Who would you classify a villain in TOS?
- Thread starter The Laughing Vulcan
- Start date
Melakon qualifies.
Now that just raises further questions.
...As does the fact that a "cargo vessel" would make a diversion to Thasia and pick up the survivor. What is it that draws ship after ship to this planet where supposedly nothing humanly interesting meets the eye?
Perhaps the Thasians are just lonely. And mean well to the young boys. And they wanted it in the first place. And liked it. And would say nothing to the contrary if interviewed by the authorities. (Oh, ignore the pleading and screaming - he is just a kid, after all.)
Timo Saloniemi
Perhaps the Thasians are just lonely. And mean well to the young boys. And they wanted it in the first place. And liked it. And would say nothing to the contrary if interviewed by the authorities. (Oh, ignore the pleading and screaming - he is just a kid, after all.)
Timo Saloniemi
I'm not sure how Ronald Tracey escapes this discussion. I have held for a long time that he is the most evil of the TOS antagonists.
1. His actions, purposeful or not, led to the deaths of every member of his crew.
2. He is a trained starfleet officer and one of the service's top commanding officers (otherwise he would not have been placed in charge of a Constitution-class Starship) and he violates the most sacred of Starfleet regulations in the worst possible way.
3. His motivations are purely self-serving: power and immortality
4. He cold-bloodedly murders another Starfleet officer, nearly kills Spock, tortures Kirk and tries to kill him twice in savage hand-to-hand combat.
5. He is responsible for murdering "thousands" of the Omega inhabitants, exhausting multiple phasers.
6. He lies to the Enterprise crew and endangers their lives as well.
7. He makes racist, disturbing statements about Spock's alien nature to manipulate the Yangs.
I don't know if there is anyone who was as straight-forwarded evil as Tracey in the series. I think the fact that he was not an alien, but a top Starfleet officer, makes it worse.
1. His actions, purposeful or not, led to the deaths of every member of his crew.
2. He is a trained starfleet officer and one of the service's top commanding officers (otherwise he would not have been placed in charge of a Constitution-class Starship) and he violates the most sacred of Starfleet regulations in the worst possible way.
3. His motivations are purely self-serving: power and immortality
4. He cold-bloodedly murders another Starfleet officer, nearly kills Spock, tortures Kirk and tries to kill him twice in savage hand-to-hand combat.
5. He is responsible for murdering "thousands" of the Omega inhabitants, exhausting multiple phasers.
6. He lies to the Enterprise crew and endangers their lives as well.
7. He makes racist, disturbing statements about Spock's alien nature to manipulate the Yangs.
I don't know if there is anyone who was as straight-forwarded evil as Tracey in the series. I think the fact that he was not an alien, but a top Starfleet officer, makes it worse.
He didn't. See post #5.
Doesn't wash. What's evil about that? Was the captain of the Intrepid evil when his or her actions doomed 400 Vulcans? Absolutely nothing in the deaths of Tracey's crew was his fault - the planet killed them all, despite Tracey supposedly following Starfleet procedure.
Out of the skippers who lost their ships and crews, Matt Decker is the suspicious one. Tracey's story is plausible, Decker's is not (although admittedly it's also fragmentary). For all we know, Decker murdered all 429 of them in cold blood. Or at the very least he commanded the actions that caused their deaths, while Tracey supposedly issued no damning commands.
How so? He kills mindless savages to protect civilization - but as far as we can tell, he does it without making a show for the locals. Kirk similarly gunned down opponents when the locals weren't looking.
That a few of the natives would nevertheless learn the truth about Tracey during the months of unavoidable interaction is no different from Kirk spilling his guts to all sorts of native riffraff as in "A Private Little War". And Kirk there wasn't even stranded on the planet and unable to avoid interaction!
Utter nonsense. If he wanted power, he would ally with the savages, not with the victims. And whether he gets immortality or not is in no way related to any of his actions. He himself is convinced that the planet provides the immortality: there's no need to fight for it, as the local cultures have zero role in it.
Kirk fought all sorts of villains, too. Some of them wore the same uniform that he did. Tracey simply does it much better, even defeating the hero in his favorite game of hand-to-hand.
Granted, murdering one of Kirk's crew is a bit nasty. But that hardly elevates him to any sort of top villain status. Decker tried to murder Kirk's entire crew, after all.
And thanks to this action, thousands of others live a little bit longer. Significantly, those are the last thousands on the entire planet, while the savages are everywhere.
Supposedly, protecting the innocent is a violation of the Prime Directive. But do you really think Kirk would have acted differently? He never hesitates to kill in order to turn local cultures into his idea of perfect humanity; it's just that so far, those he needed to kill have not been "fellow humans".
There's nothing in the regs against lying, or Kirk would have hanged long ago. And nothing Tracey said endangered the lives of our heroes in any way. The planet did that.
So he's as clever as Kirk in manipulating people through words.
Oh, make no mistake, Tracey is the hero of that episode, with Kirk almost the villain, until he's thwarted by the savages and the issue becomes moot.
This is so ridiculously far-fetched I can barely take any part of it seriously.
Care try and support your own arguments somehow? That is, with dialogue references or quotes of plot twists?
Basically, Tracey is Kirk after six months of Robinson Crusoe on the island named Hell. If the writers intended something else, they really fumbled this one.
(Then again, they did try to portray those marching under the US flag as the good guys, not stopping to notice that they had already written them as worse than that standard yardstick of national-level evil, the Nazis.)
Timo Saloniemi
Basically, Tracey is Kirk after six months of Robinson Crusoe on the island named Hell. If the writers intended something else, they really fumbled this one.
(Then again, they did try to portray those marching under the US flag as the good guys, not stopping to notice that they had already written them as worse than that standard yardstick of national-level evil, the Nazis.)
Timo Saloniemi
Mmmmmm...... children.
Errr, I mean that's outrageous, how dare he!
Actually, I had a serious post that got deleted, I wanted to say that I always thought one of Star Trek's greatest strengths was the lack of simplistic "white hat/black hat" stories. There's almost always some nuance or some reasoning for character's actions. Something that sadly falls apart for the movie era. While there is Melakon and Janice Lester and others there isn't a lot that you can just list as the bad guys.
Thinking about it, in Mudd's defense, he had to survive his own encounters with a maniacal villain. They marked him so severely that he pathologically fashioned a representation of this horror to remain with him, despite all of the pain he must have endured.
Oh, Stella!!!!
Oh, Stella!!!!
If we are talking about what is truly evil, it is a willingness to promote harm to others for motives that are either completely self serving or based on something truly vile, like hatred of others simply for being different. Redjac seems to kill others for his own amusement, rather then survival, he laughs evilly and gloats over the impeding deaths of the various crew, that doesn't come across a being that does this for a need to survive. Redjac is more like a cosmic serial killer then a being who only kills to survive. Melakon was a power mad racist psychopath who killed others and betrayed his own leader, in a combination of bigotry and power lust. Those two villains are not even remotely sympathetic. Kudos at least felt ashamed of his actions, which is more then you can say about either redjac or Melakon.
People like Khan and the Romulan Commander have redeeming aspects to their characters, that prevent them from being pure evil.
Frankly its completely unfair to say Kirk is on the same moral level as Redjac and Melakon, I would say Kirk is morally superior to Khan, though Khan has legitimate gripes with Kirk and Kirk maybe on the same moral level as the Romulan commander.
Really there are many different types of villains, ranging from sympathetic to monstrous, with more generic bad guys in the middle. There are tons of Star Trek villains who are just jerks, no redeeming qualities, but not guilty of anything really beyond the pale.
Sorry to resurrect this topic, but I felt it deserved to be brought up again.
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My last post on the thread was the same day as this one; perhaps I simply didn't read it. You asked Vger23 to supply evidence in his dumfounded refutation of at least some of your arguments here. I would ask you for the same thing, just out of curiousity, as I notice a similarity here to other posts of yours that point to like sentiments on the actions of Kirk and the Enterprise. Perhaps I should be aware of this, but it seems that you often impugn those actions as being imperialistic, self-serving, and without foundation. I don't know how you developed those views, and I'm loath to make possibly specious assumptions as to their provenance.
But, what I do find is that the rational and logical veneer that you apply to "solving" arguments, not infrequently leads you down paths where, consciously or not, you can play fast and loose with evidence as it's presented. In this instance, you've volunteered more than a few whoppers, as well as surprisingly biased or condescending statements that IMO don't redound particularly well to your credit
For instance, there's absolutely no valid reason to even suggest that Decker was malign in the actions that resulted in the death of his crew. That he made errors in judgement can be argued. Yet, as McCoy avers, he's in a state of shock and clearly grief stricken. Unless you're arguing that aside from being a Starship captain, he's a master thespian, I think that musing just doesn't wash. You continue in the same vein later on:
You do understand the difference between the concept of murder and someone, in a leadership position, taking steps against an unquestioned massive threat that will imminently place billions of lives at risk, that in its application might cost the lives of a ship that is clearly in a military mode at this point? That Decker is immune to logical arguments as to the effectiveness of what he's trying to do, and in fact is almost certainly not in the state of mind to be making those decisions is not in debate. But to blithely state that because of these conditions, he has some animus towards Enterprise to unambiguously seek its destruction with malice aforethought, is simply not supportable.
Uh, what? First, his brief is not to protect civilization, if that's how you wish to characterize the Kohms anyway. The hordes of mindless savages, as you rather cavalierly describe them, the putative Americans mind, don't seem much more brutal and barbaric than I imagine the Mongols would have been characterized by many of their victims, who were far more advanced than the (enlightened?) Kohms. There just happened to be a lot more of them and as for being mindless, they seemed to have at least intuited some profound meaning to what they were protecting, though more along the lines of a magical talisman perhaps. Still, it did not take long for some dawning of the actual significance of the words to start to take form, episode time constraints put aside.
Aside from this consideration, what objectively are you referring to with the clear aspersion you make to Kirk's apparently, in your opinion, needing to be surreptitious in taking lethal action against enemies? How many episodes can you cite, that I must have missed, to be unaware of his having to do so with unsavory, immoral, or unethical basis. Please, feel free to rattle them off.
Native riffraff? Really? Please explain what the hell you mean by that epithet you toss out there as if it were a casual aside? Perhaps, because they were people that Kirk knew from before and that reposed trust in him. Were they so much less civilized than the Kohms, if, in reality, at all, in whom you appear to place
some greater value?
Sure about that? I seem to recall his rationale for following through with his strategy, was not to become the revered feudal warlord of a uncivilized planet, but to find the supposed medical basis of the Kohms' immortality, than get out of Dodge by virtue of whatever Starship came looking for the Exeter and showering himself with all the hosannas he figured would be due him by presenting this miracle to the Federation. Have I got that wrong too? If not, I hardly think that Tracey would find the means to achieving this actual power that he coveted by associating himself with that "mindless" horde, would he?
Sure, Tracey, the great humanitarian. As seems pretty much crystal clear, he just needed to keep them from being annihilated for as long as it took to extract that knowledge that had true meaning to him, not to advance any other cause that had any relevance beyond his own imperatives.
Well, I think as is well documented, by his own words on many occasions, Kirk certainly didn't consider himself as a representative par excellence of a perfect culture. "All right. It's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today." That doesn't neatly conform with your construction, does it? Similarly, to your earlier characterization of his taking life in an extralegal, immoral, or self-aggrandizing manner, some examples would be most instructive. I think I can safely assume you're not going to point to MU Kirk.
I seem also to recall Tracey doing his darnedest to sell his Starfleet comrades out to the Yangs, by virtue of his feats of strength, his demonization of Spock, and condemning Kirk by implying that the power of the Holy Words, doesn't allow him to speak them. I think that's Tracey's doing, not the planet's.
Well, that's a viewpoint that seems rather novel to me and one that I certainly have heard rarely, if ever, defended. But I suppose that it appears to make sense to you in the rather more than slight way you've misrepresented what was actually shown to have occurred.
T'Pring
She tried to organise Spock or Kirks death so she could run off with her boyfriend scott-free. Bitch!
She tried to organise Spock or Kirks death so she could run off with her boyfriend scott-free. Bitch!
T'Pring,
Never asked for her parents to betroth her to Spock (she was seven), didn't want to marry him (she had a stud-muffin), her society only gave her one way out (Kal-e-fee).
Originally stud-muffin was going to fight Spock, but that would risk him (and T'Pring was in love), fortunately stranger from the stars thoughtfully brought two alternate champions.
Now T'Pring didn't have to risk stud-muffin, could get out of the marriage she never asked for, and could satisfy societal requirements.
Coincident?
Never asked for her parents to betroth her to Spock (she was seven), didn't want to marry him (she had a stud-muffin), her society only gave her one way out (Kal-e-fee).
Originally stud-muffin was going to fight Spock, but that would risk him (and T'Pring was in love), fortunately stranger from the stars thoughtfully brought two alternate champions.
Now T'Pring didn't have to risk stud-muffin, could get out of the marriage she never asked for, and could satisfy societal requirements.
Matt transfers the crew from the ship to the planet, the dooms day machine then transfer it's fire from shooting at the ship to shooting at the planet (where the crew now is).
Coincident?
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Therefore she's a villain.
I have more sympathy for Elaan of Troyius. At least she tried to openly stab her way out of an unwanted arranged marriage. Not connive her way out of it.
Is 'Enterprise' not canon? T'Pring could have arranged to get out of the unwanted marriage beforehand. Giving Spock time to get someone else.
Yes, I would think so. I don't know what information Decker, if one is proposing he was acting malignly or self-preservingly, would have been acting on to have the decision he took, make sense. It seems like a very slim proposition to suggest that he could have known beforehand that the log still wouldn't have finished the ship off, after its rather more substantial meal of the planet.
Aside from any such calculation, if saving his own skin was his goal, was he such a great actor to convince McCoy that he was obviously suffering from shock? Also, he would have hardly put his own life at risk, knowing something as implied above, by commandeering Enterprise to only reach the same position again.
I've always thought the scenario had played out as suggested directly by what we were shown, with the concomitant result of Decker being overwhelmed with guilt for something that had been beyond his control and making his final gesture as a clear manifestation of the state of mind he was in. I have to say, it's never occurred to me to even think that he may have manipulated the circumstances in any way whatsoever. Call me naive if you like, but I think this conclusion is the only one that can be drawn from the evidence and seems an entirely realistic explanation of how the situation played out.
I don't think Decker was duplicitous. I do question the logic of evacuating the crew to a planet with a planet killer nearby, but I'm of the opinion he was trying to save them. Too bad it was unsuccessful.
I even wonder if the loss of Ron Tracey's crew caused him a mental break that made him so ruthless by the time of the episode. He certainly seemed more malignant that Decker, but again, the loss of all of his people may have made him desperate to bring the cure to the Federation. A flaw with this theory, though, is that some of what he said suggested he was positioning himself to benefit personally from it rather than giving it freely.
I think he was supposed to have had an exemplary record prior to the incident, though perhaps not thought of as in the pantheon of captains of his era. Regardless, it would be hard to claim that he had this long career during which he was hiding some great character flaw. I don't doubt that the crew's loss was devastating, but his actions afterwards always seemed marked to me by calculation rather than mania.
Perhaps he thought that any surviving captain of a crew totally decimated, would have some taint attached to him forever, regardless of the official explanation, so when he discovered what he thought would be an inestimable boon that he could personally present to the Federation, he thought it worth it to double down and do whatever was necessary to insure that goal. Going that far over the line meant that he would employ whatever methods of subterfuge or worse, that were needed to cover up his tracks afterwards.
Perhaps he thought that any surviving captain of a crew totally decimated, would have some taint attached to him forever, regardless of the official explanation, so when he discovered what he thought would be an inestimable boon that he could personally present to the Federation, he thought it worth it to double down and do whatever was necessary to insure that goal. Going that far over the line meant that he would employ whatever methods of subterfuge or worse, that were needed to cover up his tracks afterwards.
