Lost: Top Ten Villains

One thing Lost does not fail on is villains. I don't know how, but there has not been a Lost villain I didn't love to hate. So I will be giving my top ten villains of Lost and go into why they were so villainous. Here we go.

10. Stuart Radzinsky

"You don't have the stomach for what happens next."

We first heard of Radzinsky in season 2 as being the first man down in the Swan Hatch. You can imagine our surprise when he delivered a strange new turn as the secondary villain of season 5. Radzinsky first appears to be a bitchy Dharma scientist until "a hostile" enters his lair and all of a sudden his mind shifts to Red Dawn. He goes from paranoid to obsessive to violent to sociopathic in just a few days. I hated him because he was a control freak, because he was always complaining, because he was so compulsive. He was just an overly frustrating person who made a good antagonist. Making Radzinsky the bad guy was a good move. Makes me all the more glad that he ended up being that bloodstain on the Hatch ceiling.

9. Tom Friendly

"If you cross this line, we are gonna go from misunderstanding to...something else."

Tom was pretty much the first glimpse of leadership we saw among The Others. Though he was just a flunky, to us he first appeared to be a very intimidating and fearsome villain. From the moment he takes Walt to the time he warns Jack to back off, Tom makes his point very well. The funny thing is, Tom is eventually revealed to be a pretty nonviolent person. He is sickened by blood, too sensitive for most extreme violence, frightened and taken aback very easily, and, like most of The Others, seems like a nice guy for most of the time. He's also gay, which was a nice surprise. Tom Friendly, a man who really shouldn't have crossed a guy named Sawyer.

8. Edward Mars

"This oughta be good."

Mars is the first villain of the show. He is the arrogant US Marshall who has spent years hunting and has now finally captured Kate at the beginning of the series. In the present he is very feeble, having been mortally wounded after the plane crash. In flashbacks though, he is a total douchebag who takes pleasure in Kate's suffering, especially when he knows why she did what she did. Even while near death on the Island he's a jerk, mocking Jack about already having connected with Kate. Another thing about Mars is he seems to be very hard to kill. This may be the Island working it's magic, but I doubt it would work on a guy like him. First his skull is busted in by a briefcase during the turbulence, then he gets a big piece of shrapenel jammed in his gut, lies in suffering for a few days, Sawyer tries to put him out of his misery with a bullet to the heart, and then Jack finally kills him out of mercy. I was not sad to see Mars go at all, and I was glad he was Jack's first kill.

7. Ethan Rom

"And Charlie...I'll kill you last."

The first Other we see, the one who made us realize that our heroes were not alone on the Island. At Ben's request, Ethan slips into the survivors camp on the day of the crash posing as another person on the plane. He makes friendly banter with a few people like Jack, Hurley, and Nikki and Paulo. He also begins hunting boar with Locke. This gains him some respect from the survivors. It is not until Hurley finds out he wasn't on the plane and he kidnaps Claire and Charlie that we realize who he is. When Jack comes after him, Ethan takes the good doctor down and then hangs Charlie as a warning for him to stop. Later when Claire makes her way back to the camp, Ethan attacks Jin and Charlie and threatens to kill a person each day Claire isn't back. He makes good on his promise, killing Scott...or Steve. Eventually though he is ambushed by a group of castaways and given a brutal revenge beating from Jack. Just as we are about to get answers, Charlie shows up and unloads a pistol into his chest. This is not quite the end of Ethan as he has appeared in just about every season since then, in flashbacks or otherwise. We see Ethan as the friendly guy he was before kidnapping Claire and wondered what drove him to do the things he did. In one of the Missing Pieces episodes, it is revealed that Ethan helped Jack look for medical supplies on one of the first days. Ethan shared Jack's worry for Claire, but when Jack mentioned that if he needed help in a delivery would Ethan volunteer, Ethan was unsettled. He told Jack sadly that his wife and kid died in labor. This gave a lot more depth to his character and motivation. I don't really hate Ethan that much anymore.

6. Charles Widmore

"It's sad, really, how little you know."

Widmore was a very surprising character. I mean, he was always a villain, but he became a more intriguing villain as the series progressed. We first met in the Season 2 finale, where he appears to be the upperclass, douchebag father of Desmond's love Penny. He fills that role for the next few times we see him, doing everything in his power to keep his daughter and Desmond apart. Okay so we hate him right off the bat. Then it turns out that the freighter that has come to the Island to capture Ben and supposedly kill everyone else was sent by Widmore himself. Ben first says Widmore wanted to exploit the Island for its unique properties. And then it turns out that Widmore was one of The Others, their former leader in fact. He's always been a pretty cold and ruthless guy: he was quite the sadist as a kid, threatening to cut off time traveling Juliet's arm to make a point and snapping his own friend's neck to protect his people. From the moment we know his involvment with the Island, he becomes one of the show's most sinister characters. As of late he seems to have become more of an anti-hero as his mission now seems to be stopping The Man in Black. Also I have more sympathy for him now after a moment where he reflected on everything he has sacrificed: His son Daniel Faraday was killed, his daughter Penny hates him, his grandson Charlie has never met him. Oh and his relationship with his ex-Other-wife is mercenary more than anything. Still I don't fully trust Widmore. I don't completely trust any of the contenders for whatever ultimate prize there is in the war for The Island.

5. Mikhail Bakunin

"Why are we continuing with this little game, when we all know it has gone to the next stage."

Mikhail Bakunin. What can I say? He's just a cool villain. He's a guy I could see James Bond fighting. A smooth and dark voice, that eye patch, and his near invincibility. Seriously, Mikhail is a hard guy to kill. He has his brain hemorraged when he is thrown through the sonic fence by Locke; he is beaten half to death again by Locke (hmm, maybe he was still pissed about the Cold War); Desmond shoots him in the chest with a speargun; he finally goes down by suicide when he pulls the pin on his grenade to kill Charlie. I can't really say much, except that he is just a very dangerous villain and no doubt one of the top Others under Ben's command. He is also quite unlucky. Even in the alternate reality where he is a successful thug with two eyes, he gets shot and killed by Jin, losing the eye in the process. Fate course corrects again!

4. Martin Keamy

"I've never been one for talk."

Keamy is slime, pure and simple. Whereas Mikhail is a Bond villain, Keamy I could see on 24. Essentially, Martin Keamy has his hands in all sorts of vices, he's a gangster, an assassin, and a hardcore mercenary. Keamy is one of the least moral villains on Lost, as he doesn't mind doing anything to get the job done i.e. killing several innocent bystanders including a sixteen year old girl...oh yeah, and Karl. While being a diabolically vicious bastard, Keamy and his group of mercs also made way for huge spectacles of Island action that was particularly delightful, including one badass fight with our resident red beret Sayid. Even in death he managed to be a douche, because after Ben kills him a "dead man's trigger" activates a boatload of C4 on the freighter and kills almost everybody on board. Still, for some reason I think he was an even more evil person in the sideways world where he was an LA gangster. Just a bit more nefarious I suppose. Either way, or dimension, Keamy is a bastard.

3. Locke's Father

"A little hot for heaven, don't you think."

I won't call him Anthony Cooper because he mentioned that that was one of his aliases to Sawyer. Locke's Father, honestly, may be the most vile villain I've seen on the show. He's not a particularly dangerous man, but he's a lifelong confidence man and knows how to manipulate. He has no doubt ruined countless lives over the years, the two most notable being that of John Locke, his own son, and James Ford, the son of victims who took his alias "Mr. Sawyer." He not only ruined John's life once, but three times: stole his kidney, ruined the relationship with the woman he loved, and then paralyzed him by pushing him out an eight story window. In a con he "pulled half a dozen times" when he was younger in which he seduced an Alabama housewife and stole her and husband's savings, Locke's Father caused the death of the Ford parents, leaving son James to seek revenge. Tell me you don't hate him, I dare you. The thing I hate about him is what a smug son of a bitch he is. Even when he is captured by The Others and his life is very in danger by his son or Sawyer, men who have every right and reason to kill him, he still keeps that cocky smile and taunts them endlessly. I was clapping when Sawyer choked the life out of this monster.

2. Benjamin Linus

"I was one of the few smart enough to make sure I didn't end up in that ditch. Which makes me considerably smarter than you..."


The first true archenemy on Lost. Ben pulled a very convincing facade as stranded millionaire Henry Gale when he first met the castaways (convincing for me, not for them). Eventually he was found out and tried to play himself off as a mere underling for as long as possible until manipulated Michael sprung him loose and he resumed leadership of The Others. Episode after episode of season 3, Ben did everything he could to be the most intimidating character on the show. He became the bad guy you love to hate. He was a manipulative, arrogant, and brutal mastermind but he was cool about it. He is also very multi-dimensional. There comes a point where you can sympathize and pity him as much as you can hate him. He is also pretty easy to read, like when he has a plan and when he has no idea what the hell he is going to do.

1. The Man in Black

"It's kill or be killed, and I don't wanna be killed."

He has always been watching and waiting. He has planned for a very long time. And by the end of Season 5, when he finally let the smoke settle and came out from the trees, we knew one thing. He's coming. And, as it would seem, there is not a thing anyone can do to stop him. The Man in Black, otherwise known as The Monster, could be considered the first villain of Lost. He makes his presence known in the very first episode and was pretty blunt regarding his intentions for the castways. Just ask Oceanic pilot Seth Norris, Mr. Eko, Montand, Shannon from Boone's weird hallucination, Nikki, and Paulo inadvertantly (though honestly, I think that was the one time we appreciated him). But what served as an intimidating plot device and interesting use of CGI actually had an arc all of his own. After killing his "mother", The Man in Black is thrown into the source of the Island's energy by his goody two shoes brother Jacob. After this his spirit is ripped from his body and turned into a dark cloud of anger and EVIL!!! All he wants from then on is to leave the Island more than ever, and will kill anyone who gets in his way, except those protected by The Rules everyone fails to explain...Actually he kills them too. Everyone was kind of on the fence about whether he was the good one and Jacob bad, but I never trusted him. There was a moment when he simply asked Kate to follow him to the beach: he held out his hand to help her stand, she looked at him and he had this awkward smile on his face, like he was trying to hide what he really was. Sure he already killed some forty people by then, but that moment kind of set me off completely. He is also pretty badass. I mean, no other villain on Lost has stood against a mortar explosion without even batting an eye, or calmly strolling into a hail of gunfire. After he initiates plan "kill everyone, leave Island" he shows himself to be the most menacing villain the show has ever presented. He especially pissed me off when he took the form of deceased John Locke. Oh yeah and that time he killed three, let me repeat that, THREE main characters: Sayid, Sun, and Jin. After that the bastard was in the cross hairs of every lover of Lost. It came down to this literal chain smoking bastard going after the source of the Island in a last effort to destroy the Island and everyone on it. The variable however was Jack Shepherd, the recently elected and instantly resigned Jacob Replacement. In the end both of their plans worked: The Man in Black managed to enable the Island's slow destruction and Jack was able to render him human and thus killable. This duel between the man of science and the man of evil who looked like the man of faith concluded on the cliffs of the Island's coast. Hero and villain charged at one another and instigated probably one of the coolest fights on Lost. Just when he has the upperhand on the ex-doctor/ex-deity, Smokie takes a round to the spine from Kate. Though defeated, and almost embarrassed at defeat, he still tries to make a quick villain quip, but Jack has had enough and kicks him over the cliff where he dies on the rocks below. He ended his arc nearly destroying the Island and killing the hero who saved it and ended his terror. He had the been source of much darkness, perhaps all of the darkness on the Island. Every event that took place led our heroes into his hand, but this proposed superhuman creature was not all knowing and was overconfident and in the end that combination was what destroyed him. After this nameless monster was killed, the scales may have finally and eternally tilted back to the light.

And those were my top ten Lost villains. They were some pretty evil sons of bitches, but they made the show intense(er) and for that we could thank them. What we couldn't thank them for is the number of people they killed. Seriously, these guys were douches. Thanks for reading.