10 Iconic Villains Who Deserved Much Better Deaths

6. The Emperor €“- Star Wars

The big bad with electric hands is killed by the sudden and frankly inexplicable guilty conscious of an absent father, who up until that point had shown absolutely zero hint that he had an ounce of goodness in his body.

So, watching him be picked up by his former apprentice like a WWE champ, while still shooting his electrical wad everywhere (for no logical reason, as if it's a power hose) and tossed mercilessly down an infinite pit is just plain wrong.

How He Actually Deserved To Die

If Darth Maul deserved to be chopped in half, and Count Dooku got a light-saber scissors job on his neck, surely the main villain of the entire series deserved more than being thrown down a hole. If you watch the series through from Episode I to IV, the wrinkle-faced wretch makes some pretty bold claims about his powers, and the attraction of the Dark Side.

And then he gets picked up like a helpless upturned tortoise and tossed down a great big well, to essentially prove that everything he claimed was a lie, and that Anakin went all Darth on a false promise. Vader and the Emperor should have faced off properly, bringing the Oedipal elements of the series full circle, with lightsabers and duelling and force pushes.

But instead one dies in a frustratingly simple fashion, and the other one dies in the process. The world definitely did end with a whimper there.