Stupid Genius

I like stories with a smart protagonist and a smart antagonist, but there's a risk.

Recently, I had occasion to see The Bletchley Circle on Instant Netflix. The premise is that a quartet of female boffins, who used to break Nazi codes, have gone on to civilian lives, BUT one of them notices a pattern in the news of a series of murders.

And she gets the band back together to do some sleuthing.

Great premise.

I love working with smart people and I never worked with a smarter bunch than when I was part of the Puzzle Palace. So, the prospect of seeing these brainiacs in action was most appealing. I was even able to ignore the RELENTLESS ANTI-MALE SEXISM of the story. (The only males who aren't rapists, murderers or both in this story are father-figures representing the benevolent Socialist government.)

It was an absolute joy to see the alpha geek chick giggling about figuring something out, but in the context of a horrible crime. Not an appropriate time for giggling, but that's what geeks do. My delight with this story started very high and it suffered a monotonic decline as the story left off the mathy bits and delved into the psychology.

But what got me to write this down was an instance of something I saw that has been often repeated in stories with smart protagonists. Let's suppose you have Sherlock or his smarter brother Mycroft in a confrontation with a bad-guy, the hero can't do something stupid. The hero has to see what the reader sees before the reader sees it.

In Bletchley Circle, the girl meets the killer alone in a darkened building. She doesn't know the guy is a killer, but every viewer who's paying attention realizes everything about him fits the profile she's just assembled of the killer. Eventually, he's shown smoking the same brand of cigarettes as were found at the murder scene, and even the slow members of the audience put two and two together. And a little bit after that she reacts so that the viewer sees she realizes what most of the audience already knows.

She's supposed to be smarter than you are. Smarter people don't take longer to figure out things than the audience. If you're going for the suspense thing where the audience feels jeopardy while the protagonist is blithely waltzing into danger, you've got to have a reason for it that's better than your super-genius didn't think of it. She could be setting a trap or she could have a gun in her purse aimed at his heart unbeknownst to the audience.

Conversely, when you have an normal-intelligence protagonist and a stupid villain, this risk goes away. Raylan Givens doesn't wear his star because he breaks Nazi codes: it's because he can pull his weapon faster than the other guy. Boyd Crowder isn't a criminal mastermind because he's three chess-moves ahead of the Detroit crowd. It's because he makes things blow up and people die.

With normal-intelligence characters minds move at a pace where you can see them come to realizations. Low-intelligence characters are useful in villains because their violent impulses can be expressed unpredictably.

Though it is is tempting to make your characters super-intelligent, you have to be very smart to not write them doing something stupid when the story needs it.

Strange Love

A friend recently remarked that she really loved old-time songs she termed "hellfire and brimstone," but she felt the old-time songs didn't love her back.

She was right, but she was wrong.

The Westboro Baptist crowd is an exception I'll describe in hopes of making my point by contrast. I once watched one of their YouTube videos where the girl spent five minutes repeatedly saying, "You're going to Hell," in a perky voice with a smile on her face. One cannot say this with a smile on your face and have an infinitesimal of love in your heart.

I think there is a sort of sadistic personality type who enjoys inflicting emotional pain on others. Such people are beneath contempt.

Such people are NOT the folks who were writing and performing the old-time "hellfire and brimstone" songs.

What were they thinking?

My earliest memories of church involve crying. "Hellfire and brimstone" sermons are not as common as they once were, but if you read any of the old-timers' books about soul winning, they say there ought not be a dry eye in the place. The fellow who wrote the book on "Hellfire and brimstone" just happened to be a Christian philosopher named Jonathan Edwards. He reasoned that a sinner doesn't love God, but he may love his own skin enough to seek a way of escape and thereby acquaint himself with the good news parts of the Gospel. Upon learning what God has done for the sinner, the sinner may think it fitting to love God back.

If you really believe those around you are at risk of destruction, the compassionate thing to do is warn them and share what you know about how to escape.

This line of reasoning makes the "hellfire and brimstone" warnings an expression of love. So, my friend is indeed loved back. But it's a strange love. The only way you can distinguish this love from Westboro's hate is whether the person saying it is crying or smiling when s/he says it.

Now, when writing a plausible villain. The conventional motives are money, jealousy, hatred and revenge--Plus whatever other negative emotions I've overlooked. Better motives are unconventional, positive emotions.

Provided you can make them plausible.

You see, it's because I love that young girl that I inflicted all those tortures upon her and eventually burned her at the stake, because God would judge her witchcraft more harshly and perhaps my efforts turned her to repentance and the joys of Heaven. 

Right.

Religious fanaticism is a dangerous thing when writing villainy department because a) it's overdone, and b) most writers doing it are functionally illiterate of religion. Their villains come off as off-key and get all the trust-cues wrong. And I hate when they do that.

So, I suggest something different.

My favorite villain is the Operative in Serenity. He's perfect because he's not motivated by the stale and trite things. He says he's motivated by Faith. Not the concrete Faith in God that J. Gresham Machen wrote about, or the vague objectless Faith in Faith that Soren Kierkegaard wrote about. His faith in the government who empowers him and sends him on his killing spree.

In a post-Christian, or post-Theist society, there are some folks who will still need to find something bigger than themselves to put meaning and purpose in their life. If they are Atheist, then the government is the second-best thing. Thus, I see a government fanatic is a better villain than a religious fanatic.

Mindful of this, consider this quote by C. S. Lewis:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

So, next time you're wondering about your next villain, perhaps you'll consider some sort of overbearing altruist.

The Derailment

I look for compelling motivations for villains because I see a lot of stories where the villain's motives are dodgy at best.

I was watching a documentary about an aircraft designer who worked for the Nazis and it gave me an idea for antagonist design. I generally like creative types and aircraft designers are on my short list of good guys.

Like Jake Blues, I hate Illinois Nazis as well as the German ones. Did I say I generally like creative types? Well, I love German engineering. So, I'm torn.

Let's pause momentarily to reflect the nature of good and evil. Good consists of adhering to a set of perpetually binding obligations, but it's not an unfair simplification to say it's following rules. Evil includes breaking rules. One might think that greater evil is seen by more rule-breaking, and that's in part true. Someone who obeys all traffic laws, is a better citizen than another who only breaks the speed-limit. And he's better than another who also runs red lights.

This model has its limitations. If someone breaks EVERY law, EVERY time, s/he'll be monumentally ineffectual. And ineffectual villains are less evil than effective villains.

To really get villainy out of a villain, the character must have several lawful, even admirable qualities.

Let's suppose you have a Nazi aircraft designer who's building a secret weapon for Hitler. In order to be an aircraft designer, he had to do his homework in school. And the kinds of students who cheat on their exams go into Politics, not Aeronautical Engineering. And this fellow has to have a decent work ethic, because you cannot build a secret weapon for Hitler if you're passed out from last night's drunken debauchery at the roulette wheel.

What I'm saying is that you will invariably have a great deal of good in an effective villain. In fact, you'll probably find that the person will be 99.44% good, with just one little problem that spoils everything. Like burnt soup. Most of the soup is not burnt, but the tiny bit that is burnt changes everything.

Think of Michael Corleone who is a good boy and whose father does not want him to become a mafiosi. Yet, he is drawn into crime to avenge the murders of his family members. Evil in this world is like a train wreck with twisted metal all over that causes secondary and tertiary damage. Your villain should be like this train wreck who's chugging down the straight and narrow all happy and healthy. THEN something should happen to make the wheels come off the rails.

Because your villain started out as a good boy, he's had a chance to gain skills and reputation and accomplishments that will draw others to him. And he more good he is and does before the derailment, the bigger the potential damage afterwards.

In Louis L'Amour's novel The Daybreakers the Sackett brothers first make friends with Tom Sunday who is slowly turned into an enemy through bitterness and anger. And this makes him the perfect catspaw for novel's villain.

Your novel needs a villain as well as some minions. I suggest that you draw from the noblest people among the ranks of National Honor Society members, the PTA, and overall goodie-two-shoes. And having given them education, connections, wealth and influence, THEN devise something that'll derail them. Perhaps a sister dies of cancer in tragic circumstances and the brother blames God and lashes out after the manner of Captain Ahab. Or maybe his mother spins a lie that the hero gunned down his no-account brother in cold blood.

The easy part of evil is that it is predicated upon lies, and your villain can just as easily be knocked off the rails by lies.

And Now For A Word From Our Villain

Here's another writing peeve. It's not a BAD thing, just an annoyance that I recommend against.

In thrillers you'll enjoy Our Hero doing great things and defeating the bad guys. And as the novel, or series of novels, progresses the challenges Our Hero overcomes grow larger and larger. This process of escalation is a Good Thing and I can't recommend it enough.

But as the challenges become larger and more complicated, they need to be explained and elaborated to the reader. And the writer may want to increase the sense of jeopardy that Our Hero faces even if s/he doesn't know what's coming. It's not a Bad Thing for the reader to know that the Nazis have held back a secret Death Radio transmitter even if Our Hero doesn't know they intend to use it on her/him. My peeve is how the writer discloses this to the reader.

Let's suppose the Nazi with the nefarious plan is Agent X. The opening chapters of the novel really have to be written from Our Hero's point-of-view (POV) or the POV of someone close-by. And let's suppose you manage to get Our Hero through several scrapes of greater and greater danger. All the while you're sticking with Our Hero's POV.

The moment you change the POV to Agent X is jarring. It is more jarring the longer you wait. My peeve is that I think you ought not ever use the villain's POV. I think a skilled writer need never do so. Suppose Our Hero is in love with the fetching Deja Thoris and milliseconds after they proclaim their unending love, she is spirited away by Agent X.

Now, s/he can gloat in front of Deja or, even better, Deja can investigate what her captor is up to.

I think it is better to keep the POV in characters who are sympathetic to Our Hero's story-goals. The reader really ought not identify with the villain's story goals, and writing scenes from Agent X's POV humanizes him/her. You can write Agent X as a fully-developed non-cardboard character, but you dare not make him so sympathetic that your readers start rooting against Our Hero.

If you go into Agent X's POV, then you might show him kicking puppies or something else to make the reader hate him more. It really depends upon whether your plans for Agent X's defeat require the reader to really, really hate him.

(I've been known to stop reading just before the climax b/c I hated the hero and loved the villain. Such works never get more than 1-star or even the time it takes to write a "that sucked" review.)


Part of the reason why I advise this is my own discomfort when reading scenes wherein a room full of Nazis detail their nefarious plans. I'm not happy seeing them twirling their handlebar mustaches and laughing nefariously.

Or let's suppose you want to show Agent X as a conflicted, tortured sort who will repent of his/her Nazism and help Our Hero at the last moment. That can justify a few scenes in Agent X's POV to make the repentance seem un-contrived.

Now, if Deja Thoris is spitting in their beady little Nazi eyes, and saying "they'll never get away with it" it's a little better. Hackneyed, but a little better.

But I'd rather see Our Hero thwarting that nefarious plan, and I may just skip the Nazis plotting chapter just so I can get back to Our Hero.

For the most part, I recommend you stick with Our Hero's POV and if you have to jump into someone else's head, make it someone sympathetic to his/her story goals. Of course, you know your story better than I do, and you have to balance the forces in play to tell your story as clearly and as interestingly as possible.

What's Up With Star Trek?

There have been quite a few Star Trek movies. The last two constitute a "reboot" of the franchise.

I haven't thought through what should and should not be done in a franchise "reboot," but I have some specific observations about the two movies of its reboot.

When you consider a fictional universe with as much that's been developed for Star Trek, there's a huge amount of backstory that's known. And where trekkers are fiends for trivia. So, the Star Trek reboot started out by demolishing all of it to build on a fresh foundation. Vulcan got trashed and the story got started before the start-point of the original show. This cleared the decks for the movies to tell all new stories in the reboot movies.

I hated it for many reasons, but trashing a Corvette Stingray in the opening scene was unforgivable.

When the second movie came around, all I knew was that Benedict Cumberbatch was the villain. And that was a huge source of interest to me. He's the actor who plays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Any actor who can play Sherlock would do sociopath well.

At this point, I shall begin to disclose spoilers from the Star Trek movie "Into Darkness."

Tune out if...

...you...

...do...

...not...

...want...

...see...

...spoilers.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a villain who is delightfully evil. He is marvelously competent at villainy as he starts blowing stuff up and killing Star Fleet personnel wholesale.

One of my hobby-horses is how the writer finds suitable motivation for the villain.

If you watched Star Trek the original show, and the second Star Trek movie, the motivation of Khan Noonien Singh changed with time. In the backstory of "Space Seed," there was this thing called the Eugenics Wars wherein Khan conquered a significant portion of Central Asia, and before he was defeated, he skipped out on a space-ship called the Botany Bay.

In this chapter of his life, Khan's motive was mere power. He was in the warlord business and he was motivated to gain power and rule. This is a very easy motivation to understand and to depict.

Khan's motivation is unchanged in "Space Seed" as he goes about taking over the Enterprise. All he wants is power. That's cool. And when he's dropped off at a nearby planet he's cool with reigning in hell rather than serving in heaven.

When "The Wrath of Khan" comes around, we discover the nice planet he was dropped off at has become hellish, his wife is dead, and he blames Kirk for these unhappy events. Now, Khan is angry with Kirk and he is consumed with wrath. Grumpy villains intent upon revenge is also a good motivation for villainy.

With this in mind, let's consider "Into Darkness." Benedict Cumberbatch is doing all the mayhem but it is not clear to me why. In the movie, we learn that Peter Weller is worried about Klingons so he thaws out Khan and puts him to work dreaming up weapons to fight Klingons with.

However, it's not completely clear to me why Khan decides to start blowing stuff up. Sure, he could be mad at Peter Weller, but why?

After things start getting blowed up and Kirk's friend Captain Pike gets killed, the movie is clearly misnamed. It should have been "The Wrath of Kirk."

And that's what doesn't quite work in the movie. It's a neat concept. Take a movie that everyone knows, "The Wrath of Khan" and then swap all the roles: Instead of Khan being wrathful, it's Kirk. Instead of Spock sacrificing himself and getting a deadly dose of radiation, and dying while Kirk looks on, "Into Darkness" swaps Kirk and Spock. And instead of Spock getting resurrected by some plot device, Kirk gets resurrected.

It's a fun concept, but you can't get the joke unless you're a long-time fanboy.

This works today, but I don't think it'll hold up with time. I've said before that Han Solo shooting first worked because the viewers in the 1970s were familiar with Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" wherein Angel Eyes showed he was a bad man. It quit working when George Lucas became a bigger filmmaker than Sergio Leone and nobody except film buffs and old guys understood how Han shot first because Lee Van Cleef shot first. By that same logic, everyone today interprets "Into Darkness" in the context of "Wrath of Khan," but they won't thirty years hence.

Does Benedict Cumberbatch work as Khan? Oh yeah. Anyone who plays Sherlock must speak arrogant as his native tongue. The best line in the movie is when Khan tells Kirk he's "better." Kirk asks, "at what?" And Khan says, "Everything." He carries off Khan's superhuman competence and aggressiveness marvelously. I really believed this was a genetically-engineered superman.

His only weakness from a story-telling perspective was his motivation. The writers needed to show a link between Khan's murderous campaign at the outset of the movie and some specific betrayal by Peter Weller or injury at his hand.

It would be trivial to do. The Botany Bay set off with 84 souls aboard, only 72 survived--including Khan (in "Space Seed's" time-line). In "Into Darkness's" time-line at least 73 survive--72 inside photon torpedoes plus Khan.

Perhaps Peter Weller got to the Botany Bay with all 84 cryogenic chambers intact, but he killed nine of Khan's crew by experimenting on them before he thawed out Khan. And when Khan finds out, he gets the motivation to launch his campaign of terror.

More likely, Khan's plan was to manipulate Star Fleet into launching the photon torpedoes at Kronos and somehow they don't blow up and somehow he thaws out his buddies and somehow he takes over the Klingon Empire? Yeah, that's what Khan had in mind.

The unclear motivation is what prevents me from saying Khan is the best villain ever.

Stupid Villainy

Unhappy events in my life have reminded me that criminality if far more plausible when it is stupid than when it is genius. We like our detective fictions to be chess matches between masters. We want to see Holmes contending against Moriarty, Spiderman against Green Goblin, James Bond against Ernst Blofeld--the list goes on. But villainy in real life is far more often perpetrated by idiots.

I tend to forget this. I've complained about the villain who feeds minions to his sharks when they displease him. Why would I go to work for the guy in the monocle who kills off his minions? That's moronic.

Consider the movie Fargo. This movie is hilarious. William Macy plays a feckless loser who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. The criminals are hilariously stupid as you can see in their various interactions. Their madcap antics turn this comedy into darkest black when they start murdering innocents.

This illustrates something significant. You may need to be smart and/or good to make it through life, but you can be both stupid and evil to create a great deal of mayhem. The best crime writers know this and they can make the reader laugh at the stupidity of enterprising criminals who end up re-enacting Wile E. Coyote pratfalls and Darwin Awards. This can add some comic relief to some rather heavy reading. And then you can make your readers feel guilty for laughing.

Unthinking villainy can affect well-educated folk, too. Let's suppose I were a High School Chemistry teacher with cancer and neither money nor insurance for chemotherapy treatment. Sure, I could start cooking meth, but that would entail scary work with scary colleagues. OR I could saw off the end of a shotgun, walk into a bank wearing a Barak Obama mask, and demand the contents of all the registers. The feebs would pick me up before dinner time, and after my conviction on bank-robbing & weapons charges, they'd ship me off to the Mayo Clinic to get my cancer cured at public expense. That's a lot smarter than what Vince Gilligan's villain came up with in Breaking Bad.

Let's face it, you don't have to be Darth Vader to choke the life out of your girlfriend. And you don't need to be Gabbar Singh to toy with the victims of your cruelty.



I think stupid villainy is something like Mr. McGregor's veggie garden. You've got a nice, tidy little garden going on. Then some pestilent little bunnies come along and take what they want and cause damage much greater than whatever value they could derive.

These criminals may aspire for the "big score," but they are seldom capable of more than venal enterprises. Their misdemeanors reflect the lack of trust they inspire. Smart people do not leave high-value items unprotected. They do not entrust high-value items to lame brains. The protection afforded high-value items is seldom penetrated by numb-skulls. The criminal who is a dunce must settle the scrap-metal value of a cast-iron antique he steals because he lacks the sense to take it to somewhere besides a junk-yard. They feel they've put something over on you when they lie about matters inconsequential.

This mindset is what I think lies at the heart of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He has the role of constable, he's not very bright, and he tells himself he's not a criminal by affecting the intelligence he does not possess.

Of course, the cretinous villain does not realize his disability. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. This makes him ripe for manipulation. Which I suppose is something the super-villain with a monocle knows. S/he can promise the dimwit shiny things. "After we hold the moon for ransom, you'll be right there at my side."

More likely, the smart villain can set up the blockhead villain with a "big score" to the end of getting him caught, whereupon the smart villain can steal the lolly from the evidence room. (This scenario does not even require a super-genius villain.)

So, next time you're up for some crime writing, or want to put together a mystery, consider putting some addle-brained imbeciles on the chessboard.

Too Stupid To Live

Sometimes I am so enraged by a story it sticks with me for more than 24hrs after I leave it in disgust. This is a good case of a story that might have one significance to its author and to imperialist audiences, but it has a drastically different significance from a different perspective. And from that different perspective, the "heroes" are evil and the "villains" are good.

This is one of those times. On Instant Netflix I found an old movie, Thunder In The East, with Alan Ladd, Deborah Kerr, and Charles Boyer set in India during the Partition. After several decades of parasitism, the British Raj cleared out of India. In so doing, they created a power vacuum wherein 1.5 million people died.

This movie concerns a remote province where a contest for control is taking place between the local maharaja and a bandit army who the movie claims is Really Bad--along the lines of Gabbar Singh. Alan Ladd flies his DC-3 into this place with a cargo of machine guns, rifles, and ammunition. The sorts of tools a local government might want when fighting off rebels trying to take over.

Alan Ladd gets an appointment with the maharaja's main guy, Charles Boyer, who keeps a picture of Gandhi on his desk. Boyer tells Ladd that war is not the answer and that violence and guns don't settle anything. (It sounds sooo fitting in a French accent.) So, no-thanks, he's not buying.

After Ladd leaves Boyer's office, Boyer calls the airport and tells the airport people to steal the guns and ammo. He says "confiscate" & "impound" but when you take something without paying, it's stealing, even if you're from the government.

Meanwhile Ladd meets the other white folk who are in a snit because they took down the "whites-only" sign at the British Social Club.

After it becomes clear that things aren't safe--particularly the roads, Ladd offers to fly the white people back to Mumbai at market prices. The Brits call him a thief and he raises the price--good for him. He only has 20 seats on the airplane after all. (Market prices are the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources.) Meanwhile, Boyer seizes the DC-3, but Ladd steals it back, and Boyer's flunky disables his airplane. Instead of saving 20 people, everyone's stranded.

The maharaja has decided to spend the summer in France and he has escaped in his own airplane.

Maybe those rebels are freedom-fighters who have the support of the people and they have more legitimacy to rule than the craven maharaja and his thieving crew.

At this point I stopped watching, because I knew how things would play out. Alan Ladd would lead the defense of the white people using his own guns & ammo, Charles Boyer would see violence save his worthless hide, and Debora Kerr would civilize Alan Ladd. It sickened me because every single character in this movie was too stupid to live. And that evil "heroes" would triumph over the "bandit-army" freedom-fighters.

Alan Ladd was stupid to leave his cargo unsecured. The British were too stupid to stay behind after the British Army left and stupid to insult the only guy who could save them. Charles Boyer was stupid to order the airplane disabled.

The only people I sympathized with were the Indian citizens.

When the US won our independence from the Brits, the victorious Continental Army helped George Washington maintain order. India and Pakistan had a power vacuum created by the British withdrawal.

Alan Ladd and Debora Kerr could fly to America and the Brits sail to the UK, but what of the Indians who remained?

Fates Worse Than Death

So I've got Instant Netflix with which I have been watching a lot of Bollywood, and against my better judgment a TV show I missed during its first go-round, Warehouse 13. This is a show that has a literal warehouse of deus ex machina plot devices. And this luxury must beget a certain laziness, or maybe not.

What I found objectionable is an instance of a pattern I've seen repeated time and again in various Hollywood offerings. This is worse than the implausible villain, because it is more insidious.

First, let's recap the scenario. One of the Evil Conspiracy's minions has been captured by the Warehouse 13 people and she's tied to a chair. The boss lady of the Good Guys has a ticking time-bomb situation and she uses one of the plot devices to subject the minion to discomfort. Since waterboarding is the worst thing imaginable that one person can ever do to another (according to the New York Times), the minion is almost-waterboarded. And since The New Guy (or is that New Gay?) is an induhvidual of superior morality, he objects and pulls his pistol on his boss. An interminable interlude ensues during which the story stops and a colloquium on the ethics of prisoner interrogation. The minion has the sense to escape. (It's not as if the New Guy already has his gun out and could shoot her in the leg.) The minion reports back to Mr. Evil Conspiracy and after giving her report, a second minion injects her in the neck with some poison killing her.

I've complained before about minions having a lousy retirement plan, but I won't today.

Instead, I'll note the irony that the writer spared the minion the discomfort of waterboarding just to kill her off in the next scene. Hmm, I always thought "a fate worse than death" was something different from waterboarding. ("[The ape] threw her roughly across his broad, hairy shoulders, and leaped back into the trees, bearing Jane Porter away toward a fate a thousand times worse than death.")

Update: If the writer REALLY believe that torture is not only wrong morally, but yields no actionable intelligence (as the New Gay and the New York Times insist), why did the prisoner reveal a clue that led the Good Guys to the solution to the mystery. If you really believe waterboarding is wrong, have the prisoner yield misleading info that impedes the investigation.

That's a pattern I've seen in a lot of stories. Writers who dutifully pay the Hollywood Stupid Tax fail to apply their ideals to their stories. If you look at the 3rd reel in most movies, you'll see antagonist after antagonist subjected to capital punishment at the writer's hand for his/her crimes of the 1st and 2nd reel.

Why wasn't the villain tried and convicted under due process of law and then sent to some Scandinavian prison for rehabilitation? S/he can spend a term of incarceration doing pottery and counseling whereupon s/he can return as a valued member of society. Instead, the writer imposes his/her own vigilante justice with the hero reciting some pithy one-liner over the corpse.

The problem is that Hollywood lacks the courage of their convictions. If you really believe there is a particular way that evil should be dealt with and the criminal justice system should work in real life, why not depict it working that way in your stories? If Capital Punishment is wrong for the guy who murders a convenience store clerk, it's also wrong for your monocled super-villain.

Besides, good super-villains are hard to come by.

A Few Bad Men

I've griped about how I think Dr. Who and BBC Sherlock failed when it came time to depict their protagonists' nemesis. In the case of Dr. Who, it is another Time Lord called "The Master," and in Sherlock Holmes's case it is Professor Moriarty. Every Batman needs his Joker and every Superman needs his Lex Luthor.

Thinking through your antagonist is as important as your protagonist and his/her love interest.

My complaint with BBC Sherlock is that Professor Moriarty seemed exactly like The Master who seemed like a nasty schoolboy. True, nasty schoolboys personify evil, but they needn't be taken that seriously. (Unless putting one over your knee and spanking him is not an option.) I guess that's my complaint: If the villain is just like someone you've spanked, s/he falls short of being taken seriously.

Likewise, fellas with monocles and long-haired cats don't work for me. But instead of enumerating what's wrong with other villains, I'd like to say what I think is right with one. I seek a Specification for Antagonist Design.

In one sense, anything that's to your hero's advantage should have a corresponding advantage in your villain. The Doctor is special because he's a Time Lord. Then the Master is a Time Lord, too. Sherlock has mad deductive skillz. So does Moriarty. But they needn't be the same sorts of advantages. They can be formidable, but different. Maybe your villain cannot shoot webs from his wrists, but he has robotic arms coming out of his back instead.

In World War II, the Japanese Zero was a superior aircraft in several key aspects. Nevertheless, the Americans learned how to avoid its strengths and exploit its weaknesses. Avoid a turning fight against a Zero, and if you can't, get outta Dodge. That's how conflicts work in real life and that's how your stories should work.

Stories without conflict suck. And where conflict is concerned, it takes two to Tango. Thus you want to think carefully about your protagonist's dance partner(s). The best villains have several admirable qualities about them. Sure, Gabbar Singh is evil, but he's got a sense of humor and irony and he loves to laugh--before he shoots them. Darth Vader was a sensitive soul easily disturbed by his co-workers' lack of faith--before he choked the life out of them. The Operative was motivated by his faith.

Most Westerners share a cultural heritage of the Greek/Persian conflicts of antiquity. We relate to the independent-minded Greek hoplites who are vastly outnumbered by a host of Persian slaves, but win because they are free men who can seize the initiative on the battlefield while their opponents await the commands of their masters. Thus your story will resonate better with Western audiences if you have a feisty band of Rebels outmaneuvering the giant Empire.

The circumstances needn't be martial. You can write the same conflict between Preston Tucker versus the Big Three automakers with the same asymmetry.

Because companies are generally larger than readers, it's common to make some Corporate Type the villain. Given the amorality of common corporate governance, this is not a stretch. But Big Labor and Big Government work just as well in the role of Persians waging a war of attrition. And since the only good politicians in Washington are Whigs (and long dead) you can show bipartisan villainy. If you want to make Big Religion the villain, choose one that is not in the habit of chopping people's heads off.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm putting together a villain who's motivation is money. He won't blow up the world, because that would destroy all the shops where he spends money. He won't kill everyone, because then there would be no one left to be minions. He doesn't feed his minions to sharks, because it reduces minion-morale. However, his minions are well paid, they have full health insurance with dental, and a generous 401k matching plan.

In other words, he's exactly like me, but with a few billion dollars.

Well, he's different from me in one regard: I'd waste time in the third act gloating about the details of how my nefarious plan works. This villain would just kill the hero and move on to the next item on his Things To Do Today list.

Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. This means you should show the stuff on the good side of the line in the villain's character. Once upon a time, that might have meant being a pious, church-going man, but the Hollywood stupid tax has made religion a telltale of villainy.  In choosing the good you put into a villain, you risk making him more sympathetic than your hero.

So, what good attributes do you think should inhere within the character of a villain?

Sherlock Who

The BBC series Sherlock airs on American PBS stations.

It just finished its second season here in the States and I thought it fitting to share my opinions. The show was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Those names seemed familiar and I did some googling. Yup, those guys were big in the reboot of Dr. Who a few years back.

This is good news because the Dr. Who reboot has been wildly successful. It's also bad news because the biggest mistake made in the reboot was carried forward into Sherlock.

Any story whose protagonist is somehow special must soon acquire an arch-nemesis who is equal in every way to the hero, but evil.

In Dr. Who the arch-nemesis is another Time Lord named the Master. In the original Dr. Who series the Master was a fellow who looked sort of like a Spanish count. In Law & Order Criminal Intent the arch-nemesis was Nicole Wallace. She was delightfully evil and quite easy on the eyes. However, when they rebooted Dr. Who the Master was cast as a sort of nasty schoolboy. Cruel for no apparent reason, he acted immaturely and i found it impossible to take him seriously.

Speed forward to BBC/PBS Sherlock.

Writing when he did Arthur Conan Doyle did not know that he had to give Sherlock Holmes an arch-nemesis. When he wanted to kill off Holmes and go on to something else, he created Professor James Moriarty. In so doing Doyle created the pattern of the arch-nemesis.

People smarter than I have described the necessary prerequisites of an arch-nemesis. One necessary prerequisite of an arch-nemesis is that the reader (or viewer) take him seriously. I could not take seriously either the clown who played the Master or the other clown who played Professor Moriarty.

Evil, like truth, is complicated. You can't just take all the virtues and swap them out in equal measure with vices. Or you'll get some useless old sot shambling through scenes. For my money, the best villain I've seen in a while is The Operative. He's so evil, you don't even learn his name. In his case he believes in the Alliance and he believes the ends justify the means. HIS means generally consist of killing people with his katana.

He kills for his faith.

What made the Operative so effective was that he held all the virtues intact, but he was pursuing an agenda given to him by the Alliance. Years back I saw "The Day The Universe Changed." In the opening scene James Burke shows a witch burning and describes what could they be thinking to do such a thing. Clearly, the end of saving the girl's soul from eternal hellfire justified end means of burning her alive. Such thinking also motivates savages who fly airplanes into buildings.

But villainy is not one-size-fits all. One does not become a Nazi all in one go. Instead, small steps, baby steps are made one at a time weaving a cord of character that ends in evil and arch-evil. C.S. Lewis shows this in Perelandra and again in That Hideous Strength as reasonable, civilized individuals are transformed into demonic villains one seduced step after another.

I think that the reason why Dr. Who muffed the Master and Sherlock muffed Professor Moriarty stems from the fact that the grammar of virtue and vice, of good and evil, has been lost to this generation of Englishmen.