Giving too much power to the villain

[Temis the Vorta]

Everything he did after his break with reality seemed to flow naturally from who he was beforehand.

he became a true believer in the Pah-Wraiths.

Those two statements are contradictory. Dukat never believed in anyone but Dukat.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Well, you could always try it this way...

It seems, to me at least, that the Batman universe does the opposite.

I find the villains MUCH more interesting than our hero.
And, especially with the Joker, Tim Burton and Chris Nolan appear to agree.

The difference is, I think Nolan was really trying to make Batman just as interesting and important as the villains in his movies. He wasn't completely successful, but I can certainly see a lot more effort than in the Burton movies, where way more screen time and dialog was devoted to getting to know and understand who the villains are.

I think Tim Burton's choices were just as deliberate. Even amongst the good guys, Batman was still something of a cypher. So much of the time, we're seeing him from the perspective of Vicki Vale, Alexander Knox, or Commissioner Gordon.

Another good example is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There we had villians who were just as strong and just as developed and nuanced as the heros. Dukat, for example, could easily have overshadowed Sisko. But, the fact that TPTB went to great lengths to humanize Sisko (his love of baseball, his relationships with his son and father, his romantic affairs, etc.) made him the more relatable figure.

Dukat shows the dangers here, though. They had such a compelling villain that the temptation was always to have him turn good (they had several places where they were leaning towards painting him as misunderstood). Then Ira Behr put his foot down and said "No, this guy is as bad as Hitler." Many people feel they made Dukat one-dimensional in the last few episodes of the series. I think part of it was a fear that Dukat could overshadow the good guys.

I think they managed to walk that fine line with Dukat. Where they tumbled off the tightrope was in the last episode when he got posessed by the Pagh'wraiths. Those guys really just seemed evil for the sake of being evil and that kind of ill-conceived uniformity just didn't fit in with the nature of DS9.

Compare that to the Dominion. They were always, undeniably, the bad guys. However, their motivations were understandable & realistic yet still unsympathetic. They were a power-mad empire with their own idea of how to organize the galaxy to their advantage.

 

[JarodRussell]

Everything he did after his break with reality seemed to flow naturally from who he was beforehand.

he became a true believer in the Pah-Wraiths.

Those two statements are contradictory. Dukat never believed in anyone but Dukat.

Dukat didn't believe in the Pah-Wraiths, since he knew they existed.