“We’re all at war with ourselves—that’s what it means to be human.” –Sylar, It’s Coming
One great thing about being a writer is the imperative to create worlds to dwell in. We create characters to play with, talk to, fall in love with. The escapes that our audiences retreat to we get to experience twice; we are our own audiences first. I want to write stories about people that I think would be great to know because in the process, the characters become real parts of my life. Then I get to introduce them to the world.
Just recently, I became a fan of the NBC show Heroes. I quickly devoured all three seasons (more than once actually) and while Peter Petrelli is my favorite hero, I give Sylar the award for best part of the show. Watching that incredibly dark villain take shape was so much fun that I just kept thinking: I want one. I want to create a character who is that kind of wrong. I think playing with a character like that will be extremely fun, especially pitting them against my protagonist. There might be a sadist hidden in me somewhere.
So what does it take to create a character as dark and deeply disturbed as Sylar? We begin with Gabriel Gray, a shy, unassuming man whose apartment is filled with books. This speaks to a rich inner life, but perhaps a sense of isolation from the world. He has a talent for intuitively understanding how things work, which initially manifests itself as an ability to fix watches. In I Am Become Death, Gabriel explains: “If you can understand the complexities of a watch you can understand anything, everything, cause, effect, action, reaction.” But more than that, his “ability is not just understanding how things work, there’s a hunger that comes with it to know more, to have more. [He] couldn’t control it and it turned [him] into a killer, a monster.” The understanding alone was not enough of a power. In Six Months Ago, Gabriel tells Chandra Suresh that a part of him always wanted to be special:
“When I was a kid, I used to wish some stranger would come and tell me my family wasn’t really my family. They weren’t bad people, they were just insignificant, and I wanted to be different, special. I wanted to change, a new name, a new life. The watchmaker’s son became a watchmaker. It is so futile and I wanted to be important.”
One key moment is when Chandra responds by telling him that he is important. This is everything he wants to hear. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be special or significant. It’s a natural human desire that most of us share. We want to be important and to make a difference in the world. For so long, Gabriel found himself powerless to break out of his mundane life spent fixing watches. Then he learns that there are people in the world with amazing abilities and his talent for understanding also gives him the power to take those abilities from them. Unfortunately, he has to kill them, fairly gruesomely, in order to do so. (I am intentionally refraining from going in to the exceptions to that rule.) In an interesting turn, the first person Gabriel meets with a special ability doesn’t want it and asks him if he can make it go away. Granted, I’m sure he would have preferred to live, but I digress. Gabriel thinks the man is “broken” for wanting the power to go away. He “fixes” it for him. This is also the first time he calls himself Sylar.
Later, when he goes to Chandra to show off his new ability—telekinesis—he says: “I’m different now. I feel I’ve been given a chance to start over—new life, new identity, new purpose.” These are all the things he said he wanted. Even so, he does not immediately become a relentless killer of people with abilities. In the episode Villains, we see that he feels intense guilt and remorse for what he’s done and attempts to take his own life. He explains, “I’ve done something unforgivable… A man had something that I wanted, but I took it at a terrible price.” That his suicide attempt fails initially looks like providence and a second chance for him to be a good person. It’s important to recognize that his vision of himself at this point is as a victim. He says, “I have a kind of problem. I guess you could say I’m like addict. I have this overwhelming hunger; I covet the abilities of others.” That Sylar sees himself as weak, as someone with an uncontrollable power, leaves him vulnerable to the malign forces that are plotting against him. They place the prey he covets within his grasp, and he falls, unable to resist the temptation. Sadly, he repeatedly finds himself at the mercy of people who want to manipulate him and is thus unable to find any lasting redemption.
It is the victim mentality that fuels the desire for power. He can never have enough power to feel complete because all of his worth is determined by others. He exists in a state of perpetual powerlessness. An incredible neurosis for someone so supernaturally powerful. But he is never fully in control of his own destiny. All of his attempts at redemption fail because they rely on approval from an outside source. So the best he can do is to feed his homicidal urges willingly because that gives him the illusion of control and fighting against them doesn’t work. I think that makes it easier for us to pity him when he says things like “I want to be a good person.”
Chronologically, all that I’ve outlined happens before the show starts. For the first half of the first season all we see and hear of Sylar are the stories of the carnage he is leaving in his wake. He is a bogeyman, killing and disappearing into the shadows. All we know is that his modus operandi is to slice off the top of people’s heads. We are led to see him as a vicious psychopath. That’s not far off either. He’s killed almost 50 people that we know about by the end of season three. And yet, the first time we get a good look at him is in a flashback. He is sitting at his desk in his shop with his special watchmaker glasses on, looking young and innocent, charming and endearing. (It’s no accident that he’s played by the extremely attractive Zachary Quinto; we do like our bad guys sexy.) The first thing he does is fix Chandra’s watch and then refuse compensation: an act of generosity. So, despite the terror he is causing in the present, we cannot simply write him off as a monster. Zachary said of the character: “He’s definitely somebody that has been overcome by a hunger and overcome by a pursuit for power and for importance that did start a little more innocuously than it evolved into.” He has also said:
“The sad part is he’s well-intentioned. He wants to improve his life. He wants to make a difference. He wants to matter. Through the process of realizing how to do that, he gets blinded and loses himself in the pursuit of it and goes a little crazy—a ‘little’ being an understatement.”
Again, in The Hard Part, he comes to a crossroads. Sylar has a vision of the future and believes he is going to destroy half of New York City. He reaches out for help. He says, “I understood it before: the killing. I had a reason: take what others didn’t deserve. It was natural selection.” But facing an apocalypse that kills half the city in an instant, he cannot grasp a motive. “They mean nothing, they’re innocent, there’s no gain, so why would I do it? What possible reason could I have for killing so many?” His conscience is still active and he sees innocence in the world. So how monstrous is he really? Can an entirely evil character conceive of innocence? Recognize it?
In a truly heartbreaking scene, Gabriel goes to his mother looking for answers and a way out. He expresses a desire to stop himself. Here are the two lines of dialogue that mark the moment when you think everything could have changed:
Gabriel to his mother: Maybe I don’t have to be special—that’s ok to just be a normal watchmaker. Can’t you just tell me that’s enough?
Gabriel’s Mother: Why would I tell you that when I know you can be so much more? If you wanted, you could be president.
(This is like that moment in Revenge of the Sith when Yoda tells Anakin to “let go of all that he fears to lose.” Less than helpful.)
As an audience member, you wish his mother could have told him what he needed to hear. It is clear to us that the life of a watchmaker would have been preferable to the other path laid before him. His mother had the chance to save him and instead put a condition on her love, planting in his mind the belief that he has to be special to be worthy. And not just special, her mention of being president is significant. Not only is it a position of global power, but one attained by winning a popular majority. The country must judge you worthy of that position, declare you valuable. External validation is necessary. So even if he could get to the point where he considered himself special, it would not be enough. That becomes clearer as the scene continues and he tries to show his mother that he is special and that he can do extraordinary things. At first, she is enchanted, but fear quickly takes over and she runs away from him. In the episode I Am Sylar, he tells how he felt in that moment: “I wanted you to die. The way you looked at me, like I was some kind of monster. I felt so small.”
So these are our keys. My philosophy for creating a character like this is take a whole person and start hacking away at them, sort of like Gabriel fracturing himself by creating the alternate persona, Sylar. How does a person respond when they don’t get unconditional love from their parents? How does a person respond when all their attempts at achievement gain them nothing? How does a person respond to feeling powerless? Or powerful? In a world that champions celebrity, people of significance and power, how does an unremarkable person leave a mark? If a person perceives himself as a victim, how will he take his revenge upon the world? How many times will a man attempt to redeem himself when every effort fails? If you strip away everything that someone cares about, how quickly will they fall to the dark side? What is it that keeps some people in check? What happens if you take those limits away? Where is the point of no return?
Let’s also use another one of Zachary’s insights into the character: “I would say we both have a desire to be valued. My desire to be valued is manifested in cultivating relationships with my friends and family. Sylar’s desire to be valued manifests itself… well, in a murderous rampage.”
That’s an amusing statement, but I think what’s most interesting is that it reveals how closely we can brush that dark side within ourselves. How far away is it at the beginning, at that moment when the choice is made? We all have the potential for good and for bad. What happens when we find ourselves incapable of forming relationships with people that will value us? How long can a person endure that kind of isolation? That the desire has the same root is what makes it possible for us to conceive of acting out the darker aspects of ourselves, even if it is only through fiction. Perhaps, hopefully only through fiction.
We all crave love and acceptance. It is easy to believe that the only way to get those things is by being important, special, setting oneself apart, by being different. Then, in the race for power and glory we forget what we were after in the first place. If a child is brought up to believe that the world is a dangerous place, a place to be feared, that everyone is out to get them, and that they will have to fight others to get what they want, that child will become an antagonist for the world. They will see the world as an enemy, an obstacle. Not hard to imagine them judging the world as wrong and themselves as righteous. Think of an arrogance based on contempt versus self-respect.
By exposing the inner workings of Sylar, I have given myself some building blocks to work with for my own character. I think what’s important to remember is that there are many moments in the series that compel you to feel deeply for Sylar. He is conflicted and lost, clearly deeply damaged. But it’s his inner conflict that gives him his humanity. And while he has moments of vicious cruelty and almost unspeakable evil, they are tempered by these moments of attempts at redemption. I think one of the most compelling things about this character is that he is not wholly evil. He is not just a monster. And perhaps what makes him truly scary is that he is recognizable as a man.
Sylar and His Mother
*If you have stayed with me this long, I thank you. Brevity is a skill I have not yet mastered.