As Prefect of Bajor, then under Cardassian occupation, Dukat committed or was complicit in numerous atrocities against the Bajoran people, including slavery, sex trafficking, reprisals, and genocide. He later staged a coup of the Cardassian Union, subjected its territory to ethnic cleansing, and prosecuted a bloody war against the Federation, for which he was indicted for war crimes. He escaped before his trial, vowing to complete the genocide of Bajor. In the process he almost killed Benjamin Sisko, successfully killed Jadzia Dax, seduced and corrupted the spiritual leader of Bajor, founded a suicidal religious cult, attempted to murder his own lover, and became the embodiment of the evil Pah Wraiths.
Despite all this evildoing, he was portrayed as suave, intelligent, charming, generous, and (at times) sincerely contrite. And the fans absolutely loved him. This murderous, psychotic, genocidal maniac is one of the most beloved non-principal characters in the franchise.
Is there a character from any other TV series who is so depraved and despicable and yet so popular?
I would not describe him as likeable. I would describe him as charismatic. This is very different. He’s also complex and understandable, and yet consistently surprising. This makes for an excellent villain.
For a likeable villain, I would point to the Mayor on Buffy. He’s charming and personable and you can imagine yourself being taken in by him and even becoming friends (as long as you never see him eat a giant bug).
I love watching Dukat operate and interact with other characters, but I cannot imagine ever befriending him.
I still think there’s an element of likability insofar as he’s written and portrayed with a hint of redeemability. That is, despite all his past misdeeds, and despite his repeated attempts to excuse them or play them down, he (very) occasionally demonstrates genuine self-reflection and a desire, or perhaps just a potential, to better himself. Viewers want to like him, or at least they want to like the sort of person he might become.
Yeah, I don’t see what was likeable about Dukat at all. He was a good villain, in that you enjoyed hating him. At least until the last season when he went over the top in mustache-twirling villainy.
That said, unlike the other TNG-era treks, my watching of DS9 was a lot more sporadic. Maybe there were some episodes where he seemed likable. On the other hand, I’ve seen SFDebris’s reviews for many of the episodes I missed, and it doesn’t seem like it.
To me, a likeable villain needs to be sympathetic, someone you can understand why they are that way, and could even maybe see some wish fulfillment in their actions. Or they can just be camp and hilarious–that seems to be what they went for in Dukat’s last season, but it didn’t work for me due to how he had been built up before.
I present Boyd Crowder from Justified. A man who is not just a career criminal, who can murder someone in cold blood just because he suspects that the person is an informant, but also an unrepentant racist and white supremacist. At one point, he also did the “I’ve reformed and founded a church” thing, which ended up just being more violence.
He was supposed to be a one-off character for the pilot episode, but was so charismatic and popular with the audience, that they brought him back to be the main antagonist for the entire series.
Along those lines, I would also nominate Walter White. The arc of Breaking Bad is very clearly about the devolution of an ordinary but weak man as he actualizes as an outright villain. But he’s clever and competent in his work, and it’s fun watching him be an outlier in the world of criminal pharmaceuticals, so many viewers somehow managed to miss the point and identified with him all the way through to the end, even as he’s destroying his own life and the lives of everyone around him. He’s a fascinating and compelling character, to be sure, and for many people, apparently, this was enough to find him, for certain values of the word, likeable.
I think the trope you’re looking for is the Magnificent Bastard – a character who’s aims and methods are undeniably evil, but who executes them with such charisma, audacity and effectiveness that the audience can’t help but pull for him on some level.
The typical plot of a Dukat episode involved setting him up as an arrogant and unrepentant ex-dictator, teasing the viewer with a glimmer of hope that he could finally reform or even redeem himself (usually by having him engage in some intelligent introspection, or actually behaving in a genuinely altruistic manner), and then tearing everything away with a dramatic relapse in the final act. So yeah, he did seem likeable in a lot of episodes, if only briefly. The formula seems to have worked quite well and kept the fans coming back for more.
Dukat repeatedly sabotages himself through his neediness and self-centered behavior. He doesn’t just want to be a powerful tyrant; he wants to be admired, loved, and respected by the people he oppresses.
In the same universe, Gus Fring fits the most likable ‘bad guy’ better, IMO. Especially if people are using good guy and bad guy as stand ins for protagonist and antagonist.
The thing that really sells Dukat is that he often comes across as really believing his own bullshit. As conniving and manipulative as he was, there were a lot of points at which he was clearly lying to himself just as much, which gave him an air of sincerity. It can make for a compelling character, onscreen or indeed in real life.
Alaimo wasn’t the only one. I was pretty active in Star Trek fandom at the time DS9 was on the air, and I remember a lot of fans who were heavily shipping Dukat and Kira, and couldn’t seem to imagine why anyone would find such a pairing objectionable.
We tried to rewatch DSP a while back, but just couldn’t get into it. Hard to imagine that we had liked it so much before. Maybe had to get past the first season or so. I had a hard time getting past my Jake-hate.
As I recall, Gul Ducat did get more fleshed out in later seasons. He was more “understandable/relatable” as a bureaucratic in a horrible situation. Maybe he was entirely horrible previously during the occupation, but as the situation evolved, he seemed somewhat less so. But I don’t know that I ever thought him “likable.”
It almost happened in the sixth-season episode “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”, where Kira travels back in time or has some sort of Orb-induced hallucination (it wasn’t really clear) where she becomes a comfort woman servicing Bajor’s Cardassian occupiers. In the end it was actually Kira’s mother who ended up in a vaguely consensual sexual relationship with Dukat, which is somehow even squickier than a Dukat–Kira pairing.
