Ultimate Movie Bad Guy: Yoda

Who is the worst villain in the movies is tough to judge, but as far as shear scale of misery few can compete with Yoda from the Star Wars series.

For those not familiar with this obscure series of six films, numerous books and who knows how many spin-offs, it features a self-righteous leader of a cult movement called Jedi, named Yoda.

In Episode 1 of the series it is shown that Yoda and the Jedi run a shadow government that can overrule the will of the peoples elected representatives in the republic. They even send, "Peacekeepers" to rule on disputes across the galaxy.

With the republic being run by the shadow government of Jedi, the Senate falls into corruption with the Senators feeling that since the shadow government runs everything anyhow they might as well take whatever they can get out of the government.

After seeing how the Jedi are taking the power away from the people, Palpatine starts a campaign to counter-act their force on the galaxy and starts interfering with their "Peacekeeping" missions.

This brings about the wrath of Yoda, who won't stand for anything to balance out his power.

In the next two Episodes, Yoda devotes all his resources to hunting down the mysterious Darth Sidious leading to battles across the galaxy. This hunt is only an excuse to build a large force to get the galaxy to obey his will, as Sidious is actually his next-door neighbor, Palpatine. A fact Yoda had to know as he could sense the Dark Side of the Force anywhere in the galaxy.

His plans backfire on him when Anakin Skywalker gets fed up Yoda's tyrannical cult, that preaches against any type of compassion and instead asks its followers to, "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose" and choose the cult over love and family.

With Anakin's help Sidious frees the galaxy of the oppressive Jedi rule.

Rather than just replace the Jedi with the Sith, Sidious works for 20 years to restore the power to the people by turning the galaxy into a loose Confederacy of Planets giving the local governors more power thus more power at the local level.

He realizes the drawback to this type of government is that Governors can turn into warlords and threaten the security of their neighbors so the Galactic Government needs to have an overwhelming force to stop any planet or group of planets from threatening others. So he builds a temporary fleet of warships to maintain order.

Knowing that the temptation for the military to intervene and micro-manage the affairs of planets when it shouldn't he wisely makes this fleet expendable as shown by the fact that the old republic's fleet was well painted with fine attention to detail, but Sidious's fleet just had some gray primer splashed on them.

His real goal was to have the fleet dismantled and replaced by a few Death Stars. Ships capable of destroying entire planets. By only having these Death Stars enforce the peace it would prevent Governors from massively abusing their powers, yet would be too unwieldy to get involved in the day to day operations of the local governments, leaving that up to the people.

Under a system like that a religion like the Jedi could flourish and encourage people to take its teaching to heart, while discouraging it from having just one spiritual leader. But Yoda was such a control freak he would rather see the galaxy plunged into the Dark Ages than not be under his thumb.

In his exile Yoda used his network of Wookie spies, to recruit the galaxy's most dangerous outlaws and sent his right hand Wookie, Chewbacca, to recruit Luke Skywalker to his cause.

He learned to use Sidious's methods of having the Imperial Fleet hunt down one ship making the citizenry, in this case the Ewoks, turn against them.

He used Luke to get Anakin to flop-flop on his support and betray Sidious, a plan he knew would work as Anakin will betray any one in power.

This leads to the destruction of the Central Authority, which would lead to anarchy as the local governors would be free to attack their neighbors and the Imperial fleet set loose to go rogue and join with whomever they felt like.

The galaxy would be reduced to a feudal system of individual rulers of planets attacking each other for decades if not centuries until the war torn planets had enough and would turn to anyone who offered them security, even if they had to give up their freedoms. Letting the Jedi establish their old rule again.

So as far as an individual villain inflicting misery on others to achieve his goal, Yoda wins hands down as far as pure scale of the misery he inflicts on others. Sending countless trillions into conflict just to satisfy his cravings for power make Yoda the ultimate movie Villain.