Thread by @STvSW

Modern #StarTrek and its campy moustache-twirling comic book villains . . . it's sad. The best villains aren't villains at all.

That said, there is also the "inertia of parity".

https://twitter.com/STvSW/status/1579436149025931264

The inertia of parity is the pull toward writing foes with like systems. If you make your hero vehicle X, foes will have X . . . and if you make your hero vehicle Super-X, big foes must also have Super-X.

It gets absurd. Think of Knight Rider, Airwolf, even Wild, Wild West.

Knight Rider: baddies in cars plays well enough because it's normal. Big bads had to have supervehicles, though, to compare favorably… a bit out there, but okay.

Airwolf, being a bulletproof Mach-1+ super-helicopter, was more than a match for mere car-using badguys. So they *explicitly* invented a parallel universe where badguys were commonly adding missile launchers to helicopters, which is getting pretty dang out there.

"Wild, Wild West" featured guys running around on an awesome train, so, at one point, there was an enemy running around on an awesome train, which is about as nutty as it gets.

"Stargate SG-1" did a good job dealing with this sort of problem by avoiding parity, to some extent.

In Star Trek's case, the usual scenario is to have your crew on the flagship or the local version thereof. thus your big baddies will typically need to be spacefaring, which is normal enough in-universe, but the pull is to give the baddie a single ship that can whip your hero.

This gets weird quick since you're talking about a premier vessel of a first-rate hegemonic power. A pirate ship that outclasses it is a little hard to believe, no? Imagine drug lords floating around in something capable of defeating an Iowa Class Battleship from WW2.

Still, you can outclass your hero well enough in Trek. The Borg, for instance, don't work in Airwolf or Knight Rider, but are perfectly plausible in Trek. However, it's hard to create that personal interest. They had to mess up the Borg to do it for First Contact, for instance.

(Star Trek II was technically an outclassing, though not apparent to most, and was done extremely well via a captured ship.)

The issue with the current comic book villains is shown up by Star Trek II: Khan didn't give a damn about the Federation. Had he, it would've been ridiculous. The only reason the pairing of personal vendetta and anti-Federationism kinda worked in Nemesis was the clone thing.

But #StarTrekPicard doesn't have anything good to fall back on here.

The result is another interchangeable set of unremarkable black-clad badguys who care about the main cast because reasons and who want to destroy the UFP because reasons and who have a supership because reasons and who even cares?

#StarTrekPicard

https://twitter.com/TrekCore/status/1578853771844911104