I've always considered the idea of a favorite villain to be rather bizarre. If it isn't itself an oxymoron, "the man you love to hate" certainly is and that phrase is commonly used to describe popular villains. It used to be that the antagonists that I liked in any way were the ones who weren't really evil. After all, how can you like someone you can't sympathize with?
So why do I consider Kronos to be my favorite villain? It isn't really for anything he is or does. Kronos is a thoroughly despicable person and sometimes it's hard to tell whether he'd rather rule the world or destroy it. Actually, in some ways, he's a rather pathetic villain without his brothers.
If you watch his most recent flashback, you'll see what I mean. Yes, he and his gang caused a lot of destruction but they weren't that hard to locate and, once confronted by people able to fight back, they were quickly put out of business. (Though not without bringing some of the rangers down with them.) Only Kronos' Immortality saved him from sharing the fate of his men. This is hardly the primal force of nature that the Four Horsemen are presented as being. Admittedly, no serious opposition to the Horsemen is shown in the Bronze Age flashbacks, but they give the impression of being a virtually unstoppable wave of destruction.
It's Kronos' shared history with Methos and the interaction between them it causes that makes Kronos interesting. I would even go so far as to say that it's not Kronos as a character that I find interesting, but Kronos as the living embodiment of Methos' past coming back to haunt him. Kronos is the catalyst for and external representation of Methos' internal conflict between who he was then and who he wants to be now.
Still, it wasn't seeing Kronos on the show that really made him my favorite villain. I did notice that there was something special about him. Kronos was worse than Kalas or Horton in the ways that made me hate them enough to actively wish that one of the other characters would kill them. However, I didn't hate Kronos, and shortly thereafter came to the conclusion that I no longer hated the other two. It was when I started trying to write a fanfic with Kronos and Methos in it that I decided I enjoyed writing them together.
So I reached the conclusion that I like Kronos as a character even though I can't stand him as a person. And I had to admit that he was my favorite villain, even though I still think it's a rather bizarre concept. And, like most of the bizarre things I find myself doing lately, it's all his brother's fault. (For more on the bizarre things I do, most of which are Highlander related, see Methos Made Me Do It.)
This article previously appeared in Interregnum #32.
