Villainy

It turns out that I may have stopped watching Star Trek Voyager prematurely. Why? Because when I stopped watching, the chief villains were the Kazon, whom I generally referred to as "Broccoli-Heads", as in "Oh crap, another episode with the Broccoli-Heads and Chakotay's love child." But later on, the Borg apparently became major players in the series, along with the mysterious Species 8742 (an interesting wrinkle, that: if the Borg represent the pinnacle of technological sophistication, what with their history of centuries of raiding other civilizations for their goodies, Species 8742 represents the pinnacle of evolutionary sophistication, what with their unnatural strength, vitality, and aggressive immune systems).

I'm generally drawn to engaging villains. The normal rules of writing generally argue that the best villains are those that the reader (or viewer) can link in allegorical fashion with something in their own world, and the more personalized the villain is, the better it is supposed to be. The Klingons in early Star Trek, for example, were meant to be overt allegorical references to the USSR, which played well at the time because of the Cold War. The Empire in Star Wars appears to be a sort of direct allegorical reference to Nazi Germany, what with its usurpation of constitutional authority, tendency to wear black uniforms, and complete fascist ruthlessness.

(Here's an odd thing: in the Star Wars movies, I often find myself rooting for the Bad Guys, but I never do that in Star Trek. I suspect that this means that I view the Federation as inherently good, as demonstrated by its actions, while I don't necessarily see that the Rebel Alliance is any distinct improvement over the Empire in Star Wars.)

But the Borg break all of the rules of villainy in writing, and maybe for that reason I find them especially interesting. They don't appear to be an allegorical reference to anything in modern life (though I sometimes refer to those cheesy cell phone gizmos that Happenin' Young Guys wear on their ears as "Borg implants"). They aren't really personalized at all; one Borg drone is as good (or bad) as any other. Not even the Borg Queen really puts a face on them, as she can apparently be destroyed without really being destroyed, and there are still questions about whether she is the Borg, leads the Borg, represents the Borg, or is just something the screenwriters came up with to give Picard and Data a foil to work against in Star Trek: First Contact. Alice Krige is a piece of work, huh?

Nor do the Borg really strive for any of the ends that most of our villains aim for. Power, profit, love; these all seem to be alien to the Borg. They assimilate species and technologies because that's what they do; that's their path to species improvement. They don't even fight wars in the usual sense. They come, they assimilate, and they move on, not out of aggressiveness or militarism or even military strategy in the usual sense, any more than a tarantula wasp is engaging in organized hostilities when it paralyzes a spider and lays an egg on it. And since the Borg don't really "want" anything except to assimilate us, they are next to impossible to negotiate with. No tense negotiations, no summit meetings, no treaties - they either assimilate us, or they don't. And they don't do any of it out of maliciousness; they appear to sincerely believe that this assimilation method moves both them and the assimilated species closer to perfection.

There have been some good villains in Star Trek. One of my favorites was the Doomsday Machine, which appeared to be a stand-in for the "cobalt bombs" that people talked about in those days. But sometimes the villains aren't really things at all, but attitudes. One of my favorite Next Generation episodes was the one where David Ogden Stiers was a scientist who was right on the verge of figuring out how to stabilize a star and thus save his whole civilization from annihilation, but he has to go back and commit suicide because he's about to turn 60. What's the villain? The star? The scientist? The culture that requires such ritual suicide? Or the Enterprise people who think they know better than those yahoos do what's important in life?

Even V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a good villain, at least for me. The movie had its flaws, I suppose, though I tend to be indulgent of it and cut it a great deal of slack. V'Ger has strong Borg overtones, so it isn't surprising that I liked it. (There is some "chatter" that the "machine planet" that rebuilt Voyager VI was really a Borg or proto-Borg planet, and I like that hypothesis.) Or the giant energy-eating amoeba in The Immunity Syndrome, or the guys who had institutionalized thermonuclear war to the extent that they didn't bother launching actual nukes; they just sent notes to the probable victims asking them to report to the disintegration booths.

But I confess I grow somewhat weary of certain villains, and the motif of large-scale war between rival political entities never really grabs my interest. There is a wargame that I enjoy called Starfleet Battles, which simulates in a fairly detailed way battles between various Star Trek ships (detailed to the point that you have to keep track of energy expenditure, and since it requires energy to keep your shields up and keep your weapons going, sometimes you really do have to shut off the life support systems to stay in the fight). It's a wargame, so its background requires there to be war, otherwise there would be no game. But boy howdy. I don't know if any of the background material in Starfleet Battles is considered canonical Star Trek material, but I hope not. There are constant wars, often all-out wars, and when all-out war between the Federation and Klingon Empire doesn't satisfy, they bring in other species with bigger and more powerful ships. Soon there are coalition wars that span pretty much this whole side of the galaxy. Pretty soon that isn't enough either, so in comes a wave of fascist bastards from the Andromeda galaxy to invade our galaxy.

There is (or at least was, back when I stopped buying expansion packs for it) exactly one "science mission" in the game, and you only played it while you were waiting for your friends to show up so the real fighting could begin. You collected "science points" by studying the anomaly of interest, and when you'd collected enough science points, you could say "Hot dog, now let's blow that goddamned thing up!" (I found it pleasing to put limits on our destructiveness - only one or two ships per side, no battleships or super-dreadnoughts, and with a backstory that didn't involve open warfare but something more like cleaning up pirates or putting down renegades.)

Another Star Trek villain that I really like are the Klingons. They started out as cheesy stand-ins for the Soviets, but over time fans (and writers) got hold of them and transformed Klingons and their culture into something that seems to resemble feudal Japan if you squint. They may still be rivals, but they aren't really adversaries any more. I for one found the "retooled Klingons" interesting. I have to say, I'd make a wonderfully crappy Klingon in real life - their preoccupations with knives and violence seem strange to me, all that hair would bug me, and they have the ugliest shoes in known space. But Klingons are fun to think about, and I wrote several novels retelling the exploits of a certain Klingon starship commander. Alas, these novels are long gone, destroyed by catastrophic hard drive failures over the years. But there was a lot of swearing of oaths, a lot of that "Kahless awaits thee at Sto-Vo-Kor" business, and enough boarding actions and deliberate ramming maneuvers to keep Horatio Hornblower busy for months.

I never had much use for the Romulans, though, which seems odd given my abiding interest in the history of the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. I think the problem is the way they look - their bowl haircuts and really badly tailored clothes bug me. Plus I had the bad fortune of reading a Star Trek novel (this was back in the days when Trek fan fiction was considered kind of icky) that basically made the Romulans into the heroes of what amounted to a bunch of bad BDSM erotic fiction. You like BDSM? Indulge in good health, by all means. But it isn't something that I'm particularly keen on reading about, and to this day when I think of Romulans, I have this mental image of guys with pointy ears, bowl haircuts, leather underwear and whips.

And who wants THAT?