Dukat sucks so much. I love him. At least, I loved him before he went from being just this cruel and dangerous but also awkward and kind of pathetic dirtbag to being a Serious 100% Evil CraAAaazy Villain. He’s really lost a big part of why I enjoyed him: that sometimes he had to work together with Our Heroes to solve a problem or make it worse, and that he genuinely saw himself as benevolent and in the right rather than just wanting to burn everything down.

I know he starts a cult and goes out in a blaze of magical fire at the end of the series or something, but in my heart, my ideal post-series fate for Dukat, the character that I liked before everything with him went off the rails, is much more mundane. He doesn’t deserve a big dramatic evil villain death. He has like… a subspace podcast where he rants about how the Federation sucks and does paid promotions for powdered parasitic fungus supplements and tulaberry ketones. Ziyal returns his calls sometimes, but her therapist is encouraging her to keep some more distance if she feels like she needs to. One day Dukat is sitting in his bachelor pad full of badly-assembled space IKEA furniture watching TV and Politician/War Hero Garak shows up on the news for an interview segment, and he digs his claws into the arms of his chair so hard he rips the fabric.