User Name/Nick: Ryann
User DW: cornichaun
AIM/IM: cornichaun
E-mail: cornichaun @ gmail
Other Characters: just Zane
Character Name: Stephen Hart
Series: Primeval
Age: early 30s
From When?: The end of the series 2 finale, in which Stephen died.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Stephen is a hero. He will not hesitate to throw himself in dangerous situations if it means helping someone. He is brave enough to get over the reflex of fear when confronting a prehistoric predator. Even when he's in the wrong, he's usually
trying to do the right thing.
Item: A compass. Nice, good worksmanship, waterproof, extremely hard to break.
Abilities/Powers: Stephen is entirely human-normal in terms of powers. He is, however, extremely physically fit, very smart, and generally knowledgeable and resourceful. He has specific scientific expertise in matters of biology, the history of the Earth and the functioning of ecological systems with regards to evolution. He was a junior fencing champion and junior Olympic shooting prospect before he quit to go save the world. And he has generalized competence to expertise in like. Everything. Especially outdoorsy things. He's an expert animal tracker, and it can be assumed that he has competence in skills such as camping, hiking, fishing, diving, rock climbing, camping in strange and hostile environments, ice fishing, canoeing and kayaking, and more.
Personality: Stephen presents himself as a quiet, unassuming sort of bloke. He doesn’t move with any particular grace, doesn’t dress very nicely, tends to lean himself casually against things. His personality only starts to come out when he’s acting in his role as a kind of outdoorsman. When he’s tracking animals, he becomes all business, sharp-eyed, spotting every broken twig and imprint in the mud. He’s clearly very competent, smart, steady, not scared easily, willing to face down dangerous situations. He stays quiet until he has something to say, which is probably either something important or something sarcastic.
Stephen was pushed very hard when he was young. To him, and to his parents, achievement was success. He was an athlete from a very early age, training for a significant amount of time each day. It made him solitary and deeply committed, a thoughtful and quiet person. He loved the outdoors because it let him mix solitude with beauty. But the athletic competitions in the end started to feel hollow to him, so, over the objections of his parents, he stepped away from his Olympic ambitious and went to study natural history instead. Stephen wanted to save the world, in a little, quiet piece of himself that he wouldn’t expose to anyone else. He cared about the natural world incredibly strongly, more than he cared about the world of humanity. During this time in his life, he had quite a few adventures, including saving whales, responding to environmental disasters, tracking animals through the Amazon, and more. He traveled over a lot of the world, and worked for many different people, and while he made a lot of friends, he never deeply connected with anyone.
Stephen’s solitude finally broke when Nick Cutter and his wife Helen Cutter came into the picture. Both were professors, teachers of Stephen’s, and he became close to both of them. A protégé, of a sort. He was fresh and idealistic and trusting, and they were some of the first people to help him focus that into real, productive contributions. What ruined this was when Helen Cutter initiated an affair between herself and Stephen. This was undoubtedly an exploitative relationship. Helen was in a position of power over Stephen, and Stephen was naïve. She used his insecurities and his admiration for herself and for Nick against him, using careful affection and the withdrawal of the same to make him feel as though the faults in their relationship were all his. That Nick would hate him. She manipulated him and left him uncertain which of his emotions were real and what was the right thing to do. This situation was building to a breaking point, with Nick and Helen arguing constantly, when suddenly Helen disappeared.
Stephen was in a permanent state of tension, heartbreak and dread for the next year. He couldn’t share his mourning with anyone, not even Nick, and he was terrified of the relationship being uncovered. Eventually, the relationship was distant enough that Stephen could see how Helen had used him, but he couldn’t shake how much he cared for her. He would mentally justify the things she did. And he never told Nick. The result of the affair with Helen is that Stephen now has an extremely difficult time with intimacy. He’s shown in the series with a girlfriend of three years who has been off studying infectious diseases in a distant part of the world for more than a third of that time. He doesn’t seem to miss her or care particularly about her absence; in fact, he actually (deliriously, to be fair) asks out one of the other members of the team while they’re still dating. This is typical of Stephen: he keeps nearly everyone at arm’s length, preferring to keep his private life not only private but as nonexistent and shallow as possible. (When another teammate points out that he didn't give off the impression that he had a girlfriend, Stephen returns, "Funny. I didn't realize I was giving any impression at all." and cuts off the conversation.) Helen broke his heart. He never got over her.
After Helen’s disappearance, Nick Cutter became Stephen’s best friend. He was Nick’s lab assistant, and probably the only one who stayed close to Nick after Helen died. Their relationship wasn’t a particularly emotionally open one; they went after interesting animals, they probably had the occasional movie night, they went camping and sampled lab specimens and stayed up late grading papers. But they didn’t share their feelings. And it wasn’t just friendship, from Stephen’s end: he felt like he owed Nick, on top of the generally worshipful feelings he had anyway. He became Nick’s shadow, anticipating his needs and his thoughts. And he really didn’t dislike being that way. It felt just fine to him. (It’s worth noting, here, that Nick didn’t get over Helen either. Even eight years later, he doesn’t have anyone else in his life, and given a chance to investigate a phenomenon that might have explained Helen’s disappearance, he jumps at it. It’s likely that Nick depended as much on Stephen’s presence as Stephen did on Nick’s.) Stephen would do anything for Nick. On just a
glance from Nick, later in the series, Stephen plunges straight into an unknown anomaly, into an unknown era of the past, just because there might be a chance he could stop one of the soldiers from shooting Helen.
When the anomalies are discovered - tears in time, leading backwards into the distant past - Stephen ends up in a situation in which his abilities are really important: he is the one on the team who has expertise in dozens of little things that are suddenly relevant in this modern world. He helps dive to look for a prehistoric shark; he tracks a dinosaur through the Forest of Dean and saves the lives of a teacher and a schoolboy. Stephen adapts quickly to the changed circumstances and the new importance of his life. So quickly, in fact, that it’s likely this is what he was longing for the whole time. Stephen doesn’t love the outdoors because he wants to be flung into some distant past where people were more in tune with nature. He likes his truck and he likes guns, and cellphones aren’t bad, and showers and iPods are nice. But this is what he’s good at, and he wants more than anything for it, and for him, to be important. Even when he’s bitten by a giant centipede and nearly killed early on in the show, it doesn’t much deter him from flinging himself into dangerous situations. (Not openly, anyway; he deals with his issues concerning that very privately, as usual.)
Enter Helen, again. When Helen returns, she does so elusively. She has apparently been going through the anomalies and exploring the past for eight years, occasionally returning to the present but never contacting Nick or Stephen. She is manipulative and plays her cards close to the chest, and is shown to value the experience of time traveling more than general humanity. Nick vacillates between dismissing Helen and pursuing her, but Stephen argues for giving Helen the benefit of the doubt, even when she leaves Stephen for dead in a subway tunnel. ("She left you for dead, Stephen." "Maybe she thought help was on the way." "Maybe she didn't
care.") Again, he's still justifying Helen's actions to himself. When Nick finally rejects Helen, publicly, she maliciously outs the news of her old affair with Stephen and asks Stephen to leave Nick and come through the anomalies with her. Stephen, in shock, refuses, calling her a bitch.
This is the single most important development of Stephen's character in the whole show. It tosses his and Nick's relationship into confusion: Stephen starts distrusting Nick, especially when Nick's gun jams and Stephen is nearly killed by a velociraptor. Through they apparently make up ("You didn't go with her. That's all that matters"), they're never as close after that. Stephen, in fact, starts speaking up for his own opinions, publicly disagreeing with Nick and stating his reservations about what they've been doing in keeping the anomalies and the invasions of the past into the present a secret. Bringing everything into the open starts Stephen down the path of becoming a more independent person.
But then Helen ruins everything. Again. She shows up and starts to work on seducing Stephen, through such incredibly subtle means as breaking into his apartment and ensuring that when he returns he finds her naked in the shower. Also such means as planting the seeds of doubt in Stephen's mind about Nick, about the program, and about the people he trusted. But he holds her off and refuses to totally give in, instead making her talk to Nick about going public. The 'talk' never happens; Nick takes one look at Helen, and one look at Stephen, and fires Stephen on the spot. Here, finally, Stephen gives in to Helen: when they return home, she calls him "my poor Stephen" and says "he should never have hurt you like that" and this breaks Stephen's resolve entirely. Because that's the one thing he wanted to hear. He wanted so badly to belong to someone, and to be important, and to have his pain and his point of view acknowledged that he fell for Helen's manipulations against his better judgment.
In the end, Stephen sacrifices himself to save central London from a bunch of rampaging predators. He dies a gruesome death in the middle of said predators, as a meal they're fighting over. But this sacrifice isn't so much redemption as it is a way out. Stephen is trapped; when he finds out that Helen is the one behind most of the things that have been spurring his paranoia, he's furious and lost. His sacrifice is a way of relieving himself of all the burdens of guilt that he's accrued, and of getting himself permanently out of the situation of having to live with the situation around him. If he hadn't died then, it's almost certain that he would have found a way to run away.
In summary: Stephen is a hero who genuinely tries to do the right thing, but who gets caught up in other people's lives and lets himself be manipulated and subsumed in other people's goals. Because of this, he's sort of stuck at a level of emotional maturity that better matches that naive undergraduate that he once was. He's quiet, efficient and talented, with a wry, blunt sort of sense of humor. He doesn't believe he's worth being loved, but he wants to be loved more than anything, so he rejects anyone who ends up coming too close. He can be incredibly driven and determined, but it's never on his own behalf.
Barge Reactions: Stephen is pretty used to Weird. Dinosaurs started showing up in modern-day London; an interdimensional Barge is not totally out of the question. That being said, he'll probably be disoriented and bewildered for several days, maybe a few weeks, considering the very violent circumstances of his death. This will be a kind of afterlife for him, and by the time he's recovered from the shock of what happened, he'll know what to expect in terms of the varied people on the Barge. Though he'll approach everything with a vaguely-2007 paradigm, he'll keep an open mind and always adapt to the situation at hand. He can't afford to not believe the things that are happening, so he will believe.
Path to Redemption: n/a
Deal: He wants to know what the hell the anomalies are. Why they're appearing. What it will take to make them stop, or at least predict them and control the impact. When given the chance for a deal like that, there's no way he could resist actually getting the information - it could potentially help too many people.
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Primeval_characters#Stephen_HartSample Journal Entry: http://tlvgreatesthitsdw.dreamwidth.org/59891.html?thread=8559859#cmt8559859Sample RP: Stephen Hart is the sort to run thirty miles a week. He ranges far and wide from his flat. He finds himself out in the woods, endlessly seeks the parts of the Earth that are still wild enough to satisfy him. (Before the anomalies, that is.)
And now he's on a Barge, and he can span the whole place in fewer minutes than he has fingers on one hand.
It's hard not to feel like a creature in a zoo. He has to shrug off the feeling of being watched
constantly, not like a stalking predator but like a large, overwhelming presence. It's not any particular psychic sense, just the feeling of a hunter, and it might very well be his own damned imagination, but it's impossible to ignore. He runs around and around the deck, lopes up and down the stairs without really getting out of breath, even takes a
treadmill, though he loathes the things. And he's just running in place like a gerbil in a wheel, like any second he's going to feel the cat's claws sinking into his skin.
He slows to a light jog, then a walk, outside on the deck. Leans with his palms on the rail. The moment of quiet is a mistake. It lets memories press in again, crowding close. He remembers claws - was it claws? - raking through his guts. He remembers screaming, and starting to fight, reflexively, because he couldn't hold still. He remembers Helen's kiss and the feel of her body, and the mix of all of that makes him nauseated, suddenly. But instead of running again, he drops down, sitting back against the rail, and holds his head in his hands.
Once, a long time ago, he spent a month in a retreat where they meditated six hours a day. Stephen found it maddening after one day, unbearable after three, and then, finally, calming after a week. His body had changed during that time, and his mind, too, shifting into a calmer, slower mode. He thinks that that time is what now allows him to be as patient as he is. He reaches for that calm, turning through the mantra in his mind, trying to think of the starscape above instead of the violent memories within.
He isn't really successful.
But he's successful enough.
He stands, slides in the iPod earbuds, and keeps running.
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