First of all, that is basically a distinction without a difference. Many of the "antagonists" mentioned fall into all the usual tropes...
No, it's really not. There's a whole other thread around here somewhere that talks about potential antagonists for DSC season two, and it makes the distinction pretty clear. For instance, Lorca (as presented throughout most of S1) could have been an interesting antagonist for Burnham in terms of testing her ethics... only in his final episode was he degraded into a Villain, the kind who shoots people in the back, gives monomaniacal speeches about repellant values, has to be defeated in physical combat, and gets tossed down a hole to his Gruesome Demise.
Or consider
Game of Thrones, for instance. Ramsay Bolton was a Villain with a capital V (and very boring by the end). Jaime Lanister is an antagonist, and he's more complex and more interesting.
Maj Culluh at least has the benefit of being POOR, so you could explain away his cliche villain persona... But then there's the Vidiians, a civilization that is literally too stupid to really exist and whose backstory is purely a plot-driven excuse to not have to name any particular villain. ... the Vidiians were Voyager's first major "planet of the hats" species which reduced an entire civilization to a handful of characteristics with virtually no variation in behavior or motive (the others being the Malon, the Hirogen and the Ocampa). In other words, "Villainy as a social construct."
That they later tried to apply this trope to Species 8472 pretty much made every Voyager fan throw up in their mouths a little. And I'll again point out that the Borg Queen actually showed up in the TV series as a recurring villain too...
I'm not going to defend anything from VOY. It was inarguably the worst Trek series, and my affection for the franchise would not be reduced one iota if VOY had never existed. The writers were running painfully low on ideas, and relied on a lot of very tired tropes. But your claim was about what Trek had been like
since the beginning, not what it degenerated to before petering out.
You're forgetting The Keeper, Mudd, Trelane, The Gorn, Ben Finney and Kor.
No, I'm not; I deliberately excluded them because I don't think any of them qualify. None of them were gratuitously malevolent. Certainly not Chaotic Evil, to put it in D&D alignment terms.The Keeper was just trying to entertain visitors; Mudd was just an unctuous con man; Trelane was a spoiled child; the Gorn was being manipulated as much as Kirk; Finney was an exaggeration from Kirk's imagination; and Kor was just a Klingon doing his job.
But how you managed not to include Ronald Tracey to this list is a mystery to me; he is easily the most straight-played villain in the entire series.
Debatable. Tracey was just a captain who'd gone native and taken sides, and been reduced by tragedy to a tenuous hold on his sanity. A bit of a trope in TOS, perhaps, but IMHO not the same as a villain.
At any rate, with "Omega Glory" you're still not exactly citing anybody's favorite Trek episodes. I maintain that Star Trek at its best (which most of the first two seasons were) mostly avoided cliché villainy.
Discovery had 5: T'Kuvma, Kol, Georgiou, Lorca, and Mudd...
Yeah, that's five in only 15 episodes (and just three actual stories). To be clear, as much as I enjoyed "Magic..." as one of the best episodes of the season, I was disappointed in how it turned Mudd from a roguish con man character into someone much more bloodthirsty. T'Kuvma and Lorca were case studies in wasted potential, and Kol and MU Georgiou were just one-note from the start.
In a sentence, basically DSC spent too much time imitating Trek at its worst, rather than at it best.
I have a strong affection for those iterations of Klingons but also respect the fact that the creators of the show stated there were several species of Klingons, as part of variants seen from TOS to TMP.
They did? When? Where? That seems like a Word Of God
explanation, but I don't recall anything like that ever being on the record.
Just ignoring the problem doesn't remove the need for handwaving, IMHO; it just draws attention to the fact that things don't line up.
This. Exactly.
Requiring an in story explanation for every make up change, uniform alteration and set upgrade is the worst kind of fanthink and has ruined many a comic book, TV show and any other form of entertainment.
Total straw man. That's not what we're talking about, nor what I'm arguing.
People seem to think making it look old and cheap would actually be a hit. I mean, it works fine for fan films, but that is never gonna fly with a studio product that hopes to grow the fan base.
We should make a drinking game out of how often you can't resist taking gratuitous cheap shots demonstrating how much you dislike TOS. Also, another straw man.
