#i grade

[themattress]

I Grade: The High Evolutionary

Appearance: He looks very similar to the comics except that his suit is dark purple rather than more red in hue, which honestly looks more visually pleasing, and he has a flesh tone mask rather than a metallic one due to story-related reasons which has an unnerving effect.

GRADE = 5

Performance: Chukwudi Iwuji is fucking phenomenal in the role of the High Evolutionary. Able to logically calm and detached one moment, explosively angry and childish the next, and the whole way through maintaining a vibe of supreme arrogance and utterly heartlessness, I have never felt such visceral hatred for an MCU villain due to the actor's performance. David Tennant as Zebediah Kilgrave in Neflix's Jessica Jones came close, but even then there were times he made me interested or made me laugh or even made me pity him. This guy only made me feel the utmost, skin-crawling contempt, and Iwuji cannot be praised enough for it.

GRADE = 5

Motivation: This is the one area where the High Evolutionary falls woefully short. Basically he wants to rule the universe because he has a god complex, literally saying "There is no God! That's why I stepped in!" Rocket sums up the motivation behind this as "you didn't want to make anything perfect, you just hated things the way they are". And you can infer some stuff from this - that the High Evolutionary is such a narcissist that he felt life in the universe was lacking because it didn't revolve around him and what he thought is best - but that's kind of just a retread of the other big Guardians baddies Thanos and Ego, and not nearly as interesting since we get no backstory or insight for the High Evolutionary and rather than having any of Thanos' intriguing complexity or Ego's charming simplicity, he's stuck halfway and achieving neither as a result. The one saving grace is the more solid motivation he has relating to Rocket specifically: despite being a lesser life form experiment he never intended to use in the world he sought to create, young Rocket actually figured out something that he, with all his great intellect, couldn't, and as a narcissist he can't stand that fact since it makes him feel like the lesser one. Then on top of that, Rocket ended up mutilating his face: another massive narcissistic injury. So his obsession with getting Rocket back isn't about his master plan or really anything rational, it's just so he can put him "back in his place" and assert himself as superior ("You freakish little monster! How dare you think you are more!?")

GRADE = 2.5

Villainy: Along with the actor's performance, the High Evolutionary's villainy made me despise him. His entire history is about playing God, creating new forms of life, abusing them and ultimately destroying them when they can't be "perfect" the way he wants them to be. We see it with an entire planet of his creations, we see it with the Sovereign, and most heart-wrenchingly of all we see it with Rocket and his fellow animal experiment friends. It's telling that Nebula, when seeing just what was done to Rocket in his formative years, actually says that it's worse than what Thanos did to her. And yeah, in terms of being loathsome, the High Evolutionary surpasses both Thanos and Ego. They at least have some credibility for their heartless arrogance, being a powerful Titan warlord and a living god respectively. The High Evolutionary is just a man. A weak, pathetic man, and it makes his narcissistic cruelty not only far less justified but far more realistic, emphasized even more in the fact that he's not some galactic emperor, but the leader of a corporate conglomerate. There are many men like the High Evolutionary in our own world: small men who rise to positions of power and use it to crush everyone else to make themselves feel big. It's among the most chilling kinds of evil.

GRADE = 5

Resolution: As he tries to kill Rocket, his raccoon creation fights back, and is then joined by every member of his family, the Guardians of the Galaxy, with each of them getting a hit in...ending with Gamora, who guts him with a blade. On the ground, his hideous face is exposed and he sobs pathetically about how Rocket ruined everything. Rocket has a chance to kill him with his gun, but doesn't, as executing an opponent who can't fight back and is already bleeding out isn't who he wants to be...definitively proving himself a better lifeform than his own creator. It's fantastic, but the only flaw is that afterward it left unclear if the High Evolutionary bled to death or if he survived and was imprisoned. A scene of the latter was filmed but cut (mercifully so since it included his mask back on in his confinement, and he does not deserve that luxury), and so he is last seen hanging limp over Drax's shoulders.

GRADE = 4

Overall: 4; if we had only gotten to understand what makes him tick more and received a firmer conclusion to his character, he could have been one of the MCU's best. But even as stands, he's still in the higher echelons, being the most viscerally despicable villain by far.

[themattress]

I Grade: Gravik the Super Skrull

Appearance: He's just a guy. Until he's a ugly-looking CGI monstrosity, that is.

GRADE = 1

Performance: For the most part, Kingsley Ben-Adir gives a pretty dull performance. He's just charismatic enough and shows conviction enough to buy him a radical movement leader, but that's the thing: it's just enough. He doesn't go above and beyond that. At least, not until the last episode and his confrontation with "Nick Fury", where all of a sudden he just loses his mind and starts hamming it up like mad, to a hilarious degree ("You PIMPED us, Fury!") I'm not sure if that's good, but it's at least entertaining, and in this miniseries I'll take what I can!

GRADE = 2.5

Motivation: Gravik has a solid and, dare I say it, justified motivation - Nick Fury has been using the Skrulls to facilitate his rise in S.H.I.E.L.D, promising them he's working on getting them settled on a new home planet when he actually isn't and doesn't believe it can be done. Having realized his people have been conned, Gravik decides that if they're stuck on Earth as their new home then they ought to be ruling it, which is why he leads his band of renegade Skrulls. It's only held back by him being so selfish and hypocritical in his actions that it undermines the sincerity of his beliefs - a Marvel villain problem that people often deride.

GRADE = 3

Villainy: Surprisingly, Gravik gets a pretty damn high score in villainy! He kills Maria Hill, kills Talos, almost kills G'iah, kills his own followers when they get out of line, kidnaps many people to replace them with Skrulls, and his endgame is said to be about making the Skrulls stronger but ultimately just serves to make him stronger, showing that he was using his own people just as much as Fury used them. He wasn't interesting, but he sure was detestable!

GRADE = 4

Resolution: Bad CGI fight and anticlimactic death. Yawn!

GRADE = 1

Overall Grade: 2. A strong motive and loathsome villainy save him from rock bottom.

[themattress]

I Grade: The Scarlet Witch

Appearance: She looks good, don't get me wrong, but....idk, something's off. I feel like Elizabeth Olsen was not ever cast with wearing a comic-accurate costume like this in mind, and it comes off as a well-done cosplay rather than the character going from page to screen.

GRADE = 4

Performance: As fantastic an actress as Elizabeth Olsen is, this is an incredibly uneven performance. It feels like half of the time, she's committed and doing as wonderfully as she did in Wandavision, but the other half of the time she's doing the most stereotypical "crazy woman" performance, the kind where it feels like the actress is doing a Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction impression, which adds to the iffyness of what's being done to the character.

GRADE = 3

Motivation: Yeah, so after a well-done arc about overcoming grief in Wandavision, Wanda Maximoff does the unfathomably dumb thing of taking the Darkhold, which she knows is corruptive, with her to study in isolation and use it to control her new chaos magic powers. Predictably, the Darkhold corrupts her. But not only does it corrupt her, it does it through plaguing her with dreams of her fabricated children from Wandavision, the ones she willingly gave up as part of her arc's conclusion there since she couldn't keep them existing without harming other people...and as a result, she becomes obsessed with getting them back, even if it means harming other people. And unlike in Wandavision, she is knowingly harming people at all times, yet has the gall to insist "I'm not a monster, I'm a mother". It's so stupid.

GRADE = 1

Villainy: As the Scarlet Witch, Wanda commits truly vile deeds. She controls monsters to go after America Chavez in order to capture her and sacrifice her in order to gain the power to traverse the Multiverse and find a world with her children in it, where she then plans to kill their mother and take her place. When Doctor Strange tries to keep Chavez safe at Kamar-Taj, she attacks it and viciously slaughters many of its mages, at one point even almost killing Wong. She later dream-walks and possesses her Earth-838 counterpart, using her body to go try to capture Chavez again, in the process murdering the members of the Illuminati in brutal ways, even Mr. Fantastic whom outright acknowledges himself as a father and Wanda still kills despite knowing it will leave his wife and children alone and grieving just as she was after Vision's death. Eventually, she finally does capture Chavez and nearly does sacrifice her life: strapped to a stone table for a blood ritual and everything. She's heinous...just heinous.

Yet she can't score a perfect grade, 'cause "it was the Darkhold's fault, not hers".

GRADE = 4

Resolution: After Wanda finally goes to her desired world but is faced with her children being afraid of her which makes her instantaneously realize the error of her ways, Sam Raimi just straight-up recycles Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man 2's conclusion, as Wanda goes "I will not die a monster" and sacrifices her life by bringing the dangerous thing she unleashed to begin with (in this case, the "true" Darkhold which is inscribed on a temple's wall) down on top of her. Predictable, underwhelming, and more importantly it feels like a cheat: after how far the Scarlet Witch was pushed as a villain, the only two satisfying outcomes are either that she is defeated while unredeemed, or that she survives in order to actually redeem herself, which would involve a lot of hard work and effort on her behalf, especially toward the people of Earth-838. Dying in this sacrificial way doesn't redeem her or make up for what she did.

GRADE = 1

Overall Grade: 2.5; fantastic style, frustrating substance.

[themattress]

I Grade: Kang the Conqueror

Appearance: Kang the Conqueror looks excellent. Not only does he manage to be imposing in that outfit, but the visor over his face has him looking blue just like in the comics without actually needing him to have blue skin. If nothing else, the MCU nailed the look of this guy.

GRADE = 5

Performance: So, this one's complicated. I think that Jonathan Majors does a fantastic job at portraying a cold-blooded sociopath. The problem - beyond the unnerving fact that he wasn't acting so much as he was just being himself - is that apparently that's not what the intention for the character was. According to the director and screenwriter, Kang was supposed to be deeply humanized and even sympathetic. But absolutely none of that comes off on screen! For example, apparently the initial bond between him and Janet Pym was supposed to be genuine? Could've fooled me, because what I saw was someone who was using her from the beginning and felt no hesitation or remorse treating her as an enemy once she discovered his true motives for escaping the Quantum Realm. So this is gonna have to get a mixed score.

GRADE = 3.5

Motivation: The worst thing about Kang, bar none, is his motivation. He is a multiversal conqueror who was sealed away in the Quantum Realm, and wants to escape in order to restart his conquest. Sounds reasonable enough, right? But the problem is that he has a justification for why he needs to conquer the multiverse....that being that if he doesn't, then his variants will run rampant across it, and they're much worse and more dangerous than he is! Sound fucking familiar!? This is literally the exact same motivation as his variant from the TVA, He Who Remains! "Lemme keep my despotic rule, because otherwise a lot more of me will come in and doom us all!" Kang was supposed to be one of those "a lot more of me" He Who Remains alluded to, but instead he's just rehashing the exact same beats in order to kick the can of the "real threat" further down the road! And we all know how that turned out!

GRADE = 1

Villainy: For what he is given, Kang does make a pretty effective, ruthless villain. Not only do we get a good sense of how many he's slaughtered in his multiversal conquest and how he's oppressed the residents of the Quantum Realm, with not even his minions being safe from ill treatment, we also see him manipulate a woman into helping him through playing off her desire to return home to her family, and callously torture a child in order to coerce her father into doing his bidding. He doesn't have much time, but he makes the most of what he has.

GRADE = 3.5

Resolution: Kang goes out embarrassingly. First he is defeated by an army of giant ants and his own minion MODOK screaming "I am not a diiiiiiiiiiick!", and then we he gains his second wind and fights against Ant-Man and Wasp, he gets thrown into the power core creating a portal outside the Quantum Realm and is destroyed by its energy. That's right, not only is he defeated in his first appearance, but he fucking DIES too! And Marvel Studios really thought this guy was fit to be the successor to Thanos!? What an absolute creative misfire this was!

GRADE = 2

Overall Grade: 3. Kang pursued greatness, and instead achieved mid-ness.

[themattress]

I Grade: Flag Smasher and The Power Broker

Flag Smasher (Karli Morgenthau)

Appearance: Let's be blunt - it's fucking awful. It's an embodiment of a comic book property that seems embarrassed of being a comic book property, since Flag Smasher's badass monochrome comic costume is not reflected at all in Karli's or any of her followers'. This is honestly as embarrassing an adaptation of Flag Smasher's look as Malekith's was for his.

GRADE = 1

Performance: Erin Kellyman does a fine job with what she's given, the problem is that what she's given goes too wildly up and down without much rhyme or reason. Sometimes she's insecure and in over her head, then other times she's confident. Sometimes she's angry, other times she's stone cold stoic. Without anything grounding these shifts, it's difficult to get a grasp on who she is. But again, Kellyman puts in the effort, so I can't fully flunk her on this.

GRADE = 3

Motivation: This is where Karli really falls apart. Originally, the show had a very different storyline that she was a major part of: a side effect of the Blip was new strains of viruses emerging, with one in particular being deadly (evidently, the same one that would take the life of King T'Challa). Using this virus as a justification, the Global Repatriation Council boots everyone who immigrated to other nations during the Blip and had been more or less accepted as citizens under the circumstances out, prioritizing all the prior citizens who had re-appeared when the Blip was reversed. They would receive priority medical care, while all the immigrants put into displacement camps were left to rot. Donya Madani, whom had been a test subject for HYDRA's Super Soldier serum, adopts Karli and inspires her to seek justice for the disaffected, leading her to Power Broker and Dr. Nagel's version of the Super Soldier serum which she ends up taking. But this serum affects her mind and starts driving her mad, something that increases after Donya Madani herself dies from the virus and after John Walker ruins an attempt for Sam to get her the help she needs, thus she loses perspective and commits more violent acts. In the end, she plans to risk spreading the virus across the world by planning to forcibly transmit it to the GRC via gas bombs, as in her broken state of mind she figures it's the only way to make the GRC give a damn about all of the infected.

Unfortunately, thanks to COVID-19, the virus was removed from the story, and most of Donya Madani's role with it, as she now dies right away from tuberculosis of all things. With no connection between Madani and the Super Soldier serum, there is no firm reason for Karli to steal it to begin with, and it's now a betrayal of the Power Broker rather than something that she permitted to happen. More importantly, without the virus, what the GRC is doing, while certainly sketchy, doesn't seem remotely as heinous as it was originally supposed to be and thus not warranting Karli and the Flag Smashers' extreme response, which makes her look much worse when she suddenly starts committing heinous acts of terrorism, which includes attempting to burn the GRC alive in the end rather than force a virus upon them. There is some leftover allusions to Nagel's serum affecting her mind, but not nearly enough, which leaves Sam's insistence on trying to save her and the blatant sympathy she is shown by the narrative feeling baffling to many viewers. So instead of agreeing with her fight but not how she fights it, they even disagree with her fight, since her motives for it are incoherent.

GRADE = 1

Villainy: While at first leading the Flag Smashers in well-intentioned crimes, Karli eventually starts doing truly terrible things as a villain - she blows up a building full of people which kills many of them, she coerces an innocent woman into helping her by threatening her and her children, she kills Hoskins and later proclaims that his life didn't matter, she takes the GRC hostage and attempts to burn them alive in order to stop a democratic vote from taking place, and she tries to kill Sharon and Sam even as they attempt to reason with her. This should ace her a perfect score, but as stated at length above, it wasn't properly motivated and the narrative doesn't frame her the way her deplorable actions make her deserved to be framed.

GRADE = 4

Resolution: Sharon shoots her dead, partly to save Sam and partly to cover up her identity as the Power Broker. An ingrateful Sam leaves her behind and carries Karli's body away as the show desperately tries to make us think that this is a sad, tragic moment, which is followed by Sam lecturing the GRC against calling the people who attempted to burn them alive due to openly political reasons "terrorists", telling them that they all need to "do better".

Yeah, and so do you, Marvel!

GRADE = 1

Overall Grade: 2; the worst Captain America-related villain in the MCU, by far.

The Power Broker (Sharon Carter)

Appearance: It's just Sharon Carter, same as always. She's beautiful and all, but at some point I could have used an appearance of her in some sort of supervillain-y looking attire.

GRADE = 3

Performance: This is Emily VanCamp's best performance as the character and it's not even close. She's calm and cordial when she needs to be, aggressive and snarky when she wants to be, and actually comes off as a believable former black ops agent. The only mark against it is that we never get any moments of genuine emotional vulnerability, which we needed given her motivations as will be discussed next. She's just an evil girl-boss the whole way through.

GRADE = 4

Motivation: After spending her life believing in the cause of her great-aunt's organization S.H.I.E.L.D and the national government it was a part of, and in her great-aunt's beloved Steve Rogers whom she herself developed feelings for, Sharon betrayed S.H.I.E.L.D and the US government for the sake of Steve and his friends. Then, for the next few years, she was a hunted fugitive who never received any contact or help from Steve and his friends, even after they received government pardons following the Snap. While we know the main reason for this: she had gone so underground in Madripoor at this point that she was counted as a victim of the Snap, Sharon did not. Considering herself betrayed and abandoned, Sharon's depression twisted into a hardened view of the world, one where you can only truly trust in yourself and rely on yourself, and where you are at the mercy of the powerful unless you are among the powerful. Knowing that there are plenty who share this view, especially in Madripoor, Sharon used all her skills to amass a fortune as the Power Broker, someone who provides power through any means (weaponry, science, government or organizational positions, etc.) to others in exchange for money...which of course increases her own power. As far as motivations for villainy go, this is a well-crafted one. The internal logic all tracks.

Unfortunately, there is yet another snag here: there is no given reason as to why she would remain the Power Broker even after Sam is able to clarify what had happened and she received a pardon and reinstatement from the US government. She has everything back that she had lost before, yet she still keep her status as Power Broker and connections in Madripoor and will even secretly betray the very government that just welcomed her back because....she's too used to it and is thus inherently evil now, I guess? It doesn't help that we haven't seen her again since, so we can't delve any further into what she might be thinking.

GRADE = 4

Villainy: Most of the Power Broker's villainy is kept off-screen. The majority of what we see Sharon doing in the series is working against other villains and helping out the heroes, presumably done so that it's more of a "twist" when she is revealed as the Power Broker. Even her betraying the US government from within at the end is compromised by the revelations of the corrupt things that government has done plus what it will continue to do so long as people like Thaddeus Ross and Allegra Valentine de Fontaine are involved in it.

It's as if Marvel wants to make Sharon a villain yet also not want to make her a villain, with the end result satisfying no-one. Hero, villain, anti-hero...they really needed to pick a lane.

GRADE = 2

Resolution: As said before, she successfully covers up her identity as the Power Broker, is pardoned and reinstated by the US government, and then promptly gets back to work as the Power Broker from within it, promising to sell all sorts of federal secrets to foreign buyers. And she was never heard from again. Evidently, earliest plans for the series actually had plans to give her a superhero identity, which proves that fundamentally nothing has changed for Sharon Carter in the MCU: the powers-that-be do not know what the Hell they are doing with her. The character and her actress continue to be squandered. They deserve better.

GRADE = 1

Overall Grade: 2.5; she's certainly better than Flag Smasher, but that's a low bar to clear.

[themattress]

I Grade: Agatha Harkness

Appearance: It's Kathryn Hahn in a flowing witch robe. That's all it takes to be beautiful.

GRADE = 5

Performance: Kathryn Hahn gives an incredibly layered performance as Wanda's comedic nosy neighbor / best friend Agnes, then pretending to be "released" from Wanda's spell by Vision while ultimately failing to hold back her cackling laughter, then revealing her true deliciously wicked colors, all while an inner vulnerability peeks through at several points, which is explored in full during her own spin-off series. She's a richly complex character.

GRADE = 5

Motivation: While further details of her backstory in Agatha All Along end up enhancing her motivation in Wandavision retroactively, in the show itself it's presented as simply a power-hungry witch's desire for more power. It's competently done and would score a basic 3, but even there I must give a little extra for showing some backstory that explains why power is so important to her, as we see that without the ability to take power she'd have died long ago.

GRADE = 3.5

Villainy: A wonderfully written and played villain she may be, but her actual villainy is pretty basic. It's exactly what you would expect a wicked witch to do: manipulation, coercion, and ultimately shooting CGI magic blasts at people. The reveal of the villainy she's done in secret is honestly more entertaining and memorable than any of the villainy that she does openly.

GRADE = 3

Resolution: The fitting fate of being mindwiped into her false Agnes persona and made to live in Westview is undone in Agatha All Along, but that progresses into an even more dramatically satisfying conclusion....in the penultimate episode, after which the final episode kind of cheats on it. While it's nice to keep her around, it lowers the score short of perfection.

GRADE = 4.5

Overall Grade: 4; a truly iconic villain of Marvel television.

[themattress]

I Grade: The Sony Sinister Six

Appearance: The top row of villains - Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and Electro - look great. Doc Ock looks as great as he did in Spider-Man 2 if not even better thanks to Alfred Molina's aging making his face even more appropriately wrinkly, while the Green Goblin and Electro are marked improvements over their original appearances (the former who enters the movie with it only to quickly and mercifully have it discarded). Unfortunately, Sandman and Lizard are pure CGI and not particularly good CGI either, and Venom doesn't actually show at all!

GRADE = 3

Performance: The actors bring their A-game, especially Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina.

GRADE = 5

Motivation: Once again, the top row does better than the bottom row. Norman Osborn is lost and scared amidst his madness and arrival in another world and just wants to be cured and restored home, while his Goblin personality wants to spread evil and destruction for the Hell of it and is perfectly willing to use and even kill his other self toward those ends. Doc Ock desires to return to his grand experiment until he is cured of what has driven him mad, after which he sincerely wishes to atone for his sins. And Electro has become addicted to his power and wants as much of it to secure a future for himself instead of dying like he did before...or worse, returning to being the loser he used to be. Sandman, Lizard and Venom are just there, though, and in Venom's case he never even meets the rest or makes it to the big battle! I'll still give this one an extra .5 though due to Norman and Gobby's duality.

GRADE = 3.5

Villainy: Venom isn't a villain at all here, and most of the rest just do the standard. But one of them goes above and beyond said standard, and that's the Green Goblin. He wrecks the initial attempt to cure the other villains sans Doc Ock and convinces them that they should use their powers however they want, then out of sheer hatred for Spider-Man and the moral responsibility he represents murders Aunt May, with the desired effect being that Peter's vengeful fury will make him discard that moral responsibility and kill him in their next fight! The Goblin doesn't care about Norman's life / his own life; only that he corrupts his enemy.

GRADE = 4

Resolution: Doc Ock is cured first and becomes an ally, all the other villains who show up at the big battle are then cured, then they and the other two Spider-Men all sent back to their home worlds including Eddie Brock / Venom who was drinking at a bar, unknowingly leaving a piece of the symbiote behind. Like the past two categories, Gobby gives this one an extra bump, as his resolution is incredibly tense and dramatic, with Tobey Maguire's original Spidey in a major role and Norman's demonic alter-ego trying to get Peter to kill him to the very end.

GRADE = 3.5

Overall Grade: 4; a true cinematic Rogues Gallery on fine display!

[themattress]

I Grade: The Kingpin

Appearance: C'mon, just look at him. Perfect comic-to-screen translation is perfect.

GRADE = 5

Performance: Ever since his first appearance in Daredevil Season 1, Vincent D'onofrio has been an immediate standout as Wilson Fisk. He plays him as imposing, possessed of a brilliant intellect and commanding presence but with a constant bubbling fury beneath the surface of his calm front, which frequently explodes in a truly terrifying and violent manner. But he is also socially awkward to the point of shyness, and a detail-oriented creature of habit to something of an autistic degree. And at the start, there is a kinder, more honorable side of him, a side that wishes to do good and cares for others. As he progressed through the many shows he appears in, we see him grow and change in both positive and negative ways: he becomes more able to use that brilliant mind of his to be strategic and manipulative on his own rather than delegate so much of his plans to others, is increasingly better at controlling his temper (especially following supernatural intervention), and far more sociable and able to adapt to change. However, he also becomes even crueler and sadistic, openly accepting his nature as evil and embracing self-serving villainy with relish, and his bottomless appetite for power and control begins to hurt the people he loves. The one part that does not change is the sheer sense of durability D'onofrio provides him. He will not let any vulnerability, any setback, any outright defeat stop him from coming back strong. It's why he's the Kingpin.

GRADE = 5

Motivation: When he was a boy living in Hell's Kitchen, Wilson Fisk suffered under his abusive father, who would not only beat him, but also beat his mother while making him face a wall and do nothing but listen to it happen. One day, Wilson snapped and beat his father to death with a hammer in a violent rage, which his mother then helped cover up. Having to part ways from his mother lest the truth come to light, Wilson went to live with relatives, and later traveled to study abroad in Asia where he began to gain his wealth and intellect. But he had internalized that his violent, murderous rage made him strong; that it saved him and his mother from their horrible living situation. When returning to New York City to build up his business, Wilson decided he wanted to save all of Hell's Kitchen through violence and murder, which is why his capitalistic philanthropy ended up being just a front for him being a powerful boss of organized crime. But after Daredevil derailed his criminal operation, Wilson realized that in actuality, he never cared about Hell's Kitchen and its people - he was just addicted to building up the feeling of security and control for himself; the security and control he was deprived of for his whole childhood until he killed his father. He's a villain, not a hero.

Embracing his villain status in prison and accepting the moniker of "the Kingpin", Wilson was ultimately able to manipulate his way to freedom as he took control of the FBI overseeing his case, and was poised to resurrect his criminal empire stronger than ever until he was defeated and put away by Daredevil again despite all his best efforts to destroy him. Getting released from jail again thanks to the political complications caused by the Snap, Wilson slowly but surely built his gang back up, and eventually became even more powerful when he was elected Mayor of New York City, from which point he plans on becoming ruler of an independent city-state he seeks to create with his wife, Vanessa. Gaining and wielding power for its own sake is all that drives Wilson Fisk now - it's what makes him feel spiritually fulfilled.

GRADE = 5

Villainy: The Kingpin has a mostly stellar record when it comes to villainy. In Daredevil Season 1, he was the distant figurehead at the top of a pyramid, the foe Daredevil had to fight his way to, with most of his villainy being executed by his henchmen (with a noticeable exception being the murder of journalist Ben Urich, which he did with his own hands). In the following two seasons, he becomes more direct, personal and manipulative, growing to resemble his comic book counterpart more. Hawkeye and Echo split the difference, where in the former he's again just the highest up in a criminal conspiracy who only gets taken on at the end, while the latter showcases his personal brand of evil more. The only slip-up he has is in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, because for 8 out of 9 episodes he isn't a villain...not in the traditional sense, anyway; he has to operate differently now that he's Mayor, and is more of a protagonist than antagonist. It's different and interesting....which makes it jarring when in the 9th episode he just immediately jumps back into his old ways again, becoming the Kingpin again except with a Mayoral title attached to it. That turn needed way more time to breathe, and Marvel sadly didn't give it that time as a consequence of the show's messy production history. Oh well, at least he ends a season winning for a change.

GRADE = 4.5

Resolution: The same thing preventing a perfect score in Villainy prevents a perfect score in Resolution.....well, that and the fact that he hasn't remotely been "resolved" yet. When, if ever, that happens is still unknown. Hopefully, the pay-off will be just as good as the build-up.

GRADE = 4.5

Overall Grade: 5. He's the human / Earth-based / street level equivalent to Thanos.