Glory to the Founders and their master plans.
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. But first, let me tell you all about my master plan!”
Ah, the villain’s master plan, a tried and true technique that most writers will need at some point in their careers. A master plan gets the story moving and gives the heroes something to fight against. It builds anticipation for the audience. What will happen if the villain succeeds? The master plan is so common that some writers get complacent when using it, which leads to plots that feel forced or incomplete. When crafting the perfect plan for your villain, be sure you know the answers to these five questions so that your villain may twirl their mustache with pride.
1. What’s Stopping Them From Carrying It Out?
Unless your villain’s goal is simply to mess with the protagonist, there needs to be something stopping the evil plan from coming to fruition on page one. Too many stories act like the bad guys are completely inactive when the hero isn’t around, and this leads to audience frustration.
In Star Trek: First Contact, after a massive battle with Starfleet, the Borg reveal their true plan: go back in time and attack humanity before anyone knew what a phaser was.* This raises a serious question: Why did they wait until Starfleet was shooting at them to activate the time travel device? Why not fly to the edge of Federation space, go back in time, and waltz over to Earth without resistance?
There must be something stopping the villain from putting their plan into motion, or your story will end on the first page. It could be a simple time issue. Maybe the brownies of doom won’t be finished baking for another few weeks. But it’s more satisfying if the villain has to get off their butt and do something; preferably, something that makes the hero’s life hell.
The villain might need several important devices to complete their plan, or they might need to eliminate a group of powerful guardians. This will mean your villain is out and doing something from day one. That lets you build up the threat they pose and inject a little mystery into what they’re planning.
In Deep Space Nine, the Dominion’s master plan is to conquer the Alpha Quadrant. There’s only one problem: the Alpha Quadrant is already full of powerful space nations who don’t want to be conquered. So the Dominion plots and schemes, baiting the Romulans and Cardassians into a disastrous preemptive attack and goading the Klingons into starting a war of their own. The Dominion even attempts to destabilize the Federation by spreading fear and misinformation on Earth. With these smaller goals to build on, the Dominion is properly set up for season six, when they unleash their full might upon the Alpha Quadrant.
2. Why Do They Want to Do It?
Knowing the villain’s motivation is important and doubly so in regard to their master plan. If you don’t know why a villain does what they do, your audience will get confused. The villain’s motivations can be sympathetic or not, so long as it’s a deliberate choice. This will be immediately important if your villain is a POV character, but even if they aren’t, you’ll probably want to reveal what drives them eventually.
One problem with Netflix’s Daredevil is that they don’t seem to know why Kingpin, the big bad, does what he does. Kingpin goes on at length about how he wants to save Hell’s Kitchen and how he’s a using evil means to a noble end. But when we actually see his plan in action, it mostly consists of kicking poor people out of their homes so he can build new developments.*
So, his plan is to throw everyone out on the streets? Kingpin seems like a smart guy; he must realize that his actions are only hurting the people he’s trying to save. Does he only want to save the physical area of Hell’s Kitchen, not caring at all for the people he grew up with? That could be the implication, but it’s an inconsistency that’s never resolved.
Unless you’re building an intentional mystery or contradiction, the audience shouldn’t see the villain say one thing and then do something entirely different. It creates confusion, which is rarely good. Daredevil had enough other positive qualities to make up for this problem, but that’s hardly something you can count on.
A positive example is another show in Netflix’s Marvel run: Killgrave from Jessica Jones. Killgrave is a terrifying villain, and one reason for that is his motivation. His elaborate plan to ruin Jessica’s life is all based on his need for control. Jessica defied him, and no one is allowed to do that. For the sake of his monstrous ego, Killgrave devotes all of his resources in an attempt to force Jessica back into his service. It’s a thrill to watch.
3. What Will the Results Be?
Imagine the hero fails in their quest, and your villain’s plan goes off without a hitch. What happens? Is it everything your villain expected? If not, was that a deliberate choice on your part? All too often, stories feature a villain whose plan has not been fully thought out. Authors will sometimes go with the first idea that pops into their head, unaware of how audiences will see right through their flimsy setup.
The Dark Knight Rises is particularly bad in this regard. As best I can tell, Bane and Talia’s plan is to take over Gotham for… some reason. It’s either to get revenge on Batman or to fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s plan to destroy Gotham, or both, depending on the scene. Whatever the precise reason, the two villains concoct an elaborate scheme to take control of Gotham, and it works, but it’s not clear what they expected to happen after that.
Once in control, they mostly seem to sit around, waiting for Batman to escape their prison and try to stop them. So why did they do any of that? What did this look like in their minds?
The Dark Knight Rises illustrates the danger of a poorly thought out master plan. It received far less positive reviews than the previous film, the Dark Knight,* and made the same amount of money despite a larger budget. While the Joker’s plan was also somewhat nonsensical, at least he had a suitably twisted psyche to go along with it. Bane and Talia are both portrayed as completely rational.
When plotting out a villain’s master plan, you don’t need to be a mastermind yourself. Just consider how the factors you’ve set up will interact once completed. If you’re not sure, this is a great place to run the master plan by a friend and see what they think would happen.
Moriarty from Elementary does this really well. Sherlock’s nemesis lays all manner of complicated plans. These plans have more plans hidden inside them, and inside those is a scheme or two. Despite all the complication, Moriarty’s machinations always have concrete results at the end, although they aren’t always obvious until Sherlock lays them out.
4. How Can the Hero Stop It?
Spoilers: The end of Mad Max: Fury Road.
If your villain’s master plan is so great, how is the hero going to stop it? This is a question you need to answer early; you can’t trust heroic pluckiness and spunk to save the day. If it looks like your protagonist has no chance, the audience may decide not to stick around. Why bother to read something that’s predetermined? This is true even if you’re planning an ending where the villain wins. The audience needs a bit of hope to lure them to their doom.*
In season seven of Supernatural, a new enemy appears on the scene. These are the Leviathans, and they’re bad news. They’re super strong and more or less immune to any weaponry the hunters Sam and Dean can muster. The Leviathans’ master plan is to lace all the food in America with mind-control drugs, so that hungry monsters everywhere can have an all-they-can-eat buffet.
The Leviathans’ plan should have worked, too. Sam and Dean do eventually find a weapon that works against them, but it will only work once, so they have to save it for the big boss. When they go to Leviathan HQ, they should get handily beaten, but for some reason none of the Leviathans they run into have guns, even though they’ve used guns in earlier episodes.* When Sam and Dean close for melee, the Leviathans’ super strength is nowhere to be seen. While the Leviathans might be defeated, the audience are the real losers.
To maintain believability, your hero must have some quality that allows them to credibly stop the villain’s plan. This can be a special power, friends in the right places, or even just a unique mindset. You should set this up in advance, so it doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere. Subtlety is fine, so long as the moment clicks.
In Mad Max: Fury Road, the titular Max figures out an unexpected plan to defeat the evil Immortan Joe by doubling back and taking over Joe’s Citadel. The Citadel is defenseless because all of Joe’s warboys are out chasing Max and Furiosa. While hints of this twist are planted throughout the film, few in the audience see it coming because the heroes spend most of the story literally running away from the Citadel. It took someone with Max’s unusual thinking to come up with the plan.
5. Why Can’t Anyone Besides the Hero Stop It?
Your protagonist had better be the center of stopping your villain’s plan, or the story is going to get boring fast. That can be a problem in settings that have organized law enforcement or any other powerful groups who’d be interested in stopping evil plans. Few authors are so silly as to end their climax with a SWAT team swooping in to arrest the villain, but if the audience thinks it should have happened that way, the story suffers.
Some of the Dresden Files books have this problem. In that setting, the White Council is the governing body of magic. One of their jobs is to stop sorcerers and monsters from murdering people. Of course, magical murders are exactly what Harry Dresden, wizard and private eye, investigates. So why doesn’t the White Council, with all its resources and power, solve those crimes instead?
At first, the books explain that the White Council doesn’t trust Dresden. He has to solve magical murders because if he doesn’t, the Council will assume he’s the murderer. But that excuse wears thin after a while, and it makes the Council look incompetent. We later find out they are anything but incompetent, so why was Dresden out facing down magical danger alone? Having a team of wizards backing him up would have ruined the drama, that’s why. This is hardly a satisfying answer.
The best way to make your hero the only one who can stop the villain’s master plan is to bake that requirement into your setting. If your protagonist is the sheriff of a remote mining station, or the only sorcerer in a city of mortals, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. If that’s not an option, then the key is to build the justification early in your plot.
The video game Baldur’s Gate II starts with what looks like the magical police riding to your rescue, capturing your nemesis and carting him off to magic prison. So you go about doing random quests for a while, only to find out that your nemesis, a mage named Irenicus, has corrupted the magical police from within. He’s in control of all their resources now, and you’re the only one with a chance of stopping him.
The master plan is too important to leave to chance. Villains drive the drama, so your story may hinge on whether their plan pleases the audience. While asking these questions doesn’t guarantee a good plan, they’ll give you a strong foundation to build on.
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Not that the Dark Knight Rises is flawless, but I thought Bane’s plan made sense.
Raz al ghul believes Gotham is hopelessly sick and wants to purify Gotham with fire, so Bane and Talia want to take it to the next level and want to purify by outright destroying it. But Bane also wanted to make a point, just blowing it up wouldn’t be enough, he wanted it to implode, to come to ruin by the bad elements he saught to rid the world of, showing how Gotham’s corruption and the ruthlessness and selfishness of it’s citizens led to Gothma’s end.
Keeping Batman alive was pretty cheesy, but Bane thought he was no threat to him (having easily bested him and not knowing about Catwoman’s better side) and he wanted to inflict a special level of pain on Batman for killing Raz and betraying the league.
Fisk from Marvel’s Daredevil TV show knew exactly what he wanted (BIG WARNING: spoilers for those who didn’t watch the show yet, go do so then come back).
It doesn’t have to be 100% logical or clear for it to work dramatically, Fisk isn’t exactly a prerfectly sane healthy person to begin with, he is a deeply disturbed and messed up indivisual, especially because his “growing up” conditions were far from normal (unless you consider cutting up your abusive father’s dead body into tiny pieces with your mom’s help to hide it or smashing someone’s head into human paste with your car door -because he ruined your romantic dinner- is normal).
He basically used the gang leaders (The Russians, Chinese and Japanese) to generate extra revenue (to eventually pour into renovating the city and of course buy all the cops and judges he can) and silence up anyone who opposed his vision for Hell’s Kitchen (while planning to get rid of them down the line when they no longer are of use to him in order to fully control the city according to that vision he had, which is something he does again with the Punisher in S2, used him then tried to kill him, didn’t wotk out well this time though).
He basically wanted to rule the city and shape it in his image, he wanted it to become his own city .. Fisk’s city, he is obviously a megalomaniac and the whole eviction and rebuilding of old neighborhoods is only part of his grand plans, and yeah it’s very obvious he only cared about the physical city itself (like i said wants to own it and make it his own) not its citizens, in fact the only human beings he gives a shit about are Venessa and Wesley (and the later is dead so it’s only Venessa).
6. Is the Plan Needlessly Complex?
Bond villains are notorious for this. For example, in Skyfall, Silva spends what must be months of planning and at least a billion dollars on a plan that relies heavily on random factors going precisely his way – when all he really wants to do is get revenge on M for his crappy treatment. A simple kidnapping would have sufficed.
Of course, Bond and M themselves aren’t above the stupidly complex and risky plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byku-4Sl4zE
This is a good article overall.
Netflix’s “Daredevil” is an Origins storyline, and there is a huge underlying storyline in “The Dresden Files” where the villains are waiting for their brownies of doom to finish baking, much like the Dominion’s and their master plan to conquer the Alpha Quadrant in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”.
In my opinion, aside from the author missing the point of why Fisk / Kingpin, the villian in Netflix’s “Daredevil”, does what he does, and that in “The Dresden Files” the council doesn’t believe Harry or ignores him most of the time (the underlying reason(s) for why some things are not addressed become known much later in the series), this article has some good breakdowns and tips to help a writer create their villain.
This post is so incredibly helpful… I will now have to go back and redraw basically everything about my villain from my TV show. Many thanks!
Awesome, I’m glad you found it helpful!
I’ve only just started reading the Dresden files but doesn’t Dresden say pretty early on that there are only a few dozen wizards of his calibre in the United States? That’s a lot of magical murders for such a small group to handle, maybe the white council is competent but can’t be everywhere at once, especially since many of their members don’t seem all that interested in the wellbeing of mortals anyway.
So there’s a few ways to interpret this. They mention there are about 200 Wardens at any one time, which isn’t a lot, and they also imply that Wardens are all super badass. Maybe not as strong as Dresden, but heavy hitters all of them.
It’s certainly possible that the stuff happening in Chicago is also happening all over the world. With only 200 Wardens, the White Council would be stretched to breaking.
But that’s not the impression the books give. For one thing, the Council can spare Morgan to do little but harass Dresden for several books. More over, if the level of shit Dresden was doing always struck me as exceptionally dangerous. At least, Morgan seemed to think so when he thought Dresden was doing it. If this kind of thing is happening everywhere, I figured Dresden would have heard of it.
And while it’s true that the White Council doesn’t care a lot about humans, they care a LOT about people breaking the Laws of Magic.
Well now that I’ve actually finished the series I feel like I can comment further. Morgan can afford to stalk Dresden in book 1 because at that point there’s no war going on. In book 2 the enemies are a bunch of different species of werewolf, only one of which (the FBI guys) are actually in violation of a law of magic and that’s only revealed near the end. In book 3 the White Council is very determinedly not getting involved because they want to avoid a war with the Reds, From Book 4 (especially past book 7) on it’s established that the Council is fighting for it’s existence against the Red Court and after about Book 7, Harry can’t exactly call the Wardens because he is the wardens- one of only 3 in the central US and the most powerful surviving warden operating in North America. Also a lot of plots that Dresden gets involved in in the middle of the series involved either the white court (which the white council was desperate to avoid antagonizing) or the denarians (whom the white council consider somebody else’s problem). I dunno, the only book where the White Council didn’t have a plausible in-story reason for not intervening was Dead Beat, which I consider arguably the worst book in the series, and even there the wardens get involved eventually. The fact that it’s well established from early on that the Council suffers from extreme institutional dysfunction means that I don’t have any difficulty maintaining suspension of disbelief.
The first question should obviously be ‘would a five-year old see any holes in this plan?’
I know a lot of stuff makes sense in your head while you write it, but sometimes you have to wing it in the end, just so the plan can be kept in the story (or it might just be me, because I’m an unorganized author). I once added a full chapter in the middle of a story so the plan actually felt like it could have worked out (it didn’t, of course, because of heroes, but then…). I think taking a step back and thinking about that plan as if it had come from somewhere else might be helpful.
There’s a reason The Evil Overlord List features a 5-year-old consultant. We grow up with familiar tropes about master plans. Sometimes technology marches on. I’ve heard of instances where a kid watches an old movie and asks the adult fan, “Why didn’t they call for help on their phone?” because their generation is used to ubiquitous cell phones, while the movie existed before that.
That reminds me: I should reread that post about stuff to keep in mind about modern settings, which included cell phones. I’ve got a Changeling NPC who has Goblin Vows with smartphones and digital cameras, and seeks to mix fae magic with modern technology to maintain an advantage over the monsters.
Yes, I know that list … and it’s very useful.
It must be hard to understand for kids today why you couldn’t just call help on your phone in the middle of nowhere in the big horror movies of the 80s. Or why you needed to go to the library to find information on something instead of just googling it.
I was more referring to common sense, though. A lot of the convoluted plans villains (especially the evil mastermind type) make are just so over the top. Just shooting someone (that’s also on the list) is much easier and more reliable. Which is, incidentially, why I have an evil mastermind do that in one of my stories. I know, of course, that those plans are supposed to give the hero the chance to break free of the horrible trap he’s fallen into and defeat the villain. Luckily, the aforementioned evil mastermind isn’t actually the villain of the story, so he gets away with that.
This was quite solid, though I think its worth noting that the Leviathans drug would kill all the other monsters too, but yeah I recall them using Castiel’s teleport a bit but there were still issues, the sudden loss or poor use of super strength is a big problem in that show I feel.
More than the damn forced-to-fit dumb Masquerade that Dresden Files has, I despise the White Council. They’re useless as an enforcing body and the local magicians in America would be way more effective when the Europeans moved over here and tried to muscle their way in as the magical powerhouse they’re supposed to be for the very simple reason that Dresden magic appears to operate, culturally, how it’s supposed to – and almost no local American magical tradition has a rule about not freaking the norms, and controlling the weather and commanding lightning storms over huge areas is a thing magicians are supposed to be able to do.
Half the White Council’s rules are only in there because Butcher didn’t think very deeply about the way a magical society works – thought a lot about how the magic itself worked, not about how it’d change societies.
The Masquerade is a common problem in Urban Fantasy, because without a law which keeps all those supernaturals from showing the world they exist, the world of those stories wouldn’t be so much like ours. The existence of magic alone would definitely have changed the world and would have left it looking completely different by the end of the 20th/beginning of the 21st century. Not to mention what the existence of vampires, werewolves, or – even worse – gods and demons could do to reality as we know it. If you don’t have to believe in a god (or several), because you can just meet them or see them on TV, where would religion be?
Actually, a Masquerade normally demands a working enforcing body, because otherwise, it would be broken way too often and everything would fall apart by itself.
This was a solid article, thanks!
Dresden files tends to make the point the wardens are over stretched, and they make the main character into one precisely because he is doing there job pretty well.
This article is amazing for writing and plotting a villain’s master plan. In fact, I think I’m gonna bookmark this page to review and keep asking myself those questions to make sure I get it right.
My villain, an anthro military feline named Toshineko Hirozaki, was going to be portrayed as a humorous but extremely intelligent villain, so I decided to search for articles like this.