User blog:AustinDR/Dr. Alexander Thorkel (EP)

Probably will just continue making blogs about some of the effort posts I've done over at TV Tropes. Said candidate had been approved, and is listed under A to E of Monster/Film:

What's the work?
Here is my next candidate, this time from Dr. Cyclops. I had originally seen the candidate in question being removed from the YMMV page because it was an unapproved entry, so I decided to shed some light on this one. Dr. Cyclops is a 1940 science fiction film concerning two biologists receiving a request from one of their colleagues stating for them to come to his laboratory that is hidden away in the jungle. They don't realize what they had just gotten themselves into...

Who is he?
Dr. Alexander Thorkel is a biologist who had spent two years conducting research in a Peruvian jungle.

What has he done?
Eventually, he shows a slide that he had been working on to his pupil Dr. Mendoza. Mendoza is horrified by his mentor's lunacy and requests that he destroy the slide as he was "tampering with powers reserved to God."]] When he tried to shut down Thorkel's research, Alexander shoves his head through a tube, ergo exposing him to the radium stream.

Sometime later, he sends out a request to fellow biologists Dr. Mary Robinson and Dr. Bullfinch. They are also accompanied by Dr. Bill Stockton (a mineralogist) and Steve Baker, who made it sure to see that his hired mules were being treated well. Alexander greets the group enthusiastically, explaining how since his eyes were going bad, he needed one of them to identify a specimen underneath his microscope. Bill begrudgingly describes the specimen as being iron crystals. Delighted, Alexander thanks them for their trouble, and bids them ado.

Angered that they had been sent a thousand miles for nothing, the group decide to stake out at his home. Whilst they rummage through Thorkel's possessions, Alexander decides to show them what he had been researching on. He explains to them that he had been conducting research into how to shrink organic material. He also explains that he was mining for pitchblende -- an ore made out of uranium and radium -- in a deep shaft. After multiple failures, Bill's insight helped him to specialize his research. Without any warning, Thorkel imprisons the group in the radiation chamber, and turns it on. When they woke up, they realized that they were shrunken down.

Satisfied with his research, he informs the group that he had tested his shrinking ray on several animals prior to them, only for them to not last an hour. By all means, they should be honored. Bullfinch decides to negotiate with the deranged scientist, but he's only interested in measuring him. When he realizes that the shrinking is temporary, Alexander murders Bullfinch and goes to hunt the remaining members of the group down so that they wouldn't report him to the authorities. The group attempts to escape in Pedro's boat, only to be confronted by Thorkel again. Pedro urges his fiends to escape while he leads Thorkel away. Thorkel shoots him, and tries to burn the others out of the tall grass. Unbeknownst to him, Mary, Steve, and Bill secretly hid in his specimen box.

The group set up a gun that would shoot Thorkel once he went to sleep in his bed. However, he actually ends up sleeping at his desk, so they had to change their plan. They take his spare glasses as well as the ones on his desk. Alexander wakes up, and chases the trio into his mine shaft. As he was trying to slice at them with his knife, the plank underneath him gives way, thus causing him to desperately dangle from the rope. Steve slices the rope, and Thorkel plummets down the mine shaft.

Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
He has none. Now, as for the who Affably Evil thing...I don't buy it. True, Thorkel does as friendly with his guests when they first met him, but that immediately goes out the window when he imprisons them against their will, uses them as his new guinea pigs, and has no qualms with killing them. At worst, he treats it more as a minor annoyance. Towards the end, he drops the polite demeanor and shows that he was really a madman with a god complex.

Heinous standard
Big Bad, he sets it from the forced experimentation done to the group, to the multiple attempts on destroying them (whether it be poisoning them, burning them, etc), to committing three murders in a needlessly cruel way.

Conclusion
Unsure. Personally could lean either way with him.