Rereading IDW Sonic. I've noticed that every one of Doctor Starline's Big Plans have gone basically exactly the same. It's like he's following some kind of failguy checklist, which would look something like this:
- Implicitly through all other steps: take for granted that everything's just going to be perfect and you'll totally succeed without a hitch on your first try forever, and that everyone will behave in exactly the way you want them to. Get surprised whenever this does not in fact happen, even though "people not behaving in exactly the way you want them to" is your entire villain-motivation.
- Accomplish a bunch of prerequisites for your Big Plans on your own (getting all the Chaos Emeralds to give to Eggman, stealing DNA from Tails and getting Belle's data in order to create Surge and Kit, etc)
- Gather allies by just sort of showing up out of nowhere and toadying up to them. (The toadying was actually sincere with Eggman, but.)
- Work together with your allies to bring the Big Plans to fruition. Inadvertently and unknowingly, alienate everyone around you, because you have no understanding of people or how they work.
- Get your ass kicked once your alienated allies decide that they no longer need you, because you tend to form alliances with other villains, and Sonic villains tend to have a fairly limited number of ways to deal with people they don't like. Important: you must not see this coming -- again, because you have no understanding of people or how they work. (As an aside, Starline has slept through character A saying "let's kill him now" and character B saying "better idea: let's wait until we've gotten what we want out of him, and then kill him", on two unrelated occasions with different sets of characters.)
- Ponder the problems and things that went wrong in the previous steps, fail to see the forest for the trees, make one (1) incremental change to how you operate, and decide that you've Learned Your Lesson And Will Never Fail Again. Get started on a new Big Plan and return to step 1.
And he made a snide remark about what he called the Sonic Cycle. As if there wasn't a really obvious Starline Cycle there, to.
... Of course, with his Surge and Kit plan, he only got as far as step 5 before he freaking died. Still, I'm not convinced Starline is gone for good. I feel like the trauma-brain-ghost Surge got when she was wearing the Dynamo Cage had to have been foreshadowing something.
