19. Shinzon
Star Trek Nemesis was the final film for the Next Generation crew. There was supposed to be one more but after Nemesis earned the honour of being the first Star Trek film to flop at the box office, that was shelved and this became the last hurrah for Picard & Co. The film stared Tom Hardy as Shinzon, a clone of Jean Luc Picard. The Romulans were hoping to use Shinzon do a switcheroo with the real Picard and plant a spy on the Federation flagship. However, political change on the Romulan home world meant the plan was shelved and Shinzon was sent to work in a slave labour mine. There he was taken under the wing of the Remans, a species also under the whip of the Romulans and he plotted his revenge. Later in a ''secret base,'' he constructed a huge warship and set about to free the Remans and overthrow the Romulan government, however he had a problem. Shinzon's body was designed to to be aged artificially to match the real Picard. When that didn't happen, Shinzon began to die and the only hope he had was for a complete cell transplant from the real Picard. So in comes the Enterprise and a movie that desperately wanted to be The Wrath Of Khan mark 2. The issue with Shinzon was not Tom Hardys acting or his back story, but a script that smacked of laziness; and the consequence was that we didnt care about the villain or his motivation. He dumped B4 (an android like Data) on a planet to attract Picard and somehow the Enterprise was the ship that detected the positronic signature. Shinzon somehow managed to build a massive warship on a secret base, without being detected. He was bald even though we had seen a younger Picard in the TV series and he had a full head of hair. He wanted to destroy Earth (as every good villain should) but unless you saw a deleted scene on the DVD, you didnt really know why he was bothering or why he was so angry. In the end, we got a pretty forgettable villain in a film that screamed that Star Trek needed to get out of neutral and find some of the fire that made it awesomeand no, JJ Abrams didnt do that.
Most entertaining moment: Trying to mimic Patrick Stewart like a cosplayer at a Comic-Con.
18. Uhura
Undoubtedly Uhura is a landmark character in the world of television. In the 1960s her presence on a mainstream show marked an important achievement for the civil rights movement, a goal series creator Gene Roddenberry had in mind when he conceived the TV series. Its a well-known story that Nichelle Nichols wanted to quit the show until Martin Luther King convinced her not to. Nichols and William Shatner also hold the honour of conducting the first interracial kiss on TV, thanks to Shatner deliberately sabotaging alternative takes so that they couldnt cut the kiss out or use a take where you couldnt see their lips locking. Fast forward to 2009 and Zoe Saldana steps in the role in JJ Abrams remake. Gone is any desire to make her a strong supporting crew member and instead she is the Megan Fox of Star Trek now who used her exceptional aural sensitivity skills to bully her way onto the Enterprise. There she played tonsil-hockey with Spock, watched him walk in to the turbo lift, flirted on and off with Kirk and swiveled dramatically in her chair. Designed to be eye candy on the Bridge, scriptwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have a track record of creating superficial female characters, just watch Transformers if in doubt. It's just a shame that Uhura had to be given the same treatment in order to make Star Trek appeal to wider audience.
Most entertaining moment: Looking concerned, consistently.