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.
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.