Spoilers Which season of Discovery had better villains?

[The Overlord]

Which season of Discovery had better villains? It seems like season 1 had a revolving cast of villains: T'Kuvma, Kol, Lorca, etc, the last couple of episodes did not have a main villain. Meanwhile, in season 2, there were was one shot villains, but Control was ultimately the main villain of the season, he was the villain who ultimately drove the plot.

I think I like Control better then the season 1 villains, Kol and T'Kuvma were alright, I liked the twist with Lorca, but Control got more focus as a villain than the others and is a villain with an epic scope, the stakes are really high with Control as the villain.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Season one started off with strong Klingon characters, but by the end of the season (and massive creative turnover later) they were generic caricatures and shit. Lorca... that awful twist still hurts. Shit. Georgiou... nope.

Leland and Control are by-the-numbers and generic, and Leland-as-control acts as emotional and fallible as any human baddie. Oh yeah, and it's the Skynet storyline from 1984 being retold in Star Trek in 2019, which is just bizarre.


Let's hope Disco S3 brings us their first good villain character.

 

[Wulff359]

Whow, that early?
I guess it was Season 5, when the self-borgified Thomas Riker was sent to Disco by the female Q to wreak havoc among the new crew (after they killed off all the main cast in the Season 4 finale, that is). I absolutely went with his anger toward federation personell after they abandoned him with the cardassians - but taking it out on the future people that inhabited Discovery was quite a stretch in the beginning as they were not even born during the Marquis time. Good that they found a way to explain it with "The Sisko" who is timeless. Casting Samuel L. Jackson as Jake Sisko was a good move, did not see that coming. Would not mind keeping him as Captain in Season 6!

 

[SJGardner]

Whow, that early?
I guess it was Season 5, when the self-borgified Thomas Riker was sent to Disco by the female Q to wreak havoc among the new crew (after they killed off all the main cast in the Season 4 finale, that is). I absolutely went with his anger toward federation personell after they abandoned him with the cardassians - but taking it out on the future people that inhabited Discovery was quite a stretch in the beginning as they were not even born during the Marquis time. Good that they found a way to explain it with "The Sisko" who is timeless. Casting Samuel L. Jackson as Jake Sisko was a good move, did not see that coming. Would not mind keeping him as Captain in Season 6!

No love for Season 3? I loved it when the leader of the mysterious V'Draysh that Discovery's new future friends were running from turned out to be Captain Killy in command of the Enterprise-R, having survived the Federation-Klingon War and spending the last millennium in cryogenic suspension so that she could catch up with Discovery and have a reckoning with that impostor who briefly stole her life a thousand years ago. She's the type who holds grudges like that.

 

[BillJ]

Which season of Discovery had better villains? It seems like season 1 had a revolving cast of villains: T'Kuvma, Kol, Lorca, etc, the last couple of episodes did not have a main villain. Meanwhile, in season 2, there were was one shot villains, but Control was ultimately the main villain of the season, he was the villain who ultimately drove the plot.

Can't really choose, they all seemed to be such missed opportunities. None of them had any real depth.

 

[Rahul]

To give a honest answer to the thread-question:
There have been two villains on DIS that I actually really liked.

1. Pre-assimilated Leland
Really, I cannot stress how much I personally liked Leland. Because he's an asshole. But a good one. He's not evil or anything, in fact, his goals are actually very sincere. But he's just an asshole about it. He's the "the-ends-justify-the-means"-guy. Not realizing his means are so fuckin' evil that he is himself even directing the "ends" into the worst case scenario. That is a dangerously realistic portrayal of how many people want to "get stuff done", and "get their hands dirty" to "teach 'em badguys a lesson". And through all of that - I found the actor quite charming! Really, Leland is probably my personally favourite guest actor on DIS (after Pike). He's a well done "grey" character, that's neither 100% condemned nor the twisted hero. Star Trek needs more guys like him.

2. The Ba'Ul
The Ba'Ul weren't that much developed, they just were the opressors of the Kelpians. They could have appeared in any given TNG-episode as a race of human-looking actors with a bit of forehead prosthetics. What makes me like them so much is two-fold:
1. They are absolutely reasonable. Yes, they are straight up evil opressors, that threaten to commit genocide. But they have an entirely reasonable motivation: Self-preservation. They were almost going extinct because of the Kelpians. If it's "us vs. them" - we all would chose "us". And yet - they didn't! They created an elaborate, evil suppressor regime. But they didn't totally annhilate the Kelpians either. They only tried last second, when they thought their own way of life was on the line again. Before that, they created that twisted regime, where they protected themselves, but still "preserved" the Kelpians in Zoo-like conditions.
2. How they were - visually - portrayed as absolute evil incarnate. Looking like demons from a horror movie. Giant, geometric ships. That language. The flying stones all over the planet. That was great.
Any of these two things alone - a badguy looking evil, or a badguy with a clear-cut motivation - would be okay alone. But combined? It worked absolutely wonderful, and is my favourite addition of DIS to the entire Trek lore so far!

 

[NewHeavensNewEarth]

I would probably go with T'Kuvma as well as Voq, because they had some ok backstories and more nuanced reasoning behind their actions than Control did. Control was a very simplistic enemy in its basic motivations, and came off as a little 1-dimensional.

 

[Lord Garth]

Season 1

• T'Kuvma could've been more. I don't see him as a Villain so much as someone who wanted to be a Revolutionary, so I won't count him. He wasn't a villain. He was an antagonist.
• Kol is a Generic Klingon Baddie. That knocks him out of contention.
• Lorca should've stayed gray. He's out.
• Emperor Georgiou may have started out as a Villain, but she was already on the path of becoming an Anti-Hero by the very end of the season. Anti-Hero =/= Villain. She's out.

Season 2

• With Kol-Sha, we find out that in Kol's case: the apple didn't fall very far from the tree.
• Leland is a good foil for Pike as an Anti-Hero. And then when Control takes control of him, and he becomes a Villain Proper, he's Terminator Leland.
• The Ba'ul transmission looked cool onscreen, that by default gives them an edge. Shallow, but I don't care.

I'm going to have to give it to Season 2.

 

[Starflight]

Neither the Klingons or Control have really grabbed me. Can barely remember anything about the Klingons. I liked Leland quite a lot, and having idealistic Pike clash with pragmatic Leland could have been interesting, but I guess that wasn't the route they took.

 

[Vger23]

Season 1 had Klingons, Lorca and MU Phillipa.

That gets my vote.

 

[eschaton]

If forced to pick, I'd say Season 1. I mean, I prefer Season 2 overall, but at least the revolving door of Season 1 antagonists were fleshed out enough we understood their motivations:

T'Kuvma: Wanted to unite the Klingon Empire
Kol: Wanted to use the war advance himself and his house.
Voq: Wanted revenge against Michael for killing the T'Kuvma - the one Klingon willing to accept him for who he was
Lorca: Wanted to return to the MU with Michael, and then seize power from Georgiou
Georgiou: Wanted to retain power, then basically just out for shits and giggles, along with to advance her own position.

Control, on the other hand, sucks as an antagonist, because the motivation for genociding all intelligent life is never clearly explained. It wouldn't have taken much for them to connect the dots, explain that a threat assessment program re-interpreted "the Federation" to possibly be inclusive of as little as itself. Thus, if Control survives forever, the Federation is safe. The only way to ensure perfect safety is thus to systematically wipe out all other intelligent life, after which "the Federation" would have no threats. But they never went there. This is particularly odd because once Control assimilated Leland they basically showed it as acting like a person, with moods and flaws - even engaging in a Bond villain style monologue for no good reason when it possessed that mook Michael knew. It wouldn't have been hard at all for Control to explain its motivations, yet it never did so. And a villain which never has an explicable motivation is a poorly crafted one.

That said, I'm of the opinion that villains don't belong in TV Trek. Trek has had plenty of antagonists from TOS onward, but they are seldom presented as genuinely evil - just people who have very different goals from the main cast, whose goals put them on a collision course.

 

[Longinus]

Control, on the other hand, sucks as an antagonist, because the motivation for genociding all intelligent life is never clearly explained. It wouldn't have taken much for them to connect the dots, explain that a threat assessment program re-interpreted "the Federation" to possibly be inclusive of as little as itself. Thus, if Control survives forever, the Federation is safe. The only way to ensure perfect safety is thus to systematically wipe out all other intelligent life, after which "the Federation" would have no threats. But they never went there. This is particularly odd because once Control assimilated Leland they basically showed it as acting like a person, with moods and flaws - even engaging in a Bond villain style monologue for no good reason when it possessed that mook Michael knew. It wouldn't have been hard at all for Control to explain its motivations, yet it never did so. And a villain which never has an explicable motivation is a poorly crafted one.

Yeah. It is actually quite remarkable how badly this was handled. There literally was no stated motivation at all. This is why I have to hand it to season one. As noted, the Ba'ul were great, but the main villain of the season two is pretty much the worst villain in Trek.

That said, I'm of the opinion that villains don't belong in TV Trek. Trek has had plenty of antagonists from TOS onward, but they are seldom presented as genuinely evil - just people who have very different goals from the main cast, whose goals put them on a collision course.

This too.

 

[eschaton]

Yeah. It is actually quite remarkable how badly this was handled. There literally was no stated motivation at all. This is why I have to hand it to season one. As noted, the Ba'ul were great, but the main villain of the season two is pretty much the worst villain in Trek.

I mean, if they had kept the depiction of Control to what we saw in Project Daedelus - a program which could "possess" machinery and doctor holovids, but didn't truely communicate in a human way, that could have been great. The idea of malevolent super-intelligent AI is extremely creepy and scary, insofar as it not only has powers orders of magnitude beyond our own, but can literally think thoughts we cannot fathom - meaning we can never really understand its motivations.

But then they went with the assimilation of Leland - basically going the "Borg Queen" route and taking a terrifying faceless villain and personifying it (thus lessening the horrific impact). After doing this, it's just inexplicable they didn't try to get into Control's head even a little bit.

 

[The Overlord]

If forced to pick, I'd say Season 1. I mean, I prefer Season 2 overall, but at least the revolving door of Season 1 antagonists were fleshed out enough we understood their motivations:

T'Kuvma: Wanted to unite the Klingon Empire
Kol: Wanted to use the war advance himself and his house.
Voq: Wanted revenge against Michael for killing the T'Kuvma - the one Klingon willing to accept him for who he was
Lorca: Wanted to return to the MU with Michael, and then seize power from Georgiou
Georgiou: Wanted to retain power, then basically just out for shits and giggles, along with to advance her own position.

Control, on the other hand, sucks as an antagonist, because the motivation for genociding all intelligent life is never clearly explained. It wouldn't have taken much for them to connect the dots, explain that a threat assessment program re-interpreted "the Federation" to possibly be inclusive of as little as itself. Thus, if Control survives forever, the Federation is safe. The only way to ensure perfect safety is thus to systematically wipe out all other intelligent life, after which "the Federation" would have no threats. But they never went there. This is particularly odd because once Control assimilated Leland they basically showed it as acting like a person, with moods and flaws - even engaging in a Bond villain style monologue for no good reason when it possessed that mook Michael knew. It wouldn't have been hard at all for Control to explain its motivations, yet it never did so. And a villain which never has an explicable motivation is a poorly crafted one.

That said, I'm of the opinion that villains don't belong in TV Trek. Trek has had plenty of antagonists from TOS onward, but they are seldom presented as genuinely evil - just people who have very different goals from the main cast, whose goals put them on a collision course.

A sympathetic villain is still a villain.

Khan had sympathetic traits and a valid motive, but is still a villain. Killmonger from Black Panther, sympathetic backstory, still a villain. Annorax wanted to bring back his dead family, but was willing to kill billions to do it, he is a villain.

Plus there have been several pure evil villains who appeared in Star Trek: Melakon, Redjac, Fajo, Dolim, etc.

 

[BillJ]

Lorca was by far the best bad guy. Too bad they turned him into a Mirror Universe mustache twirler at the end.

 

[seigezunt]

No love for Season 3? I loved it when the leader of the mysterious V'Draysh that Discovery's new future friends were running from turned out to be Captain Killy in command of the Enterprise-R, having survived the Federation-Klingon War and spending the last millennium in cryogenic suspension so that she could catch up with Discovery and have a reckoning with that impostor who briefly stole her life a thousand years ago. She's the type who holds grudges like that.

Get writing this story now.

 

[SJGardner]

Get writing this story now.

Well, it eventually will have to be written in fanfic form, considering it's obviously way too awesome to actually be filmed

 

[Tiphanie]

I have to say although I liked season 2 better in general, Control as a villain was a little bit lame I think. The whole evil AI thing... not for me.
I really loved the twist with Lorca in season 1 and MU Phillipa was also great! She softened too much in my opinion in season 2. Lost her badass evil character and turned into this "mother figure" for Michael.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I can't believe y'all have forgotten the villain(s) I consider to be the absolute scariest in what we've seen before: the Logic Extremists. Acting calmly and without anger, and with their own brand of Vulcan logic, they can plot and carry out your demise and you might not even know you were potentially a target until it's too late, because eliminating you is part of some plan thought out by a superior Vulcan intellect. Control may have wanted to wipe out all organic sentients, but that's at least straight-forward and an obvious threat.

 

[guyute03]

Season 1.
Gabriel Lorca.
Captain Space A**hole.