The critical moment of my entire life came a few weeks after my third birthday in a hotel room in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
I am sorry to say that I have no memory of this supreme event. I have heard of it only second-hand from my family, among whom it has achieved the status of legend. As they tell it, they had just spent several hours driving down from Winnipeg, listening to a high-stakes attempt at constitutional reform in Canada come unravelled on the radio. My dad, wanting a reprieve from the day’s driving and politics, laid down on the hotel bed and put on the TV. It was a new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation—the season three finale, in fact: “The Best of Both Worlds,” soon to become one of the most infamous cliffhangers in the history of television. And I—a tiny, wide-eyed blonde child who’d never before paid much attention to my parents’ viewing habits—sat there watching, transfixed by terror and fascination as our heroes in their silver starship faced-off hopelessly against an ominous black cube and the pale, merciless robot people—the Borg—who dwelt within. I could only watch helplessly as they kidnapped the dashing, bald-headed captain and altered him.
“Altered?”
“He is a Borg!”
I can only imagine the horror that must have tinged my young soul in the final minute of the episode, as the corrupted hero appeared onscreen, announced that he was now Locutus of Borg, and promised that my life, as it had been, was now over. There was an orchestral swell, a bearded man ordering someone called Mr. Worf to “Fire”—and the rest, as they say, was history.1
Locutus, as it turned out, was right. My life was never the same after that. I have only documentary evidence to go on, but even a cursory glance at my childhood drawings shows the sudden appearance of darkly greebled cubes and anemic cyborgs with laser-pointers mounted on their heads as motifs in my artwork (together, it must be said, with endless representations of the Reading Rainbow guy in a golden visor). I had become a Trekkie. I had been drawn into the fandom—assimilated, if you like—by its most famous villain, as much as by anything.
Which is why it so grieves me to admit that the Borg are actually kind of boring.
Don’t get me wrong! I love them as a concept; I still think that they feature prominently in many of the greatest Star Trek stories ever told. I even love some of the weaker stories with them—I will defend the Agnes Jurati/Borg Queen subplot in Picard season two unto death. But, well… there just aren’t that many stories you can properly tell with them, or at least, not if you continue to write them as villains.2 In their first appearances, they worked brilliantly as an apocalyptic threat to the Federation; but you can only defeat an enemy onscreen so many times before the dialogue about how invincible they are starts to ring a little hollow. Worse than that, the writers had to water down the Borg’s original concept almost immediately for dramatic interest; you just can’t have many compelling conversations with a faceless swarm announcing that resistance is futile. The Borg are great every so often, but it doesn’t take long before you want to go running back to the Klingons, Romulans, Vorta, or Cardassians—baddies with whom you can actually manage a compelling tête-à-tête3 about Great Power politics or competing cultural philosophies. It may have been the action-packed spectacle of “The Best of Both Worlds” that first drew me into Star Trek, but it is this—the intellectual back-and-forth, the radical project of trying to imagine yourself in the Other—that has kept me here these many years, and that I have tried to emulate in my own novel.
So why is it, then, that on those rare occasions when Secret Hideout-era Star Trek has tried to actually introduce major new threats, so many of them have tended to be in the model of the Borg—monstrous, generic, doomsday villains? Let’s consider our track record: Discovery season two introduced CONTROL, an evil AI who wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy for reasons that were never made clear, with a catchphrase that sounded like someone ran “Resistance is Futile” through a thesaurus app. Picard season one ended with a brief face-off against a similar, extragalactic AI so powerful that it could scour all organic life from the Milky Way at the drop of a hat; season two ended with an even more generic threat from… something… that randomly opened a transwarp conduit that almost devastated the Alpha Quadrant for reasons that were never explored.
And of course, the recent third season of Strange New Worlds has given us the Vezda, an enemy against whom reason and diplomacy are ontologically useless; they’re Evil, you see—“the evil that predates doing evil,” as Captain Batel memorably puts it in “New Worlds, New Civilizations.” Essentially, they’re the Devil: they desire only to wreak death and destruction across the Cosmos; the portals to their realm are kept in vast and ancient temples that seem to radiate menace; their leader, possessing the corpse of the unfortunate Ensign Gamble, goes about in a terrifying horned mask, compelling his followers to gouge out their own eyeballs for no apparent reason. And like all devils, there can be no reasoning with them; any attempts to understand their motivations or to seek peaceful coexistence are futile. They are, in other words, extremely one-note.
To be fair, this is a well that Star Trek has dipped into before—although mostly in episodes that I generally consider to be on the weaker side. On the original series, Scotty was once possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, who fed off of the fear generated by sadistically murdering women4; on The Next Generation, Tasha Yar was killed by a tar monster somehow agglomerated from the discarded evil thoughts of a “race of titans.” The closest antecedent, though, are the Pah’Wraiths from the last few seasons of Deep Space Nine: a race of infernally evil “fallen angels” eternally longing to escape their prison and wage war against the forces of good, kept in check only by the noble self-sacrifice of a Starfleet captain in a climactic battle heavy in both CGI and cheesy dialogue.
And yet, Deep Space Nine gets away with it because it gave us enough antagonists who were genuinely compelling to excuse one who was not. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Strange New Worlds, whose main prior contribution to Star Trek villainy, besides occasionally dusting off the Romulans and the Klingons, has lain in reimagining the Gorn as slavering, Xenomorph-like beasts driven into murderous racial frenzies by solar flares. To its credit, the latest season has finally walked this back somewhat, showing us that some Gorns at least are perfectly reasonable individuals capable of conversing civilly over a game of chess—and yet, there has been no attention given to how this can be reconciled with their predatory disregard for other forms of life, nor to how their culture works at anything beyond a surface level. And even when La’an kills Ortegas’s Gorn friend in a misunderstanding, the episode seems more interested in tying itself into continuity than it is in sitting with the morality of such an act. The Gorn might narrowly avoid the “always chaotic evil” trope, but the ideological tension that has so animated previous Star Trek villains (including even the Borg, when they are written well) has remained depressingly absent.
It didn’t have to be this way. When Star Trek: Discovery was released back in 2017, its very first scene featured the Klingon warlord T’Kuvma laying out his critique of the Federation. The scene is hampered by the decision to film in glacially slow, distorted Klingonese, and it would have been nice to get some sense as to how much ideological diversity there was amongst the Klingons themselves, but the dialogue itself is gripping stuff, comparable to Michael Eddington’s “You’re worse than the Borg” speech or Quark and Garak’s “root beer” conversation back on Deep Space Nine.
The first season of Picard, meanwhile, teased the fascinating idea that the Federation itself had become infected with the same culture of paranoia that had brought down the Romulan Empire—an important commentary on the psychological effects of death anxiety and living under a rampant security state that was unfortunately somewhat lost in the noise of too many competing plotlines. And the Vau N’akat story arc in the gravely underappreciated Star Trek: Prodigy centred around an all-too-timely conflict between pluralism and xenophobia. Hell, even Lower Decks, a comedy, managed to retool the Pakleds into the franchise’s single best commentary on the new era of authoritarianism, though the joke, admittedly, had run its course by the end of the second season.
But all of that appears to have fallen by the wayside. Our enemies have become monsters, mindless killing machines, manifestations of Satan on Earth against whom we can enact consequence-free violence. Meanwhile, in real life, we spend every day watching genocidal violence play out on our handheld devices, underwritten by American taxes, with leaders commanding us to despise and drive out the Other—the immigrant, the disabled, the person of colour, the transgender, the Palestinian—with other Others soon to come, and don’t you doubt it.
So yes, Star Trek needs new villains; and I don’t just mean another “Gabriel Lorca”-style pastiche of MAGA politics (though even that might be too much to hope for under America’s—and Paramount’s—new censorship regime). Rather, we need Star Trek to do what Star Trek has always done best—present us with an Other in whom we can see ourselves. Recall that back before the Gorn were “monsters,” they were a rival spacefaring power who sought only to protect their own territory from colonization—a motive that Kirk found sufficiently resonant to spare their captain’s life. And one of Trek’s few “satanic” aliens who actually worked for me was the entity from “Day of the Dove,” who stood-in for the dehumanizing horrors of war and could only be defeated by finding common ground with the Klingons. A good villain is a foil for the heroes—illustrating who they are by way of contrast and forcing them to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about themselves. So the question becomes: what do we want to illustrate about the Federation, a fictional civilization that pulls an increasingly awkward double duty as both an imaginary ideal and a mirror for the liberal world order?
Once we put it in these terms, a plethora of options start to unfurl themselves. Perhaps some space capitalists; not scheming used-car salesmen like the Ferengi, but something closer to what they were originally intended to be: a sort of East India Company in space. Discovery tried to do something similar with the Emerald Chain back in season three—they were only particularly interesting in one episode and otherwise mostly came across as generic pirate-y types, but I think that the idea is a sound one. Or perhaps an enemy to represent pushback against the Federation’s insidious “soft power”? The old novelverse did something similar to great effect with the Typhon Pact, but I envision something other than a coalition of the Federation’s imperial rivals; perhaps an alliance of minor worlds who were deemed ineligible for Federation membership for some key, illiberal aspects of their social structures that they refused to change, and who now attempt to recruit new worlds to their reactionary counter-Federation.
Or, given how much recent Star Trek series have muddied the Federation’s reputation, perhaps we could have an anti-villain; someone who, at least initially, appears to occupy the moral high ground—say, by interfering in the affairs of pre-warp civilizations to effect goals that seem noble. Or perhaps someone who turns the Federation’s own tactics against them; an insidious foil, capable of waiting patiently to achieve what they want. This was what I had hoped would become of Jurati’s collective: a version of the Borg who are prepared to take no for an answer because they know that time is on their side and, sooner or later, the answer will be yes.
I could go on; I’m sure that you could think of any number of options and I encourage you to lay them out in the comments. But one thing is for sure: a villain who is simply Evil—“the evil that predates doing evil”—isn’t an interesting foil. Because when the villain is Evil itself, all that it tells us is that the heroes are on the side of Good; and, as history and current affairs show us, once you believe yourself to be automatically on the side of Good, you can excuse doing anything, no matter how evil. A villain in whom you can see yourself is a moral corrective for this tendency.
- My parents will fault me if I don’t also mention that they tried to calm me down by putting on an old Tom Baker Doctor Who serial that happened to be airing on a local PBS affiliate. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of assuming that a three-year-old child would find it just as silly and campy as they did, rather than, for example, existentially terrifying. ↩︎
- Insert mandatory grousing about the third season of Picard ignoring the benign version of the Borg that the second season had spent ten episodes setting up. ↩︎
- Literally, in the Klingons’ case, in that they ram their heads into each other. ↩︎
- Specifically women, on the grounds that “women are more easily and more deeply terrified.” Did I mention that this episode was bad? ↩︎
The alien in the first image looks straight out of DARK CRYSTAL. The Borg were always scary to me because of assimilation. Anyone who has spent their life fighting society’s determination to sanitize and take away what makes them unique finds the idea of being forced into that bland normalcy utterly horrifying.
I feel like Paramount – and corporate culture in general, but specifically Paramount – are going to get in the way of realising a villain on screen that speaks to the evil being done today.
I personally think that the last thing Trek needs is villains, period. Character conflict, when not intrusive, is fine and even a well-written antagonist can be used effectively. Villains just drag the show down to the level of an Irwin Allen show. What separated the original series from the pact were episodes like “Devil in the Dark” and “Metamorphosis ” that turned the typical monster premise of sixties television SF on its head, or “The City on the Edge of Forever” which was a character-driven, high-concept show with tragic overtones. When the show did increasingly resort to villains it was the usual nonsense of aliens testing humanity or using them for sport with only the occasional subtle shadings courtesy of Gene Coon and Dorothy Fontana offering any relief.
“Next Gen” was at its best when it avoided villains and concentrated on problem solving episodes which is where the show’s reputationas “competence porn” came from. The Borg only worked very early on when they were a metaphor for American imperialism/consumerism and, much as H.G. Wells had done with “The War of the Worlds,” showed the horror of colonialism by putting the heores in the shoes of the conquered. Sadly, they then gave us the Johnny Depp Borg called Hugh and, worse, the damned and utterly stupid queen, hence draining all of the horror out of one of the show’s most original and effective ideas.
I will give “DS9” credit for an overal better track record, particularly with many of the episodes involving the Cardassians, and the Vorta, particularly Weyoun, and even a few of the Jem’Hadar, although the founders were crushing, one-dimensional bores.
I agree — fighting “villains” is not what Star Trek is primarily about. I’m unimpressed by what the recent Starfleet Academy trailer shows of Paul Giamatti’s villain character, and my immediate reaction was that I’d be more interested if the show didn’t have a Big Bad and a season-long story arc but just told stories about cadets at the Academy being cadets.
“[Picard’s] season two ended with an even more generic threat from… something… that randomly opened a transwarp conduit that almost devastated the Alpha Quadrant for reasons that were never explored.”
That one still rankles three and a half years later…
Anyway, I totally agree, both that Trek needs better antagonists, and that the state of the world we’re living in right now should give writers more than enough fodder to work with. However, with this country so narrowly divided (and the First Amendment on life support) I don’t imagine Paramount is interested in giving us antagonists who are relevant to the moment we find ourselves in. The useful thing about archetypal evil, at least from a corporate perspective, is that people can pretend it represents whatever they dislike, regardless of the creator’s intentions (see Star Wars memes).
Even Star Wars, evenrecently, managed to make the Empire a commentary on fascism. The Vezda aren’t even that.
My favorite Star Wars Youtuber put out a video after Mon Mothma’s speech saying this is what Star Wars was supposed to be about all along. Some people just stopped listening.
Imagine my double-take, after reading your first line from my computer here at the University of North Dakota.
That coincidence aside, I enjoyed the rest of your piece in general agreement. The narrative focus of the more recent series (and uncannily less so in the “children’s'” show Prodigy) has certainly been compromised. Too many flashy ideas and not enough cohesive world-building.
Sure, I’ve still watched it all, but with sporadic blooms of disappointment.
(There just aren’t that many places to go on a day trip from Winnipeg, I’m afraid)
Cheers from Fargo! Love your Folk Fest and your parents taste in television !
I like your local PBS affiliate and titular film!
Don’t have a Watsonian explanation, but the obvious Doylist explanation is that the actor needs to see where he’s going.
If LeVar Burton could play Geordi La Forge for seven years with a wire headband over his eyes, then Chris Myers can handle a few scenes of sneering and monologuing from beneath a blindfold.
I just figured the mask and bone suit (or whatever) were some existing ceremonial garb from that planet’s culture, rather than something EvilGamble created.
Well put!
On a more practical thespian level, I would really like to actually hear an actor playing a villain speak. You know? Imagine Ricardo Montalban buried under so many prosthetics it made him sound like he had cotton balls in his mouth, or Marc Alaimo reduced to being a snarling lizard man in a suit. I mean, I want to hear these people deliver some memorable lines, dagnabbit. This is Star Trek. Quote Shakespeare and monologue like crazy, please!
There’s so much hard sf that can be mined for ideas. Much of TOS dealt with the frailty and perseverance of being human, and the possibilities of different ways of being. Humans strive for paradise, they don’t want it handed to them. Spock was fascinating (see what I did there) because he was an outsider who could look with curiosity at human tendencies that humans take for granted rather than a character like Data who strove to be human. I always found TNG to be not much more than Love Boat in space, and found the Borg a ridiculous threat. Moreover, when the Enterprise had the opportunity to destroy the borg borg cube in one of the episodes – a situation that spoke very clearly of whther to justify genocide – the Borg conveniently self-destructed. This is the problem with sf that wants its audience to feel good about itself rather than to confront the choices that need to be made in difficult situations; the stuff that truly makes us human. And of course the overt Shakespeare references in TOS acknowledged this. Episodic charater-driven sf of Star Trek always worked best as morality plays. Kirk’s arc through the 6 movies with his justifiable yet irrational hatred of Klingons that you see develop throughout the series is a great example, and an extremely brave bit of writing to show disagreeble sides of the invicible yet falible hero.
SNL did have a sketch of ST: The Love Boat Generation, which featured Worf as the Games Master (“There is no room for the weak and cowardly in shuffleboard!”).
You don’t need to imagine it; just look at the contrast between Marc Alaimo’s charismatic performance as Gul Dukat versus his completely forgettable turn as one of the Antican delegates in “Lonely Among Us”. Only a certain number of actors can effectively play characters under that much make-up, and you can’t cast Doug Jones as everyone.
Good point, I had forgotten about Alaimo’s earlier appearance.
Armin Shimerman had to talk around the false teeth he wore as Quark, and it didn’t hurt his performance any. Indeed, when he returned to voice Quark in Lower Decks, he actually had to put in the false teeth in the recording studio so that Quark’s voice would sound right. Acting through prosthetics is a learnable skill like any other. Heck, the reason so many aliens in SF film and TV are played by strong-voiced theatrical actors is because they have the skill to enunciate well through prosthetics and deliver potent vocal performances when their facial expressions are obscured.
Of course, if an actor’s voice is muffled by a mask or helmet or whatever, they’d just dub over their lines in post-production. Or you’d have a suit actor under the mask and a different voice actor recording the dialogue, like David Prowse and James Earl Jones as Darth Vader.
Of course I was referring to those poor actors playing the Klingons in Discovery. It wasn’t just their voices but their movements were awkward as well. I spent the entire time feeling sorry for the people rather than paying attention to their performances.
Again, the glacially slow distorted Klingonese wasn’t doing anyone any favours.
Disagree. Star Trek is not Star Wars. It’s not about villains or bad guys.
“Villains”, “antagonists”, “foils”, whatever you want to call them, it needs an Other than represents a philosophical challenge to the Federation.
Not every story needs a villain. There was no villain in “Hollow Pursuits” or “The Inner Light.” There was no villain in “Duet” or “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” There was no villain in “Tuvix” or “Latent Image.” Stories need conflict, but conflict doesn’t just mean good vs. evil. It can be between equally well-intentioned people with conflicting goals, or against a force of nature, or against the protagonists’ own failings or doubts.
What’s often forgotten in modern productions is that Star Trek was meant to be drama, not melodrama. Look at early season 1 of TOS — it’s not larger-than-life space opera, but a grounded drama with naturalistic characters doing everyday things while doing jobs that happen to be in space. Melodrama is generally about good vs. evil, but drama is just about people dealing with problems.
“There was no villain in “Tuvix” ”
The scriptwriters?
Nope. The fact that it’s so controversial means they succeeded brilliantly at what they were trying to do.
Although a case can be made that part of a writer’s job is to be as sadistic as possible toward one’s characters.
I would argue that Janeway is the villain in “Tuvix.”
*sigh* I knew somebody was going to say that. No, she was the protagonist forced to make an impossible choice. As is often the case in stories, the fact that the audience may disagree with the protagonist’s choice is the entire point, since the story is challenging us to decide for ourselves rather than simply telling us what to think. See also Kirk’s choice in “A Private Little War,” Sisko’s in “In the Pale Moonlight,” etc. Sometimes circumstances don’t allow a protagonist to create a happy ending, leaving them only bad options to choose from. The story is about how they make that choice and how they live with it (though “Tuvix” ended too abruptly to explore the latter).
I think that I specifically repudiated the idea of good vs. evil in the above essay.
“Villain” doesn’t imply that something’s a melodrama. Pulling from early season 1 of TOS, would you not call the Talosians, Gary Mitchell, Charlie X, Balok, Lenore Karidian, Harry Mudd, Tristan Adams, (robot) Roger Korby and so forth villains? I would hesitate to call any of them evil, but surely in their respective stories, they play the role of villains. Likewise when you start to get into the more “space operatic” parts of the series; the Romulan Commander in “Balance of Terrror” is not evil; but he is still a(n anti-)villain. Kor is not evil, but he’s the villain of “Errand of Mercy”; Khan is not evil, but he’s the villain of “Space Seed”. I could go on.
I feel like you’re arguing against a position that I have not taken.
I’m just saying that, while many fine stories have antagonists, there are also many fine stories that don’t. I have never thought of Star Trek as a franchise that “needs villains.” Its villains are not what define it, because it isn’t about winning battles over enemies, it’s about exploring the human condition. Sometimes that exploration can be done by pitting the characters against an antagonist or a rival philosophy, but I think it’s missing the point to argue that that’s a fundamental need. Star Trek doesn’t need new and better villains, it needs less of a focus on villain-based writing overall. It needs writers who don’t prioritize trying to create the next Khan or the next Borg, who don’t feel the need to force every season into the Buffy “Big Bad” model, but are just telling stories that center on characters and ideas. Use villains when they serve the story, but don’t tell the story to serve the need for villains.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!
Thanks for a great article; I agree completely.
One of my favorite episodes in all of Star Trek is “The Devil in the Dark,” where something that seems like a mindless, evil monster turns out to have quite understandable motives, and the key to solving the problem is to UNDERSTAND the other’s point of view and compromise with them. Star Trek needs a lot more of this, because failure to understand and compromise with other human beings is tearing our planet apart.
My favorite Star Trek movie isn’t the one most people like best; it’s The Voyage Home, because in THAT movie, there ARE no villains, or if there are, the villains are the human selfishness and short-sightedness that allowed us to hunt the whales to extinction. We could also use quite a lot more of that in Star Trek. I’m an atheist, and yet I feel compelled to mention the Bible’s admonition that we first remove the beam in our own eye before we complain about the speck in another’s, a very Trekkian idea.
In addition to better villains, modern Star Trek also needs to have lower stakes most of the time. Something that will destroy all life in the galaxy or the universe is overkill most of the time; save that for a season finale or something. We cared about Captain Kirk when the only thing at risk was the fate of the Enterprise or the fate of the planet of the week or even the fate of a single character. I think the audience becomes numb to galaxy-threatening levels of peril if it’s done too often, and it isn’t necessary to do that to make us care about what’s happening. “Amok Time” is one of the best episodes of TOS, and the only risks were that Spock might die or that Kirk might get court-martialed for insubordination … at least until the Kirk-Spock fight at the end.
I’ve long found it interesting that canonical Trek hardly ever went to the “threat to the entire galaxy/universe” well; pretty much the only time TOS ever did that was “The Alternative Factor,” and that was a really dumb episode. (When something was presented as a threat to the galaxy, like the Doomsday Machine or the giant amoeba, it was more in the sense that it could potentially attack anywhere in the galaxy, rather than threatening to destroy the entire thing at once.) I don’t think TAS or TNG ever did it, and the closest DS9 came was the episode where they discovered a baby universe starting to grow and had to put it back into subspace or wherever before it expanded and displaced our own. Yet there were multiple cases where the tie-in novels featured threats that could destroy the galaxy or universe, and I found that an interesting contrast. I appreciated Trek’s restraint in not going to that well, though the current incarnation of screen Trek is not defined by restraint.
After all, my problem with the concept of threats to the entire universe is that the universe is so vast and ancient that if it were possible for anything to destroy the entire thing, it’s a statistical certainty that it would already have happened. After all, in any story where the intrepid heroes defy impossible odds to save the universe from destruction, the fact that those odds are impossible implies that most efforts to prevent universal destruction would fail — and it only takes one. (Unless you presume quantum immortality, that every time the universe is in danger, there are multiple timelines where the destruction happens and one where it’s prevented, and we simply happen to inhabit the one that’s left by virtue of the anthropic principle. But it takes the triumph out of fiction if the characters only succeed by a statistical technicality rather than their actual skill and determination.)
Beyond the physical, another issue that I have with it is that the writers are simply never going to pull the trigger and the audience knows it. And so, instead of having astronomical stakes, such stories effectively have no stakes at all. Like, I never once believed that corrupting the mycellial network would destroy the multiverse, or that the DMA would destroy Earth (or even Ni’Var). But I did believe that, say, Boimler might blow his shot at promotion, or Una might lose her commission.
Yes, exactly! The writers of Secret Hideout Trek seem to think that threats to the entire galaxy are exciting, but actually, I think they’re kind of stupid. :-)
Great article. We’re probably about the same age and I was pulled into Trek much the same way.
As for potential commentary, the Expanse touched on something I would love to see Trek develop; what happens to the freeloaders, the indolent, in the Federation? What are the effects of a socialist state long-term where everything is available? Can we explore this somehow?
What about galactic bullies who invade and genocide cultures who are not Federation? Should we act as police, or not get involved?
I like your idea of dealing with a race that does not follow the Prime Directive, but if they are not Federation, what right do we have to interfere?
Orville hits hard on the morality episodes by making us ask great questions (it’s some of the best Trek in a long time..:better than Discovery without a doubt).
A good villain might be one that has a different set of ethics, but in their view is working for the grater good, which just so happens to be at odds with the Federation. An Anti-Federation competing for worlds to join it, but who is hostile to us for some reason.
min summary though, I absolutely agree. Let’s get some better villains.
A couple of smaller scale thoughts:
1. Vezda and eyes: since the original escapee burned out ensign Gamble’s eyes as an apparent way to either possess him or pave the way to possess him (the eyes or the window to the soul, etc), I just figured that he had his followers gouge out their eyes to prepare more vessels. Not that this addresses any of the main point, that they’re the opposite of subtle and don’t add a lot of character or processing to the story. A villain that is there to move the story rather than be the story.
2. It makes me appreciate the villains of The sehlat who ate its tail. There was limited opportunity to process what the crew being human meant, and when I think about it, there’s a whole layer of humans becoming Borg except without all the cybernetic bits and what does that mean? There are big questions about what killing them means and about “there but for the grace of God go I.” They don’t get to process it a ton, but it’s also a hallmark of older science fiction to me that they often just threw the question out there rather than having their characters also come up with a solution for you.
Laid out with great pith, as usual. Would love to see a counter civilization who believes the Prime Directive is evil and goes around trying to develop new contacts–in a supportive, not a colonial way.
Thank you!
I’ve always had a soft spot for the robots of Krikkit. No need to mess around with complicated reasons for villainy.
That was kind of what I’d expected the Vau N’Akat’s origin story would be.
The worst sin of Picard S1 is that the Romulan anti-machine cult was entirely correct. They did not misinterpret the visions the machine-stone circle gave; there was an existential threat to every molecule of life in the galaxy, and sacrificing a bunch of DI’vI’ngan to prevent complete annihilation of all life was perfectly understandable. Hunting down the androids and eliminating them is absolutely necessary because of the threat even one of them having bad experiences with biological life has to the trillions of living beings between Sagittarius A* and the distant rim out to the Magellanic Clouds.
I mean, it’s probably not the absolute worst thing but it’s one that’s stuck in my mind for a while.
That, coupled with the fact that the first half of the season sets up the Romulans as a parallel to real-life struggles with xenophobia against refugees, and then the end of the season reveals that, oops, the nefarious Romulans were actually secretly behind the whole thing.
That reminds me of The CW’s one-season series Star-Crossed, a cross between Romeo and Juliet and Alien Nation, about a forbidden romance between an Earth girl and a boy from a group of alien refugees. The show tried to be an allegory for anti-immigrant bigotry, but the writers felt obligated to conform to the modern serialized season-arc model where everything is driven by secrets and conspiracies and shocking revelations, so it turned out that everything the paranoid racist rednecks claimed about the aliens’ sinister secret plans to invade Earth was actually true, and thus the show that was nominally trying to expose the evils of xenophobia ended up saying the xenophobes were right all along.
This is the problem with the modern need to force nearly every show into the season-arc model. Since the model relies so much on sequential plot twists and revelations pertaining to the same subject matter, it pushes writers to do conspiracy-driven stories, and sometimes that’s exactly the wrong kind of story for expressing certain thematic ideas.
It also has an annoying habit of continually validating conspiracy-minded reasoning in general.
Well, there have always been plenty of conspiracy-driven stories in fiction, many of them quite memorable. The problem is not that serialized plot arcs allow for conspiracy stories at all, it’s that the format is weighted too heavily in favor of them at the expense of other kinds of storytelling. In particular, if you want to make an allegory condemning xenophobia and paranoia about outsiders, then a conspiracy-driven plot is a poor choice for how to approach it. (At least one where it turns out to be the aliens behind the conspiracy. If it had been a conspiracy by the humans against the aliens in the show, that would’ve worked better. Alien Nation did that now and again with the Purists, though it was an episodic show from the days before season arcs were common.)