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A Big Bad is a jeopardy, usually a character with evil designs (though it may also be situational, e.g. a comet heading towards the Earth), that is behind all the other bad happenings. The Big Bad can have effect across a number episodes, even an entire season. If a show has a series of Big Bad jeopardies, they can function like a series of Monster Of The Week that take more than a week to finish off.
The Big Bad may be confronted frequently, but is too powerful to finish off until the last episode of the sequence. To keep interest up and provide something for the good guys to defeat, the Big Bad may work through Evil Minions and will almost certainly have The Dragon protecting him.
The term "Big Bad" was coined in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It was characteristic of Buffy's Big Bads for their identity or nature, or even the fact that they are the Big Bad at all, to remain unclear for considerable time.
It is important to remember that Big Bad is not a catch-all trope for the most important villain of any given story. The Bad Ass leader of the outlaw gang that the heroes face once or twice is not the Big Bad. The railroad tycoon who turns out to be using the gang as muscle is the Big Bad.
The term is sometimes expanded (especially in Role Playing Games terminology) to "Big Bad Evil Guy", or "BBEG".
Evil Overlord, Diabolical Mastermind, The Chessmaster, and often Manipulative Bastard are specific types of Big Bad.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Buffy Big Bads were, in order:
- Season 1 - The Master
- Season 2 - At first it looks like Spike is the Big Bad, but it turns out to really be Angelus
- Season 3 - The Mayor
- Season 4 - Adam
- Season 5 - Glory
- Season 6 - At first it looks like Warren, Jonathon and Andrew, "The Trio", are the Big Bad, but it really turns to be Evil Willow.
- Season 7 - The First Evil
- In the 2005 Doctor Who revival, the Arc Words for seasons two and three ("Torchwood" and "Mr. Saxon") refer to villains operating behind the scenes who were confronted in the season finale. The arc word for season one, "Bad Wolf", was, understandably, assumed to be a Big Bad by fans, but proved not to be.
- In the original series, the Master was introduced as the Big Bad of Season Eight. However, pushing him to the front of every story almost resulted in instant Villain Decay.
- Supernatural's Big Bad for the first two seasons was The Yellow-Eyed Demon aka Azazel. Lilith emerges as the new Big Bad in Season 3.
- Star Trek Voyager had two Big Bads over the course of the series:
- For the first two seasons, the ship was hounded by a sect of the Kazon, although the exact Big Bad is debatable: their leader was First Maje Jal Culluh, but The Mole, Seska, had center stage much more often (even going on to menace the heroes a couple more times post-mortem).
- A few seasons later, the Borg took over as Voyager's main adversaries, and the role of Big Bad was passed on to the one controlling them (or personifying them, or whatever was going on there), the Borg Queen.
- Silik of Star Trek Enterprise was almost the Big Bad of the first two seasons, but being that he was being controlled by Future-Guy, he fell short. The whole story was never really concluded because the Temporal Cold War didn't really go anywhere and wasn't very popular.
- The Xindi story of season 3 spent most of the time trying to figure out who among the Xindi Council was reasonable and who wanted to blow up Earth no matter what, or the Big Bad. Eventually every Xindi species but the Reptilians started to side with the Enterprise instead of the Sphere-Builders.
- Every season of Power Rangers has had its own Big Bad, gradually evolving from "sends/grows the monsters" to more complex and modern Big Bad figures.
Video Games
- Video games usually centre around some form of combat, and to do this it needs bosses. An ideal candidate for the role - especially the Recurring Boss or Final Boss - is, of course, a Big Bad, and so games often feature a whole host of the things. Big Bad bait-and-switch is incredibly common, especially in the Mind Screwier kind of plotty game, and it's not uncommon to have to fight one Big Bad possessed by another, or several at once, or one who morphs into another (see One Winged Angel and Bishonen Line). Some of the greatest Big Bads in popular culture were spawned out of video games -- for instance, Pyramid Head (the Implacable Man from Silent Hill 2), who became a meme, and System Shock's SHODAN.
- Xenosaga: The Xenosaga game series (as well as Xenogears) makes particular use of Big Bads, specifically by using bait and switching the big bads multiple times. A routine of the Xenosaga games is that once a Big Bad has been "dethroned" from their role, their connections to the main characters are deepened and explained. This happens with Albedo and Margulis, among others.
- The Final Fantasy series is famous for its Big Bads. Some of the most well-known:
- The Ratchet And Clank series gave us a nice selection of Big Bads as well:
- Supreme Executive Chairman Drek in the first game
- Captain Quark in Going Commando
- Dr. Nefarious in Up Your Arsenal
- Gleeman Vox in Deadlocked
- Emperor Otto DeStruct in Size Matters
- Emperor Percival Tachyon in Tools of Destruction
- Most Nasuverse works have one.
- Roa/SHIKI (whoever is dominant at the time) in Tsukihime.
- Wallachia, then White Len, in Melty Blood.
- Kotomine and Gilgamesh in Fate Stay Night (they didn't start everything, but are lying in wait).
- Araya Souren in Kara no Kyoukai.
- No matter who starts the plot in each original Mega Man game, you can guarantee that Dr. Wily is behind it in some way. Same goes for Sigma in the X games (with one exception), and eventually, Dr. Weil in the Zero games. Even Battle Network does this, with the villains of the 2nd, 4th, and 5th games being connected to-you guessed it- Dr. Wily.
- The Kurain Village Arc of the Phoenix Wright series eventually revealed that it had a Big Bad of sorts in Morgan Fey, whose schemes to get her daughter Pearl installed as the "Master" of the Kurain Spirit Channeling technique spans two games and strikes the main characters from beyond the grave. She also has her daughter Dahlia as a Dragon of sorts.
- Beiloune in Okage: Shadow King
 , who turned out to be surprisingly sinister.
Western Animation
- Vilgax, from Ben 10, is a textbook example. He's wounded grievously in the pilot, drives the plot of most of the first season from behind the scenes, and finally shows up in person in the first season's finale, bigger, meaner, smarter, and tougher than anything Ben's faced before. From there on out, he's usually put somewhere between appearances that keeps him from getting involved... He's also an Implacable Man and a Determinator, so he HAS to be kept out of the picture for other plot arcs to happen.
- The Big Bad of the Cadmus Arc of Justice League Unlimited was constantly being teased. At first it seemed Amanda Waller was the mastermind, then Lex Luthor, until it was finally revealed in the next-to-last episode as Brainiac.
- This was far from the only example in the DCAU. Batman Beyond had Derek Powers, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who soon became known as the supervillain Blight, as its Big Bad for the first season.
- Superman The Animated Series featured an ongoing arc of Superman's struggle with the intergalactic conqueror Darkseid, and his increasingly daring designs on Earth. (By contrast, Lex Luthor's schemes were almost purely episodic in nature.)
- Even Ra's al Ghul in Batman The Animated Series arguably qualified, being introduced in the final moments of one episode, and following up on it later with a cataclysmic two-parter.
- Teen Titans followed a Big Bad formula similar to Buffy:
- Fire Lord Ozai from Avatar The Last Airbender, usurped the throne from his older brother, deliberately disfigured his son and kicked him out at age thirteen, and is the lead suspect in his wife's mysterious disappearance. A real piece of work, all right.
- Megatron in almost every incarnation of Transformers, except when Unicron appears.
- Generation 1: Led the Decepticons on Cybertron and constantly tried all sorts of evil schemes to steal energy from Earth. Since these plans tended to fail, the writers eventually resorted to an Enemy Mine plot every other episode to avoid Villain Decay.
- Beast Machines: succeeds in conquering Cybertron and ruling over a planet of mindless, sparkless drones. All the happens before the series begins. During the series, he absorbs every spark on the planet and somes within a millimetre of godhood. Yes, godhood.
- Armada: L Eads the Decepticons and gets his servos on the three most powerful minicons in the universe and would probably have derstroyed the Autobots if Unicron hadn't forced them into an alliance.
- Energon: Rallies the Decepticons into once again fighting against the Autobots, then hijacks Alpha Q's plan to restore his home planet and instead manages to successfully revive and, for a time, control Unicron. Oh, and he reformats Scorponok's and Demolisher's sparks to make them less moral and more loyal to himself.
- Transformers Animated: His body was destroyed in the pilot, leaving him a head in a scientist's lab. Hooked into the lab's computers, and with the right words to Professor Sumdac, he's working at getting a new body, while arranging the construction of an army, and killing the Autobots... and he's not doing too badly. He gets better about half-way through the first season.
- WITCH had Evil Overlord Phobos in season 1, who was succeeded by Nerissa, a Chessmaster and former Guardian, in season 2.
Anime
- Dragonball Z had at least one a season: Vegeta, then Freeza, then the Androids, then Cell, then Buu in all his myriad pink forms.
- The series Monster Rancher actually had a group of overarching villains called the Big Bad 4.
- Objection: Moo was clearly established as the Big Bad of Monster Rancher (hell, it even says so in the opening theme song!). The Big Bad 4 are closer to being the Quirky Miniboss Squad of the series.
- Naraku from Inuyasha more or less personifies this trope.
- Most action anime tend to revolve around this concept.
- As do most ongoing Magic Warrior Magical Girl series, Sailor Moon for example has:
- First season: Queen Metalia with Queen Beryl as her Dragon
- R: (Part One) The Makaiju and the Aliens
- R: (Part Two) The Death Fantom
- S: Pharaoh 90
- Super S: Queen Nehellenia
- Stars: Chaos/Sailor Galaxia
Film
ComicBooks
- Darkseid
- Dr. Doom has a big habit of being this, as does the Kingpin.
- Krona not only is the indirect cause of all of DC's Crisis Crossovers (long story), but also ''fought both the JLA and the Avengers, rallying all the bad guys to his side to help defend his fortress of evil that was made from Galactus' caracass.
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