In this exclusive Dispatch from Andromeda, learn about the Nightsiders, a race so amoral they could give pointers to Hollywood agents.

Don Lipper speaks with Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda co-executive producer and head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe about creatures that go bump in the night and what makes a good series villain.

SPACE.com: Tell me about Nightsiders.

Robert Hewitt Wolfe: Nightsiders, they don’t like their children. They’re not very nice people. I tell you, there’s certain African frogs that lay huge amounts of tadpoles and then eat them. That’s what Nightsiders do.

SC: How do they advance?

SC: No Mother of the Year Awards.

RHW: Not for a Nightsider, no. No.

SC: That presents an almost immediate conflict that a human would have with a Nightsider

RHW: Yeah, people and Nightsiders, they don’t quite come from the same place philosophically all the time.

SC: Are there people who the Nightsiders are more in tune with?

RHW: Anyone who’s out for themselves and is consumed by self-interest and is prone to lying, stealing, mugging; the Nightsiders get along fine with people like that.

RHW: Yeah, they probably philosophically have more in common, they’d probably be more in tune with a Nietzschean than a human. But, you know, Nietzschean don’t usually get along with anybody anyway.

SC: But they both come from that same place of immorality?

RHW: Yeah, but the Nightsiders are not quite as self-sufficient as a Nietzschean. Nightsiders tend to have to hire other people to do their dirty work a lot of the time, whereas Nietzschean do it themselves.

SC: Can you tell me who the premiere Nightsider character is going to be?

RHW: Um, there will be a premiere Nightsider character in the first episode, his name is Geren Tex. He’s a cool guy, he’s an interesting guy.

SC: So, if I were to say they’re not like homeless Jawas…?

RHW: No, no, I would not say that. Um, they don’t look like Jawas, they don’t act like Jawas, we can understand what they’re saying when they talk, they don’t wear robes, homespun robes, I don’t think they’d be caught dead in homespun robes.

SC: Are we going to be seeing a lot of them?

RHW: We’re seeing a lot of them in the first two episodes, and we’ll be seeing them again occasionally, but it’s hard to say right now who we’re going to see the most of.

We’re in the experimentation phase, you know, first time we saw Klingons on Star Trek no one knew they would be the huge villains for the next 20, 30 years. They were a one-time thing. The ships were cool and John Colicos was cool, so they came back.

SC: Are they going to be the primary villains in the series?

RHW: Again, we haven’t, we’re in the very early stages and I know who the main ultimate badness is, but the path to get to that is TBD. It’s fair to say that the Nightsiders are not the principal bad guys in the beginning episodes.

SC: Did you learn anything from Next Generation experience with the Ferengi? They thought the Ferengi were going to be the Klingons and they were universally called "the Jerry Lewises of space."

RHW: I guess what I learned was that you never know. We thought that the people who were hunting Tosk [in the episode "Captive Pursuit"] at the beginning of Deep Space 9 would be really cool bad guys that we would see again and we never saw them again in the seven-year run of the show.

SC: Why do you think that happened?

RHW: I don’t know why that happened, those things just happen sometimes, we try to put them back in at some point and they never really quite worked out the way we wanted it to. We wanted to imply that they were part of the Dominion.

If you are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt when you introduce an alien race that they must be your ultimate bad guys, you could be setting yourself up for some trouble. But if you have the luxury of trying people out, seeing how they work, and seeing if you want to ever see them again, a little flexibility goes a long way with that.

SC: Otherwise you’re like Dr. Who and you’re stuck with the Daleks whose plans of universal conquest are over if they encounter a pair of stairs.

RHW: There’s that. Who knew the Cardassians would be so incredibly cool the first time? They were created as a one-time throwaway villain and they turned out to be great.

SC: In your mind, what does it take to be a really good recurring villain?

RHW: You need a really great look for it to be a recurring villain. Your ships need to look cool. The makeup scheme needs to be exciting. It really helps if you have someone wonderful play them the first time they show up, and that’s something you don’t always know until it happens. They have to have a distinct sort of cultural take, or at least the seeds of one. And then it’s a little bit of magic, it’s a little bit of everything coming together in a really wonderful way.