My favorite Star Trek stories had no villain. Maybe that's why the movies as a whole leave me disappointed. For me, Star Trek is about learning and discovery, meeting new peoples, going new places. Yes there are plenty of stories about rescues and patrols and even wars but they aren't the primary drive of the premise. When the movie reduced everything to "threat of the moment" it really lost something very important.
Having said all that, I pick TMP's Vejur over the big turd with the dingleberry hanging from it. V'Ger had a reused background story, but it did something with it, at it's heart, with all of it's awesome power, it was unfulfilled and seeking it out, like we all are to some extent. The whale turd was willing to wipe out anyone in it's path for what? To find out how the last episode of Single Female Humpback Lawyer ended? Why destroy all life in Earth's oceans when the right answer wasn't received? If there were any other whales, they would have been killed. What if Humpbackish had drifted over the centuries and they all spoke like Minke whales now. Are buffalo still extinct, too? Will a giant space buffalo show up next?
It has a defined role, a motivation, a history that is revealed. The whale probe is just a generic conceputal enemy, a means to an end, only there to give the characters a reason to deliver the aesop, and dispatched almost as summarily as it arrives.
