Best Star Trek: DS9 Antagonists

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Last one. I'm not interested enough in Voyager or Enterprise...although B&B might make the list of the latter.

 

[Vigilance]

I voted Jem'Hadar, but really there should have been an option for the Dominion as a whole.

The reason I say that is because what truly made the Dominion the best post-TOS big bad in the entire trekiverse was the interesting relationships between the big three: Vorta, Jem'Hadar and Changelings.

Those three races and their relationship to each other truly made the Dominion something frightening: an anti-Federation.

Chuck

 

[Steve Jung]

Gul Dukat. You never could tell what he was up to.

 

[wingsandsword]

My first thought was Gul Dukat: the perfect recurring Star Trek villain. Villainous, he's always a threat when you see him (even when he's being peaceful, there is always a threatening undercurrent), he does have a complex background and motivation, but it never really takes away from him being a nemesis, and he's always around to make trouble when inconvenient for the heroes.

The Vorta and Jem'Hadar were great. The Jem'Hadar were the best grunts, and the Vorta were wonderfully slimy and devious commanders. The Dominion was even better than the Borg as Trek villains, as the Dominion was dangerous, but they were enough like us we could relate to them a little better, and although they were stronger than the Federation, they were not so impossibly powerful that victory seems implausible. As Vigilance said, in many ways they were the Anti-Federation.

The Maquis were good as an occasional antagonist. Showing that the Federation isn't perfect, and that humans really do make mistakes. A conflict where both sides see themselves as the good guys, and a chance to take a close look at what the Federation is really about.

Section 31 is a good antagonis for much the same reason. In a dangerous galaxy filled with other super-secret spy agencies like the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar, with threats to the very existence of the human race on the scale of the Dominion and the Borg, it was somehow reassuring to know that the Federation had it's own "dirty tricks" arm, but also that menace from within, as the Federation has to look after its own

 

[Nightfall]

Hands down, Gul Duckat.

 

[Aaron L]

Gul Dukat always seemed to melodramatic and over the top for me. Section 31 all the way.

Luther Sloan. William Sadler is an awesome actor.

 

[Nightfall]

Well maybe over the top but his fight against the Klingons was/is pretty neat.

 

[Darthjaye]

Gul Dukat, because he had his hand's in just about every major problem that DS9 dealt with. He was the big reason the Dominion made their move on the wormhole. He's the true antagonaist from beginning to end of the series. He's in the very first episode as the main bad guy, and in the last as the main bad guy. That, and he truely was vile and I agree with the others here that even when he was on the good guys side, he was never fully on that side of the line. He's the guy in the room you keep in view all the time. It's also interesting to note that at no time in the series did he ever feel like he had done anything wrong to the Bajorans. His perspective made him more twisted than even the Dominion could hope to achieve.

 

[drothgery]

The only reason I didn't vote for Dukat was because of season 7; cynical Dukat was a great villian, but crazy Dukat, not so much.

I'd cast another vote for the Dominion as a whole; the changeling/Vorta/Jem'Haddar and their various minions were the toughest adversaries the Federation's run into (with the Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, you got the feeling that if the Federation were willing to be as mean and nasty as they were, it wouldn't be much of a fight; with the Dominion, the Federation was pulling every underhanded and dirty trick they could think of, and still almost lost).

 

[Vigilance]

I'd cast another vote for the Dominion as a whole; the changeling/Vorta/Jem'Haddar and their various minions were the toughest adversaries the Federation's run into (with the Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, you got the feeling that if the Federation were willing to be as mean and nasty as they were, it wouldn't be much of a fight; with the Dominion, the Federation was pulling every underhanded and dirty trick they could think of, and still almost lost).

This is true. The Dominion actually posed enough of a threat to make the Federation question some of their values.

That said, I think there were wars that bad in the Federation's past, such as the original war with the Romulans (about which there were still hard feelings when the Romulans returned in TOS' "Balance of Terror") and the Fed's war with the Cardassians (look at O'Brien's racism toward "the Cardies" which he never quite lets go of).

So perhaps the main reason we see the Dominion as a bigger threat is that this is the first time the producers actually let us SEE the Federation be threatened, as opposed to it just being an interesing bit of character or universe history.

I'd still vote for the Dominion though, because it was a real WWII type struggle, with the Federation and Klingons taking help from literally ANYONE, from the Romulans to (in the end) the Cardassians.