Discover which Star Trek characters would make the perfect Doctor Who villains.
For Sherlock Holmes, there is Professor Moriarty. Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader. Batman has the Joker, and Superman has Lex Luthor. What is a hero without their rogues gallery? Star Trek is, obviously, no exception to this time-worn truism. The Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, the Founders and the Borg have all made legendary nemeses for our Starfleet protagonists.
But a truly great villain is not simply a nemesis. They are a foil. Batman is defined by his villains roster because they challenge his persona and the setting he defends. If Batman were to be challenged by Lex Luthor or General Zod, it would be a mismatch of hero and villain.
The Dark Knight's rivalry with the Joker works because the Clown Prince of Crime challenges not just Batman’s safety, but also his ideals. So it is with Superman and Lex Luthor, Holmes and Moriarty, etc. The relationship between hero and villain must have some kind of yin-yang quality for their struggle to resonate.
Which brings us to Doctor Who. The question is: what if three characters from the Star Trek franchise jumped through the space time continuum and entered the Whoniverse? Which three would be the best selections to wreak havoc and devilment upon planet Earth?
The Borg
Well isn’t this an easy one? The Borg come to Earth, and only the Doctor can stop them. Need I go on, or are you already sold? Of course, the Borg are not unlike a certain other big bad from Doctor Who’s early days, with schemes to “upgrade” the universe and “delete” those who resist.
The Cybermen, a perennial Doctor Who nemesis, have been part of pop culture since their debut in October 1966. The Borg and Cybermen's shared desire to purge the universe of emotion and individual identity would make them natural allies. Or perhaps archrivals? Who knows?
Still, despite these aspects that are directly attributable, rightly or wrongly, to Doctor Who’s creative legacy, the Borg still have plenty of their own gimmicks. While the Cybermen are usually used as a cautionary tale of humanity’s efficiency-obsession run amok, Borg are more characterized as an insectoid hive. Here, the horror lies not in humanity’s fear of its own potential, but in the fear of losing your soul while remaining alive and fully conscious.
Essentially, the Cybermen are spiritual successors to Frankenstein, the Borg are heirs to the zombie genre. They are an almost elemental nightmare, a most offensive, stomach-turning affront to the free-willed individualism that Star Trek and its creators hold so dear. The Doctor, free spirit that he is, would likely see them the same way. In another timeline, they could have been each other’s biggest threat.
The Vidiians
Doctor Who loves its body horror. If Star Trek is inspirational, Doctor Who takes an almost juvenile glee out of terrifying younger, Saturday morning audiences. The young BBC viewer hiding behind their couch is a well-known archetype, one that the show has worn, to varying degrees, as a badge of pop-culture honor.
And nothing makes audiences squirm quite as reliably as seeing humans turned into pig monsters or growing gas-masks out of their mouths. While Star Trek has not dabbled quite as extensively in body horror, it does have one species that can compete with any of Doctor Who’s gross out monsters: the Vidiians.
Introduced in Voyager’s first season, the Vidiians are a spacefaring species suffering from a devastating malady known as the Phage, which eats up and destroys their bodies one tissue cluster at a time. To solve this problem, the Vidiians harvest organs from the various species they come across: an organ here, a lung there.
In one instance, the Vidiian surgeon Sulan even removes a USS Voyager crewman’s face and grafts it onto his own! If these aliens were to come to Earth, the Doctor Who stories write themselves. The added morality play of a species stealing body parts to try and stay alive is also well within the Who wheelhouse; the Doctor would love a chance to negotiate a truce with the misunderstood organ thieves. Who wouldn’t, after all?
The Loom
Finally, we have the Loom. They are one of Star Trek’s most recent villains, having first appeared in 2024 in season two of the animated Star Trek: Prodigy. But to call them mere villains would be something of a misunderstanding: they are more of an elemental force, antibodies within the fabric of spacetime itself.
When the Star Trek timeline is disrupted — say, because of a Romulan mining ship like the Narada going back in time and destroying the Vulcan homeworld — the fabric is torn, and the Loom come pouring out like pus from a wound. Using a grab bag of powers that would make Q blush, they prey like vultures on the corrupted timelines, destroying the temporal disruptors and everyone already affected by them.
They can slow time to a standstill, rendering any target without time stabilizing technology as good as dead. For those targets who are able to deploy a stabilizer before they are frozen, they will quickly find themselves being hunted by massive, crawling kaiju with manes covered in billowing tendrils and maw-like faces straight out of Stephen King’s cursed Langoliers adaptation.
When one of those tendrils is wrapped around a prospective victim, they are not just killed, but erased from history. Every memory anyone has ever had of them is erased, and they cease to ever have existed. And good luck outrunning them.
The Loom can phase through solid matter and take flight, allowing them to battle entire starships singlehandedly. Hopefully, Doctor Who would quickly learn how to defeat the Loom after studying Prodigy's epic season 2 encounters between the deadly trans-dimensional creatures and the crews of the USS Protostar and Voyager. After all, a time-space threat of this proportion can only be answered by spacetime’s most indomitable champion.
Do you agree with our Star Trek/Doctor Who crossover list? Share your thoughts and comments with us on the Redshirts Always Die Facebook and X pages.