In Star Trek, you either die a villain or live long enough to get recontextualized as part of a more nuanced species. The Next Generation gave depth to the Klingons who’d plagued Kirk and the Enterprise on The Original Series, while Deep Space Nine fleshed out the Cardassians and the Ferengi, who replaced the Klingons as stock villains on TNG. Other species are less fortunate; Voyager’s ill-received Kazon, for example, were largely dropped from the canon after serving two seasons as one-note antagonists.
Deep Space Nine’s Jem’Hadar split the difference. Chemically enslaved shock troops for the fascistic Dominion, the reptile-like soldiers merited mention in some ancillary novels and games, but otherwise vanished from Trek after DS9’s conclusion (Starfleet Academy’s Lura Thok is part-Jem’Hadar, but the series is set eight centuries after DS9 and tells us little about what happened to them in the interim). But DS9 attempted to flesh out its villains as best it could, and one of the best examples was “To the Death,” which aired 30 years ago this week.
