Greatest Villians of Stargate (Not including SGU)

[Terran_Empire]

Looks like I am on a roll with these poll threads but I think we can all agree the last one turned out to be a turkey shoot. I hope we get a more balanced poll this time around.

Ok, so who are your favoirte Stargate villians from SG1 and Atlantis? If you have an episodic villian i've included an option for that in the poll but please specify.

For me it would be the Wraith hands down. They were the most consistent villians and they simply had a great character design and concept. Their biological hiveships were a dozen times cooler than a Goa'uld Ha'tak mothership, and overall the Wraith gave me more chills than any other villian and for that i'd say they are the greatest villians of Stargate.

 

[MacLeod]

I don't think it's a simple to break it down into Gou'ald, Wraith etc.. Some individual Gou'ald worked better than others.

 

[Terran_Empire]

Absolutely. But for the purpose of gauging opinion, votes for Anubis, Apophis, Ba'al etc would all could towards Goa'uld.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I wasn't thrilled about any of them. Mediocre/obvious villains are one of Stargate's big problems. Of the choices, the Goa'uld are the best, but the Tok'ra get my award for most interesting potential villains, if the writers had had the guts to go there.

The Goa'uld were rendered less interesting because they were artificially weakened by squabbling among themsleves. Imagine how much scarier they would have been if some of them had gotten organized and joined forces instead of just flouncing around like Las Vegas drag queens.

Forget the Goa'uld, the Tok'ra could have been far scarier because they aren't obvious bwahaha types. Just give them a motive to need to have more and more human hosts - a fertile Queen in their midst would have done that - and they could have ended up being great slippery-slope type villains.

The Wraith were rendered ridiculous by their haunted-house makeup and behavior. The way to make them far creepier would have been to make them look and act pretty much just human.

I don't think it's a simple to break it down into Gou'ald, Wraith etc.. Some individual Gou'ald worked better than others.

That's because of individual actors. This is more a question of whether the writers were delivering villain species that worked across the board, regardless of who was playing them. The writing is where the villains were lacking.

 

[The Wormhole]

The Goa'uld, definately. They were so over the top and "campy" that one simply couldn't help but be entertained when they were on screen. They're cliched supervillains and no one pretends they're anything else The Goa'uld and the Jaffa contributed to some of the finest stories from all ten seasons of SG-1 and gave the Stargate franchise some of its more memorable characters.

The Genii are a good choice for runner-up, though an interesting idea they were never developed satisfactorily and after the third season were really nothing more than a token presence.

The Ori while entertaining due to the theatrical nature of the Priors were simply too powerful to be interesting. They're uber-powerful and are succesfully conquering the galaxy. Yet, we know that they will be defeated since they are the Bad Guys. But being uberpowerful, that means the only way to defeat them is with some contrived deus ex machina. And that's exactly how the storyline played out.

The Wraith spent most of their time being faceless and when we did see them they're usually just screeching and hissing. Yes, they gave us some interesting characters like Todd and to an extent Michael, but otherwise, I'm just not feeling them.

As for the Replicators, no. Just no.

 

[AJ86]

I voted replicators. They were the only villain that were genuinely unnerving in my view, the bug form at least. Just a relentless wave of mechanical death, nothing you could do to reason with them, and little you could do to stop them. Anubis would be up there for me as well, he wasn't just powerful, but intelligent too. The Wraith, in my opinion, were by far the worst. They just looked utterly ridiculous, and the character's fear of them never really rang true for me. Michael was an interesting villain though.

 

[Harvey]

A hard question to answer, since just about every villain that appeared on the franchise wore out it's welcome. The Goa'uld were silly, but contributed to a number of interesting stories, so I'll give them the win.

The Genii had potential, but were squandered after the first season of Stargate Atlantis.

The Ori were too powerful to be meaningful adversaries. The only way they were going to be defeated was if our heroes discovered a convenient piece of super-tech, and after two rather mediocre seasons, that's exactly what happened.

The Wraith were too quickly watered down to be much of a threat, and attempts to make them three-dimensional either fell flat on their face (Michael) or came too late (Todd).

The Replicators were diminished every time our heroes defeated them only to have that action reversed to bring them back, and by the time they appeared on Stargate: Atlantis they were rather tiresome as villains.

 

[Scout101]

Hard to really vote for any of them. Goa'uld became far too much of a joke, and were never really that deep to begin with. Ori storyline was nonsense. Replicators never really had any decent development in SG-1, but the SG-A treatment was alright (just not very related to the SG-1 version). Wraith were probably my favorite, if I had to pick, just for decent consistency and at least a semblance of a threat. Not that they didn't have silly plotlines too, just that they never felt as diminished as the others by the end...

 

[Starbreaker]

The Goa'uld. Mostly just Apophis and Anubis.

 

[TedShatner10]

The Goa'uld were rendered less interesting because they were artificially weakened by squabbling among themsleves. Imagine how much scarier they would have been if some of them had gotten organized and joined forces instead of just flouncing around like Las Vegas drag queens.

The Goa'uld chronically infighting, seeing each other and the Tok'ra insurgency as more pressing threats, worked on a certain level (otherwise a unified, stable Goa'uld hegemony would much more quickly send over two dozen Ha'taks to flatten Earth). But I agree the moral gap between the Goa'uld and Tok'ra would be more ambigious, with the Goa'uld depicted less like 2D supervillains.

I voted for the Replicators as the greatest villains - they sterilized whole galaxies and seemed convincingly alien. I dig their visual apperance, and the sounds they made. And even the CGI depicting them holds up pretty well today, even if they kinda went on a slow downward slope as a threat from S6 onwards, and introduced "human" Replicators.

 

[AJ86]

Better to have a logical reason as to why a powerful enemy can be defeated by plucky backward Earth folk than to have the show lurch from one contrivance or convenience to another in order to keep them still in the game. Besides, without their arrocance they'd be a bit bland, and without their lust for power they wouldn't have any motive.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Better to have a logical reason as to why a powerful enemy can be defeated by plucky backward Earth folk than to have the show lurch from one contrivance or convenience to another in order to keep them still in the game. Besides, without their arrocance they'd be a bit bland, and without their lust for power they wouldn't have any motive.

Here's one solution - have the enemies not be out-and-out enemies but rather have inherent self-restraint holding them back. The Tok'ra would fit that bill. Let's say they have a fertile Queen and a need for more hosts than their local resources can fulfill, and start thinking about Earth. Or, they stick to "local resources" but in an increasingly coercive fashion, and that creates a conflict with humans, who start to interfere.

In both cases, the Tok'ra's self-image would still be intact. They wouldn't see themselves as villains, and would not be able to rationalize pulling out all the stops to fight Earth. OTOH, their kids need hosts, and why are humans meddling in something that's none of their business? The Tok'ra could easily see themselves as the victims, just defending themselves. There's plenty of dramatic tension there, but no need for contrivance to explain why puny humans keep beating a superior culture.

Someday I hope Stargate is revived and given a swift reboot in the ass, along the lines of nuBSG (meaning that thorough, not necessarily with all the navel-gazing), and the Goa'uld, Tok'ra and maybe even the Wraith can be developed into the villains or quasi-villains they could have been. The Replicators and Orii can be left on the cutting room floor, tho.

 

[Kirby]

I voted for the Goa'uld.
Had they not gone to the replicator well so many times, I would have voted for them since they really creeped me out at the beginning. After a while though the replicators became a joke. I wonder if SGU had continued, when they would have shown up.

 

[TedShatner10]

The Replicators and Orii can be left on the cutting room floor, tho.

The problem with the Replicators is that they kept using them after Season Five of SG-1, where they introduced "human" Replicators, and after they were effectively defeated too late in S8 you had silly Replicator wannabes (the Asurans).

The general problem with the Ori is that they were repackaged Goa'uld, with human slave footsoldiers and everything.

 

[The Wormhole]

After a while though the replicators became a joke. I wonder if SGU had continued, when they would have shown up.

Season 3. Replicators always show up in the third season.

 

[Brikar99]

The Goa'uld. Mostly just Apophis and Anubis.

I liked Ba'al, though mostly because of the actor playing him.

 

[Gil T.Azell]

The Gou'ald.

I was just waiting for Jack to utter a line like "Why would a god need a device too..?"
in similar fashion to "Why would God need a Starship?

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

The Goa'uld were the best villains. A shame they never managed to get anyone else remotely as good in the years tha followed.

Also, I would like to nominate Jack as a great villain. We all all love him, but think about it - if he weren't around, they'd have gotten SO much more done on a day to day basis at the SGC...

Mark

 

[starburst]

The Goa'uld for sure, especially Ba'al as a serious antagonist, no other group of bad guys were developed enough which is a shame as groups like the Lucian Alliance and Genii could have really gone places.

A close second to me were the Replicators before the human forms arrived on the scene as a faceless menace with a single thought and cause kind of like the Borg before First Contact.

If it was specific bad guys it would have been a coin toss between Ba'al and Todd as both had the interesting aspect of being developed into an enemy who was at times almost a friend (but not quite).

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

If it was specific bad guys it would have been a coin toss between Ba'al and Todd as both had the interesting aspect of being developed into an enemy who was at times almost a friend (but not quite)

I agree. I'd say Todd was closer to "almost a friend", though, Ba'al was more of a straight-up antagonist who was willing to team up with the good guys if it suited him. And the fact that Todd was actually willing to use the retrovirus to remove the feeding ability/requirement made him a much more three-dimensional villain. He didn't kill and eat people just for fun like a lot of the other Wraith did, he just did it because that's the only way he could live. (His joke about the farmer and the fruit notwithstanding.)