Most Sympathetic Antagonist

[indycar]

Which antagonist from any movie, series or even single episode did you have the most sympathy for?

I would have to either say Sybok, since he was trying to help people lose their pain and he wanted to find God, or Nero, since he had lost his family, his planet and most of his species.

 

[hux]

Arturis.

 

[Tracy Trek]

Which antagonist from any movie, series or even single episode did you have the most sympathy for?

I would have to either say Sybok, since he was trying to help people lose their pain and he wanted to find God, or Nero, since he had lost his family, his planet and most of his species.

I would say Sybok as well, he tried to do the right thing in the end.

 

[trynda1701]

Tribbles, of course! All they wanted to do was eat and breed!

 

[Griffeytrek]

Probably Gul Dukat, just as the most longstanding and fully fleshed out one. Even if he did go a bit off the rails towards the end. After that the trio of the three classic Klingon's Kang Kor and Koloth, and how they became so understandable by DS9.

 

[TheGoodStuff]

Dukat. Definitely Dukat.

Allow me to quote....myself:

One of my most goose-bumpy scenes [not 'tearing up' scenes] is simply when Dukat slams his fist on the central console and snarls:

"Victory was within our grasp!"

One sentence, and it is one of my most memorable ever Trek moments. Gets me every time.

The acting is so good [from one of my all time favourite villains]. You can HEAR the despair, the frustration, the implication [of such a huge setback] in his voice.

What really gives me goosebumps though, is that I empathise with him. Not only does DS9 create one of the greatest villains of all time, but in this scene it makes me actually feel sorry for him. Yes I want him to ultimately lose. Yes I want our heroes back on their station. But for all his arrogance, Dukat is brilliant and the entire plan could of worked if the wormhole aliens hadn't intervened. You really are seeing a man whose best laid plans have just dissolved before him.

 

[Jedi_Master]

Nero... if they had given him just a bit more backstory. The comics helped fill in the blanks and made him much more sympathetic.
JJ's biggest flaw is how much he trims from his films. Sometimes we need that extra info.

 

[jaime]

Cumberbatch Khan. Until the writers ran out of ideas and grabbed TWOK by the unmentionables.

 

[Vandervecken]

Apollo

"Would it have hurt us, I wonder, just to have gathered a few laurel leaves?"

Who Mourns for Adonais? is a B grade ep at best, but Kirk (and Michael Forest at the end) sell the tragedy.

 

[Greg Cox]

The first name that popped into my head was Richard Daystrom, struggling to compete with his glorious past, eventually having a full-scale nervous breakdown . . ..

 

[Kilana2]

Probably Gul Dukat, just as the most longstanding and fully fleshed out one. Even if he did go a bit off the rails towards the end. After that the trio of the three classic Klingon's Kang Kor and Koloth, and how they became so understandable by DS9.

I go with Dukat, too. Although he had only one moment where I felt sympathy with him... When he lost Ziyal.

 

[Captain Rob]

my first response was to choose Sybok as well.
Then I started thinking maybe it would be Montalban's Khan.
For all of his superior intellect, he couldn't overcome his genetic predisposition to rape, pillage, plunder, enslave, and murder.
Which is why I feel that if the rest of his group were the same way. By the time Chekov and Terrell arrived. The entire group would have killed each other through infighting. They had no one else to battle.

 

[Push The Button]

Anon Seven from TOS: A Taste of Armageddon.

"You're worried about your ship, captain...I'm trying to save a world."

"What is the greater morality? Open honesty? Or a deception which may save our lives."

Anon wasn't evil, or greedy, or power hungry, he just didn't have many options open to him, or so he believed until Kirk forced him to think outside the box.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I don't think having a traumatic backstory makes a mass murderer sympathetic. That's just not the way morality works, you don't get to shoot someone because your mother didn't hug you enough. "Bad childhood" might be an excuse for some crimes but not murder. You make the choice to kill innocent people, you forfeit all your sympathy.

There's very few villains in Trek who are both sympathetic and interesting. The writers give the good characterizations to the mass murderers and sociopaths like Dukat. The sympathetic villains are the kind of one dimensional people who realize the errors of their ways. Star Trek writers rarely found an alternative to either making someone a heartless killer or making them blindly act dogmatically then realize they're wrong. Those are the two speeds you usually see.

Species 8472 was kind of sympathetic even before In The Flesh because from their perspective they were defending themselves against attackers with a terrifying biological weapon.

 

[Griffeytrek]

Actually thinking on it a little more, the single most sympathetic performance by a foe might be Mark Leonard's Romulan Commander from Balance of Terror.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'm a sucker for a baddie who's trying to help the people he cares about. Even if it usually means mass murder.

Annorax trying to resurrect his wife in "Year of Hell"
Nero trying to create a world without the Federation, in the belief it would mean his wife was safe "Star Trek"
Khan trying to save his crew in "Into Darkness"

 

[stardream]

Arturis.

I can see how things would look from his point of view.

I do wonder about the lack of curiosity on his part about what happened. If it had been me I might have asked in a casual way "How did you get through Borg Space?"

But then Janeway might have been reluctant to tell the whole story and he would have wound up back where he started.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I'm a sucker for a baddie who's trying to help the people he cares about. Even if it usually means mass murder.

Annorax trying to resurrect his wife in "Year of Hell"
Nero trying to create a world without the Federation, in the belief it would mean his wife was safe "Star Trek"
Khan trying to save his crew in "Into Darkness"

Thinking they're cool villains doesn't make them sympathetic. It just makes them a little more interesting. I'll take interesting over sympathetic for my villains.

 

[Griffeytrek]

Thinking they're cool villains doesn't make them sympathetic. It just makes them a little more interesting. I'll take interesting over sympathetic for my villains.

I think the term "fully fleshed out" might better comprise the gamut of both interesting and sympathetic. The best villains are always those whose heads we can get into. The ones where we can see ourselves staring out of their eyes, just a little.

 

[Greg Cox]

Actually thinking on it a little more, the single most sympathetic performance by a foe might be Mark Leonard's Romulan Commander from Balance of Terror.

You know, I think you nailed it.