There’s a major problem facing current superhero media that needs to come to an abrupt end. There’s a disturbing trend of wasteful villain murder going on and banging my head against that wall out of the sheer stupidity of this trend is starting to leave me feeling a little bit cranberries. This problem cemented itself in my mind when I was watching the most recent episode of the CW’s Flash TV series. The ending featured the villain of the episode falling to his death, while the Flash just stood there like a turkey in the rain. You may not know that much about the Flash, but the commonly know fact about him is that he’s quite speedy. In fact, he’s been known to break the speed of light on occasion. So why is it that he couldn’t have caught the falling villain? We aren’t operating on normal-world physics here, where catching someone falling from that height would kill him as it would in our world. The Flash could’ve saved him, but he didn’t. Why? Bloodlust.
Not on the part of the hero, mind you. The hero is limited by the scope of the writer and this writer was thirsty for some death. A lot of writers and creators have been thirsty for some villain death, not just The Flash show-runners. The problem’s been in a lot of recent movies and on Flash’s contemporary TV shows; namely Arrow, Gotham, and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Being able to easily dispose of a villain in such a wasteful manner lessens their potential to be a good villain, especially in a serial.
When there’s a stand-alone film or story, then sure, kill the villain to your heart’s content. But in a series, it’s important to keep the widest stable of tools at your disposal. Killing off even the most one-note of villains is akin to throwing away one of those screw-turners you get with cheap furniture. Sure, you might not think you need it anymore, but what happens when one of those screws comes loose and your screwdriver is on vacation? You’re swimming up filth creek with a paddle, that’s what happens.
Send them to jail, have them escape the encounter with the hero, out them in a coma or anything other than bringing their life to an end. Something that the original comics understood, that the interconnected movies and shows haven’t caught on to yet, is the staying power a good villain can have when they actually, you know, stay around.
Lex Luthor and Magneto aren’t the villains they are today because they only got a single solid issue back in the thirties or sixties. Even the smaller guys like Black Adam and Arcade didn’t get good until much later. If you don’t know who Black Adam and Arcade are, trust me, they got good later on. And in a TV show, if you’re constantly killing off all your smaller players, there’s no hope to explore or evolve them, turn them into something better. It’s all a matter of foresight and despite having intricate plans for big crossovers events, they lack it for the smaller things and that might just come back to bite them someday soon.
