I'm unsure how there can be a "Borg Queen" in what we had known previously about "the Borg" before Star Trek: First Contact.
Short story: Timeline alterations and paradoxes (or even continual plot discontinuity between stories) caused her creation later on, or it was due to the mindset and ultimately failed experiment of Locutus that had the Collective deciding to make their own unifying figure.
Shorter story: They ran out of ideas and didn't want to build on the TV show's episodes (which sometimes had slightly altered continuity as well), so they went all out with the new creation.
Up next, the sleep-inducing long version, with even more headcanon gymnastics than what I'd just written:
Initially, The Borg were in a cube with however many tens-to-hundreds of thousands of drones operating it, none more important than the other. One could even apply a social commentary of communism in the Borg. It had no heirarchal weakness, you could take out the upper-right quadrant and the rest would just adapt and rebuild, and Q stated when set up the Federation's "introduction" to them. Immediate, synced reaction and decisions in a split-second notice.
True.
"Q Who" set a lot of groundwork for the Collective, distributed technology to ensure that a Cube could remain operable even if 79.4586753094747321-whatever percent was rendered inoperable. We're told they only take technology if it interests them (think "Pakleds, on steroids via the hive mind gestalt"). The story even showed incubators, making some invariably wonder about "Borg Copulation" as byproduct.
Then comes "The Best of Both Worlds". Characters are shocked that they want people by name, all of a sudden. The audience could figure it out real fast that they were going to
Cybertize Borgify Picard, though the "why" remained a genuine mystery. The story ignores baby borgs and reveals a terrifying greater truth of the Borg and how they will abduct and alter as many individuals as possible to more quickly grow their ranks. Why? Because they want to grow and improve others' lives, despite having forgotten a few things along the way. (No worries, "Voyager" builds on this via species 8472, as having an enemy requiring actual ranks, but that also renders the Borg as being more generic as a result.)
Then again, "I, Borg", on top of everything else (both bad and good) and that's a long post in of itself, forgets that assimilation is used to increase their numbers, hence characters spewing nonsense that the Borg is a singular race. It had an initial race, but incorporated so many other species and races. The Borg was always a gestalt, but as the Cube in TBOBW was destroyed, it's an easy assertion that more Cubes are out there and that the Collective is big.
"Descent" also acts vaguely, unsure if it's a splintered-off group or the actual results of Picard's big idea to let Hugh go home to teach the others how to laugh. The easiest assumption again is more headcanon gymnastics, that it's a splinter group. The story spends more time waffling and giving us hokey dialogue, especially during part two and squandering a great story idea that was far better suited as an action piece and with psychopathic murderous Borg thanks to Hugh (unlike what's to follow) than 88 minutes of a damp squib, especially part 2, and Lore was another convenience and arguably unneeded contrivance as well. Then again, the idea of converting human brain patterns into electronics or positronics or whatever pt 2 said tries to make up for it (despite floundering). So much of pt 2 is so bad that it takes down the good stuff with it
.
Then, we have a Queen, who makes decisions and commands drones to do what she wants, which sometimes isn't even based on logic or data, but for personal reasons.
As with everything preceding, the continuity is vague and woolly, nor does it help when the Queen brushes it all off with corny "such limited three dimensional terms". It'd have been easier, more believable, less risible, etc, to have Queen explain how the failed Locutus experiment precipitated the need of the Borg to create a figure on their own and be more forceful with assimilations as they hadn't dealt with too many other species by then (except Voyager also throws in so many big 4-digit numbers that it's impossible for that claim to work. Or, most species weren't as troublesome to assimilate, even though they only had the one shot with Locutus so far as the other TNG stories did the right thing and not "let's do another 'harvest the humans' thing".)
Now comes the fun part: Again, a separate post to discuss the stupidity of the plot is needed and, to be frank (and Larry and Jim and Mike), a certain Red Letter Media covered all of the movie's plotting problems in a fun video, but the time travel aspect is pointless.
Oh, heck:
(It mentions
Defiant being the one and only prototype for
what would have been a new class of starship, with one single purpose (fighting borg), until "Valient" shows up for zero reason except to confuse the audience as a cheap gag, since there's been no borg there or anywhere near there or anywhere zillions of solar systems away from there. So it's more headcanon time, maybe they added more bolts to the chassis so it wouldn't rip apart at top warp and now built more to allow cadets to command it when all the adults died or whatever, but this is getting way too far off (read "scope creep") so I'll reel back...)
But all this temporal shenanigan stuff, combined with "Enterprise" prequel's contrived discovery of the Borg because "sweeps week" is cool and they need ratings, must have quietly changed the timeline, which also renders Aunt Kathy's virtual spit-inducing lambasting of Q for introducing the Borg in that one episode more than completely moot.
(Nope, I didn't make up the "Aunt Kathy" moniker, woohoo! It gets used in the subsequent Q episode, too!
)
But that's the thing with time travel, isn't it, if someone goes back in time and changes it, we wouldn't know**. We only know because it got on film because it's a piece of fiction that, at one time, took more care with continuity. (Or as much as it could at the time, after season 4 TNG, things started to unwind... their not having a database of scripts and happenstances to make looking up basic continuity didn't help either.)
Once the queen was introduced, it made for an interesting Data vs. Queen confrontation and story, but it completely cut the balls off of what was so coldly threatening about the Borg.
Data and Queenie sitting in a tree was hokum, and a weird inversion of "Descent" where now the Borg, otherwise upgrading people, now want to make Data look like a biological lifeform completely? Won't that skin start to decay and smell bad and stuff? Seems antithetical, but add in more headcanon nonsense and it's an experiment of the Borg to help heal injured Borg instead of pulling out components that in turn trigger a disintegration process. Problem is, the Borg were so burnt out and none of those ideas used that it's all for naught. (Okay, deprecated or archaic or arcane or esoteric or otherwise, "naught" is still a word. Or is not a not word if you dig double-negatives, but I digress...)
** for a far, far better example of sci-fi discussing repercussions from time travel alterations, check this story out:
(And the best bit involving Vicki and Steven isn't even shown!)
