The Mythcreant Podcast 473 – Why Your Villain Should Stay Dead
Even the best villains must eventually come to the end of their run, but what if you could bring them back? It would be so easy, what would be the harm—NO. You stop that. Do not give in to temptation! This week, we’re talking about why it’s almost always better to leave a villain dead and then complaining about stories that didn’t leave their villains dead. You could say there’s a bit of an Echo in there, and that, somehow, Star Wars discourse returned.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Paloma Palacios. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening theme]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Orin. With me today is –
Chris: Chris.
Oren: – and –
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Now, you might remember that I was vanquished at the end of the last episode, but I have risen again, better and stronger than before.
Bunny: Nooooo!
Chris: Oh man, I put so much work into killing you.
Bunny: It was such a struggle. Could you just go back to being dead? That’d make it a lot easier.
Oren: No, since people liked me as a villain the first time, they are guaranteed to like me even more the second time. That’s just how stories work.
Bunny: You know when someone comes up to you and they’re like, did you miss me? Did you miss me? Yea, I always miss them more.
Oren: This is the process. You just brute force everything. It’ll work out.
Chris: But marketers really need easy, profitable successes, can’t we just take the last story and just do that again?
Oren: Yeah. Minimize the investor risk.
Bunny: Look, even if you have an evil laugh, it’s even better ’cause then you can put it in trailers
Chris: Or the end of the credits, like we think the villain is dead, and then we have the entire credits, and then we resurrect the villain at the end of the credits. Like when most people left and then everybody’s like, why is the villain – I thought this person was dead and we made a really big deal about how this villain was dead. At the end of the last movie.
Oren: I hope you watched the mid credits scene!
Bunny: Psyche!
Oren: So today we’re talking about why your villain should stay dead. They almost certainly should. The good news is that, from what I can tell, this is mostly a TV and movies thing. I actually could not find many novels that did this.
Bunny: That’s not too surprising.
Chris: I wonder if it has to do partly with, again, bringing in big name actors that play the villains again.
Oren: I think it really is. I think it’s the franchise obligations from what I can tell.
Bunny: Also Oren, go away if villain should stay dead. Hoo. Get outta here.
Oren: [laughs]
Chris: Well, that’s a nice evil laugh, that will do.
Bunny: I would put that at the end of the credits.
Oren: So there’s the big franchises like the MCU or what have you, where they have a bunch of characters and no one ever wants to get rid of them because each new writer wants to be able to use them. You see this in comics too, right? They’re never gonna permanently kill off a named character. That’s just how comics work, or at least how mainline, Marvel and DC work. And it’s the same thing when it comes into TV and movies, but you occasionally see it in other places where it makes even less sense and is even more confusing.
Bunny: Here’s a question – Do you think it’s better or worse to bring back a dead villain or a dead hero?
Oren: I would in most cases say a dead villain is worse. Neither is good. You shouldn’t start killing people and then bringing them back. It’s very tempting, but don’t.
Chris: Either one can seem really contrived, so they can both have that issue, but at least with a dead hero, I think people are more likely to be excited that the hero comes back and they can still function in their role as a hero.
Oren: The hero doesn’t have the same problem that the villain has of, if we killed them, they’re probably not threatening anymore.
Bunny: That’s true. What you need in a villain is, primarily, threatening. If you’ve gotten the crap kicked out of you, I think you’re just a little bit less threatening.
Oren: There are some edge cases where that’s not the case. Sometimes the villain doesn’t get taken out by the heroes, and in those cases it’s not that specific problem. There are other problems, but it doesn’t have that specific one. But with a hero, that’s never gonna be an issue, or probably not ever gonna be an issue, but you’re still resurrecting a dead character is always gonna have a serious cost that is always going to erode audience trust in what you’re showing them. This is true of anything when you take back something that should be untake-backable, but it comes up the most with character death.
Chris: I think that the way it really destroys the experience is if when you do want a character to die. What you want is for your audience to be focused on that tragedy. You do not want them to spend all of their attention being like, okay, is this character really dead? How graphic was this death? Have they been bisected? Have they been set on fire? Their pieces been sewed back together? If you actually have a dramatic death scene, you want them to be in the moment feeling the tragedy of that death when you know so many characters are brought back, that is less and less possible, and it becomes harder and harder to actually make deaths look permanent even if they are, and this is happening with injuries too. Marvel’s very bad. Marvel has become extremely bad about injuries.
Bunny: It also makes the audience just trust you less. It also, no matter whether or not it was planned, it just feels sloppy, I think. It seems very difficult to me, even if it was planned to make it not feel uncreative and sloppy, like you didn’t have any other ideas.
Oren: There are ways you can do it if you really set it up in advance. Maybe. I’m not gonna rule out a hundred percent of those possibilities, but it’s pretty rare, and most of the time, there’s no question. Most of the time when we see this happen, if people are complaining about it, that means you’ve already failed.
Chris: Yeah, some implementations are definitely better than others, and so it’s impossible to say never, ever, ever, but it’s so uncommon for it to be done well, and of course, every time somebody does it, now they have the legacy of all the other storytellers have done it, right, in a cheap way.
Bunny: That makes it even harder, at the very least, that legacy is accompanied by a lot of unhappy people.
Oren: I also think we should consider another reason why you shouldn’t bring back a dead villain, and this one’s a little more subtle, but I think it’s just as important and it’s ’cause it’s repetitive beyond the lack of threat. We’ve already done this and you made it seem like we were getting a new villain, right? That’s what happens when you kill off a villain. It seems like we’re getting a new one that’ll be interesting and some novelty will be added, and instead you brought back the old one.
Chris: Or just new problems because usually when you have the same villain, there’s a limit to how different the next problem the heroes are gonna tackle will be, so that also just limits, besides just the villain character, other types of variety in the plot arc.
Oren: Then of course there’s the practical consideration, which is that most settings don’t have an explainable way to bring a character back from the dead and the ones that do have their own problems. And so as a result, most of the time when a character gets brought back beyond the more abstract level of, ‘well now I don’t believe you’ when a character dies, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s just not believable. They almost always end up having survived an unsurvivable injury. How did they get back by not dying?
Bunny: I think the way to do this is just to say. How did they come back? That’s a secret.
Oren: If you don’t explain yourself, everything’s fine.
Chris: I also think that it can be, again, really unsatisfying and frustrating when the hero does everything right and they’ve gone through their climax, their turning point, they’ve proven themselves, saved the day, and despite, through some examples here that we’ll bring up, despite doing everything, somehow the villain is just comes right back again and it just feels like authorial fiat, where we, the story, took it in one direction and the heroes didn’t succeed because the author just said so, and it undoes all the agency that the heroes have in many cases. That’s just a really unsatisfying way to end the story.
Oren: So I think we’ve talked, covered the principles enough. I think we get to complain now about specifics.
Bunny: Specific examples! Okay, my favorite part.
Oren: I think we’ve had our vegetables, we can have our dessert now. So spoilers for echo, but yeah, kingpins back. He’s alive. How is he alive? It’s ’cause he didn’t die. That’s how he’s alive.
Bunny: It’s a secret!
Chris: It’s also, spoilers for Hawkeye, because Echo is a spinoff of Hawkeye, but that just tells you how many times Kingpin should have died because he started in Daredevil. He was a Daredevil villain. I didn’t even think he was a good Daredevil villain.
Bunny: Isn’t his shtick just being rich, like being a crime guy?
Oren: No. His shtick is that he’s large.
Chris: Yeah, and he is a crime guy, but like he’s not very good at it.
Oren: And in Daredevil, he at least conceptually made sense. Right? Because Daredevil was a very gritty show. Daredevil arguably doesn’t even have superpowers, because his superpower, and there’s a lot of ableism wrapped up in this, but his superpower is that he can see. He has about as much perception as a sighted person. That’s his superpower.
Bunny: About that – apparently, we’ll get to this in a couple episodes, but he has a really random grab bag of powers that mostly amount to extreme senses and also sight.
Oren: Right, but in that specific show, he almost doesn’t have a power, so going up against a normal crime boss enemy works fine and Kingpin can be a big dude who’s good at punching. That’s not a problem. In execution it was a problem in that Kingpin wasn’t very smart and seemed really bad at running his crime organization, ’cause I guess part of his character is that he throws temper tantrums. And I thought we all agreed after Kylo Ren, that’s probably not a good trait for your villain to have, but apparently it’s okay when Kingpin does it.
Chris: They make him almost an underdog because there’s other crime boss antagonists that are also Kingpin’s antagonists, and they all seem much smarter and more competent than he is, and he just comes off as really pathetic to me, just not an intimidating villain. He feels like a goon, a typical goon, who then somehow ended up in charge and had no idea what to do.
Bunny: But what if he’s really tall?
Oren: He is very tall. He’s a big guy. But then it gets way worse in Arrow. Where, in Arrow,he’s up against Hawkeye, who, yes, is the most loser Avenger, but is still an Avenger. Hawkeye has still fought intergalactic alien space warlords, and now he’s fighting a guy who is large, and the show even recognizes that at some point, because it just keeps beating up Kingpin. Kingpin will show up in a scene and get beaten up, and then someone will drive a car into him.
Chris: Yeah, there was literally a scene where somebody drives a car into him and then he just gets up again and I’m like, what is happening?
Bunny: The human punching bag.
Chris: Does he have indestructibility powers? ’cause he isn’t supposed to, but he acts like he does.
Oren: That’s a whole thing, and it did not make him a good villain, and then finally he died.
Chris: Oh, finally, I would just rejoice. Finally, this character, more minor antagonist, (again, spoilers) Maya, she finally shoots him in the head at the end of Hawkeye.
Oren: Not just in the head – in the eye. You could not be more lethal than that.
Chris: It goes into his brain. Okay, great. We hated that villain. We hated him when he showed up in Hawkeye, but at least now he’s done. He’s been in two shows, which is more than he deserved, but he’s done and – suffer – He wasn’t done.
Oren: No! And then he comes back in Echo and he has a little scarring around his eye. How did the bullet leave those scars? His eye is not even not working, his eye is intact! Did the bullet bounce off of his eye and he was just stunned? What happened?
Bunny: He’s not even that big of a guy. I’m looking these up and he’s smaller than some wrestlers.
Oren: Yeah, he’s a moderately large man. I don’t think he’s bulletproof. I, I don’t get it.
Bunny: You can get an action figure of him that comes with detachable fists.
Oren: Oh, that’s nice. That’s a good. He should have that power in the show.
Chris: Yeah, he should have actual powers. Oh man. And then of course, at the end of Echo, he is, instead of like, again, he’s willing to kill lots of people. He has no problem with that, but at the end, Maya decides to heal his trauma instead of killing him, and it’s like, oh no, he’s gonna be back.
Oren: I noticed we didn’t heal the trauma of the Rocket Launcher dude, that guy we just shot. Does he not have trauma that could be healed? Why does Kingpin deserve to have his trauma healed? He is one of the worst people in the Marvel universe. Bringing back Kingpin for a second time was just ridiculous and it completely killed a lot of the drama, and at least they didn’t kill him again knowing they were gonna bring him back. At least this time, they were honest enough to just have him run off into the darkness, like, that’s a little bit better, but man, that was so irritating.
Bunny: I guess he could come back evil again. Man, I didn’t wanna be de-traumatized.
Oren: The reason this happened was clearly that they just made a mistake at the end of Hawkeye, probably because they didn’t know if Echo was actually gonna get to be a show or not, and they wanted to give Maya’s storyline in Hawkeye some closure, so they have Echo kill Kingpin as closure, but then they get their spinoff and they decided it needed to be about Maya and Kingpin, even though it didn’t. There are so many things it could have been about other than Kingpin.
Chris: I just wonder why they brought Kingpin into Hawkeye in the first place. Were they out of villain ideas?
Oren: I do think that’s actually it. I think it’s because the MCU seems to really, really, really like pulling in all of the stuff from other stuff you’ve seen, and they’ve run out of most of that, so they were like, Hey, we haven’t used the Netflix shows – let’s grab those, people liked those! and that seems to be their motivation as far as I can tell.
Bunny: It was just extra weird because they have so many comics, dozens and dozens of villains that they could pull from.
Oren: People liked that villain in Daredevil, but from a storytelling perspective, it’s obviously a bad choice.
Chris: So somehow Palpatine returned.
Oren: Yeah. Ugh…
Bunny: I’ll have you know, it’s cloning Dark Magic Secrets only the sith know.
Oren: Palpatine returning is the opposite from Kingpin returning, and it’s still bad, but it’s the other side of bad because with Kingpin it’s like, how did he come back? He didn’t die, we’re not gonna explain it. With Palpatine, it’s like, uh, force Magic cloning – those might exist, who knows? Those technically exist, you can’t tell us we’re wrong.
Chris: At least we know why they did it. It was absolutely desperation.
Oren: Yeah, it’s ’cause they didn’t have a villain. It’s ’cause they were like, oh crap, it’s the third movie, nobody planned anything! We can’t use Kylo Ren as the main villain for a number of reasons, and so we need a new one.
Bunny: When I went looking for that quote, because I was like, did they explain it anymore? Did they just say somehow Palpatine is back? And the answer is no, they didn’t explain it, but there was an additional quote about how they don’t explain it, and I found a lot of horrible discourse about how somehow Palpatine has returned is actually a really smart line.
Chris: Well, it’s definitely lamp shading, I think. There’s no question it’s lamp shading that ‘look, we don’t know, okay.’
Bunny: They’re trying to be like, look, it was actually so obvious! There was someone on Reddit who is ‘clearly, it’s a soul transported into a cloned body, everyone else just wants to be spoon fed.’
Oren: Oh, did they say spoonfed? That’s a classic. Yeah. You can tell it’s implied to be cloning. You don’t need to read Reddit discourse to tell that they have big cloning tanks. It’s just that it doesn’t matter.
Bunny: It translates to, yeah, we dunno.
Chris: I also just love the idea that they decide to make a clone of Palpatine and instead of making young palpatine as he looked when he was like a senator, they decide they’re gonna, once again age that clone, so he looks like the wrinkled dark Lord.
Bunny: Why isn’t he sexy? That’s my question. He could have come back as sexy as he wanted.
Oren: Especially since this is a story about him having a granddaughter come on, show us this face that wooed this lady that we don’t know who she is, but she was around, she had to find something interesting about him.
Bunny: Yeah, why is he like missing fingers and stuff? Why is he being hoisted around on a crane? Does his clone not have legs?
Oren: There’s almost certainly a tie-in novel that explains how using the dark side of the force makes your body fall apart in this particular case.
Chris: And he used lots of dark side really fast. His clone did as soon as it was resurrected.
Oren: Lots of dark side characters don’t do that, but this time it did for reasons, read, this tie-in novel, it’ll explain it.
Bunny: He got up from his cloning tank and immediately shot lightning for two months.
Oren: Hang on, I’ve solved it, I figured it out. So in the old Star Wars D6 RPG, there was an exploit where your force lightning did damage based on how much dark side points you had, but using Force Lightning gave you a dark side point. So, in theory, if you could just force lightning a rock for several days and then your force lightning would do infinity damage.
Bunny: You just wrinkle yourself.
Oren: So that’s that. We’ve solved it, everybody. We’ve figured it out. He’s just power gaming.
Bunny: Who would’ve known?
Oren: This is the ideal Sith body. You may not like it, but this is what peak force lightning looks like.
Bunny: Maybe it’s what the Siths find sexy? Maybe that’s why he removed his clone’s fingers? He’s like, oh yeah, that’ll get ’em going.
Oren: This is not the only character that Star Wars has randomly brought back. They usually do it in the animated shows, which is a little less annoying ’cause those are understood to be their own thing. Darth Maul is brought back, which isn’t great, but it’s better than Palpatine.
Bunny: I think they should have just gone in with Palpatine coming back and rather than explain it in the opening crawl, they should have had a character see him, slap their hands to their face and go, Palpatine’s crazy sister!, just pull a little mermaid, too.
Oren: That would be perfect. I don’t see a problem with that.
Bunny: You can bring your villains back as much as you want, but you have to say ‘villains crazy sister!’
Chris: I do think that the Palpatine Fiasco is a good example of how a film that’s even quite good, becomes terrible if you bring them back, for all the reasons.
Oren: Especially with Palpatine, because he was just so thoroughly defeated. That was just the completion of a really major arc. Whereas with Darth Maul, it didn’t really feel like his arc finished. He had a lot of unspent potential. People saw Darth Maul and thought he was really neat. He looked cool. He was the first character to use a non-standard lightsaber. He fought two Jedi at once. He seemed like he was an important guy, and so him just dying at the end there felt like a real letdown, and so we’re more willing to forgive when Darth Maul comes back. I’m still not advocating for it, but I see why that’s less annoying. Whereas with Palpatine, it’s, look, this guy has nothing left to give. Okay.
Chris: We fully explored this character. We spent a lot of time defeating this character. We defeated him very thoroughly. He’s been dead for quite some time now.
Bunny: He even looks like a towel that’s been rung out.
Chris: But I do think the tricky thing is if they had a third movie. Where is their villain gonna come from? I might have gone with a hut instead or something like that.
Oren: I don’t know. I have thought about this a lot.
Chris: How, where will the villain come from?
Oren: Randomly theory crafting: How would you fix episode nine if you can’t change anything in the previous two movies? And I’m at a loss.
Chris: Time travel.
Bunny: Oh no, that doesn’t open up any other problems.
Chris: At the very beginning , your characters travel back in time. Change what happened in the previous films.
Bunny: This can only go well.
Oren: Both the sequel Trilogy and the prequel trilogy have the same problem and that there’s just so much wrong with them and it is so unclear what anyone was trying to achieve that it’s really hard to try to come up with fixes ’cause you just have to start from scratch.
Chris: The whole thing. The whole thing needs to go in the trash bin.
Oren: Teen Wolf is another series that likes to bring back dead villains, although after the first two, they just stopped killing them and just had their villains hang out instead of dying.
Chris: That’s what’s so funny about Teen Wolf! The teen Wolf, he usually has two villains per season, and the first season, they kill both of them and they both end up getting resurrected. It was like they realized their mistake, oh, actually we wanna keep those villains. Drat, why did we kill them? And so then for the rest of the seven seasons, two of those seasons are like, have a part one and part two with their own villains, right? They have lots and lots of villains and they never kill them ever again, so the show just collects more and more villains as it goes on. It’s like, oh, come on, you probably could have afforded to kill a few of those villains.
Oren: They just keep building up.
Bunny: Should’ve just put ’em all in a house together. They can share a condo and it’ll just be the villain house and they hang out there and antagonize each other.
Oren: They honestly did need something like that because that was a problem they had at the end of one, I think it was season three, where they have the big bad guy who they’ve defeated, temporarily, and they don’t know what to do with him, and so they just give him like a stern talking to and send him on his way is. He’s killed so many people, but don’t worry, they’re confident he won’t do it again.
Bunny: You pinky promised.
Oren: It’s like you guys, I don’t know man, you need some kind of system in place. I just, I feel like your solution of doing nothing leaves a lot to be desired.
Chris: I do think though that the villains that they killed and brought back do make very interesting case studies because they are handled in different ways. So we’ve got Peter and Kate, and Peter is probably the bigger villain in the season, and he’s brought back, but they don’t try to make him a big bad again, well, for the most part, there is one scene in one of the episodes where they have this like big hook where Peter’s scheming, like, ha ha, I’ll get you. And it’s like, really? That’s not – now, Peter, Peter, I’m sorry, You can’t handle this, this is not happening. But for the most part, he becomes an untrustworthy ally so they don’t need to make him threatening again and he’s interesting in that role.
Oren: Although they do then try to turn him back into a villain in the climax of one of the seasons and it absolutely doesn’t work, but it like, just comes outta nowhere. It’s like, oh yeah, I guess he’s the bad guy, sure, why not?
Chris: They take care of that problem that way. They do also give his resurrection a lot more buildup, then they do for Kate’s, and it’s still a bit contrived, but I do think investing more time and building up towards it makes it feel better.
Oren: One of the reasons it feels better is that it helps alleviate the possibility that anybody could come back at any time. ‘Cause if you establish the rule, that is gonna take a lot of effort, like a lot of narrative effort to bring a character back. We can at least feel like if we don’t see that the character’s probably not just gonna pop up one day.
Chris: It also just feels like, again, the show earned it and it doesn’t feel as cheap anymore. In this case, we have another character who is a banshee and she can sense death, so it gets combined with her arc of realizing she’s a banshee and she starts getting visions of him and doesn’t realize it’s him at first and that kind of a thing, so it’s a major investment to bring him back. Whereas Kate, instead of her becoming just a untrustworthy ally, she is actually a big, bad again and actually works pretty good because instead they put her their investment into revamping her so that she can be, but she has to be more powerful. She was originally just a human in the first season, and she’s a human who knows how to use firearms, which in Teen Wolf, has the whole constraint where only humans use guns.
Oren: Kate’s actually interesting, because after she’s brought back, she’s a were-jaguar or something, and she’s, I think, one of the only characters who has magic and guns, which doesn’t make sense, but that’s a thing. She’s able to break the guns rule because she used to be human, I guess is the argument.
Chris: It’s a little contrived that she’s a were-jaguar. Teen Wolf has established that when people get bitten by a werewolf, they might become something other than a werewolf, but to me it, feels contrived every time. This person has a tragic backstory, so they became this other thing, all these characters have tragic backstories.
Bunny: Jaguars are just more tragic.
Oren: If you look at a Jaguar, haven’t you ever thought, that it is a sad wolf? If a wolf was really sad, that’s what it would look like.
Chris: And they don’t take – her resurrection is a surprise, so they don’t really take time with it, however, they put a lot more investment into she gets new powerful minions and new magical powers and other things to make her more threatening again.
Oren: And to make her feel different. So it’s not just, oh look, it’s Kate again. It also helps that when she died, the heroes didn’t actually kill her, the other villain killed her, so it didn’t feel quite as repetitive. It wasn’t like, oh, well we’ve already beaten this person, so it worked okay.
Bunny: Compared to some of these other examples, I’ll say.
Oren: It worked well enough for me to use her as my case study of how to bring back a villain. If you’re gonna, this is the way to do it. I still wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to try, this is probably the best model you’re gonna get.
Well with that, I think we are gonna go ahead and draw this episode to a close, since I’m going to go be permanently dead this time and not brought back again, I promise.
Bunny: Good riddance!
Oren: Pinky swear, but you might meet my weird sister next time. That’s all I can say.
Bunny: Oh, it’s Oren’s crazy sister.
Chris: Now, if you would like us to bring Oren back from the dead so he can host another episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek, and for the first time, we’re thanking Vanessa Perry, who is our foremost expert on the works of T. Kingfisher. Thank you all so much, and we’ll talk to you next week.
[Closing theme]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast