I agree about the villains. I've always been a  Star Trek fan growing up (next generation), but the villains have been pretty lame. The problem, is they'll present themselves as being worthy foes but then they'll get smacked down so fast and so hard (sometimes within the same episode) that they lose whatever impressive appeal they had. The Borg were probably my favorite, but after the Enterprise got almost destroyed a few times but miraculously came up on top...it's like "next?" After the Captain becomes one you get the feeling he has a huge advantage from that point on...because he does. Boring. The Romulans and Klingons are pretty much the only ones with the potential of being nemesis', but having a klingon as one of your high-ranking, regular cast members (like wharf), you always get the feeling like everything will be ok. Especially when he seems more of a badass than their entire army. Romulans are just not interesting bad guys...

Now with Star Wars, even though I love the movies and I do like the story, I always thought it was a little goofy and cliche. Something about George Lucas makes me take it less seriously, BUT...the villains are on an entirely different playing field. If you look at the "Empire," you're talking about David vs Goliath. A rebellious, oppressed army fighting against a galatical stronghold with the capabilities of blowing up a planet with one shot, definitely draws in a person's interest. We love underdog stories. Now, if you look at the Sith it's even cooler because Jedi's are so fucking cool. First of all, they can manipulate the "force," have "Light sabers," and display an actual "evil" that separates themselves from your average star trek bad guy. Secondly, it's  more evenly matched. It's like opposite sides of the same spectrum trying to overcome the other in a balancing act.  In fact, since Darth Vader pretty much takes over everything and kills off most of the Jedi's, you get the impression that the Sith are more powerful. You never really see this much struggle on Star Trek. MAYBE in an episode, but not as an ongoing vendetta.

I think probably my favorite collection of villains came from SG-1 (Stargate). The show obviously doesn't have a large enough audience or production value to compete with Star Wars or Star Trek, but they did a good job continuing the story line on their foes and made some of them pretty interesting. There's 5-6 main villains that pop in and out of the series, but I think the most interesting are the Goa'uld which go allllllllllllll the way back to the original Star Gate movie, and the Replicators.

The Goa'uld are sort of like the Borg in how they assimilate others into their collective, but they're also extremely power hungry, which makes them seem less mechanical than the borg who sadly, look like they're just occupying their time productively. Replicators are extremely badass. They're basically machines that replicate more of themselves by destroying your ship or anything else you possess. The more advanced your parts are, they more advanced they are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Stargate)

Anyway, that's enough rambling ;o

I pretty much gave up on ST after the Hugh episode.  If that's what humanity is, then they don't deserve to survive.

Exactly.  Villains require a serious us-them dichotomy, and when you're getting into space stuff, you run into the problem of them being human.  If you look at the most famous ST villain -- Khan, you see a madman.  Yes, he's human, but he's got super strength, and his mind isn't truly human.  But.. by making him crazy, you're pigeon holing yourself.  You can't make your villain both human and despicably evil because humans just aren't despicably evil unless they're truly insane.

In Starship Troopers, it was easy to hate the bugs because they're so foreign, but even in that movie, you run into the problem of the bugs having a "right" to live their own lives.  (Yeah, that was a main point, but it still illustrates the point.)

The devil, in his various guises, has always made a compelling villain, but it only works once.  In the old BSG, there was an episode where Mephistopheles (wasn't that who it was?) made an appearance.  It was a great episode, but once you know he's the devil, he has no more power... so... that's that.

The best villains, in my opinion, are people who aren't really evil.  (Come to think of it, villain creation pretty much refutes the notion of evil as a real quality.)  It's really compelling when you can actually empathize with the enemy.  You know they need to be destroyed, but it hurts you to do so because you know they could be good.  This is probably why Darth Vader has been such a dominating figure.  Sure, he's a villain, but when you learn the whole story, you empathize with him.  He just wanted to save his wife and mother.  Christ... all of us can empathize with that.  He lived in a confusing political climate where it was never clear who was good and who was evil.  On the one hand, Senator Palpatine is telling him the Jedi are overstepping their bounds and trying to wrest power from the Senate.  On the other hand, you have the Jedi, who claim there's a super-secret evil somewhere in the senate.  (Makes perfect sense if they're trying to overthrow the government.  Invent an invisible enemy!)

Anyway, we all know the story.  The point is, he's compelling because he is more powerful than smart, and it's hard to fault him for that.

And presumably, since Vader was able to wrest himself from the control of the evil mitochlorians, there might have been hope for the emperor as well.

So... the real question... are there bad mitochlorians and good mitochlorians?  Or... are they neutral, amplifying whatever they are fed by their... um... host?

Damn it Latin... every one else was all happy derailing a troll thread, and you HAD to come in and commence with feeding time -_-

Nerd points to you.  That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Well, to his credit (and you won't hear me say that about Lucas very often) he had the good sense to kill his villains.  After the prequels, the Emperor had six full movies of being the big bad guy.  That's about all you get out of a good villain, and honestly, the Emperor was a very good villain in the original trilogy.  Only hinted at in Empire, the true power of the Emperor is only revealed in the climactic conclusion.  That's good writing.  Let the suspense build.  People fear what they don't know, and the less you know about the villain, the more you dread his appearance.

While it's interesting to see Palpatine's rise to power in the prequels, it's not compelling enough to make into a movie.  I could go the rest of my life and never see that stupid kid who played Anakin again.  He was terrible, and that stupid 40 minute detour into pod-race land was one of the biggest wastes of time in my life.  Jar Jar was completely extraneous.  Actually, when it comes down to it, you could have about 20 minutes of grabbing Annakin as a boy, another hour about young Annakin the apprentice, and maybe 30 minutes of his decent to the dark side, and you'd have a single, coherent movie instead of three full length diversions.

I haven't seen Farscape, but I agree with you.

Actually, it works in horror movies, too.  One of the reasons the Exorcist was such a successful horror film was that most of the scariness was in your head until she started turning her head around and spitting pea soup.

Back in the day when I used to play Dungeons and Dragons, I always felt the key to creating a good villain was having them demonstrate their power from afar while remaining mysterious, elusive, and seemingly in total control.  

That's pretty much what Star Wars did.  You don't meet the Emperor in his full power until the very end.  Granted, there were a LOT of holes, and I have a lot of issues with the plot line in general, but that particular device is used effectively.

I don't think the kid was terrible, I think the scene he had to play were freaking way to long for the character that he plays, why waste most of the movie on the pod race part? It was a like a very long filler, and really didn't add anything to the plot or the movie itself, I mean they could have condensed that so much more and just given us the knowledge that anakin was very much technically minded, without going so much into it. After the phantom menance I watched the other 2 movies at home, and only when someone gave them to me, I wouldn't spend the money to rent them.

However Lucas used the whole villan behind the scene very well in the first three movies he put out. As have many directors, Hitchcock was great at that, Momento was another movie that kepted you in suspense never really knowing who the real villan is until the end, and even then your not truely sure. The usual suspects used that conecpt very well. If done properly it can be a great movie experience.

However Lucas for me just lost it with the CGI characters, and it bombed, I think the whole new series felt very artificial, where the first star wars movies had a better feel to it, I guess because the actors interacted with their scenery far better than what was done in Episodes 1, 2 and 3. The actors never looked natural in the settings.

ahahaha.... skar.... ahahaha

edit; Ok... ok, i admit, for a DISNEY villian... he was a bastard

One more thing to say about Star Wars and villains; I'm sure there a couple of folks here who read the Grand Admiral Thrawn books--now he was a decent villain.  No Jedi powers, no desire to build a planet cracker, just cold, ruthless strategy applied against the factions of the New Republic.  If you aren't familiar, he was a blue-skinned alien of some sort who kept getting busted down in rank because he would actually tell Emperor things like "you don't need a Death Star" and "don't install a thermal exhaust port on your Death Star".  After the Rebels won, he held back, gathered remnants of the defeated Imperial Fleet and set about kicking the Rebels' ass, largely because he saw that they were a bunch of pussies who couldn't or wouldn't unite against a crisis.  Only his death by Deus Ex Machina kept him from destroying the Rebs and reinstating the Empire.

/double post, delete plz D;

The ultimate villian for me in star-trek, is the Q-race

The power to do ANYTHING yet they choose to do NOTHING... thats just, unforgivable, in my eyes... the ultimate waste >.< heh

Q was hideously mangled in Voyager, for me it is the one great failure of the Voy series, and contrarily one of the big successes of TNG.

The problem with Q is that it's just too inconceivably perfect a villian to do anything sensible with, there's no way to attach any believable depth to the actions of Q. So while the petty senseless racketeering of TNG's Q was just plain good fun, the later, supposedly wanting for much, angst-ridden Q of Voyager was just nonsensical drivel.