Star Trek Picard Season 3 villain – Who plays Vadic and the top hat baddie?

The teaser trailer for Star Trek Picard Season 3 dropped at the New York Comic Con 2022 and with the introduction of a dark new villain, you might be wondering who plays Vadic. Sadly, this will be the final season for the show, but it looks like it’s throwing everything at it with a host of returning cast members from Star Trek Generations.

Obviously, Patrick Stewart is back as the titular Captain Jean-Luc Picard, but we’ll also have Jonathan Frakes as Riker, who returned in Season 2, Michael Dorn as Warf, and LeVar Burton as Geordie LaForge. If that isn’t enough, Brent Spiner looks like he’ll be back as Lore, the android brother to Data, along with Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher and Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi.

However, its the reveal of the villain, or possibly villains, that has caught our attention with two big moments in the Season 3 teaser trailer. One of them is new and one is a returning character that Star Trek fans will probably know already, but to cover all of the bases here’s the low-down on both of them.

Who plays Star Trek Picard Season 3 villain, Vadic?

The first villain reveal for Star Trek Picard Season 3 is the new character, Vadic, who looks set on vengeance against Jean-Luc and the whole federation. Her name isn’t mentioned in the teaser trailer, but if you put captions on then you can see that she’s called Vadic.

If you recognise her, but can’t quite place her in something that you’re bound to have seen, she’s played by highly regarded actor, Amanda Plumber. She played Yolanda in Pulp fiction – the girl robbing the diners in the cafe with Tim Roth’s Ringo – and you’ll know here for the epic expletive-laden, “execute every… last one of you” line.

She also starred in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire as Wiress, and The Fisher King, alongside Robin Williams as Lydia Sinclair. Her most recent film was Showing up with Michelle Williams, Hong Chau and Judd Hirsch, which competed for the Palm d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Not much is known about her role in Star Trek Picard, apart from her villain status as an out-and-out threat to Starfleet. She’s got a very disturbing hair do and her tone is a notch up on Honey Bunny/Yolanda, so we’re thinking this is going to be pretty intense.

She doesn’t appear to be Klingon, Romulan or any other specific alien race within the Star Trek universe,s o we’ll have to wait for Season 3 to arrive on the 16th February 2023. There will be ten episodes in total, so there’s a lot of space for her to share the villain spotlight with the other notable revelation.

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Who is the villain in the top hat with the gun?

Okay, so here we’re a little more rock solid as the character has appeared in The Next Generation a couple of times. He’s none other than Professor James Moriarty, a program of the fictional Sherlock Holmes villain created by Geordie LaForge to be able to beat Data.

He’s played by Daniel Davis (K-9, The Hunt for Red October) and the last time we saw him in the role he’d been sent off in a memory program build into the holodeck to live out his life with his love, The Countess. This was his second appearance in Star Trek with the first being his proclamation of sentience and Captain Picard promising to do what he can to free him from the Holodeck.

The villain was able to take over the ship using new command codes and seemed to be a fairly dangerous threat to the U.S.S. Enterprise. When he broke out for the second time, the captain’s only solution was to create a holographic program in which he go to live his dream of freedom with the love of his life.

The very fact that he’s back in Season 3 of Star Trek Picard is a pretty good indicator that he went on to figure it all out and he’s back for vengeance. The real question is whether or not he’s still a hologram, but we’ll have to wait for the show to stream on Paramount+ in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK to see how it all comes together.

His introduction to the series finale means that it’s going to be impossible to know what’s real and what’s a hologram. We’re going to be second-guessing every step, including the other villain, Vadic, who could well be a creation of Moriarty’s to fulfill his won need for vengeance.

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