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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2629378" data-attributes="member: 18832">It doesn't matter a jot that the Operative believes he is doing what is right and necessary to make a better world - the man orders the slaughter of innocents to provoke his quarry out of hiding. He's Evil, through and through.Motivation doesn't matter in D&D. The Operative is utterly unapologetic, presumably because he is honest enough to know that he wouldn't mean it if he did express remorse. He knows he is a monster - but that knowledge doesn't affect his fanatical resolve.Only by showing him the possible consequences of his dreams can his confidence be shattered - and without perfect faith that what he is doing is necessary, he can't do what he does.I think it's interesting, because it's clear that the Operative isn't broken by appeals to morality. He murders children - as horrific as they are, Reavers themselves can only repulse him because their slaughter is without purpose. It's the Lawful side of the Operative that is undermined by the Pax video; he is rendered incapable of believing that his society's ordered, controlling way of doing things inevitably leads to a better world, because he is confronted with the evidence that it does not.The Operative's weakness is his limited thinking - throughout the film he is shown to be outsmarted by unorthodox confrontations and maneuvering. He didn't expect Mal to bring the beacon to Inara's place, he didn't anticipate the flash bomb Inara set off, he never dreamed that Mal would lead a fleet of Reaver ships to Mr. Universe's planet and reverse the Alliance ambush, and he clearly never considered that perhaps the Alliance's grand plan for making a better world could possibly be fallible.In some ways he reminds me of Khan in Star Trek II - he is defeated by opponents who think in more dimensions than he's ever contemplated (and when it comes to Khan, "dimensions" is literal). He relies on predicting his opponents' behaviour - but he lacks the imagination to do so. He's so fixated on his vision of the future that he fails to see the full depth of the present.</blockquote>

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