Greatest bad guys

[xortex]

O.k., I had to give a shout out to Ricardo Montelban for Khan as my favorite and most memorable perfomance second to Christopher Lloyd's Kruge.

Sometimes it's hard to see bad guys in good parts as they are type cast and I can even forget that they're just actors and not evil people in real life. The suspension of disbelieve carries over outside the theater if they are so convincing. I'm thinking of the Guy from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. 'Kalimar, Kalimar!' Sometimes an actor is like his role, other times he's very different personally.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Montelban as Khan is the undisputed best.

Some other contenders....

Marc Alaimo as Dukat
Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun
Christopher Plummer as Chang
Andreas Katsulas as Tomalak

 

[sonak]

Kor

female Romulan Commander

Khan

Q
Gul Madred

Dr. Soran

pre-season 6 Dukat

Weyoun

 

[Mr Silver]

In my opinion...

"Gary Mitchell" (whatever he became, anyway)
Romulan Commander (Balance of Terror)
Khan Noonien Singh
Kruge
General Chang
Q
The Borg
Tomalak
Gul Dukat
Kai Winn
Weyoun
Intendant Kira
Female Changeling
The Borg Queen
Silik
"Future Guy"
Commander Dolim
Malik

 

[RyuRoots]

Montelban as Khan is the undisputed best.

Nope. I dispute that, as do others. In my opinion, he was a walking, talking moustache-twirling joke.

Gul Dukat really takes the Trek villain crown, though Chang is a close second.

 

[RAMA]

The Borg, circa Q Who/best of Both Worlds

 

[xortex]

The procouncil from 'Bread and Circuses' was a favorite of mine as was Skip Homier. I even remember his name he was so good with that deep voice and memorable a Mellikon. How many TOS eps didn't have a villian?

 

[USSManhattan]

Gul Dukat; Marc's portrayal of the character and his nuances, especially the reasons for his hatred of the Bajorans, sold the complexity and creepiness of his personality.

 

[erastus25]

Kai Winn Adami. Louise Fletcher was so good...especially toward the end.

The Talosians deserve some mention, in my opinion. Very complicated and interesting "bad" guys.

I actually think Jason Alexander in Think Tank also deserves a mention. Marvelous character, in my opinion.

 

[Sandoval]

The guy who played that Pakled captain takes some beating.

Him or David Warner.

Nah, I still think the Pakled guy wins by a long margin.

 

[TheDolphin]

Really? No one mentioned Kurtwood Smith as Annorax?

The best villains are the ones you can sympathize with and had that in spades.

Now, if we have to talk about worst villains of Star Trek, Shinzon has to be way up there.

V.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

In order of success:
Nero, by a long shot - he managed to kill BILLIONS of federation citizens! No other bad guy even comes close to this level of achievement.
Dukat/Weyoun & the dominion - the federatioin struggled to survive.
.
.
.
Khan? Loser. Lost the eugenic wars - decisively; lost against Kirk, twice - decisively.

Of course, if one considers trek lit, then the borg in 'Destiny' are nr 1 - they crushed the federation like a bug.

 

[Admiral Shran]

Now, if we have to talk about worst villains of Star Trek, Shinzon has to be way up there.

Indeed, right behind Nero.

 

[xortex]

And right before Sybok. I wonder if sometimes their performances are so good that they become type cast and even stereo typed as Spock was so identified with being a Vulcan that it hurt his career and other types of roles that he didn't get because people wouldn't accept him as anybody but Spock and as being too familiar to people who have to suspend their disbelief. Khan was believable as well as unreal but yet very real.

 

[Anwar]

I'll never understand the love for Khan, if it wasn't for Montalban's acting and charisma there really would be nothing to him beyond "Generic Wannabe Conqueror".

 

[Admiral Shran]

It's because Khan embodies several different types of classical archetypes. He's part Captain Ahab, part Satan from Paradise Lost and part King Lear.

And Montalban's acting and charisma are really top-notch.

 

[ChristopherPike]

TOS Kor or the Romulan Commander
TNG The Borg (force of nature days, before ending up Lore cultists, then pawns of various Borg Queens)
DS9 Dukat or Kai Winn
VOY Seska
ENT Xindi (Reptilian) Commander Dolim, (Humanoid) Degra
^ scope for a bigger bad development for John Frederick Paxton or Admiral Valdore, but since we never got that far... those Xindi are great enough to mention.

 

[xortex]

Great adversaries are a little different than great bad guys. Performances and well written bad guys I think are always conflicted. They sort of have to embrace evil for some reason and that's when it gets interesting as bad guys always think they are good guys. Greg Stillson from King's 'The Dead Zone'.

 

[KirksStuntMan]

My favorite is Kang, from "Day of the Dove". He was a real Klingon bad ass, even though he kind of wimped out at the end.

 

[JustKate]

Montelban as Khan is the undisputed best.

Nope. I dispute that, as do others. In my opinion, he was a walking, talking moustache-twirling joke.

Gul Dukat really takes the Trek villain crown, though Chang is a close second.

I'll never understand the love for Khan, if it wasn't for Montalban's acting and charisma there really would be nothing to him beyond "Generic Wannabe Conqueror".

I agree so much that if it weren't contrary to my principles, I'd write in all caps and end my sentences with several exclamation marks.

Ricardo Montalban was great - charisma out to here. But the character was ridiculous, and so were the plots involving that character. And yeah, that includes Wrath, too, though Wrath is significantly better written than "Space Seed" (not that that's saying much).

In contrast, Dukat was nuanced, complex, riveting and downright creepy - evil, but realistically evil. He was great, partly because of Marc Alaimo, but also because the writing was superior - by a factor of about a zillion - to that endured by Montalban. He's not only the best Trek villain but also one of the all-time great TV villains, in my opinion.

I enjoy Kang a lot, too, KirksStuntMan, and I love Mark Lenard as the Romulan commander from "Balance of Terror (actually, I love Mark Lenard, period) - but like some of the other contenders (e.g., Q, who is one of my all-time favorite secondary characters) I simply don't think they are bad guys. They're just...you know...not actually bad! They are adversaries of the federation, but as Xortex points out, being an adversary doesn't automatically make you a bad guy, at least not in my mind.

Many of the other contenders mentioned here are excellent, too - the Borg, Gul Madred, Weyoun, etc. I just think bad guys don't get much better than Dukat.