Marvel’s cinematic villain problem

[TMC]

http://www.agonybooth.com/agonizer/M...n_Problem.aspx

For those who don’t know, season two of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD just reached its mid-season finale, and it was good. Like, really good. For a show that started off weak and shaky and didn’t really seem like a comic book show at all, let alone one based off of Marvel Comics, it’s really hit its stride, and is now peppered with minor but welcome characters from the source material like Bobbi Morse (AKA Mockingbird) and a few other surprises, and it also sees the organization in an all-out war with HYDRA, as it should be. The show really does feel like it’s building the wider Marvel mythos in a way the movies have had little time or inclination to do until recently, and while I won’t spoil what happened in the latest episode, let’s just say a lot of characters and storylines have just been set up, and yes, this will affect the films.

Of the many things season two had going for it, one of my personal favorites was Daniel Whitehall, the head of HYDRA’s American cell after Robert Redford kicked the bucket in Winter Soldier. Whitehall is not a particularly deep or interesting character—he’s a cold and ageless evil mastermind who somehow managed to stay alive since the ‘40s, but dear God, he’s a bastard, a sadistic control freak who uses mind control, torture, and gruesome human experimentation (including one quite brutal surgery scene) to further his goals of mass murder and world domination.

Whitehall is a minor and quite recently created villain in the comics (he’s the successor to the goofily-named C-list HYDRA villain Commander Kraken) , but actor Reed Diamond played him to chilling perfection, striking a perfect balance of calm, cool, and controlling, managing to be vile and horrible yet highly competent and coldly charismatic. He’s not the only interesting or entertaining villain on the show (without going into spoiler territory), but in season two he arguably stands out the most. In fact, for my money, I’d say he’s one of the best individual villains in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But I’m not really sure that’s saying much, because when it comes to its villains, the Marvel Cinematic Universe kind of sucks.

This is a pretty notable problem, because comic books, and particularly Marvel comic books, have some of the absolute best villains in all of fiction, period, mostly because they’re treated as being as much a core part of the cast as opposing them, with the long-running nature of comics meaning that even the most despicable of monsters can and do get complex and even sympathetic backstories, relationships, and motivations.

And so far, the MCU has been... pretty poor at showing this, to its detriment.

To be fair, the majority of really good Marvel villains belong to the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four franchises, with Magneto and Doctor Doom in particular being perhaps two of the four greatest comic book bad guys ever (along with Lex Luthor and the Joker from DC). But that isn’t much of an excuse, since the MCU still doesn’t make the best use of the villains they have.