The 10 Best Star Trek Villains Ranked

The argument could be made that it isn’t so much that Marc Alaimo’s Gul Dukat is the best Star Trek villain; but that since the egomaniacal tyrant appears so often on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, we’re afforded more opportunity to watch him evolve. Rather than appearing in only a few scattered episodes, Dukat is as integral to DS9 as any of its heroes.

From the DS9 premiere to its explosive finale, we get to watch Alaimo expertly portray Dukat as an ambitious authoritarian with shifting allegiances, a triumphant Dominion warlord, a defeated and mentally unstable fugitive, a silver-tongued cult leader, and finally a fanatical devotee of dark gods — the Pah-wraiths. Few franchise characters — good or evil — evolve as much as Dukat, and it’s loads of fun watching it happen.

John de Lancie’s Q isn’t only one of the best Star Trek villains but one of the most prolific. He’s best known for being a thorn in the side of the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but he also becomes something of an omnipotent stalker to Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) in Star Trek: Voyager and even enjoys brief appearances in DS9 and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Of course, he makes his final appearance in Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, when he inexplicably dies.

Some may take issue with calling Q one of the best Star Trek villains — simply because eventually he becomes much more than that — but he certainly starts out as an antagonist. Sure, he would eventually become something of an irritating ally to Patrick Stewart‘s Jean-Luc Picard, but as the entity singlehandedly responsible for siccing the Borg on Starfleet, he can bear the title “villain” just fine.

Originating the part in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Space Seed,” the late Ricardo Montalban would reprise the role of the genetically engineered warlord Khan Noonien Singh in what rightfully is often named the best of the film franchise — 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Repurposing lines from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and doing things with the ears of Walter Koenig and Paul Winfield that can never be unseen, Khan is not only one of the best Star Trek villains, but for Trek fans of the 1980s, he became the absolute definition of revenge.

For those who don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars from Stargate, the late Louise Fletcher is best known as another villain: Nurse Ratched from the 1975 classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But to anyone who watched DS9, she will forever be one of the best Star Trek villains — Kai Winn. An absolute master of manipulation and passive aggression, few bad guys inspire as much visceral fury from fans as the ambitious Winn Adami.

You can accuse me of recency bias all you want: Amanda Plummer is absolutely stunning as the Changeling revenge machine Vadic in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, and she has earned her place on any list of best Star Trek villains. Few Trek villain actors could claim to evoke the same fury, abject terror, and sadistic empathy as Plummer does as the captain of the Shrike. Whenever Plummer is on screen in Picard she is the smallest thing you see, and somehow simultaneously the most intimidating and terrifying presence.

Jeffrey Combs has played a lot of villains in Trek, as you can tell by scrolling through his IMDb, but the best Star Trek villain he’s ever given us is Weyoun, the conniving Vorta at the head of the Dominion’s war efforts against the Federation and its allies. Technically, Combs gave us quite a few Weyouns because Vorta are replaced with clones after death and Weyoun dies more than Picard, Spock, Data, and the Kelvin Kirk combined. But ultimately, they’re all the same perfectly duplicitous diplomat who never stops smiling but always has the dagger ready.

Almost as soon as they were introduced, the Borg were one of the best and most popular Star Trek: The Next Generation villains, and 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact introduces the malevolent Borg Queen. Played by four different actresses in multiple subsequent appearances — including in Voyager, Picard, and even Lower Decks — the Borg Queen achieves the near impossible by making the Borg not only threatening, but kinda-sorta sexy.

He may be more well known for the Back to the Future films as the lovable eccentric Doc Brown, but as the ruthless Klingon Commander Kruge in 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Christopher Lloyd proved he doesn’t play bad guys nearly enough. As the Klingon whose actions result in both the death of Captain Kirk’s son and the destruction of Enterprise, the ambitious Kruge is one of Trek’s most consequential antagonists, and you can tell Lloyd is having tons of fun along the way.

Considering how drastically the Klingons — between The Original Series and the films — change both physically and culturally, Kruge is not only one of the best Star Trek villains, he’s basically the prototype Klingon for the post-Original Series mythos. We see Klingons like him in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but only very briefly, and we never get to experience them as individual characters.

It’s through William Sadler’s Luther Sloan that Star Trek fans are introduced to Section 31 — a covert agency that is sometimes said to be part of Starfleet, and other times is accused of being a rogue agency working with no oversight and without Starfleet’s approval. A master manipulator, Sloan enters the story suspicious of DS9‘s Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and eventually tries repeatedly to recruit the doctor. Nothing ranks Sloan higher in the list of best Star Trek villains more than the simple truth that, more than any of them, he convinces us from start to finish that he firmly believes he’s working for the greater good.

If nothing else proves that Harry Mudd is one of Star Trek’s best villains, there’s the fact that he’s one of the only named bad guys who gets to show up more than once in The Original Series (and even came back for the often overlooked Star Trek: The Animated Series). Rainn Wilson of The Office fame took over the role of the popular con man in Star Trek: Discovery, leading to the excellent time-loop episode “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.”