The Small Council: Who’s your pick for Season 4’s Best Villain?

This week, our Small Council discusses their votes for the WiCnet Awards for Best Performance As A Villain in Season 4.

Rebecca Pahle: This may seem counter-intuitive, but I’m going to start out my defense of Aidan Gillen’s Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish as the season’s best villain by discussing how he was the worst villain, at least in previous seasons. His sneering jackassery didn’t work for me—the whole point of Littlefinger is that he’s supposed to be a fly-under-the-radar type, someone whom no one has any problem trusting because he comes off as so damned inoffensive. But who would ever trust the show’s Baelish, with his constant evil smirks and his teleporting around from place to place to sow discord? George RR Martin has my back here—Littlefinger’s character changed vastly from show to book.

But that all gelled in season four, where Littlefinger could stop keeping up even the barest pretense that he’s not a smarmy, scheming assbag….


Aidan Gillan turned it up to 11, and oh, it finally worked. The largest part of Littlefinger’s success as a villain this season, though, was in how his relationship with Sansa brought out her own Machiavellian tendencies. I loved his line in “The Mountain And The Viper” that “Sickly little boys sometimes become powerful men.” Ostensibly he’s talking about Robin Arryn, but we know who he really has in mind. He’s so obnoxiously full of himself, which in turn made watching Sansa learn to manipulate him one of the highlights of the season.

Ani Bundel: Best Villain was a hard category for me. Most weeks, I already know who I’m voting for in the Small Council before I’ve even finished making the poll. This week, I couldn’t even bring myself to stake my claim on one character or another before hand. Because the thing about villains in Game Of Thrones is this: no one is all bad.

Save one character. Iwan Rheon’s Ramsey Snow.

I’ve had a hard time with the changes the show brought to the Ramsey Snow storyline, and the putting the torture of Theon on screen. I’ll admit, this is partly because I’m squeamish. (“The Passion of the Greyjoy” is not what I planned to watch on my Sunday night.) But partly because the character of Ramsey Snow is a psychopath–there are no shades of grey here.

Ramsey Snow was off my list of characters to vote for. Until I tried to watch a new BBC drama last Sunday called “Our Girl,” where Iwan Rheon plays a sweet, nice guy. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t watch him. His performance as Ramsey is so horrific, so insane, so frightening, that seeing him on screen, I expect that to be the character’s motivation, no matter how nice he’s behaving. I hadn’t realized how effected I had been by his performance until this. But I literally cannot see him as anything else now. Much like Jack Gleeson (who smartly decided to take a nice long break from acting, now that he’s effectively pigeon-holed his career for the time being), Rheon is Ramsey Snow. Audiences are going to have a tough time seeing him as anything else going forward. Moreover, his performance has defined the character in my mind in way that never happened in the books, because all that torture was kept off screen. More than Littlefinger and his chaos, or Tywin and his rigid ideas of what his children should be, Ramsey Snow terrifies me.

I won’t be opening any boxes from him either.

Andrea Towers: I can’t go with anyone else for this category. To me, there’s no character as emotionally spiteful in Game Of Thrones more than Kate Dickey’s Lysa Arryn–and for multiple reasons. She’s cold. She’s manipulative. She coddles her spoiled child who still breast-feeds. To say Lysa got what was coming to her would sound like I’m being cruel, but…well, she really did have it coming.

The thing is, as with most “villains” in Game Of Thrones, it’s hard to classify anyone as truly evil (well, okay…Ramsay could probably fit into that category, I suppose, but that’s Ani’s turf.) As much as Lysa was cruel and stubborn and made terrible choices, part of that was because she so desperately wanted things that weren’t necessarily attainable–Petyr’s love, stability for Robin. Still, however unstable she was in Season 1 when she put Tyrion on trial is nothing compared to how we saw her act in Season 4, when her crazy truly took over. I can’t be the only one who thought it was uncomfortable to watch her be so cruel to Sansa when she attempted to throw her down the moon door, for no other reason than her own jealous rage issues.

Lysa has been controlled by everyone in her life, from her father to Petyr to Catelyn, even, all of which makes her prone to being easily played. By the time she truly unleashes her emotions by blaming her own niece for kissing the man she loves, you realize just how far gone she is, to the point that it’s really hard to see any kind of redemption. In a way, she’s a little like Cersei: afraid that someone who is younger and more beautiful will take power from her (minus the whole prophecy thing.)

But man. The moon door was coming, and you had to admit, even you wanted it to happen at that point.

Cameron White: Like all the Lannisters on Game Of Thrones, it’s important to consider Lena Headey’s Cersei in context. A daughter of a wealthy family, a sister who’s madly in love with her own brother, a mother desperately trying to hold onto her children — these are just stereotypes. Cersei is in truth a contradiction of values. Growing up in a patriarchal world, she longed to ditch her sex for the one she (and society) consider to be superior. In the meantime, she uses everything she is and has, everything in her power, to stay ahead of everyone else. Whether by maintaining her own level of comfort, or by seeking justice for her slain son (a son she herself noted was a monster, a thought that probably will probably haunt her for a very long time), Cersei is confident and sure of her actions and righteousness in ways neither Jaime nor Tyrion could ever dream of.

I love Cersei Lannister. I don’t necessarily agree with her values, but I think she is secretly one of the story’s best characters. And the best part about her on the show is that she is portrayed by Lena Headey. Prior to Game of Thrones, I watched Headey portray one of sci-fi’s coolest heroines for two all-too-short seasons of television: Sarah Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Headey brings the same perceptive depth to Cersei that she does to Sarah; it is a joy to watch her face as her father’s words wound her, to hear the annoyance in her voice when she says “I would like you to leave my presence”, to let her bring us into Cersei’s inner life in ways both quiet (“There will come a day when you are happy, and your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth”) and deafening (the roar of the lioness as her cub is murdered before her very eyes).

Call her a villain if you must. She’s already figuring out the best way to “deal with you”. That’s what villains do, right?

Rowan Kaiser: I’m torn between two Lannisters here. The most obvious choice, I feel, is Tywin. After slowly increasing his influence over the past few seasons, Season 4 centered on the Lannister patriarch. But as that series center, we’re going to be spending plenty of time discussing him throughout WiCnet Awards season, so I’m going to write about the mild underdog here: Jack Gleeson as King Joffrey.

To be fair, Gleeson is only an underdog in Season 4 because he appears in a mere three episodes (and one of those is a corpse). But the oppressive presence he brings to those two episodes is so intense that its puncturing serves as the climax. Sandor Clegane’s “fuck the king” can’t be an uncommon sentiment in the Seven Kingdoms, and certainly isn’t among Game Of Thrones’ fans. But the way it resets the entire mood of the season premiere speaks to just how long Joffrey’s shadow is during the post-Red Wedding phase of the story.

Gleeson himself has more to do in the second episode, “The Lion And The Rose,” which was a showcase for Joffrey’s disdainful, petty cruelty. Seeing him strut around, cowing all the powerful men and women around him, despite the character’s clear unsuitability as a leader hammered home the show’s themes power and violence. And then in an instant, Joffrey starts choking to death, and Gleeson switches to playing a terrified teenager and you almost feel sorry for the villain who’s made so many characters’ lives so hellish.

Who’s your pick? Vote below!

[polldaddy poll=8378578]

• Published on 10/21/2014 at 7:15 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:40 PM CDT