Villainy

This past weekend I finished watching season 3 of Daredevil.  I loved the show up to that point, and the majority of season 3 itself was great.  The highlight of the show is definitely the villain, Kingpin.  The actor who portrays Kingpin does a fantastic job of being terrifying and evil while showing us a person who can be charismatic and smooth when it suits him.  Kingpin has no special powers aside from being extremely strong, so the fear he instills is about his ruthlessness, his audacity, his will, and his intelligence.  He is terrifying not because of magic or hand waved science, but rather because of his mind.

It is amusing almost to compare Kingpin to villains in other comic book shows.  In the Flash the villains are usually ridiculous and love to engage in standard terrible tropes - monologues, absurd threats, bragging, and other silliness are constant.  You can't be scared of them because they come across as so frivolous.

A real supergenious villain doesn't need to brag to the hero about how smart he is.  He just goes about his plans.  It is the oldest bit of advice in the book for writing - show, don't tell.  Having the villain tell the hero that the villain is super smart and dangerous is boring.  Write the villain doing something horrible and have his intelligence defeat the heroes easily - that is how you get me to believe.

Villains are honestly way more important than heroes.  I can get along with all kinds of heroes, but if the villains are weak, I lose interest.

Unfortunately the end of Daredevil season 3 was weak.  Kingpin goes back to prison, and the heroes celebrate.  But the entirety of season 3 taught us that in prison Kingpin rules all the prisoners, runs his criminal enterprise, and murders whoever he likes.  Prison only slightly slows down his crimes and body count.  So how is putting him back there a triumph?  It is obvious he will just do it again.

In a more cartoony version where nobody dies and a villain creates a doomsday device that the hero disarms just in time, prison feels like a reasonable solution.  In a gritty world with constant carnage, with a villain that still does whatever he wants from behind bars, how is prison a solution?  That conclusion was unsatisfying.

It seems other people agreed with me, and Daredevil was cancelled.  I guess that grittiness and darkness doesn't appeal as broadly as I had thought it would, or perhaps there was just something else that didn't resonate with people.

For those of us addicted to Netflix MCU superheroes, we can still count on The Punisher and Jessica Jones to deliver.  Admittedly The Punisher is more carried by the hero than the villains, but the first season of Jessica Jones is all about her foil, Killgrave.

I wonder if people would generally prefer my sorts of villains over the silly generic ones that so many shows produce.  I know what I like, but perhaps that isn't actually what most people want when they flop down on the couch at night.