Villains aren’t villains in their own eyes—self-declared monstrosity like Don John’s in Much Ado About Nothing is rare, and when it shows up, it tends to signal comedy. (Think about Lord Business in the Lego Movie—the cackling caricature indicates we’re meant to laugh ourselves. Doesn’t mean the villain isn’t a villain, doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to take the villain’s villainy seriously, but it does give us room to expect the villain’s defeat.) So, going into episode eleven, I knew I had my work cut out for me: since Fair Weather, we’ve built Alexander Norse as a slick suited monster in a classical archetype, someone willing to kill innocents to achieve his goals. What drives a person like that?I decided to go with ‘fear.’ Bookburners is a horror setting, after all! Why shouldn’t villains be as terrified as our heroes? Realizing Norse was coming, on some basic level, from the same direction as Team Three, prompted a larger arc for the episode—and gave me a chance to articulate some of my own issues with Team Three’s methods and
mission. Why shouldn’t humanity use the power of magic, rather than locking it away? Why should we let terror blur the line between the unknown and the unknowable, especially in the face of a looming global crisis? I made this conflict concrete in the arguments between Norse and Asanti in Chapter Two, which are echoed throughout the episode.The difference between Norse and Asanti lies in their reaction to fear. Norse tries to master the terror on his own; the glimpses we receive of his family and personal history suggest he can’t draw a lot of support from them. He has money and isolation and power, but he doesn’t have friends. Even his bodyguard is a construct. When he’s young, he has no one to reach out to for support—at least, no one who recognizes that he’s reaching out. His parents operate in a world of blithe narcissism; their emotions are so guarded that the few times they express feeling, it feels like a cataclysm. So, when Norse finds himself in need of support, he leans on his own darkness—he tacks into his fear, into his solitude. He listens to the whispers of the house.Asanti, by contrast, leans into her relationships. She trusts Sal, Grace, Liam, and Menchú to keep her sane, to stop her if she goes too far—and to support her when she needs to go out on a limb. That suggested the bones of their final confrontation: Asanti defeats Norse not by acquiring more power, but by attacking the man in his loneliness. And, of course, only the intervention of her friends saves her from falling to the power of the codex.As for the final scene, though…Well.MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
