Behind the Science: Darius

Behind the Science: Darius Darius from Salem's Daughter is a pretty nasty example of a villain who wants control over the entire situation, not just the person he's standing in front of. His first approach to Anna sounds helpful. He knows she has unusual abilities, and he offers to teach her. But once she refuses, you see what that offer is really worth. He influences Jared, uses the resulting attack and death against her, and helps push the town toward executing her. Then he's there offering a way out. He is creating the emergency that makes his own offer more difficult to refuse. There is a recognizable human tactic underneath that. Somebody isolates you, makes your other options worse and then presents dependence on them as the solution. But Darius isn't limited to persuasion. The comic shows supernatural interference with people's minds. He can turn people into threats, and some of them don't properly remember what happened afterward. That isn't something I'd explain away as ordinary charisma or hypnosis. His physical survival is the other major problem. Braden shoots him repeatedly at the jail, but Darius is gone when the immediate struggle is over. Later, Braden destroys his head with a close-range gunshot at the gallows. If this were a normal human body, there wouldn't be a recovery scene to explain. Instead, the issue shows energy leaving Darius and entering Sheriff Timlin. The sheriff subsequently attacks people and identifies himself as Darius. That's the important distinction. We aren't just being asked to accept unusually fast tissue repair. The story is allowing him to continue through another body after the first has suffered catastrophic damage. Biology doesn't give us a mechanism for a person's identity to leave a destroyed brain, enter another person and take over. You can talk about memory, consciousness and how much we still have to understand without turning that uncertainty into evidence that possession is physically possible. Darius is operating under the supernatural rules of this story. The body can be damaged, but destroying that body doesn't necessarily remove the being using it. I also wouldn't take his claim that he's eternal as proof that absolutely nothing can ever defeat him. Villains make claims. What these issues establish is that Braden's increasingly violent attempts to kill him haven't ended the threat, and Anna can still feel his presence after the shooting. That leaves them with a genuinely difficult enemy. They have to survive the immediate violence while figuring out what they're actually dealing with. Meanwhile, Darius can keep using other people to get at them. The townspeople, the deputy and eventually the sheriff aren't just background characters around the fight. They're part of the danger he creates, which makes every straightforward attempt to stop him considerably uglier.