As noted, I am a huge Tolkien nerd. I also happen to be a big Star Trek fan. At its best it was a very good show, often looking at interesting things in interesting ways… at its worst it was no worse than your average TV show.
By and large, they had the usual types of antagonists/villains… the (in their original incarnation) vaguely Mongolian and militaristic Klingons (they changed a lot over the years). The sneaky and militaristic Romulans… the (basically) racist and militaristic Dominion, the greedy and not so militaristic Ferengi (they kind of break the trend there)… the totalitarian, sneaky, and militaristic Cardassians.
The most common thread being militaristic—which is apparently a great evil in the Trek universe.
Because the show(s) and movies have been around so long, a fair amount of depth built up around some of these things—a bit of nuance, alterations to fit in better with larger budgets and changing times.
The one villain that kind of broke the usual stereotypical mold of Trek villains was the Borg… until they screwed them up (IMO).
The Borg managed to tic off a lot of interesting (and creepy) boxes.
Their motivation and aims were not the standard kind of motivations and aims… We will add your technological and biological distinctiveness to our own. They seek a kind of perfection or completeness by encompassing and containing everything.
They are a collective there are (originally) no individuals, no leaders. Just the voice of the Collective, wherever that is actually coming from.
They are adaptable and relentless, possessed of a high degree of technological superiority… resistance is futile. Death is irrelevant. They die without complaint. Kill without qualms. They basically ignore everything that isn’t an immediate objective and doesn’t get in the way of achieving their objective.
The Enterprise-E basically had to be rescued from them by Q (who put them up against the Borg in the first place as an object lesson).
Chilling… and truly alien. Perhaps the only real aliens that Trek has ever actually done that had a humanoid form and could be communicated with (to some degree).
Their alien quality was both a strength (in emotional effect) and a weakness (in terms of drama). How do you have an antagonist that the audience cannot fundamentally understand and relate to? That is, in practice, nothing more than a “force of nature?”
Trek struggled with this and ended up doing the usual thing… they turned the aliens into dressed up humans (first Locutus and later the Borg Queen, with a bit of Hugh as a side dish). This served the purposes of drama but, IMO, basically destroyed the Borg, turning them into simply another villain—of which Trek already had plenty.
I can’t help but think that there was a lot of potential lost in that transition. Drama (in its essence) is about the interaction of protagonist and antagonist—but there are also a lot of dramatic possibilities inherent in the struggle of humans and humanity against what we might term “forces of nature”—extreme, non-anthropomorphic obstacles that are difficult or even impossible to overcome.
Not an easy story to tell, I think—and they often do not have happy endings and are often disturbing—which probably accounts for their scarcity.
The Borg
The Borg
The Borg
As noted, I am a huge Tolkien nerd. I also happen to be a big Star Trek fan. At its best it was a very good show, often looking at interesting things in interesting ways… at its worst it was no worse than your average TV show.
By and large, they had the usual types of antagonists/villains… the (in their original incarnation) vaguely Mongolian and militaristic Klingons (they changed a lot over the years). The sneaky and militaristic Romulans… the (basically) racist and militaristic Dominion, the greedy and not so militaristic Ferengi (they kind of break the trend there)… the totalitarian, sneaky, and militaristic Cardassians.
The most common thread being militaristic—which is apparently a great evil in the Trek universe.
Because the show(s) and movies have been around so long, a fair amount of depth built up around some of these things—a bit of nuance, alterations to fit in better with larger budgets and changing times.
The one villain that kind of broke the usual stereotypical mold of Trek villains was the Borg… until they screwed them up (IMO).
The Borg managed to tic off a lot of interesting (and creepy) boxes.
Their motivation and aims were not the standard kind of motivations and aims… We will add your technological and biological distinctiveness to our own. They seek a kind of perfection or completeness by encompassing and containing everything.
They are a collective there are (originally) no individuals, no leaders. Just the voice of the Collective, wherever that is actually coming from.
They are adaptable and relentless, possessed of a high degree of technological superiority… resistance is futile. Death is irrelevant. They die without complaint. Kill without qualms. They basically ignore everything that isn’t an immediate objective and doesn’t get in the way of achieving their objective.
The Enterprise-E basically had to be rescued from them by Q (who put them up against the Borg in the first place as an object lesson).
Chilling… and truly alien. Perhaps the only real aliens that Trek has ever actually done that had a humanoid form and could be communicated with (to some degree).
Their alien quality was both a strength (in emotional effect) and a weakness (in terms of drama). How do you have an antagonist that the audience cannot fundamentally understand and relate to? That is, in practice, nothing more than a “force of nature?”
Trek struggled with this and ended up doing the usual thing… they turned the aliens into dressed up humans (first Locutus and later the Borg Queen, with a bit of Hugh as a side dish). This served the purposes of drama but, IMO, basically destroyed the Borg, turning them into simply another villain—of which Trek already had plenty.
I can’t help but think that there was a lot of potential lost in that transition. Drama (in its essence) is about the interaction of protagonist and antagonist—but there are also a lot of dramatic possibilities inherent in the struggle of humans and humanity against what we might term “forces of nature”—extreme, non-anthropomorphic obstacles that are difficult or even impossible to overcome.
Not an easy story to tell, I think—and they often do not have happy endings and are often disturbing—which probably accounts for their scarcity.