A perennial piece of advice when it comes to writing a good bad guys is to make them believable. Don't just produce another of your common-or-garden villain who wants to take over the world, or kill a bunch of people, or destroy your hero for no real reason. That's boring. That's been played out. You want to give your antagonist some sort of motivation, in the same way that (hopefully) a protagonist will have some motivation to go after them. A good bad guy is a character who, from their own perspective, isn't a bad guy. Because if they would, they stop, like in that one Mitchell and Webb sketch about the Nazis noticing the skulls on their hats. Even better when producing a compelling villain is to give them some connection to their heroic foil. That's the lesson Robert McKee puts forward in his Story seminars (and its ensuing book of the same name), but we're not sure Hollywood took it quite the right way. A connection can mean any number of things Batman going after The Joker because he killed his parents in the Burton films, on one end; a cop going after a criminal, because it's his job, on the other but, for the most part, movies have gone for one trite relationship. So trite, there's a supercut about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH0YPXb49q0 We're not so different, you and I, the villain will state in the soliloquy which will probably seal their fate, rather than departing and getting off scott-free. It's supposed to taunt our hero, whilst also nudging the audience and saying Eh? Eh? See the connection between the bad guy and the hero? Two sides of the same coin! It'd be more interesting if we hadn't seen it in everything from Heat to Austin Powers...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
