'Out of all the females of all the species in all the galaxies, I have chosen you to be the mother of my child.'
Q is back, and he has a very personal request to make of the Captain – but she is having none of it.

Star Trek Space. The Final Frontier. Enterprise embarks on a five year mission to explore the galaxy. The Enterprise is under the command of Captain James T. Kirk with First Officer Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan. Star Trek: Voyager is an American science fiction television series created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor. It originally aired between January 16, 1995 and May 23, 2001 on UPN, lasting for 172 episodes over seven seasons. The fifth series in the Star Trek franchise, it served as the fourth sequel to Star Trek: The Original Series.

There are four basic types of 1960s/1990s Star Trek episode:
- Absolutely brilliant
- Absolutely terrible
- Kind of in the middle, fine but not amazing
- Bonkers and objectively terrible but too much fun to mind.
This episode definitely fits into that last category. The plot is pretty ridiculous – Q wants to reproduce to stop a civil war in the Q Continuum, so he chooses Janeway to mate with, and then takes her into the Q's civil war, which is represented as the American Civil War, because presumably the costumes were lying around. It's all deeply silly – but then, I confess, I tend to find anything involving Q pretty silly. Q's whole character concept feels like a leftover from the Original Series, where for some reason Kirk had to deal with super-powered aliens who wanted to put his female crew members in fantasy outfits every other week. Voyager, however, had taken the idea of Q very seriously in his previous appearance, and it had worked well, so this is more unexpected.
The truth is, despite the silliness of the concept, Q works, largely thanks to John de Lancie's performance. He is so charismatic, so purely watchable as Q that his appearances are always a delight even when the story is completely silly. He also has great chemistry with both Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew. This storyline only works at all because the two have such sparky chemistry, and their verbal sparring is a lot of fun. When the episode moves into the Continuum-as-Civil-War, the fact that Voyager's crew are somehow able to go into battle with omnipotent beings is pretty daft, but watching them all run around in civil war uniforms is too much fun to mind.
Re-watching this episode twenty years (and more) later, a lot of Q's early advances sound remarkably familiar – he thinks a hard no is playing hard to get, he thinks Janeway must be interested in someone else and that's why she's rejecting him, he brings up Janeway's biological clock ticking, he thinks there must be a way to win her over and he tries bringing presents. Even though I'm a huge Janeway/Chakotay shipper, I love Janeway's clear response that it has nothing to do with another man, she simply isn't interested in him. Janeway freely admits that it's been a while and 'it'll be a while longer', and that she would like to have a child someday, but stands her ground with complete confidence. She may be the flirtiest starship captain since Kirk, but Janeway is confident and secure in her own sexuality and her own free choices.
Episodes like this are one of the reasons I love Star Trek. It's not the high drama of the series at its absolute best, but it's something that is seriously missing from a lot of modern television (with the exception of the now late, lamented The Magicians) – it's fun. It's just a nice little story idea, with some fun costumes, some funny stuff, a bit of Janeway/Chakotay sweetness, and a bit of philosophy behind it (on how a child might help the Q Continuum to evolve and grow). And it really is very funny.
Bits and Pieces
- Q and Female Q actually doing the deed – by touching fingers – is genuinely hilarious.
- Q is being presented as more of a friendly occasional nuisance in this episode, rather than an alien threat, so the purple-ish lipstick from his previous appearance has gone. Considering he's trying to seduce Janeway, that's not surprising really.
- Janeway flirting watch: It's mostly a case of Q coming on to her, but she touches Chakotay very tenderly when he says Q's behaviour bothers the h*ll out of him.
- There's a shot of a guy with both legs amputated that I'd never noticed before. Never let it be said there wasn't any blood or gore in 1990s Star Trek.
- The funniest thing about Q's 'Kathy, don't you like to watch?' is that Janeway, with pretty much no hesitation and clearly very curious, immediately comes in close to watch the mating!
- There's a shot of Paris and Chakotay in Yankee uniforms that's... very appealing if you're into that sort of thing. (And I'm British, I don't even have a particular connection with the American Civil War!).
Quotes

Female Q Star Trek Voyager

Janeway: Really? I beat out a single-celled organism? How flattering!
Q (on Chakotay): Is it the tattoo? Because mine's bigger!
Janeway: Not big enough.
Female Q: Tossed aside for someone five billion years younger...
Torres: You know, I have really had it with this superiority complex of yours.
Female Q: It's not a complex, dear, it's a fact.
A 'comedy' episode that works – three out of four Yankee Civil War uniforms.
Juliette Harrisson is a storyteller, freelance writer, Classicist and Trekkie. She runs the podcast Creepy Classics, re-telling and discussing ancient, medieval and early modern ghost stories. She tweets @ClassicalJG

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Space — the final frontier. In that vast expanse, there waits mystery, challenge, and according to Star Trek, a bunch of gods, cyborg collectives, and countless species waiting to kill us, assimilate us, or test the boundaries of our civility.

Since Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) premiered in 1966, the Trek universe has been feeding our imaginations with villains — from bizarre to embarrassing to utterly ruthless — for over half a century. Since many of the earliest Trek series were episodic, we didn't often get the chance to see the same bad guys return to hound the heroes. But as Trek experimented with serialized storytelling — particularly with Deep Space Nine(DS9) — the more promising space-faring antagonists got multiple chances to show how bad they could be or, in some memorable cases, to prove they weren't quite as bad as you thought.

Among Trek's villains are some of the most fun and memorable in popular media, and we thought we'd give you our own choices of who among them shines the brightest. Best lists are always subjective, but we're fairly confident there won't be too many disagreements for our picks of the best Star Trek villains, ranked from worst to best.

Shran walks the line between friend and foe

A lot of fans would balk at the idea of the blue-skinned Commander Shran being labeled a villain. Portrayed by Jeffrey Combs — who's played more roles on Star Trek shows than most — Shran is an Andorian fiercely loyal to his people who's introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise's (ENT) first season. We meet Shran in 'The Andorian Incident' when he leads a squad of his blue-skinned brethren in the violent takeover of a Vulcan monastery. Shran and the other Andorians come off as paranoid and xenophobic bullies. But in spite of their thuggish behavior, Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) discovers they're right about the monastery being a cover for a Vulcan facility monitoring the Andorians. When Archer exposes the truth, he earns an uneasy ally in Shran.

Shran comes to the aid of Archer and the Enterprise on more than one occasion. In particular, in season 3, Shran bails the heroes out twice, including in the final battle to save Earth from the Xindi's doomsday weapon. But there's always a volatility working under Shran's surface, threatening to once more put him at odds with Archer and his crew. It happens, for example, in season 4's 'United' when Shran's stubborn refusal to give the Tellarites the benefit of the doubt leads to Archer challenging him to a death duel.

Commander Kruge is one scary Klingon

For the most part, Christopher Lloyd's most famous characters – like Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series — aren't particularly intimidating. So it's a testament to the actor's range that he performed so well as the Klingon Commander Kruge in 1984's Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. When Kruge learns of Starfleet's secret Genesis project — meant to instantly turn lifeless celestial bodies into habitable planets — he means to seize it as a doomsday weapon for the Klingon Empire. In the process, he orders the murder of Captain Kirk's son — a death that scars Kirk (William Shatner) for years.

In many ways, Kruge is the first example of the kind of Klingon we'd see in the subsequent Trek movies, as well as the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) era of TV series. While the Klingons' new look is seen briefly in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it isn't until Kruge that we get to see a fully fleshed-out performance. While the Klingons were always warlike, Kruge and his crew are more brutish than their predecessors in TOS. Locking himself in a death grip with an alien beast just for fun and going mano a mano with Kirk as Genesis is in its explosive death throes, Kruge gives us a portrayal of what remains one of the most potent examples of the Klingon passion for combat.

Benjamin Sisko is no fan of Michael Eddington

You don't find a lot of Trek villains wearing Starfleet uniforms. After all, the desire to join Starfleet is usually accompanied by a drive to uphold the values of the United Federation of Planets. But one notable exception is Lieutenant Commander Michael Eddington (Kenneth Marshall). Introduced in DS9's season 3 premiere, Eddington starts out as an officer who appears to be overly concerned with promotion and more than willing to turn in the heroes of DS9 if they dare disobey their Starfleet superiors.

Toward the end of season 4, we learn Eddington's seemingly tireless devotion to Starfleet is a ruse. In 'For the Cause,' Eddington tricks most of DS9's command crew away from the station, and in their absence, he steals a shipment of industrial replicators, revealing himself as a member of the Maquis — a group of violent rebels who oppose the Federation's treaty with Cardassia and wage relentless guerrilla war against the aliens.

The very fact that Eddington is able to pull the wool over his eyes makes Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) obsessed with capturing the traitor. He's one of the few villains capable of getting so thoroughly under a series captain's skin, to the point where Sisko actually humors some rather questionable tactics in apprehending him.

Q Episodes Star Trek Voyager

Harry Mudd is a truly conniving Star Trek villain

The flamboyant and deceptive Harry Mudd is one of the few named antagonists from TOS to enjoy a second appearance. He first shows up played by Roger C. Carmel in season 1's 'Mudd's Women,' trying to sell women like cattle and using an illegal drug to render them physically irresistible. Later in season 2's 'I, Mudd,' the con man gives up the Enterprise crew to a group of androids with dreams of galactic conquest.

Carmel returned to voice his famous crook in 'Mudd's Passion,' an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. He runs afoul of the Enterprise once more after attempting to con the inhabitants of an alien planet into believing he could sell them Starfleet Academy.

That wouldn't be the end of Mudd. Rainn Wilson (best known as Dwight Schrute on The Office) plays a more vicious version of Harry Mudd in Star Trek: Discovery's (DISCO) first season. Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) meets Mudd in 'Choose Your Pain,' when they're both prisoners of the Klingons, and Mudd is more than happy to give up his fellow humans to avoid a beating or two. After Lorca and Lieutenant Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) leave Mudd behind when they escape the Klingons, the con man gets revenge with a plot involving a time manipulation device in 'Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.'

Luther Sloan is a complicated character

One of the most popular pieces of Trek mythology introduced by DS9 is the clandestine organization Section 31. And William Sadler's brilliant performance as Luther Sloan — the director of Section 31 during the events of DS9 – is one of the main reasons for the group's popularity.

Suspecting Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) of being an unwitting spy for the Dominion, Sloan first shows up on DS9 using a holodeck to find out the truth. He subjects Bashir to an elaborate illusion, in which all of his friends on DS9 turn their backs on him. Once Bashir discovers the truth, Sloan is convinced of Bashir's innocence and offers him a position with Section 31. In spite of Bashir's clear refusal, Sloan soon returns to use the doctor in a covert operation involving infiltration of the Romulan Empire. Toward the end of the series, we learn Sloan is behind poisoning Odo (Rene Auberjonois) and all of his people with a deadly plague.

Sloan is a singular Trek villain. He's ruthless, cunning, and mysterious, but he's surprisingly sympathetic. He's aware of the hypocrisy of betraying the Federation's core values in order to protect it, yet he still believes in what he's doing and has no ill will towards Bashir for despising him. He sees Bashir as exactly the kind of man he was born to protect, even if in safeguarding him, he earns nothing but Bashir's disgust.

Intendant Kira is one of Star Trek's most sadistic bad guys

Introduced in TOS' 'Mirror, Mirror,' the Mirror Universe is an alternate dimension where the Federation is replaced by the tyrannical Terran Empire. Rather than living by values like tolerance, diplomacy, and discovery, the Terrans are a brutal people believing in conquest and cruelty. But in DS9's 'Crossover,' Dr. Bashir and Major Kira (Nana Visitor) find themselves in the alternate universe, where they learn that since the events of TOS, the Terran Empire has been conquered by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. Terrans have become a slave race, and DS9 — retaining its original Cardassian name Terok Nor — is led by Intendant Kira.

Intendant Kira is the cold-blooded counterpart to Major Kira, and the character gives Visitor a chance to show us her acting range. Other than the Kiras of both universes sharing the quality of natural leadership, Intendant Kira is a wild departure from Major Kira. She's seductive, with an unapologetically endless appetite for pleasure, using Sisko — a pirate in the Mirror Universe — as her personal plaything. She's as vicious as any of the Cardassians or Klingons under her command and deceptively sadistic, sometimes acting as if she's about to absolve her victims before ordering their executions.

Intendant Kira was far too much fun for just a single DS9 episode. She's a recurring villain, including showing up for all of DS9's Mirror Universe stories.

Kai Winn's tale is a tragic one

You hear a lot about villains you 'love to hate.' But then there are villains you just straight-up hate. Kai Winn is definitely one of the latter.

Louise Fletcher — Nurse Ratched in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — plays Winn on DS9, beginning as an ambitious vedek of a rigid religious order on Bajor. Winn is a slippery and manipulative vedek, working behind the scenes in coup and assassination attempts. Her actions, she claims, are always at the service of the Prophets — the aliens living inside the wormhole who the Bajorans worship as gods — yet it seems she's always working towards her own ascension in the ranks of Bajor's clergy. She succeeds in becoming Bajor's spiritual leader, the Kai, but by the end of the series, her jealousy towards Ben Sisko, her seduction by Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo), and her anger toward the Prophets leads her to finally abandon her religion and follow the devilish Pah-wraiths.

Winn is one of the most interesting and complex villains in all of Trek. Her downfall is tragic in the most classic sense of the word. Once she wins the title of Kai, rather than simply basking in her power as we expect, she seems to genuinely want to help her people. The problem is, of course, she also seems to fully believe that the ends justify any and all means.

Weyoun steals the spotlight with his manipulative charm

Star Trek Voyager Episode List

What if you could genetically engineer a race to be equally cunning leaders and diplomats in the most hostile of situations? What you come up with might look a lot like the Vorta, the Dominion's lieutenant race, leading the hordes of brutal Jem'Hadar while being completely subservient to the Founders. And of the Vorta we meet on DS9, none is more memorable than Jeffrey Combs' Weyoun. While Weyoun dies at the end of his first appearance in season 4's 'To the Death,' the villain was just too good to keep dead. So, it was decided that the Founders keep clones of the Vorta always at the ready, complete with the memories of their predecessors.

As the head of the Dominion's military in the Alpha Quadrant, Weyoun shows up often in the last two seasons of DS9, and he steals every scene he's in. He's dishonest and manipulative without shame, ready to shift from intimidating to conciliatory at a moment's notice. In scenes with politically influential DS9 characters like Ben Sisko and Gul Dukat, Weyoun uses conversation like a deadly, evasive weapon — always adapting to his counterpart's mood with everything from wrath to abject apology. He lies so easily that you wonder whether or not Weyoun knows, or even cares, what's true or false.

The Prime Universe's Khan Noonien Singh is obsessed with revenge

Any list of best Star Trek villains that doesn't include Ricardo Montalban's Khan needs to delete everything and start over. First appearing in TOS's 'Space Seed,' Khan is a genetically enhanced despot who ruled over a quarter of the Earth before escaping the Eugenic Wars with 84 of his followers. The Enterprise crew soon regrets waking Khan and his people from suspended animation once they take over the ship.

While Khan is a fun villain in his first appearance, his appeal doesn't reach full bloom until 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, arguably the best Star Trek movie ever. Blaming Kirk for the tragedies that have befallen him since they crossed paths years earlier, Khan and his followers take over the U.S.S. Reliant and wage war on the Enterprise. While Khan's followers believe they're using the stolen Federation property for power and prosperity, it's soon clear their leader is willing to sacrifice everything — including his own life and theirs — to get revenge on Kirk.

Through Montalban, Khan becomes the absolute embodiment of all-consuming vengeance. The villain regularly either paraphrases or directly quotes lines from Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. And just as Captain Ahab is obsessed with destroying the titular whale, Khan ultimately has no purpose left but vengeance against Kirk.

The Borg Queen is equal parts sexy and scary

In TNG's 'Q Who,' the Borg — one of the Federation's deadliest enemies — are introduced. The cybernetic, zombie-like, hive-minded bad guys kill with impunity. However, their goal is not to kill but to assimilate the technology and biology of other intelligent species into their collective to bring them closer to perfection. There are no individuals within the Borg Collective, but in 1996's Star Trek: First Contact,we're introduced to the Borg Queen, the living embodiment of the Collective's will.

The Borg Queen does something you wouldn't think possible with the Borg — she makes them sexy. In fact, she spends most of her scenes in First Contact seducing Data (Brent Spiner) with promises of pleasures he's never been capable of fully experiencing. But she's far from just a temptress. Particularly in her subsequent appearances in Star Trek: Voyager (VOY), the Borg Queen — played by both Alice Krige and Susanna Thompson at different points — conveys the singular horror of being confronted by a being who is, in her own words, 'one who is many.'

Speaking to Looper in early 2020, Krige shared interesting insights about playing the cybernetic villain, including just how old she thinks the Borg Queen is. 'I think she was an entity that happened at the moment of creation,' Krige explained. 'And she's always been that and she always will be, and it is entirely abnormal.'

Q is a delightfully devious trickster

Perhaps no other single villain has appeared in as many Star Trek series as John de Lancie's all-powerful Q. Showing up for the premiere of TNG, its finale, and a bunch of fun episodes in between, Q is a mischievous, godlike being who defies definition. He would eventually come to harass VOY's Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) almost as much as he does Picard (Patrick Stewart), along with making brief but memorable appearances on DS9 and Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Hilarious and carefree, Q is so popular that it might be a problem for some fans to even call him a villain. But while he isn't wholly evil, he's certainly a villain in the sense that when he shows up, he's almost always an antagonist. While he usually reverses any direct harm he inflicts upon humans, he couldn't care less about those lost indirectly, such as the Enterprise crew members killed by the Borg in 'Q Who.'

Star Trek Voyager Cast

Whether you see him as a good guy or a bad guy, de Lancie's portrayal of the trickster is one of the most delightful parts of TNG and VOY. Without him, after all, we'd never see a mariachi band on the Enterprise bridge, we'd never see Guinan plunge a fork into a dude's hand, and most importantly, we'd never see the Enterprise crew in Sherwood Forest.

Dukat is Star Trek's greatest villain

One of the places where DS9 excels over other Trek series is that its serialized storytelling allows for characters to evolve. And you can see this evolution clearly in the Cardassian tyrant Gul Dukat. Formerly the prefect of Bajor during its occupation, Dukat is none too happy to find a human sitting in his old office in DS9's premiere, and his fixation on Sisko and his crushing sense of inadequacy grow over the course of the series, to the point where it suffocates him.

The Dukat we meet in DS9's premiere isn't the Dukat we see in its finale. A characteristic Cardassian, Dukat spends the first few seasons of DS9 working towards the goal of once again finding himself ruling over the people of Bajor. He's not only unwilling to face the atrocities he committed, but he's so delusional that he harbors resentment for the Bajorans refusing to honor him with statues and plaques. For a time, he's something of an ally to the DS9 crew, but when the Dominion gives him an opportunity to seize control over all of Cardassia, he becomes the Alpha Quadrant's most feared warlord. Before the end of the series, he goes from conqueror to madman, madman to cult leader, and from cult leader to the powerful vessel of the Pah-wraiths — the Prophets' destructive adversaries.

Q From Star Trek

Wonderfully portrayed by Marc Alaimo, Dukat is ultimately the most complex, believable, and twisted villain in all of Star Trek.