8 Sci-Fi Villains Perfect For Star Trek 

One of the reasons people laugh at those Star Trek crossovers with the X-Men is that it’s tough to imagine bringing comic book sensibilities (complete with heroes and villains in colorful spandex) to characters created for live-action. But we think DC’s Sinestro Corps would be perfect foes for Starfleet because they are dangerous fascists from space…basically, the kind of guys Captain Kirk wouldn’t hesitate to punch. And Sinestro himself is great at villainous monologues, so we think he’d be a natural at trading barbs with the captain whenever hailing frequencies are open.

Before you say it, we get it…the universes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek are about as different as they can be, but we still think Hal 9000 would be a perfect villain for Starfleet, especially since crews have been tackling evil AIs since The Original Series. We’ve seen how scary it can be when Data decides to take control of the ship, and we’ve even seen the Lower Decks crew deal with a HAL knockoff called Agimus. If nothing else, we’d want to watch this for the inevitable scene of some poor red shirt demanding HAL “open the shuttle bay doors.”

Ever since the first Star Wars movie, fans have posed the age-old question of whether the U.S.S. Enterprise could take on a Star Destroyer or not. And while we think those kinds of debates are too nerdy even for Star Trek fans, we must admit the Empire from Star Wars would make a perfect villain for Starfleet to face down. As a galactic organization bent on conquest and enslavement, the Empire is the ideological opposite of the Federation, which could lead to some fun, Picard-style speeches about honor and freedom (and, of course, killer space battles).

Visually speaking, we have to admit that it’s weird to think about the Enterprise taking on Galactus, the giant-sized Marvel character who runs around the galaxy, eating entire planets. However, Star Trek has shown us villains like this before: Kirk and crew not only fought actual gods before, but they once had to stop a doomsday machine cheerfully nicknamed “the planet killer” by Spock. And quite frankly, any good Starfleet crew is probably better equipped to handle Galactus than all of Earth’s mightiest heroes, who would have all been eaten long ago if not for Reed Richards always being in the right place and time.

One of the reasons that we’d love to see Star Trek have SkyNet and its army of Terminators as villains is simple–Star Trek: Picard nearly gave us such a story before dropping the ball. The first season of that show showed us the scary prospect of a “synthetic rebellion” (in which an army of androids suddenly broke bad), but that cool story thread was buried under a murky plot about Romulans and tentacle monsters. We think it’s time Star Trek did this cool idea some justice, and what better robots for them to fight than the scariest soldiers in cybernetic history?

It’s an open secret that what makes the titular monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing scary isn’t the creepy special effects–it’s the frightening prospect that anyone could be secretly infected, meaning you can’t trust anyone. Star Trek has given us episodes clearly inspired by The Thing before such as “Empok Nor,” but we’d love to see them face the exact foe from the movie let loose on a ship or a Starbase. Honestly, this is the kind of darker story that NuTrek loves to explore, showcasing how Federation principles might break down in the wake of extreme paranoia and betrayal.

As with Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica is another franchise that many have fantasized about seeing pop up in the Star Trek universe. After all, Star Trek is filled with noble characters who hate to fight if they don’t have to, and it would be cool to see what it’s like when they tackle villains as implacable and often-inscrutable such as the Cylons. Plus, a crossover with new Galactica would be perfect because that show was created by former Trek writer Ronald Moore, and we think he could help bridge these two worlds in a fun and powerful way.

On the surface level, it’s easy to see why we’d want a Star Trek crew to encounter The Reavers from Firefly: these villains are basically what you’d get if the Borg originated on a heavy metal cover, so the Enterprise would be right at home fighting them. Plus, we eventually discover that the Reavers were created through an experiment gone wrong, one that wiped out most of the planet Miranda and turned the survivors into these rampaging ghouls. With advanced medical knowledge and technology, we’re sure an enterprising doctor like Beverly Crusher could find a way to cure the Reavers once and for all.