Don't Waste Your Villain

Villains are extremely important to most stories, because you need someone to oppose your hero or someone your hero can oppose, depending on how you want to see it. Next to the hero, the villain is the second-most-important character in your story. Think about this for a moment.

Conflict, which is important to every kind of story, is most easily reached by the hero having one goal and the villain having another (or the same, if it’s a goal only one can reach), both of which are at odds. This sets them up and pits them against each other, so the story can unfold around them. See the linked post about conflict for more information on this.

A villain also should always be more powerful than your hero, have more wealth, influence, power, magic - whatever is important to the plot. If you’re writing a thriller, the villain (or antagonist, if you want to put it less harshly) is the one behind all the crimes happening. If you write a love story, the villain (here, antagonist might indeed be the better word) is the second person interested in the love interest or someone hell-bend on stopping the romance from happening. If you write a book about intrigues, the villain will be the one who directs the intrigue against your hero. It’s also important for the villain to be really threatening - a stupid or inept villain is not going to cut it for anything above a kid’s story. The threat-level of the villain determines the heroism-level of the hero, after all.

But now for the main topic of this post - not wasting the villain. There are a few examples for this in very popular stories, but I’ve picked the Star Wars Prequels for my post.

If you look at the original trilogy (today’s episode 4-6), you will find that the plot hinges a lot on Darth Vader at the beginning and slowly, without dismissing him completely, shifts to the Emperor as the Big Bad at the end. This is a very good use of a villain.

Vader is introduced very early (first scene of the first movie) and is kept threatening throughout all three movies, even though he does get his little redemption act at the end of the last one. The good thing about this is that you have an iconic villain (because Darth Vader is recognizable on the first look, even for people who have no idea about Star Wars) who threatens with ease, hold a lot of power (the whole military of the Empire is at his beck and call), and is an extremely strong fighter with ill-disguised magic on top. He’s physically intimidating, he can kill people without even touching them (the Force Choke is established early in the first movie, too), he’s an ace pilot, and he’s in a position of power which would even make him dangerous, were he not that physically threatening himself.

Now compare the duo of Darth Vader and the Emperor to the many villains from the prequels. “The Phantom Menace” introduces Darth Maul who, being very different from Vader, would have made for an interesting and engaging villain for the whole trilogy, too, only to kill him in the end (and for this post, his eventual resurrection doesn’t matter). “Attack of the Clones” introduces Count Dooku, who could also have been a challenging villain for the trilogy, but he’s killed at the beginning of “Revenge of the Sith.” The last movie, then, throws General Grievous into the fray, only to have him (her? it?) killed off as well. That’s three villains, two of which (plus Asajj Ventriss from the early Clone Wars cartoons, but minus General Grievous) would have been sufficient to carry the whole trilogy, leading up to the big reveal (not for the audience, but for the heroes) of Senator Palpatine being a Sith himself and behind it all.

By throwing each of the villains into the bin by the end of the movie where they opposed the heroes (or a little later in Count Dooku’s case), the movies do themselves a big disservice. One big strength of the original trilogy was that you knew the villains. You only needed to hear a few bars of the Imperial March and you knew who would be along shortly. You only needed to hear the artificial breathing sound to know who was arriving. Vader was the main threat, even though the Emperor was more powerful. He was the one the rebels had to fight directly, he was the one Luke had to face off against twice (Obi-Wan taking the brunt of the fight in Episode 4), he was the threat the audience knew and expected.

Darth Maul had potential, a lot of it. He looked intimidating, even though in a different way than Vader. He wasn’t as tall or physically imposing, but his lither build and higher agility still made him a very dangerous adversary, not to mention the yellow eyes, tattooed face, and horns made him look threatening. He clearly was a good hunter and when he went up against the heroes, he killed the more experienced one without suffering injuries. In addition, his double-bladed lightsaber was a novel concept for the movies (although the comics had done it once before with a Sith Lord of old). Then he was cut in two and the dark side was on Sith short of the full set (and would stay that way until towards the end of Episode 3).

Count Dooku also had potential. He wasn’t that physically threatening, not a new Darth Vader, but he was a slightly weaker version of the future Emperor himself - a man whose power didn’t lie in direct confrontation, but in influence and intrigue. And not that bad a fighter, either, when push came to shove. He was also allowed to wound the hero, very, very much like Darth Vader in Episode 5. He would have been a different enemy for the heroes, someone who could start Anakin on the path to darkness by manipulating him a little (as Palpatine does later). In Ventriss (only in the first Clone Wars series), he also had a right hand who could pick up the slack and deliver the physical threats to the heroes. He survived the first movie he was in, only to die in the prologue of the next one. Dooku was a fallen Jedi, not a Sith, so we’re still one Sith short of our set.

The less said about the strange abomination that is General Grievous, the better. It’s clear that the makers of Episode 3 were already very much focused on the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader and didn’t really want to invest that much into another villain for the story. They should, however, either have found another way to keep Obi-Wan and Anakin apart or invest more time into that villain, because he (she? it?) isn’t even a good one, despite the talent to wield four lightsabers simultaneously.

The prequels have a lot of problems, but the scattered villains, none of which gets a lot of time to develop, are the biggest one by far. The original trilogy had the hero and the villain develop parallel, giving the audience more information on the villain and giving the villain more powers as the hero grew stronger, too. The prequels pitted the heroes against a new villain in each story, never giving the villains much time to develop, to become threatening to the heroes. By the time they were established enough so the heroes officially knew about them, they were already about to go.

Imagine, for a moment, Darth Maul had never been killed off, but only wounded at the end of the first movie. He’d have made his escape or he’d have been taken away (like Vader being flung into space at the end of Episode 4). Wouldn’t you as the audience have waited for him to turn up again in the next movie? To see, perhaps, how he had grown (and overcome his injury) while Anakin had (although I still think they shouldn’t have made that jump, but introduced Anakin as an older person)? Confronting Obi-Wan at first, only to find that he had to face Anakin as well. A menace who would threaten someone dear to Anakin (better than just that vision of Padme in pain). A menace who would wound him, but have to yield to someone else again, perhaps to Yoda, perhaps to Obi-Wan, perhaps just to circumstances. In the third movie, they could have pitted him against Anakin and have made Anakin finally killing him part of Anakin’s change into Darth Vader. One apprentice Sith replacing the next by killing him - a suitable way of doing it for the bad guys of the galaxy far, far away.

Or imagine Count Dooku in the wings instead. Him spinning his intrigues, luring the Jedi into traps, taking their advantages and making them hunt for him in vain. Pulling the order (which he, as a former Jedi, should know even better than Palpatine) apart and preparing for its eventual doom. Another kind of story, but with the prequels branching out into the whole topic of galactic politics, also a possible take. And with Ventriss as his right hand, we would have had another ‘Vader/Emperor’ team-up in the story, a look at what was to come - the consummate politician and manipulator and his servant who deals out the physical damage.

I admit, I would have liked it more if they had kept Darth Maul, because he’d make for a better villain in an action movie, but I could see the other story do well, too - only, perhaps, not really as a Star Wars movie.

Learn from the prequels’ mistakes and don’t waste a villain. There may be times when you need to sacrifice a lesser villain early in the story: a strong hench, a right hand, a secondary villain in the big picture of things. But don’t throw an established villain aside easily. As the hero might have to run and live to fight another day, there are times when the villain has to do just that as well.