Circuitous Plans Are Stupid

Evil masterminds suck at actually being smart. Look at the classic James Bond villains, who always manage to capture Bond, and yet Bond always seems to escape and foil their plans. It is such a classic storytelling element that people more often refer to it in parody than in sincerity. (I'm looking at you, Austin Powers.)

Now, I understand that it is a necessity of sorts. Storytelling demands that the heroes have a chance to escape the trap and pull victory from the jaws of defeat. But I want to ignore that meta level of thinking and take these villains at face value. I have seen a lot of people who really love coming up with unbelievably complex and circuitous plans to try to get what they want. The top two offenders are creative writers and teenagers. (And god save us from teenage creative writers.) So I'm willing to accept it as a human tendency.

In fact, I can see this nature in myself. I freely admit that I love seeing machines work. One part affects another part, which in turn affects others, and through very simple mechanical principles, you have a clock or a pinball machine or an internal combustion engine. I also admit that I see stories in the exact same way; the right placement of people in locations with proper stimuli will create the story you want to happen.

Because I marvel at the intricacies and complexities of such machines, I will be more enthralled at increasingly more complicated machines. The problem is that, as any engineer will tell you, the more complicated you make your system, the more likely it is to fail. Similarly, the more parts a machine has, the things there are that can break. (If you doubt me, do some research on Rube Goldberg machines.)

The same thing happens in building a story or in masterminding an evil scheme. Every part you add to it increases the chance of failure. So why do we do it? Because it's exciting. It's thrilling. Seeing all of the dominoes you've set up fall down in exactly the way you planned is one of the most satisfying things on earth, especially to people who are smart enough to come up with these plans.

However, this analogy goes deeper. Try actually setting up thousands of dominoes and then tipping them over. More often than not, something will go incredibly wrong. And the more dominoes you have, the more likely that is. Yes, it's satisfying when it works, but it's too risky to be worth the reward.

If you want to come up with an incredibly difficult antagonist, make them practical. If they capture the hero, shoot him in the head. And do it right away; don't give a speech first. Have the villain give the speech to the hero's corpse. When you come up with somebody who is so cold-blooded and so smart, you will need a hero at the very top of their game to face the challenge.