Hidden Agenda Villain

""You'll never get away with this! By the way, just what exactly are you trying to get away with?""

- Totally Spies

The inverse of He Who Must Not Be Seen. In fact, this villain's appearance may be the only thing about him or her that is seen. His agenda, his goal, his target, his motives—all secret. We're shown his face, we know his name, we see what he does and how he operates, but we're never told why. He's after the MacGuffin, but what's he planning to use it for? He consistently sends Mons and Mooks out to kill the hero, but why? It's rarely ever as simple as taking over the world (rarely, but one shouldn't say never).

Note that this does not apply to the occasional episode-long secret plan. True Hidden Agenda Villains have a hidden agenda for an entire series or arc. If he ever "discusses" it with his minions or partners, expect The Omniscient Council of Vagueness.

Don't bother trying to decipher his hidden agenda; sometimes even the writers don't know. They're playing it safe until they come up with something good without having to Retcon. If and when an explanation is revealed, it may involve a Luke, I Am Your Father. Note, no matter what happens, it's probably exactly as planned.

Compare with the Enigmatic Minion, which is a just as mysterious underling or lesser villain working for - or possibly against - a more comprehensible Big Bad. Or perhaps not. If the agenda is so hidden that the other characters don't even know there is a villain, or if they do have no idea who it is, see Hidden Villain. See also Outside Context Villain, whose hidden agenda is only part of the menace. Compare Motive Misidentification. Contrast with Ambiguously Evil.

Anime and Manga

 * Bleach has Shukuro Tsukishima in the Lost Agent arc. He was so enigmatic that there fans kept debating about the mechanics behind his ability.
 * Chevalier from Kiddy Grade, but its played with for the whole show. Is he the secret Big Bad? Is he a good guy all along?
 * Choji Suitengu of Speed Grapher is perhaps a variant of this. At first glance, he seems to have an obvious agenda; to control the world by both becoming the man on the throne of the world's greatest Mega Corp and by enticing as many wealthy, powerful figures into his ultra-depraved fetish club as possible. Even the members of the Roppongi Club recognize this as his plan. But it turns out his real plan is
 * Yu-Gi-Oh!: Noa, the Big Bad of the Virtual Nightmare Arc, didn't reveal the reason for his grudge against Seto Kaiba or his relationship to Seto and Gozaburo until near the end.
 * In addition, Anubis from The Movie, whose motivations are never revealed at all.
 * The Japan-only novel finally comes clean with Anubis' motive;
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The demonic Duel Monster Yubel hid its villainous actions under the guise of revenge for being abandoned by Judai and a generic want to have him all to itself for most of the season, its . Also, Kagemaru's plans for the Sangenma in Season 1 aren't revealed until the final duel.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Rex Godwin, whose true agenda is so well hidden that the both the viewer and the other characters are constantly forced to revise their opinions of whether or not he's actually a villain. At first, he looks like a fairly standard Affably Evil Chessmaster type of character. Then it turns out that  Then the situation is complicated by the revelation that   And then, finally, it turns out that
 * SEELE in Neon Genesis Evangelion is one example where the secret plan.
 * Well, in the broadest sense perhaps, since
 * Noa from the Galaxy Angel gameverse.
 * Fei Wong Reed in the manga of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle was so tight-lipped about what he was doing that the Anime kept getting it wrong when they Overtook the Manga and the series had to go back and Retcon.
 * Common trait of anti villains such as Fate Testarossa and Wolkenritter in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. After or during the penultimate battle their agenda is revealed and they are promtly befriended. After which they all beat up a really evil Big Bad.
 * Kabuto of Naruto is a particularly interesting example of the trope, as his motivations and true plans are seemingly revealed several times over the course of the series, only for circumstances to change. At first, he was Orochimaru's Enigmatic Minion...who turned out to be completely loyal to him. Then, he turned out to be a Brainwashed Manchurian Agent of Sasori's...except that Orochimaru had broken his programming long ago, and his loyalty to Orochimaru is completely genuine. Now that Orochimaru is dead, he appears to be teaming up with Madara...except that he's also leaving a very obvious trail for the Leaf ninja assigned to track him straight into their secret lair. Is it a trap, or is he going for an Enemy Mine?
 * Akatsuki itself was much the same for a long time. They were attempting to gather the Bijuu, that was a given. But it wasn't until several years after their introduction that any solid plan was revealed, and even then the ultimate goal of said plan is in fact different between explanations.
 * In retrospect this makes sense as the members of Akatsuki all had wildly differing agendas from the start. The leader flat out acknowledged this early on and said he would tolerate it as long as their agendas didn't conflict with the stated goal of Akatsuki (to gather the Bjuu).
 * In Code Geass, protagonist Lelouch's Evil Overlord father, the Emperor of Britannia, is set up as the ultimate villain nearly from the get-go, but aside from vague hints and ominous foreshadowing, his motives aside from megalomania and promoting social Darwinism remain a mystery until nearly the end of the series. Likewise, Lelouch's apparent Evil Counterpart, Prince Schneizel el Britannia, isn't even clearly defined as being a villain or not until late in the series. His actual agenda remains hidden until three episodes prior to the end.
 * Schniezel is actually even closer to a Villain with Good Publicity, Until he.
 * Despite being a central character for three out of four seasons, Xellos's true motives remain...a secret.
 * The majority of Chrono Crusade (particularly the manga version, although the anime definitely invokes this trope as well) hides Aion's motivations, with Chrono trying to avoid explaining why they have a conflict with each other and Aion knowing that he's enigmatic and loving every minute of it.
 * Fate Averruncus in Mahou Sensei Negima. Currently planning to save the world. And also destroy it. And also help war orphans. Huh? Plus something about Asuna's forgotten past and apparently disliking his name enough that Nodoka needs to die for it. Pick and choose your motives here, folks. And we still don't know what Chao really wanted.
 * Kurt Godel is even worse, as he actually explained himself to Negi, who still isn't sure what Kurt wants. Or whether Kurt is even actually a villain.
 * And now we know what Chao wanted:.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist's Big Bad and even then technically nothing is revealed about him or his goals.
 * The agenda of Gundam AGE's villains is so hidden that they are initially named as the "Unknown Enemy". They are attacking colonies in a somewhat predictable pattern, but why?
 * Johan Liebert in Monster. Even after the series ends, a lot of what he was actually trying to accomplish is still open for debate,
 * In an episode of Hell Girl, an innocent nurse is sent to Hell by a stranger. It is never revealed why he did this and why he's willing to pay the hefty price of going to Hell himself to damn a seemingly innocent woman.

Comic Books

 * One Hundred Bullets has damn near everyone working for their own unknown goals. More often than not, when they talk about their plans for the future, they talk in inscrutable riddles that, if you're lucky, will make sense in the context of future issues. You'll have to read between the lines to fully grasp the implications of the plot.
 * Mr. Sinister from X-Men is often like this, with no one being aware of the goals behind his villainous plot of the week. For example one time he went through the trouble to get a sample of Rachael Summers DNA and then, did nothing with it.
 * A possible way to view The Joker. It is never made clear what his past and goals are as he constantly contradicts himself. This makes him even scarier.

Literature

 * Littlefinger of A Song of Ice and Fire is clearly gunning for something, but as he's an absolutely pathological liar with a high-functioning but severe case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, it's not exactly easy to make out. The only fairly clear part of his agenda is the possible Fatal Flaw, and even that might be an act.
 * Lampshaded in the fifth book of The Banned and the Banished—the main characters didn't realize the villain had an agenda.
 * The hyper-advanced alien Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End arrive in Earth's orbit and, over a few decades, end all armed conflict and introduce technologies that increase living standards worldwide, all the while refusing to explain their motivations. It turns out that  Whether or not the Overlords play a villainous role is perhaps a matter of opinion.
 * We don't find out until the last few CHAPTERS of the SEVENTH BOOK why the Trustees betrayed the Architect in Keys to the Kingdom. We also find out who precisely backstabbed the Piper, why the Will cursed the Trustees, whether or not it was the real Big Bad, what Sunday was up to this whole time, and in the last chapter (sans epilogue) why the Architect imprisoned the Old One. Now THAT'S a long set-up.
 * In Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History, the Wild Machines' true motive for wanting to destroy the world and erase future history isn't revealed until the final climax, and comes as a total shock to both Ash and the reader.
 * Iago's last line in Othello flaunts that he has a hidden agenda...and you will never know what it is.
 * The apparent current Big Bads of the Dresden Files universe are the Black Council. We've seen some of their members, we know some of their methods, and we've seen Dresden scuttle some of their plans. We still haven't the faintest idea what their overall agenda is, though it's hard to imagine what plan has "become a god" as an intermediate step.

Live Action TV

 * The Cylons in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica Reimagined were said in the title crawl to "have a plan", though whatever it might have been was nearly impossible to judge from their actions, which included various attempts to destroy the human race outright as well as an interbreeding program and one attempt at forming a bilateral government. That there were apparently multiple Cylon organizations with differing agendas working against each other only complicated it further. The series is now complete, and we never did find out what the hell they were after.
 * Though you can make a pretty good guess:
 * Benjamin Linus from Lost. His love for playing mind-games with both his enemies and his allies clouds the issue still further, as do the varying levels of villainousness with which he is depicted.
 * "The Company" from Heroes: Daniel Linderman, Bob Bishop, and Angela Petrelli make this look easy. Further complicated by the appearance of another Company (Pinehearst), apparently founded when broke off from the previous one.
 * As was only recently revealed in Supernatural, we haven't even begun to learn what
 * As revealed in Season 4, And boy,does it work. See Magnificent Bastard for Azazel's plan in depth
 * In Star Trek: Enterprise, "Future Guy" directed agents in the "present" to commit various acts in order to advance his goals in a "Temporal Cold War". Exactly what goals he was trying to advance was never explained. The writers admitted that they themselves had no idea who Future Guy really was or what he wanted.
 * The Star Trek Novel Verse has recently provided answers, though.
 * The Silence from Doctor Who. They were apparently responsible for the events of series 5 without actually appearing until the series 6 opening, and we're no closer to learning why they'd want to, or how they pulled that off in the first place. Nor do we know.
 * Assuming they did that first one at all. It does seem very beyond their technology, the methodology involved is very, very different. Of course, the Arc Words are Silence Will Fall.
 * It seems that their agenda has been revealed, more or less, by the end of series 6.
 * Gatehouse of The Shadow Line. He's the series's main antagonist but who he works for isn't revealed until the penultimate episode, and even after this his true goals remain mysterious until the finale's last few scenes.
 * Agravaine from Merlin. He is trying to sabotage Arthur's reign, despite having genuinely fond memories of Igraine (his sister, Arthur's mother) as well as a prime position as #2 in Arthur's court. He scathingly calls Uther "old friend", suggesting a history that has not yet been revealed. He is working with Morgana, even though he seems to find magic distasteful. He also seems reluctant to harm Guinevere (and is in fact, rather creepily fascinated by her) when Morgana demands that they assassinate her. No one really knows what he's up to.
 * Including the writers.
 * Moriarty on Sherlock apparently likes to blow people up, break into high-security places, and drive people to suicide simply because he's bored. That is, if we can trust what Moriarty says...
 * On Leverage the Italian is this in season three. She has a lot of behind-the-scenes power (she can keep Nate out of jail and in Boston after he has escaped a Massachusetts state prison), and has blackmailed the team into taking down the world's most powerful criminal banker. We know she wanted Moreau out of the way. What we still don't know is why. She could be anything from a Knight Templar looking to see him arrested to a rival Big Bad scheming to take his place.
 * In the Diagnosis: Murder episode "Rear Windows '98" we never learn what the killer's motive was.

Radio

 * Dr. Blackgaard on Adventures in Odyssey was revealed to be plotting to get the land Whit's End was built on even back to the distant flashback when Whit saved the then-rec center from being torn down. Moreover, his ultimate goals were not revealed almost until the very end.

Tabletop Games

 * The Warhammer Fantasy and 40k god Tzeentch is supposedly working on some inscrutable endgame, to which he has innumerable GambitRoulettes running at all times, often seeming to work against each other. It has been suggested a few times that the plotting might be the objective itself, since as a god of chaos it wouldn't be much fun if he won and there was only his own will. Another suggestion is that his plotting has become so complex that it's self-defeating, and Tzeentch himself has lost control of his Gambit Roulette.
 * Newer material suggests that because Tzeentch is change, he can no more stop plotting than he can end his own existence, because that is precisely what would happen.
 * In Mage: The Awakening, while not all archmasters are necessarily villainous, hidden agendas are fairly par for the course, especially regarding their Imperium Rites. Not only does utilizing mysterious and circuitous methods of achieving them make them metaphysically easier, keeping the specific agenda hidden from other archmasters makes it less likely that they will employ retroactive sabotage with their own counter-rites.

Video Games
"The patterns are there, buried in the data."
 * Metal Gear Solid: It takes 4 games and about 80 hours of play to finally understand what Ocelot was doing all the time. And he appears about 1 to 2 hours into the first game and apparently runs the entire show.
 * The heroes spent some time chasing after Exdeath / Exodus in Final Fantasy V without having the faintest clue what he was up to - and he even berates them for trying to stop him without knowing what he was planning. As it turns out,  But since he wanted to do this so he could gain control of the Void and conquer / destroy everything, it wasn't that ambiguous after all.
 * Mercilessly parodied in No More Heroes, in which, a character given precious little foreshadowing except in the manual (and in ), suddenly appears out of nowhere. After the supposed final opponent Dark Star makes a ridiculous Luke, I Am Your Father pronouncement, Jeane kills the man from behind before any fight takes place, and she does so by punching him through the crotch no less. As it turns out, has had a grudge against Travis all along, but unless you can capture video and play it back slowly (or have Internet access and see the clip on YouTube), you'll never know: she explains that the details are too gruesome and that they might drive the game's rating up even further ("What if it gets delayed? You don't want this to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?"), so she only agrees to divulge them through a brief fast-forward sequence where every revelation prompts a stunned reaction from Travis, but the revelations themselves are perfectly unintelligible (save for at the end, when Travis unhelpfully summarizes that ).
 * Well, almost perfectly unintelligible...you can get hints of stuff, mostly involving serious Squick.
 * In Chrono Trigger, Magus is the villain for a good portion of the first half of the game, since the heroes are lead to believe it was he who created Lavos. After being defeated at his castle and accused of creating Lavos, he informs the heroes he was only summoning Lavos to the year 600 AD, not spawning the beast.
 * What, exactly, Kun Lan is doing in Killer7 is never truly revealed. It is merely hinted that
 * A strange example of what may be a Hidden Agenda Villain, or maybe a Hidden Agenda Hero can be found in the High Men race of strategy game Age of Wonders. They're listed as Pure Good-seems obvious. They're masters at fighting the Undead, and aggressively attack other evil races-fine. They're unusually friendly with the humans. Fair enough. They're so piously righteous that they make even the game's main good guys nervous-hmmm... and what, exactly, have they come to do? You only find out in the epilogue, and let's just say that a Keeper who leaves the dwarf-elf-halfling coalition to join the High Men will face a bittersweet ending at best...
 * The mysterious Man Behind The Beast in Blaz Blue is apparently working toward The End of the World as We Know It, but no one knows why (or, indeed, if that's his aim at all). Guess we'll have to wait for now.
 * That the G-Man has avoided mention this long only goes to show how well his agenda is hidden.
 * Heck, we still have no idea if he's a villain, a hero, or something far removed from either.
 * Hel's plan in Valkyrie Profile Covenant of the Plume gets no explication whatsoever. In one ending a character suggests she was just stirring up trouble For the Evulz, but this character has no way of knowing for sure. It is a reasonable theory that she, but this is conclusively proven either.
 * Alex, in every game in which he has appeared.
 * Resident Evil's Albert Wesker managed to keep his true objective hidden for the first 4 and a half games. He was a special forces police officer and secretly a top researcher for Mega Corp Umbrella. When, it becomes apparent he has another motive. Soon, we discover
 * Kessler's motives only become apparent right at the end of In Famous. He's got control of a huge organization of soldiers, but doesn't aim to take over the world. He's been researching the Ray Sphere, but doesn't seek superpowers for himself, since he already has them, nor is he really trying to change the world, despite that unleashing that technology has certainly changed it. None of his lectures have the usual villainous rant; he says he's tired, and that he honestly hopes Cole will kick his ass when the time comes for them to confront one another.
 * In the first Mass Effect, Saren is identified as the bad guy less than an hour into the game but the question of why he's working for the Reapers isn't explained for quite a while. As for his ultimate goal of acquiring the "Conduit", you don't find out what it is and what it does until the very end-game.
 * The Reapers themselves are much the same throughout both games. They come back every 50,000 years and wipe out all sapient organics. Why? It's not until the end of the second game that we get the answer that.
 * As of Mass Effect 3, it turns out there's even more to it than that..
 * The Illusive Man is also this. In Mass Effect: Retribution, he proves himself capable of lying to Aria's face. That is, of course, after he says this to the player:


 * Flemeth saves the PC and Alistair from the bloodbath at Ostagar in the first Dragon Age and even sends her daughter with them. At first she claims that the Blight threats her too, but her real intentions aren't revealed until much later in the game, depending on what order you'll play certain regions.  And going even further in the game
 * In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the Evil Vizier's plans are never revealed throughout the entire game until his last words ("I could have been... immortal."), and even then, it's not clear how he wanted to achieve that goal. Thanks to the Timey-Wimey Ball in Warrior Within, he's back in The Two Thrones, and achieves immortality quickly into the game.

Web Comics

 * The still unnamed ghost from A Girl and Her Fed - who we've seen, but is (probably intentionally) hard to identify due to the art style - who was responsible for setting the Pocket President program in motion. It's been stated that the PP's purpose was to eventually spark another American Civil War... but the question of why - let alone how, given the PP's tendency to turn it's bearers into into depressed zombies or Ax-Crazy psychos - has left even the protagonists' ghostly allies baffled.
 * Hereti Corp from Sluggy Freelance. While they engage in a few bits of more explicable evil, their primary goal involves doing something with Oasis and Dr. Steve's base lab. Like most everything else surrounding Oasis, however, it's shrouded in mystery.
 * Almost. Their ultimate goal was almost certainly taking over the world, or at any rate to acquire power. They even gave the Aylee project priority over the Oasis project for a time. Dr. Schlock, however... He may have just got stuck in the role of, but many think there may be a more satisfying explanation for what he's been doing, making his an agenda hidden even from.
 * The Order of the Stick: The three directors of the Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commission; we know that they want to unite the fiend races, and that the (apparent) reason they made a deal with  was to   as part of their larger Gambit Roulette (which apparently also involves the Gates. Beyond that, we know nothing of their long-term goals).
 * Actually, one panel during their conversation with  has them talking about their ultimate goal to conquer the Upper Planes, but it isn't clear if that's the plan they're working on now, and if so, how the Gates play into that.

Web Original

 * The Necromancer of the Whateley Universe. The heroes have tangled with him several times, but they still don't know what he's after, why he's gathering Plot Coupons, and what he wants to do with them. Given who he deals with, it'll be bad.
 * In Survival of the Fittest, Danya's agenda is so well hidden that even most of the handlers don't know what it is, let alone the characters. This is a bigger deal than it sounds when you take into account that the handlers are the ones who write the plot. After five years and (almost) three versions of the game, with a fourth on the way, only a few hints have been shown.
 * Slender Man. Maybe.
 * Mechakara, the first major villain of Atop the Fourth Wall. For months we watched him occasionally pop up at the end of a video with Linkara remaining oblivious, until the Wham! Episode that explained everything.
 * Invoked with the Gunslinger, who appears happy to talk about his motivation, but after defeating so many other supervillains, Linkara is in no mood to hear it and just shoots him until he runs away.
 * The Gungan Council has featured several enigmatic villains. Two high ranking Imperial, Xyra and Ayreon, are mysteries even to their own peers and both their ultimate goals are shrouded in mystery. What Darth Apparatus wants has always been assumed to be power, yet whether it's for power's sake or some other end goal has never been explained in detail.
 * In Marble Hornets, The Operator, the Masked Men, and totheark (who may or may not be one or more of the Masked Men) all have inscrutable goals. The Operator is generally considered to be an Eldritch Abomination, and may not have a goal that humans can comprehend. It's debatable whether some of them can even be called villains, as the biggest indication of their malevolence is acting incredibly creepy. The most unambiguously malevolent character, and even his goals, outside of are a mystery.

Western Animation

 * Beast Wars has several:
 * Tarantulas first and foremost. His origins, goals, and even whether or not he's sane are all open for interpretation. Any more explanation would be meaningless out of context, but a good example would be an instance in which he returns to the other Predacons after what's implied to be a decent period of lurking in the shadows on his own, and in the same breath, both defects from Megatron's crew and offers his assistance in dealing with an alien structure that's central to the episode's plot. When the incongruity of this is brought up by Megatron, Tarantulas's explanation is simply: "I have my reasons!"
 * Megatron plays this role somewhat, with his true intentions carefully masked by a series of other plans, any one of which could take priority... It's often unclear how much he had planned from the start, how much was backup plans, and how much was simply improvisation. It takes a cunning villain indeed to play mind games with Tarantulas and come out on top.
 * Ravage, Blackarachnia, and even Quickstrike dabble in this, to boot.
 * The writers of Teen Titans confessed they at first had no idea what they would make Slade's plan in Season 1, explaining why the viewers, let alone Robin, had no idea either. Come to think of it, what Robin was meant to DO was never really specified either. The one thing he stole was meant for him anyway. And how Terra's running everyone out of town benefits him is never mentioned either.
 * Seeing how Terra curbstomping the Titans resulted in him having total control of the city with his robot armies goose-stepping through the street, the benefit to him seems quite obvious. The real question is where he was intending to go from there. Slade is the God of this trope.
 * In the original season of Jackie Chan Adventures the main protagonists know that Valmont and the Dark Hand are after the talismans, but they don't know that said talismans are meant to bring Big Bad Shendu back to life. In this case, the audience knows the intentions of the villains but the protagonists don't.
 * Grodd in the third season of Justice League Unlimited. He brought together the supervillains of the DCAU into one combined force, came up with a plan for granting invulnerability to all of them, blackmailed Lex Luthor...and what was his ultimate plan?
 * Vlad Masters often does this in Danny Phantom. The first major instance is getting the Skeleton Key. Neither the heroes nor the audiences know why he wanted it. It's revealed in a later episode. The same episode then shows ANOTHER hidden agenda; namely Vlad obtaining the Fenton Ecto Suit, The Fright Knight, the Ring of Rage (which he didn't get), and the Crown of Fire. While the former is shown in a later episode, the rest unfortunately is never explained due to the show being cancelled.
 * Also Youngblood in "Pirate Radio". He pops out for the first half of the episode, doing various villainous tasks that makes absolutely no sense and doesn't seem to connect. It's all revealed in the second half.
 * Nerissa from the first half of the second season of WITCH. . Before she got anywhere close to attaining this, though, her plot was Hijacked by Phobos, a much more straightforward Evil Overlord.