Fighting the bad guy can be an exciting climactic experience, but there are moments when you’re just hoping for a quick tussle and a cutscene to the next important part of your quest. Thankfully, there are some baddies who fit that bill! Here is a helpful list of nasty minions and villains who can be knocked in one precise blow.
Sontarans—Doctor Who
Plenty of nasties in Doctor Who can be rendered less effective with a well-aimed hit, but none so well as the Sontarans. A race of clones who are nourished via feeding tubes at the back of their necks, the Sontarans maintain that vent for feeding into their adulthoods. This means that a quick smack will quickly render them unconscious. This is supposed to be billed as a positive aspect, however—the fact that Sontaran anatomy works this way means that they are required to always face their opponents in battle. Turning their back would result in easy and immediate defeat, making it an unlikely choice for the intergalactic baked potatoes. For the glory of Sontar—HAH!
Vampires—Buffy the Vampire Slayer
In every generation there is a chosen one… and she’s pretty lucky because vampires disintegrate to dust if you stake them in the heart with sharp wooden sticks. Granted, some of these fanged monsters are a little speedier than others, but they cannot stand up to a nice pointy stake. Which is good because there are lots of them? And because this battle is basically never-ending, so Buffy deserves any breaks she can get. It’s a good thing that vampires come with so many rules, is really the point here. Obviously, Buffyverse vamps don’t have all of them, but most of the basic rules still apply, including the avoidance of sunlight and un-fondness for crucifixes, and so on. That aversion to pointy stakes makes it a lot easier for the Slayer to do her job.
Goombas—Super Mario Bros.
Goombas are fanged shitake mushrooms who aren’t terribly threatening unless you get cornered by one—or have terrible hand-eye coordination. They tend to walk back and forth in a fairly predictable way, making it a simple task for a heroic plumber to jump on them, crushing these sentient anti-Italian slurs beneath his mighty boots. So, they’re a one-jump villain rather than a one-punch villain, but the spirit is the same—and don’t spend too much time thinking about the Goombas from the Super Mario Bros. movie because while it may have its charms (those charms being Yoshi and John Leguizamo’s world-shattering smile) those shambling behemoths are NOT True Goombas.
Putties—Power Rangers
If you watched the original show, you know that it used to take a few kicks to get the putties to disperse… but that eventually stops being the case. Later iterations of these faceless clay minions gave them funny power packs at the center of their chests—strike those and they instantly fall to pieces. That’s right, it got easier to defeat these Level One threats because Lord Zedd just couldn’t resist a branded chestplate. Of course, it’s hard to call Power Rangers out for this when basically every monster Rita ever made could be immediately defeated by one sword strike from the Megazord. It’s only irritating because if that’s all it ever took, you’d think the Power Rangers would start from the Megazord? No? Just us? Gotta watch the dino versions get smacked around a little, we suppose.
The Death Star—Star Wars
It’s supposed to be the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, but as long as you can get close enough? Yeah, you’re good. Both Death Stars (that’s right, both, because the Empire decided that the answer to the first one getting blown up was to just make another one almost exactly the same way) are capable of being destroyed with one (or two) precise hits to the main reactor, making their ability to blow up planets far less impressive than it should be. The same proves true for Starkiller Base, even though it takes little more coordination. And also the Emperor’s fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers… which is sad because the cheese wedge ships were finally about to live up to their name before the entire Resistance happened to them. Point is, the Empire isn’t great with technology.
Zombies—Shaun of the Dead
There are different rules in different zombie narratives, but most of them work similarly: in order to kill zombie, you have to decapitate them, or destroy their brains, usually through one massive blow to the head. This is true for Shaun of the Dead, leading to the use of axes, vinyl records, cricket bats, and even pool cues in the destruction of the undead. When there are too many of them, this method of destruction stops being quite so effective, but as long as you don’t let a hoard of them into the pub where you’re hiding out, you’re in pretty good shape. You just need to make sure your swinging arm is good to go, and get some Queen ready on the jukebox.
The Chitauri—The Avengers
Look, there are plenty of hive minds in SF that you can ruin by blowing up some central hub, but the Chitauri are special because destroying the hub doesn’t just leave them rudderless—it actually destroys their ability to function at all. Tony Stark sends a nuke from New York City to their mothership in another galaxy, it detonates, and every Chitauri soldier just crumples to the ground. That’s… one heck of a design flaw. It’s not like Independence Day, where you give the aliens a computer virus and mess up all their ships, but still have to deal with the leftover aliens inside those ships. This is a one-and-done scenario, provided you can find a nuclear bomb and a fancy portal machine to chuck it through.
Anyone Who Goes Up Against A.D. Walter Skinner—The X-Files
While Mulder was busy dropping his gun and Scully was being the greatest character of all time, Walter Skinner spent his time on The X-Files perfecting the art of The Punch. Villains? Punch. Superiors at the office who have betrayed him? Punch. Monsters? Punch. Aliens? Punch. Mulder? Punch. Disturbingly hot double agent Alex Krycek? Punch, then HANDCUFF. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you cross Skinner, or so much as glance threateningly in the direction of his pain-in-the-ass underling/precious baby Fox Mulder, Skinner will PUNCH and you will go down.
And don’t even think about glancing at Scully—she’s the one he respects.
Achilles—The Iliad
“But he’s not a bad guy,” we hear you say. Well, if you’re a Trojan he’s sure not your buddy, so he counts.
The OG of this issue, you might say, Achilles is supposed to be the greatest hero the world has ever seen. He’s just got one problem—his mom, who dipped him in the fancy god-power river, didn’t dunk the heel she was holding him by, resulting in his truly embarrassing weak spot. Sure, Achilles can do feats that most mortal men could never dream of, but if you tap his heel? Game over. We can’t even blame this one on being played by Brad Pitt that one time; he’s like having some super high-powered computer that crashes after coming into contact with a lil bitty virus. The only thing we can say on Achilles’s behalf is that particular tendon named after him is kind of the worst. It does give up on you if you overwork it even a little bit, so… maybe this isn’t really Achilles’s fault? Maybe his tendons just needed a better warm up that day. Even superfolx need to get their gentle stretches in before the big fights.
These are just a few of our favorites—what about you? Who are your favorite villains to TKO with ease?
You know, all manner of bad guys will tend to fall over and die if you drive a wooden stake through their heart.
@1 A more notable feature of Buffy vamps is their breastbone of tissue paper. Hard to kill most bad guys with a pencil to the chest.
@2 I’ve always wondered why Buffy didn’t just use wooden bullets. That’s how Sherlock Holmes dealt with them in The Holmes Dracula File
@2: This is true- it can be excused to some extent as an extension of Buffy’s slayer strength, but even vanilla mortals rarely seem to have difficulty driving whatever vaguely pointy wooden object is lying about straight through the heart.
Spoiler alert for The Hobbit. (highlight to see the spoiler)
Smaug.
If you’re good enough, and know what to aim for, a single arrow (or huge ballista bolt, if you’ve only seen the movie) can take down a dragon.
That counts. Right?
The wicked witch, in the Wizard of Oz. Hawk and spit, done.
Of course, in Buffy they sometimes got lazy with exactly where the wooden stake was going, so they killed vampires with a stake to the stomach instead.
Re: Achilles: “’But he’s not a bad guy,’ we hear you say. Well, if you’re a Trojan he’s sure not your buddy, so he counts.”
Actually, If you’re a Greek, he’s not really your buddy, either (with the exception of Patroclus). Achilles is a pretty bad guy through most of the Iliad. He spends the majority of the epic pouting over how Agamemnon was mean to him and stands idly by, watching untold numbers of his comrades getting slaughtered just to prove how much they need him, all for the satisfaction of his delicate ego. He’s the ultimate spoiled, entitled, narcissistic man-child. It’s only near the end, when Hector’s father Priam gets to him and finds a little spark of humanity and compassion in Achilles that we see his heroic potential.
@8: Yeah, Achilles sucks. Team Diomedes all the way.
Biff from Back to the Future..
Going in one direction, don’t forget Guy Gardener. In a rather different direction, the list gets rather longer if your name is Saitama and you follow a very particular fitness regimen.
@11: I’m not sure that Guy Gardner counts- standing in front of friggin’ Batman and daring him to hit you is more evidence of weakness of brain than anything else.
I feel that the Empire’s storm trooper armour needs to be mentioned here (keywords: Ewoks, slingshots)
@12,
That’s just typical villain stupidity, a very common trope in pulp and superhero fiction.
There’s a second one from Star Trek (TOS). I can’t remember the episode name, but the villain was a malign, super-intelligent computer virus-like thing that partly took over the computer. Kirk (or Spock? It’s been a long time) told the computer to calculate all the digits of pi, which was obediently started. This is a super-intelligent digital creature?
A high heeled shoe is the ideal weapon to use on Sontarans. Just wait until he starts monologuing, slip off your shoe, sneak up behind him, he won’t hear you, and stick the heel into the slot. Works every time.
Captain Kirk’s ability to render a foe unconscious with one karate chop to the shoulder was just as impressive (to little kid me) as the Vulcan neck pinch.
@14 The episode was “Wolf in the Fold” by Robert Block, it wasn’t a computer virus, it was a body jumping energy being that fed off fear & death, it happen to leaped into the computer because Dr. McCoy made the crew ‘high’ so they wouldn’t feel fear. The Pi gambit that Spock ordered was so the computer’s resources were tied up doing that and preventing the alien from doing any real harm with the Ship’s computer, so I don’t think that really counts.
In the old Battlestar Galactica shooting the Cylon fighters in space battle was like the first level of a 1980s video game for Galactica’s vipers. I don’t think they managed to hit anything through the entire series.
Apropos of very little, it never ceases to amuse me that Mr Brad Pitt actually won up with an injury to his Achilles tendon during the filming of TROY – it’s one of those little details that suggests somebody Olympian was watching the whole process and wanted to keep the cast & crew on their toes …
@3.wiredog: It strikes me that the Great Detective would have been much better off using a crossbow or some other sort of bow – so far as I know wooden bullets are much, much less effective.
Because I’m just that much of a folklore geek, it always bugs me when vampires immediately drop, burst into flames, or otherwise expire from a simple stake through the heart. The purpose of the stake is not to “kill” the vampire. It’s to keep them in their graves. The premise is that the earth has rejected them as unclean spirits, so you have to drive the stake through them and into the ground to keep them pinned down. If you want to finish them off, you have to at least decapitate them, and preferably burn their corpses.
At short range a wooden bullet, possibly with a strengthened tip, would be effective.
When I was in the Army we once experimented with firing a pencil out of an M-16 using a blank round to propel it. Got reasonable accuracy and penetration into a tree with it.
White Walkers (or Others for you book nerds). Just need a piece of reasonably easy to find volcanic glass.
@@.-@ Right about that. Seems that vampires in literature (and later, film), have gotten easier to stake. I seem to remember that in Bram Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing’s stakes were almost the size of baseball bats and needed a hammer to drive home–and were only used on dormant vampires, at that. By the time we get to the Peter Cushing – Christopher Lee movies, the stakes are about the size of tent pegs and could be driven in during hand-to-hand combat.
@19 – kinda hard to stay on your toes if your Achilles tendon isn’t up to par ;)
@20,
Wasn’t the (or at least one of) the folkloric methods to drive a stake through their heart, decapitate them, and bury them under a crossroads?
This is likely to work on far more than vampires.
@25: Yep, a crossroads is good for all sorts of supernatural shenanigans. According to some sources, just cutting out the vampire’s heart and burning it is sufficient. This was put into practice during the infamous New England Vampire Panic. My favorite remedy is simply wedging a brick into the vampire’ mouth. This wouldn’t necessarily keep them from wandering around, but it would prevent them from chomping down on one’s neck. That’s right, your traditional European vampire is not too bright. Really, they more closely resembled the contemporary walking dead-style zombie than the sexy, seductive vamps of popular literature.
One timely note: Vampires are often associated with disease outbreaks, so we might want to stay on our toes.
@@@@@ Vampire Slayers- I’m also a fan of some of the other methods of delaying, if not permanently defeating vampires- like stealing one of their socks, because they’ll delay their rampage until they’ve found it and put it back on.
Or their apparent compulsion to count grains or seeds flung on the ground. Really amused me when I made the connection with Sesame Street.
@princessroxana I’d thought a large box of bouncy balls…Tennis, or even better, the super pinkies I used to play with as a kid, and a ball throwing machine would be a grand way to mess up any number of Sontarans…Just set the machine to oscillate and lob at a convenient wall behind them, and watch the carnage.
@5 I mean, technically that was two shots over the course of several decades.
The Masters in the Tripods books had a weak spot on the face that the rebellion utilized to defeat them.
I cannot count the number of alien menaces that are vulnerable to water. A lot of science fiction treats it like some ironic twist, it’s vulnerable to water, ordinary water! Might have worked once, but SHEESH, is there a more common secret weakness in all of sci-fi? The Wicked Witch from Oz has already been mentioned, but there’s famously the aliens from Signs, two different alien menaces defeated by The Doctor (and another on Blake’s Seven), Dune’s Sandworms, an alien plant from Outer Limits, and an uncountable number of robots and cyborgs! Enough! I demand this cliche be given a rest!