Mook Lieutenant

"Send a detachment down to retrieve them. See to it personally, Commander."

"If my trusted lieutenant tells me my Legion of Terror is losing a battle, I will believe him.. After all, he's my trusted lieutenant."

—Evil Overlord List

It's not very leader like to give orders yourself when you're trying to rule the world. Whilst you leave the hunting of the MacGuffin to your champion and the creation of the world ending device to your Mad Scientist, who's leading your legions of terror? That's where the Mook lieutenant comes in.

The Mook lieutenant is the commanding officer of the evil army. He will be seen in the background to give orders, ask boneheaded questions about the weather controlling device and give the Big Bad someone to talk to when The Dragon is a man (or woman) of few words. Very rarely in For the Evulz, he's normally a career military man who views the heroes as rabble and does not question orders. Has a high mortality rate where failure is concerned. More often than not he will look exactly like any other Mook, except that whilst all the other Mooks are wearing masks, the Mook lieutenant will not.

"Lieutenant" here refers to the position of right hand man in general, rather than a specific rank.

Examples of Mook Lieutenant include:

Anime and Manga

• Naruto: Arguably, Black Zetsu to Tobi.

Film

• Star Wars:
  • Admiral Piett is Vader's right hand man throughout The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
  • Commander Cody serves Palpatine after his Face Heel Turn in Revenge of the Sith.
• In X-Men 2 Colonel Stryker has Lady Deathstrike as his dragon; the Special Forces under his command are lead by Sergeant Lyman.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: In the last film of the trilogy Lord Beckett promotes Norrington to Admiral to lead the forces of the East India Company; after his heel face turn, however he gives orders to Lieutenant Groves.
• Cutthroat Island: The British forces in Jamaica are led by Lieutenant Trotter throughout the film.
• The Lord of the Rings: With Sauron in offscreensville for most of the trilogy, the Witch-King of Angmar relies on Gothmog, Lieutenant of Minas Morgul, to lead his army at the battle of Pellenor Fields.
  • Earlier, Saruman uses Lurtz and Ugluk to lead his army of Uruk Hai.
• Goldfinger. Kisch, who commands the army of Mooks during the invasion of Fort Knox and performs minor minion roles before that.
• Avatar: Corporal Lyle Wainfleet
• The Indiana Jones films have a couple of examples:
  • Major Gobler in Raiders of the Lost Ark, to Colonel Dietrich. He carries out a variety of menial duties and later shows some hands-on initiative by driving the escort car during the truck chase himself, rather than being chauffeured like Dietrich and Belloq.
  • The chief Thuggee guard in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seen ordering all of the other guards around and personally whipping slave children, and personally fistfights Indy.
• Spaceballs Colonel Sandurz is a spoof of all those Imperial officers from Star Wars
• Sin City gives us a nameless leader in charge of the squad of cops who try to kill Marv and his parole officer. He is the only one with lines and is identified by the large eagle tattoo over his face.
• Sergeant Simon in The Movie of Super Mario Bros. First appears as just a booking officer at the police station, but later serves more proper Mook Lieutenant functions like being Koopa's flamethrower-toting bodyguard and reminding him that humans evolved from apes, not mice.

Literature

• In The Wheel of Time, the Myrddraal are part Mook Lieutenant, part Elite Mooks. Though much more physically powerful and intelligent than their Trolloc cousins, you'll generally find them commanding Trollocs (in general, you get one Myrddraal and a hundred Trollocs, a grouping which is called a "Fist") rather than fighting by themselves. Myrddraal in turn take their orders from the Forsaken, who work directly for the Dark One. Somewhat unusually for this trope, the two look nothing alike- Trollocs are hulking beast men, while Myrddraal look like palllid humans with smooth skin where eyes should be who generally wear Black Cloaks

Live-Action TV

• Farscape: Scorpius when on his peacekeeping command vessel discusses and gives orders to Captain Miklo Braca to give to the rest of his armada.
• Doctor Who: In the episode "The Sontaran Stratagem", General Staal has his army on the ground led by Commander Skorr. Who promptly removes his helmet when he arrives.
• In Power Rangers SPD, there are special, speaking blue Mecha-Mooks who command the standard silver ones. In Power Rangers Mystic Force, there are a few isolated incidences of lone Styxoids (talking, staff-wielding Zombie Mooks) leading Hidiacs (babbling, hatchet-wielding standard Zombie Mooks, though their acid-spitting power was a force to be reckoned with for about one episode.) but mostly those were a separate squad of Elite Mooks.

Tabletop Games

• Forgotten Realms sourcebook Cult of the Dragon introduced a necromantic spell "Undead Lieutenancy" which makes one intelligent undead command any lesser (by Hit Dice) undead that would heed the caster, and make them (within 60' radius) immune to Turn Undead unless the big guy is successfully turned.

Video Games

• Mal'ganis from Warcraft III
  • Morbent Fell and Rass for Ballnazar.
  • The Blademasters for Magtheridon.
  • Rage Winterchill for Archimonde.
  • Captain Thornby for Admiral Proudmoore.
  • The Naga sea witchs for Illidan.
• In Mass Effect 1, you encountered the unnamed NPC "Krogan Commander" on Feros who is the the leader of Saren's krogan and geth forces there.
  • Mass Effect 2 has a rather odd version of this in the form of The Collector General, who was at first thought to be the Big Bad. Like Saren before him, it was shown that the General was actually being controlled by the Reaper Harbinger the whole time. However, the General didn't command the mooks personally; rather, he acted as a conduit and mouthpiece for Harbinger to do the commanding, including possessing Collector infantry and turning them into People Puppets. True to the spirit of this trope, Harbinger ends up leaving the General to die in the exploding Collector Base after the General failed him.

Web Comics

• Prime Minister Jirix from The Order of the Stick
• Bruce Moriatos from Our Little Adventure

Western Animation

• ReBoot: Megabyte uses Hack and Slash to chase down Bob most of the time, and Herr Dockter for his evil creations. Lieutenant Chauncy is in command of his Army of infected Bionomes. He differs in looks from the other infected Biomes by the wearing of an Officer's cap.
• The Dreamstone: Sergeant Blob is the commanding officer of the Urpneys. Promoted in the very first episode after the previous one failed Zordrak.
• Shrek: The Captain of the Guards.
• General Traag, commander of Krang's Rock Soldiers from the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987