The villain's journey from smug confidence to existential dread is the perfect metaphor for recursive functions gone wrong. First panel: "Look at my elegant factorial function!" Second panel: "Let me call it with 5, what could go wrong?" Third panel: "Watch as it multiplies its way down..." Fourth panel: "OH GOD THE STACK IS COLLAPSING."
The classic rookie mistake - forgetting your base case in recursion. The computer keeps calling the function deeper and deeper until it runs out of memory. It's like telling someone to look up a word in the dictionary, but the definition just says "see definition of this word."