This is the long-promised “post on villains” and I couldn’t resist the title, as an echo of the post on protagonists and as a reference to my oft-stated inability to stick the landing on bad guys. “Antagonist” is a more proper term than “villain,” and opens up the category a lot more; villains never think they’re villains, after all, but they and others less vile may act (purposefully or not) in opposition to the protagonist(s), or do questionable things that get in the way of beneficial actions.
So what I thought I’d do is go through a list of possible antagonists in the Waters of Time series, with a little discussion of each, and then see if I can reach any conclusions. Needless to say, this will involve spoilers, so best not to read this if you haven’t finished all five books. I’ll talk about Book Six a bit, but won’t spoil the plot beyond what you can already guess.
I’m going to do this more or less in order of appearance, so we will start with:
George Merrill. Surprise! But I can’t leave him out, because there is a half-hearted attempt in Time for Tea to suspect him of nefarious intent before Olivia gets to know him better. I think I’m undercutting this well enough by giving him the introductory scene of the book, but there are POV-character villains, and certainly there are charming villains, and he could have been an Arcadian agent if there is such a thing. We are in Olivia’s head, and it’s clear that he is holding things back from her while disarmingly confessing much else. His family history is against him; this comes back to bite him in The Seed Time, but by then we know him so well that even horrific violence isn’t quite enough to turn readers against him. (I hope. I made sure he had a good excuse for what he did, but I do want you to question him as much as he questions himself.) He’s also an accomplished womanizer and behaves badly with both Olivia and Marisol; TFT starts him on a nicely 18th-century reformed-rake redemption arc, but it takes a while. Flawed protagonist.
Bernard Quan. I think several of my beta readers expected him to be Philip Boyes or Tien Vorsoisson, that first lover or husband who makes a woman smaller than she should be until she discovers What Love Is with the help of our hero (not to denigrate either Dorothy L. Sayers or Lois McMaster Bujold, who both tell this story really well; my respect for them is why my betas thought I’d echo the theme). He’s not; he did love Olivia, treated her right in bed and (mostly) out, and could have kept the marriage going except for some accidents where he tripped over his mistakes and his past and fell into 17th-century Amsterdam. He is a nicely shadowy possible antagonist in TFT, though, until we get to know him in Time and Fevers. I’m affectionately fond of him, which is how a writer feels about a character with depth and faults that twist the action into interesting knots. Secondary character and powerful catalyst.
Sam Brant. Oh, here we go. Sam (disguised as Dr. Sandford) is a real antagonist in TFT, possessing almost-Iago qualities. He feels that he’s been treated badly; he escapes punishment and is doing fine until people start getting in the way of his goals, upon which he’s willing to do just about anything to eliminate them. He’s a nasty piece of work. And then he reappears in TAF and becomes pitiful; in Time Goes By he could almost be categorized as an antihero if there weren’t so many other characters overshadowing that claim. I adore Sam; see above for how writers are weird that way. He tries so hard; he wants to be better than he is, whether it’s as a villain or a hero or a lover. Or a friend. If the first book is about Olivia and George, and the second one is about Olivia and Bernard, the third one is (among so many other things) about Olivia and Sam. They get so close to having a relationship that benefits both of them, and fail unto misery, but it’s still a real relationship that has nothing to do with romantic love, and it was both painful and deeply satisfying to write. I think he would be glad to know that she’s still thinking and dreaming about him a couple of years later, and will be for a long while. Reformed but tragic antagonist.
Richard Halsey. Halsey is both hero and criminal; it depends on where you’re standing. In TFT, he threatens Olivia with rape, and later she watches him betray Hector Armitage, shoot Daniel and maim Sam; even though he also saves George’s life and helps them escape, she never brings herself around to liking him. Halsey is more directly an antagonist to George (there had to be a duel challenge in that book, after all!), but when they meet again in TGB, they become collaborators and… well, it’s quite the mutual admiration society. The enemies-to-friends trope is great fun, but the characters involved have to possess qualities that make them able and likely to bond. Sometimes that leads to lasting friendship; I’m not sure that would have worked for George and Halsey even if they’d belonged in the same century. But in a crisis, they manage well. In TST, we find out that George had an impact on Halsey as much as the reverse, changing the course of his life at least in one timeline. Final word: it’s complicated.
Wilfrid Jansen. To use one of his many names: speaking of complicated. He first appears in TAF as a mystery walk-on; when he comes back in TGB calling himself something else, he’s helpful to George but also sets off all his internal alarms. Friedman/Mirich/Makepeace/etc. is so many things to so many people so quickly that it seems a bit reductive when he shows up at the climax wearing a Gestapo uniform and threatening to cut Beatrice’s throat. I did have quite a time explaining that, in fact; he’s never simple enough to be a straightforward villain. He would be a supervillain if anything; his powers are limited and he is prone to human errors and emotions, but his abilities and relative sangfroid are impressive. Most impressive. He also required charts and timelines before I could keep track of what he was doing when. In the end (Not Time’s Fool), he’s undone by both paradox and love. He was delightful to write; I could go on for paragraphs about how delightful, but we need to move on. I’m declaring it: flawed superhero.
Andy Bishop. Appears at the very beginning but falls into the sequence at TAF for Reasons. Like George, he really shouldn’t be in this list, but I lost some beta readers over his one-night stand with Olivia, so I am tossing him in just because he got George’s hackles up and I enjoyed watching them circle each other and snarl. If these were romance novels, he could be the antagonist who threatens to steal the heroine when her true love acts like a jerk, but that’s not at all where he belongs. Hero of his own story.
Rose Franklin. Also doesn’t really count, but she has definite antagonist characteristics; she’s powerful and clever, she’s maybe not ruthless but determined to get her own way when possible, and she seduces Andy with panache and makes him fall in love with her. Then betrays him, a bit; you could argue it’s for his own good. If she wanted to be a villain, she’d be bloody great at it. President of the Motherfucking United States.
Simone Jardine. She makes her first appearance (in TGB) while kidnapping George, so she has to be counted as an antagonist, and makes a pretty good play at it. In the end, the power of a captain of industry is turned to beneficial purpose. Simone can’t really help it if she’s made use of someone who’s in love with her own ex-lover’s ex-wife, and if that keeps complicating things later on. She’s really good at money, but emotionally stunted and selfish. Secondary character and powerful catalyst. Like Bernard, and no wonder.
Max Villard. I guess I did want to buckle down here and create a real villain since Sam was reforming himself, but Max is mostly just petty and self-centered. He does manage to affect the action of TGB significantly, probably more than he intends; certainly he doesn’t mean to murder his ex-girlfriend, though he might be pleased to find that Sam’s life was blighted and shortened as a result. Then I had to go and make him a Resistance martyr, but that’s totally Olivia’s fault. Pathetic antagonist. (And the real villain of TGB is Hitler.)
Lukas van der Mark. He and his teenage gang first appear in TAF, and he’s the least important part of their various battles against George and Bernard, but then he returns in NTF as an adult and an important antagonist so I’m going to stick him here. He is a Really Nasty Piece of Work. The only tiny bit of redemptive quality he gets is Janet’s assertion that he’s not a racist, and I think she was being generous. But he’s happy to blow people out of his way no matter their ethnic background; you can’t even make that “of his time” excuse. His dad was pretty awful too; I guess he had a bad childhood, and I don’t care. Flat-out villain, if of limited scope. Yay me, I made one.
Ted Chapman. A little out of order here, but he doesn’t play a huge role in TGB and in NTF he gets to shift gears and start acting out his resentment against Charles and Beatrice for keeping secrets from him. I think he just means to do his job, really, but personal feelings get in the way. He manages to do an inadvertent ton of damage in the process; luckily, Beatrice fixes it. In TST, I got to play with him and Charles acting out the trope where enemies are forced to cooperate, with a bit of hurt-comfort along the way, so that was fun. Temporary antagonist of the security professional variety.
Henry Doyle. Another antagonist-of-the-past, of somewhat less personal significance than van der Mark, although just try to tell Andy that. He’s really less of a character in himself than a representative of the slaveholder class. He has migraines; so do I; make of that what you will. There are ways in which he is less heinous than Thomas Jefferson, but he’s not nearly as smart. Historical villain, not fully developed.
Harry Merrill. Yes, their names are related for a reason. Harry could certainly have been Henry if he’d been born in another century, but he wasn’t. The role he plays (mostly backstage, until TST) is lifelong catalyst to George, a constant chemical irritant that helps make Our Hero who he is, and knowing that fuels Harry’s resentment to the point where an explosion is inevitable. They are only together onstage for one scene, and that was enough. I’m still not sure if Harry is the most self-aware antagonist of the bunch, or the least. In any case, it’s probably lucky that his heart’s not fully in it. My brother, my enemy.
Conrad Merrill and Vera Brigham-Merrill. I mean, they did make Harry; they also made George and Sophie, so who knows. At one point I meant to make Conrad more of a real villain, but it just never worked out; he’s kind of old and tired at this point, and really he was just extremely into genealogy and other stuff happened. Vera is the one who makes an actual evil choice in TST, but she loves Rinaldo so I still can’t entirely blame her for it. They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Nancy. She doesn’t even get a last name, so she can’t be a real villain. Some poor choices, for sure, but it’s not even her idea to kidnap little Sam; she just has to deal with it afterwards. Victim of politics, I’m thinking.
David Portelli. Speaking of politics. He appears in TST as a presidential candidate and gets more prominence in Book Six; I won’t say anything more about that, except that people will think he is Donald Trump and he isn’t. He’s a whole lot smarter, for one thing. But I would also call him a victim of politics, and also of Book Six’s real villain, the time pandemic.
Let me know if I left anyone out. I might have included Charles Constantine for being too obstinate in his secrecy, Rutger Kaufmann for helping Sam, and Harry’s wife Johanna for being married to Harry; it also might have been fair to include Catharina Roes in balance to Andy, but I didn’t. There are limits, after all.
The first thing I notice in looking over the list is that men dominate. Simone is the only significant female antagonist and she doesn’t last the distance, though neither do most of the men, to be sure. This might be a sign that I’m feminist, or anti-feminist, or a realist, or forgetting half my characters; it is what it is. Some of my female characters definitely get in the way of others, sometimes even on purpose, but most don’t rise to the level of evil intent. Though, again, neither do many of the men listed here, so maybe I’m just more inclined to see men as interfering bastards. (I have only written one character who is neither male nor female; Kai Yesteryear appears briefly in TST, in what could be called a professionally antagonistic or at least catalytic role, and plays a larger and more positive part in Book Six.)
The next note to make is that writing antagonists can be fun, but it’s more fun when they are complicated people and have at least a partial redemptive arc, or when they appear to be one thing and turn out to be another, or keep changing roles. I felt, for example, that Lukas van der Mark was necessary in NTF, but I did not enjoy writing him; writing Henry Doyle made me feel actively gross. Harry and Max were more challenging and therefore good exercise for my writing muscles, but more like crunches than dancing. But I waltzed with Sam and Wilfrid.
This is true of good and neutral characters, too, of course: complexity is rewarding. But it’s often great fun to write a minor or one-scene participant in the action. In fact, I have said so many times that I want a whole book about X character that those phantom volumes now constitute an entire library. Evil intent is yucky, though; I don’t like putting myself into that headspace. Complexity mutes that reaction somewhat, but it also prompts a certain amount of empathy, which then makes me think “but what if he got better?” That is definitely what happened with Sam. But plot and setting play a role here too; Sam would not have taken the redemptive path he did if he and Olivia hadn’t accidentally landed in 1940, and yet it was the war that did him in, indirectly.
It’s clear, too, that I like… unclarity. I mean, if Wilfrid had introduced himself by saying, “My name’s Jansen and I have lots of passports and I fix mistakes in time; let me help,” he would have been either hailed as a hero or buried in the Time Travel Institute’s nonexistent dungeons and rescued by our intrepid crew, but the series would have ended a lot sooner, and besides, it wasn’t in his nature. You spend your childhood being hauled around through different centuries by a shadowy mentor who is really yourself, and see how you turn out. Watching him find a mysterious mien entertaining was gratifying; by all rights, he should have been locked in Bedlam. A modicum of antagonistic acting-out is not much to forgive.
Speaking of which, Halsey. Sometimes you write a character you want everyone to be of two minds about. Enjoy him; be horrified at yourself for enjoying him; repeat. And he gets his redemptive arc too; sometimes that just amounts to growing up all the way. He would probably regard this series as the Halsey-Armitage Family Epic, With Digressions, and from a certain point of view, he’s not entirely wrong.
Also, I am really bad at Huge Secret Conspiracies. I never really knew what to do with the Arcadians after inventing them; they are confusing because there are different groups that share the same name, and there are subgroups and secret passwords and the fucking Red King, and I’m trying to explain it in bits and pieces, but those who are expecting a Giant Reveal will probably be disappointed. Which is just like life, as far as I’m concerned.
Also like life is having a natural or perhaps unnatural disaster as the main antagonist, which has been interesting to play with in the current book. I’ll let you know later how that went.
A twirled moustache to all, and to all a good night!
Erica H. Smith 