You are waiting for more borg and romulans? Are you interested in a new enemy of the federation to appear or have another re-encounter like the cardassians?
Do we need antagonists?
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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For adventure purposes, yes, all story need it. The other is, be trapped in another anomaly, but most of the time there is evil people doing bad stuff like controlling bodies, so yes.
A very human looking alien!
The Zenkethi have been in both alpha and beta canon with wildly different interpretations. I'd like to see more of them even if it isnt major and they just decide what they should be.
I want the Borg to assimilate Khan from another timeline where he is a Gorn
GHAAAAAAAARNNNN!
a goon!
I just want something new and original. No more nostalgia bait, no more member berries. Can you imagine if TNG never introduced the Borg and just stuck with Romulans? Even when they didn't nail it right away with the Ferengi, the franchise stuck with it and ended up giving us a pretty interesting culture with some of the best characters and stories in DS9.
No one wants to take risks anymore, makes me sad.
The Gorn in Strange New Worlds are very far from the Gorn in TOS. The animalistic violence and body horror make for a really interesting enemy and there is a great deal of psychology to the conflict too. People are scarred by past experiences… they live through some really horrific terror. This is a long way from fisticuffs with a dude in a rubber mask.
I’m not sure if you consider them just recycled nostalgia bait. But I’d say if something gets sufficiently re-imagined it is still “something new” even if one can argue it isn’t “original.”
You should check out SFA!
I'm still planning on getting around to this, seen some clips of Paul Giamatti and he looks great as usual.
His character is great too.
I second this. SFA has a whole new villain faction and tackles star trek and the federation from an entirely new angle.
How about something like The Culture?
Highly advanced multi-species civilization ruled by benevolent AIs?
I have a nagging feeling that something like it should have appeared in Trek at some point.
Ship the size of a continent slips out of the skein alongside a Federation starship and immediately runs a scan that siphons up all the art and science records onboard.
"Science officer, wtf?"
"Hey there! We are The Culture! We've been partying for the last few hundred cycles, and this month has been particularly wild. Everybody thinks y'all seem cool. Wanna get fucked up, go lava surfing, and chat about life? Just park that thing anywhere."
I'd love to watch that one.
This is interesting, even without the benevolent AI, though that could be interesting as well. But what happens when The Federation runs into essentially another Federation? Do they combine and double their knowledge and territory or do they clash over differing ideals? There's no way humans were the first species to say "hey, let's work together," but if they ran into, say, space capitalists, we could wind up being the USSR of a new galactic Cold War.
This is another thought experiment that Kirsten Beyer took on in her Voyager Full Circle sequence in the Relaunch Treklit novelverse.
There were a lot of questions about whether their ethics were in fact shared or parallel with that of the Federation as well as whether they really were who they claimed to be on the surface.
Another Relaunch Treklit exploration involved a very different Breen society than Discovered unveiled. Instead of a single species, Breen turned out to be a multiplicity of species with different environmental requirements who all spent all their lives in environmental suits other than in their own homes. In the Relaunch universe, the Breen achieved species, race and gender equality by completely hiding their physiology and masking their voices.
I mean, The Culture is just The Federation if it actually followed through on post-scarcity utopianism.
Nor really.
The Feds still have meatbags making decisions.
The Culture humanoids are "lucky" enough to have benevolent AIs who spoil them like pets.
Less benevolent AI rule might look like Saberhagen's Berserkers, or Battlestar Galactica's Cylons.
I know you didn't ask, but:
As weird as it sounds, I don't think the Borg are ruled by AI. If they were, they'd be a lot scarier than they already are. Cyborg meat brains, e.g. the Borg Queen, are still in charge of making stupid decisions.
The Minds of the culture are people, with the same rights as any other inhabitant. Even the ones unwilling or unsuitable to coordinate the systems of a ship or orbital.
By contrast, both Data and the Doctor had to argue for their personhood, to convince the Federation that they should have rights, and their utility played a role in that decision.
The Federation talk a big game about fair treatment for all sentient beings, but they sure are willing to deny rights to those they don't like, and they are meat supremacists.
Sentient AIs seem to be a lot less common and less powerful computationally in Fed space than in the Culture.
Lore/Data/Lal, Moriarty, the Doctor and that's pretty much it.
V'Ger is earlier, but was overclocked by unknown alien technology, and therefore not replicable by the Feds.
Although a starship computer of the TNG era, i.e. the latter third of the 24th Century, has enough computing power to create a sentient AI, Moriarty, by what is essentially a mistake in Data's vibe coding, there seems to be some kind of brake to keep starship computers from becoming sentient themselves.
Culture AIs come in a huge range of capabilities from GSV commanding Minds to drones like Mawhrin-Skel with about the same level of intelligence as the biological citizens, to a sentient survival suit.
If you read closely, although the meatbag characters largely take center stage, it's the GSV Minds who directly control the vast majority of resources, come to consensus among themselves on strategy, or go loose cannon, or sulk in a corner, and everyone else is literally just along for the ride.
The Conspiracy aliens. We’ve been waiting… so long…..
Or the ones from Schisms.
Was it in the S1 finale of Discovery we saw some "Conspiracy" crawlies sizzling on a flat-top grill at the Qo'nos marketplace? No wonder they were pissed off a 100+ years later.
I don’t think I caught that! I’ll have to keep my eyes out whenever I do a rewatch.
Could be my mistake. There is nothing on Memory Alpha about it.
Kirsten Beyer’s had a very creepy and innovative follow up to the Schisms aliens in her Treklit Voyager Full Circle sequence of novels.
Discovery borrowed one of her plots for the 4th season. I wouldn’t mind if they adapted some of their alien concepts for SFA.
I wish I could say I’d check it out, but my To Be Read pile is a little intimidating… maybe one day.
Harry Mudd
Something new. Something relatable. Not a one dimensional monster. Something that makes challenges the federation's ideals.
Like the classic meme, more courtroom battles and less spaceship battles.
How about more new antagonists?
I’d like to know more about the Vendari Ral and the remaining Emerald Chain in the 32nd century.
However, what I’d prefer over time is to see a build up to and slow unveiling of another unique antagonist as we got with the Borg.
And how can be that new antagonist?
The ones in the image of the post are all old, rehashes from classic episodes.
When the Borg first appeared towards the end of TNG season one, all we saw was destroyed colonies. It was a mystery who or what was causing this.
Or, consider how we heard about the Romulans before first seeing them in TOS.
A slow revelation of a new and unexpected opponent, very different from the ones we’ve seen before, would be much more interesting than revisiting old ones repeatedly.
The whale probe crashes into V'Ger and they head to the center of the universe where they free God^TM
I'd like to see some of the novelverse villains. The Grigari come to mind.
They're kind of like the Borg but turned up to 11.
What them Breen do, huh?
I have this in mind, That's why I ask about the Breen in other post, but to be honest, I think when more you know about the Breen, more lame it becomes and works more in a mysterious way than a strong antagonic faction.
I enjoyed Discovery's Breen arc, but I agree that I enjoyed the concept of the Breen more as a mysterious fringe-species.
Pick one of the lesser baddies from Voyager.
Or redo Enterprise, taking a page from SNW.
Something new that's not shit would be great, but I wouldn't say no to more Borg tbh.