Cardassians
Class: Humanoid, warlike
Home planet: Cardassia Prime
Values: Stealth, cunning, treachery, strategy, betrayal, brutality, lack of mercy
Cardassians of note: Gul Dukat, Elim Garak, Enabran Tain, Tret Akleen, Gul Damar
Featured in: DS9
A warrior race like the Klingons, the Cardassians are more brutal in that they do not prize honour. In fact, in their society the most underhand and treacherous rise to the top, and in that they are probably comparable to Nazis. They wear full body armour at all times, and have just recently been defeated (they would say decided to pull out) after the fifty-year-long occupation of Bajor, whose citizens they treated as subhuman slaves. They are a military society, ruled by the Cardassian Central Command but more accurately by their intelligence arm, the shadowy and feared Obsidian Order. Cardassia is a police and military state, where even the slightest hint of disaffection is greeted with instant arrest and possible subsequent disappearance. No Cardassian trusts another, and this constant air of paranoia helps the Order to keep control of and over its people, as well as affording it the opportunity to remove any elements it deems “inappropriate”, which is to say, threatening its power.
Cardassians are not happy about their retreat from Bajor, but like the Centauri in
Babylon 5, the guerilla war against them by the indigenous population became too costly to support, and anyway they had strip-mined the planet to the point of exhaustion and starvation so there was little left for them to occupy. When the Federation went to war with the Dominion, the Cardassian Empire joined the latter, fighting against Starfleet. With a small rebel force building among the Cardassians, the tide was turned and the Cardassians turned on their former allies (a typically Cardassian thing to do!). However, although they prevailed, they paid a high price and were never again the proud, conquering arrogant race they had been. Cardassians are possibly unique in being the only race that feature in only one series,
Deep Space 9. They are mentioned in passing in
Voyager, and I don’t care about
Enterprise but I doubt it as it’s set way before anyone encountered them. Actually they’re not the only ones, but even so it’s a little odd that they are so inextricably tied into
DS9.