Star Trek: 10 Minor Villains Who Were Awesome

Star Trek

It's all well and good claiming an assignment and sitting down to write it with zest and gusto but understanding the title is perhaps key to anything that emerges from the tappings on a keyboard thereafter.

In this case it's that definition of a minor villain. There are a ton and a half of simply stunning villains running through every fibre of the Star Trek franchise since the arrival of The Cage; the Khans, the Kangs, the Kazon (ok...maybe not that one) but what about all those other ones? Well these are the minor villains - the ones that ended up on the wrong end of a Kirk double-hander, a Picard monologue, a Sisko manace, a Janeway hip stance or a jolly good ticking off from Archer. The ones whose light shone bright for a short period and then were never seen again.

So here we are to celebrate the ones that got away and never came back, or those that attempted escape and just didn't. So my concept of a minor Star Trek villain is this - one story or episode and a memory burned for eternity from one generation or another, one universe of the JJ-next. With over 700 episodes and films to flick through it can't be that hard can it? Yes. It can. You'd be shocked by just how many came back for a second, third or fourth attempt at being devious and we're looking at more than Q or Weyoun here. There are a lot but those are for another day. In fact it's even more difficult if you consider some of the also-rans that I counted out.

Honorable Mention

Two in particular stand out for me that just missed the chart - the Duras family and Tomalok. The former for being minor villains numerous times (even in their own civil war) and as such failed dramatically to make it to an awesome level as major villains. Also, they faltered with a motion picture appearance to chalk up a place as minor villains. Whoops. In Tomalok's case he is indeed a Romulan but, despite several appearances, he's not villainous at all. In fact the one appearance where there was some technological slight of hand (Future Imperfect), it turned out that it was just a recreation of the Romulan commander and not the genuine article. So, without more rambling, who comes out as the best of the rest? Who was the ultimate baddie we should have seen just one more time, even if it was to be enveloped by a humongous fireball in deep space as the Enterprise warped off to Risa? Let's consider the facts...
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A Star Trek fan from birth, I love to dive into every aspect of the franchise in front and behind the screen. There's something here that's kept me interested for the best part of four decades! Now I'm getting back into writing and using Star Trek as my first line of literary attack. If I'm not here on WhatCulture then you're more than welcome to come and take a look at my blog, Some Kind of Star Trek at http://SKoST.co.uk or maybe follow me on Twitter as @TheWarpCore. Sometimes I force myself not to talk about Star Trek.