Let's say the Borg somehow managed to assimilate a Q. How fucked is the universe?

How do you assimilate something that only has a representation of a body so that low dimension beings can understand it?

I think an individual as powerful as the Q would end up dominating the minds of the collective. The drones would simply become physical embodiments of the Q's will.

So to answer the question of how fucked? It depends on why the Q wanted to take over the Borg from within.

I'm not sure this would even be possible within the existing canon because the continuum could revoke the powers of the Q who was being assimilated.

Excluding this canonical failsafe, I think it would most likely mean that the Borg would be able to eventually replicate the powers of the Q within the collective. This posses another interesting question or thought experiment.

Would the Borg even be driven to assimilate any more worlds or beings at that point given the fact that their entire motivation is understood to be the pursuit of all knowledge in the universe? The Q seem to be near omnipotent and omnipresent. So, in theory, if the Borg gained access to this power then it seems logical that they would no longer be driven by the same motivations, and would even cease to be Borg at all since they would necessarily reclaim a sense of individualism.

Either way, great question. This is why I love Lemmy. The Trek community here is amazing.

In TNG they were going to let the Borg see a funny shape to fuck them up.

I'm pretty sure there would be something in a Q's head that would fuck them up even harder.

If this were Gate instead of Trek, ascension instead of Q power, and Goauld instead of Borg, then the answer would be Anubis.

I think the rest of the Q continuum would prevent it entirely. At worst, the assimilated Q just becomes human, lacking all typical Q abilities. However, the assimilated Q would probably still have knowledge well beyond what the Borg have, so even the knowledge gain alone is a huge help to the Borg.

I'm pretty sure they already have and just don't know it. Quinn from Voyager has done "everything" and you can't seriously expect me to believe that being part of the collective isn't on that list.

Of course, you could argue that even if he ever had been assimilated, it wasn't real, since he's still Q and the Borg aren't omnipotent. But then again, that's kind of moving the goal post when you consider how many others managed to maintain some kind of independence after being assimilated. Hugh, Janeway, Seven and her internet friends, they all managed to resist the collective in one way or another.

But ok, for the sake of discussion, what happens if the collective does get the full knowledge and power of a Q? Well, it probably depends on how Q powers and the abilities of other such godlike entities in Star Trek work. Is the continuum more powerful than the ascended collective? Does a comparative power level even enter into it or do they have the admin rights to the universe's operating system? Does it matter how many Qs there are, and if so, does the collective count as just one entity or many, and does that help or hurt their chances? Without a clear understanding of what the rules are, we can't really say how things would likely play out, only how we would want to see them played out.

That said, you could argue that we get the beginnings of a unified godlike powers theory early on in TNG. The Traveler explains that the basic building block of all reality is thought. Essentially, Star Trek's entire universe exists in a mindscape, and thought can directly alter reality. With this as our starting point, we can theorize that Q and any other godlike being is directly manipulating a layer of thought that is the foundation of all reality.

That we can't all do this under normal circumstances, but that we can be given access or suddenly do it by accident when we're beyond the edges of our normal cosmic environment implies that something is actively preventing us from just casually hacking the universe. The Q continuum being able to bestow and revoke such powers, even among their own, implies to me that they are the ones policing this stuff.

Now, how a conflict between an unknowable continuum and an ascendant collective plays out is still vague, but I think we have enough point of reference to translate this conflict into a more familiar form. In this scenario, the universe is a holodeck, the Q are running IT, and the Borg are professor Moriarty. When viewed through this lens, the question is, how effective can the Q be at containing a system breach, vs how well can the Borg evade the Continuum's countermeasures? Since we know the Borg are not always the best at thinking outside the box, while the Q do seem to be able to police their own, my money would be on the Borg getting beaten almost immediately (or perhaps even retroactively).

Well, my money would be on the Q, if it weren't for the Voyager crew being able to beat them with muskets. (I don't care if they aren't really muskets, it's still Qs getting killed or wounded by mere mortals, and on their home turf, which those mere mortals can't even properly comprehend.)

It may look something like this series, replace Deadpool with Q: https://youtu.be/xrckqzNUtPs?si=SH0OtBieDLU3G2MJ

Anybody else thinking of their favorite video game where they're ridiculously OP?