Considering that A) it was his idea to test them, B) he enjoyed tormenting others way too much to be a good guy, and C) He lied constantly, I'd say it's pretty safe to call him the antagonist, and not just a "tough love" kinda guy. Any claims he made in that regard should be taken with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

In most episodes, he was opposing Picard; that makes him an antagonist, no matter his motive as eventually revealed.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I don't know. He's indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands (millions?) of sentient beings. He, after all, "introduced" the Federation to the Borg.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

...At least, he did before the retcons came and changed all of history. Away, retcons, away! Get thee behind me, Braga!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

but, by blasting the Picard and crew across the galaxy and "introducing" them to the Borg, he gave the Federation a heads up and enough time to at least get somewhat prepared for what was coming. the Borg were probably going to find the alpha quadrant eventually anyways, and would have probably rolled right on thru and assimilated everyone without breaking a sweat had Q hot given the federation a heads up.
i've always seen Q as the "protector" of humanity. he was a part of a larger community that looked at humans (and Klingons and Cardassians and everyone else) as we humans look at ants scurrying around the base of an anthill, and they didn't care if we lived or died. but Q liked the little beings, and protected them from the others in his continuum. by being the "bad guy", he learned the limits of the little creatures, and helped to toughen them up so the others wouldn't just eliminate them.
yeah, i know.. the writers probably never thought about Q as more than a weird character they could fall back on when they couldn't think of anything else before the production deadline, but that's the way Q was revealed to me thru TNG and DS9- but not so much with Voyager. he was back to a "let's just get a script written so we don't get fired" thing. of course, that whole series was kind of like that, wasn't it? i still haven't seen the last few episodes of that series.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Don't forget Dr. Duran Duran from Barbarella, the inventor of the Positronic Ray and the Excessive Machine.

He has even a famous Pop-Band named after him.

It's all because of Kirk (the Temporal Terror) mucking around with the time line one too many times. Well, that's one way to internalize the retcons, anyway.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Pink Floyd was named after my father.

He was born (and duly christened) a good three decades before the group formed.

How about Feathers McGraw?

Or Preston the Cyberdog?

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

...Is this thing on?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

"this concept of wuv confuses and infuriates me!!!"

probably my favorite line from any episode of any tv series. ever. it just kind of comes out of nowhere...
the Planet Express crew delivers a shipment of valentines candy hearts to Omicron Persei 8 to get them to stop destroying the earth, and the ruler and his queen get confused by the misspelled phrases on the chalky candy hearts.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

So, SkepticJ, are you going to create a set of polls from this?

I'm ready to go with mine, but I can wait for yours if you wish.

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Keeper of the Jabberwock

Guards! Remove the humans lower horn!

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Aim high (but don't blow yourself up)!- Homer Hickam

In Soviet Russia, UFO report you!- Phil Plait

Carl Sagan may have seen a pale blue dot, but I see a sapphire.- Doug Phillips, Discovering Alabama.

Clear skies Maksutov.

some of my picks


Niska in Firefly
Doctor Ock in the Spiderman movie
New government in V the tv series
Agent Smith The Matrix
Pfeiffer as Catwoman
Goldfinger in the bond movie
Any one of many antagonist roles played by Gary Oldman
Nurse in one flew over the cuckoo's
The Children of the Corn
NeverEnding Story The Nothing
Magneto from Xmen
John Carpenter's The Thing
Scorpius Farscape


Don't bother buying it, I used to really like BSG but as the episodes move on the series totally 'jumps the shark', I already got season2 but apart from a few good plots like Pegasus, and the lost map to Earth I found the series to have mostly de-evolved into a depressing soap opera. Which is why I sold them off with no intention of watching that dull soap opera again.

I've kept the pilot of the new BSG (which was great) but since the pilot the series has seen a constant decline in its quality of writing and its ratings have been on a downward slide. I posted my thoughts on the series in another thread so I'll say no more on the subject as I don't want this thread to go off-topic

I nominate the five Demon Princes from the Jack Vance series of the same name, with an extra nod to Lens Larque and Howard Alan Treesong as being the most memorable of them all.

I also nominate the planet Solaris from Stanislaw Lem's novel of the same name. When an entire world is dredging your psyche to find the thing most likely to drive you insane and make it actual, you've got a serious problem, especially if its motives are inscrutable and possibly benign.

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"People do not want immortality... They simply do not want to die... They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more. Everything that has been said beyond that is a lie." - Ijon Tichy

Seconded! Much more interesting than any number of baddies who wear capes and who spend so much time gloating that their victims get the opportunity to escape.

Yeah.

Thanks, but you can go ahead if you want. There's still some good ones being listed.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Well, since Q is omnipotent, couldn't he do what happened in that episode, but fake it? Scare the living *bleep* out of them, then reveal it was all a fake, but that there really are beings like that out there, and they're coming. Or if he cares so much about humans, destroy the Borg with a wave of his hand.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Babylon 5 finally getting some love. Thank the Maker...

Most of my favorites have already been mentioned, but I'll line'em up.

1) Vladimir Harkonnen, particularly Ian McNeice's version.
2) Alfred Bester. Koenig escaped Star Trek and rebounded from Moontrap in one magnificent stroke. Shatner and Nimoy must be jealous.
3) Londo Mollari. The best villains always do it with the best of intentions.
4) Agent Smith. At least in the first movie, he was impressive. What he became in the rest was kinda bleh.
5) Grand Admiral Thrawn. Scary a man who can tell you what you're thinking based on what kind of art you're into...

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

In reverse order

5th. The Predator

4th. The original 1979 Alien - boy was that thing creepy 1st time around.

3rd. Serverlan - my only regret being that she could have looked a bit more fetishistic.

2nd. Agent Smith in the first Matrix outing.

1st. Prostetnik Vogon-Jeltz - any guy who can blow-up an entire planet and a few billion people, while regarding the whole exercise as being nothing more than like filing a Tax Return has just got to have it. (Remember it was the Vogons who first used the phrase "Resistence is useless (aka futile)" long before the Borg came along.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

Ah. This must be a strange usage of the word "first" of which I was previously unaware.

Fah! There be no shark anywhere in the vacinity of the good ship Galactica.

Season 2 and 3 are bloody brilliant!

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Well, maintaining the slightly OT feel, Season 2 turned up today, so I shall find out for myself.

Meanwhile, I have to agree with Paul. "Resistance is useless" must have been used a dozen times in Doctor Who before Adams penned HHGTTG.

On a vaguely related topic, I once bought some electronic components from Maplin, but one of the resistors they sold me had the wrong value. I had to take it back and tell them the resistance was useless... [ducks and runs]

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Goes back to the Pulps. Ming the Merciless and Fu Manchu used it a few times. Hey, Fu manchu! He was a mad scientist too, right? Put 'im on the list!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

From Iain Banks:

The Affront, the Idirans, and the Excession.

Best antagonist in a Sci Fi series:

Program managers at FOX...

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

If you were Tralfamadorian or a wormhole alien, it would make perfect sense.

Regarding B5, I don't know if they've been mentioned yet, but I would nominate both the Shadows and Vorlons.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Berman and Braga.

(Oh, you said in the series.)

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Best. The thread says best.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

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