I came across this box set and it’s really messing me up for a lot of reasons (it is marked TOS despite having characters from all over the place, and for some mistaken reason Gul Dukat is included) but what I really wanted to talk about was Q’s inclusion.
Do people usually consider him a villain?
I suppose he has done a lot of things that would be considered antagonistic, with a big one getting a number of Enterprise crew members killed in the first encounter with the Borg, but that seems, at least from his point of view a tough love moment. In the long term, Q did seem to have the survival of humanity as a goal. His judgment of humans was pompous but not villainous.
Using the term antagonist is the foremost point of order. Did he introduce the Federation to one of its most formidable foes? Yes. Did that interaction result in the deaths of 18 crewmembers? Yes. But for the sake of making aware and preparing Starfleet for the hardships to come, it appears to have been of use. Not about to excuse the means to an end argument, though. Q has insider knowledge of potential outcomes and is known to be a meddlesome force (Quint not withstanding). Do his actions then and later justify his intervention?
His actions led to more then the death of 18 crew members.
The borg were off doing their own thing. And only doing sneaky raids occasionally.
Q’s meddling led to them getting a hard on for starfleet and as a result caused at least hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Would it have happened eventually - yes, but Starfleet may have been more prepared and been able to prevent some of the deaths/assimilation.
Or maybe without this interaction the Federation would have been taken by surprise and wiped. Maybe Q killed aimlessly just for his own pleasure, or Q saved the Federation, and we will never know.
Q could have stopped the Borg as well, so they will always be a villain just like all the other beings of power that do nothing.
Does that make the Federation villains because of the Prime Directive?
Q is omnipotent, or so he claims. He’s certainly omnipotent to do things like give the Federation a complete writeup on The Borg a full and realistic simulation of what it is like to go up against them and how they can be countered without killing a single person.