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Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains
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Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains
The “villains” of Trek are meant to be foils to the Federation’s worldview, not blindly evil antagonists.
By Jaime Babb
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Published on October 14, 2025
Image: Marni Grossman/Paramount+
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Image: Marni Grossman/Paramount+
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.
The words I want on my tombstone. (Credit: CBS)
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. 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-tête 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.
Why does his mask have eyeholes if he doesn’t have any eyes? (Credit: Paramount+)
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 women; 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.
“The Prophets have sent me a gift! Their beloved Emissary, sent forth like an avenging angel to slay the demon!” (Credit: CBS)
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.[end-mark]
The post Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains appeared first on Reactor.
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