the Queen is hot to smash circuits. “Really what the Queen meets in Data is an intelligence as formidable as her own,” Krige emphasized. “She’s fascinated by it and she knows that Data’s Achilles heel is his desire to be human.” This makes sense since his desire to be more human is central to Data’s backstory.
The Queen “reels him in with a taste of human sexuality,” and it works. By the time Picard shows up, Data seems completely Borg-whipped. But Krige says it’s the Borg Queen who can’t get enough. As Krige put it, the Queen “gets hoisted on her own petard because she kind of gets fascinated by him. And lets her guard down in the process.” Alas, all’s fair in love and Borg.
