Characters / Hatchetfield Paranormal Phenomena

Main Character Index | Main Hatchetfield Residents | Hatchetfield Families | Other Hatchetfield Residents | Hatchetfield Outsiders | The Black and White | Paranormal Phenomena

The paranormal, extraterrestrial, and interdimensional phenomena that plague the various realities of Hatchetfield.

For those confirmed to be originating in the Black and White or otherwise directly affiliated with that realm or its Lords in Black, see The Black and White.

The Witchwood Forest

As a Whole

The Witchwood Forest

Appears in: "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" | "Watcher World | "Jane's a Car" | "The Witch in the Web" | "Honey Queen" | "Perky's Buds" | "Abstinence Camp" | Nerdy Prudes Must Die

The forest which covers half of Hatchetfield Island, source of many of its legends and mysterious occurrences.

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• Don't Go Into the Woods: Any forest called the Witchwood certainly invites this idea. As with Hatchetfield itself, what sort of horrors lurk there varies from timeline to timeline.
• Eldritch Location: While not mentioned in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals or Black Friday^note at least not outright — it's likely to be the last place Becky saw her husband Stanley, the Witchwood is a strong focal point of many of the stories in Nightmare Time, and seemingly the reason Hatchetfield Island itself is such a sinister place. As we learn in the first season finale, every tree in the Witchwood is a trapped soul, meant to form a web to contain the Muck-Witch and other evil magics. In Nightmare Time 2, it becomes clear that all plants grown in the Witchwood or soil taken from it have sinister magical properties. The mayor of Hatchetfield has also been quoted as ominously stating that the Witchwood is "as big or as small as it needs to be".
• Enchanted Forest: Though certainly not in a cute way.

The Hatchetmen

The Hatchetmen

Played by: James Tolbert (judge)

Appears in: "The Witch in the Web" | "Perky's Buds"

"The innocent must suffer. The guilty must be punished. You must taste blood to be a man."

A mysterious group of people responsible for creating the Witchwood and possibly the town of Hatchetfield itself.

For established characters confirmed members of this order, see (spoiler warning):

• Families ^note Bob Metzger

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• Ancient Conspiracy:
  • Their roots go back to the founding of Hatchetfield in 1824, if not before. It's implied that they're responsible for founding the town of Hatchetfield in the first place — if the name "Hatchetfield" comes from them then it's always had a much darker meaning than people gave it credit for.
  • The Judge in Hannah's flashback to 1824 is implied to be one of the founders of the Hatchetmen who initiated the plot to bind the Witch's soul with magic after executing her — and if his attitude toward the matter can be taken as representative, they are very much a Knight Templar organization not to be trusted.
• Arc Words: "The innocent must suffer. The guilty must be punished. You must taste blood to be a man."
• Benevolent Conspiracy: Seems like they must be one if they're still operating in the present day — although their MO, like PEIP, makes it seem like they may only be benevolent in comparison to the Lords in Black they oppose.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Not everyone planted in the Witchwood went willingly, but the Hatchetmen saw it as their duty to carry out the Human Sacrifice either way.
• Burn the Witch!: The fact that the Judge in Willabella's flashback was already talking about "binding her soul with our sacrifice" implies that the seemingly disorganized Torches and Pitchforks mob that executed Willabella Muckwab had already formed the plan to keep her from resurrecting via the creation of the Witchwood and were the first generation of the Hatchetmen conspiracy.
• Knight Templar: The Judge who sentenced Willabella in 1824 very much had this attitude, full of religious zeal and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that's very scary to watch, even if it's justified by Willabella's child-murdering ways.
• Meaningful Name: "Hatchet man" is a slang term meaning someone who does dirty, ugly work on someone else's behalf so that their superior's hands can stay clean.
• Senior Creep: The 1824 Judge who possibly founded the Hatchetmen may or may not be actually evil, but he's definitely very scary, all the more so for being a physically decrepit old man who nonetheless exhibits absolute moral certainty.
• Shout-Out: The Judge's words in 1824 are Sam Raimi's "three rules of horror" which, prior to their being spoken in an actual Hatchetfield story, were said to be the Hatchetfield saga's guiding principles. "Perky's Buds" reveals them to be something of a motto or oath for the present-day Hatchetmen.
• Shrouded in Myth: Little is known about them besides their planting of the Tree-People in the Witchwood. It's been implied that they're not any less evil than the Church of the Starry Children they oppose, and their mannerisms suggest they're motivated by a form of Christian fundamentalism.
• Would Hurt a Child: They kill “Those born with the Gift,” child or otherwise.

Wooly-Foot

Wooly-Foot, the Hatchetfield Ape-Man

Played by: Joey Richter (Konk) | Jeff Blim (Chumby)

Appears in: "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man"

"Konk. I'm... Konk."

^{Click here to see Chumby, the real Ape-Man} 

He eats meat, he eats grass, he gets tons of ape ass
And honestly, why do you care?
If you wanna know how the legend himself began
Ask the Ape—this is so stupid, he's not even real—Man!

A local Hatchetfield legend. Lucy Stockworth has sunk her life savings into trying to find him.

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• Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: When Konk decides to propose to Lucy, he shows up — according to the stage directions — in a full tuxedo, but because this show is being streamed live and Joey Richter didn't have time to change his clothes, he instead shows up putting on only a bowtie over his bare chest like a Chippendales dancer.
• Actor Allusion: Joey Richter playing Konk the Ape-Man feels a bit like an allusion to his role as Grunt in Firebringer — if nothing else, he's already done a nearly-nude shirtless role and had "nothing to lose". It becomes even more of an allusion when Konk proposes marriage to Lucy in a tuxedo, considering Joey had proposed to Lauren Lopez in Real Life only four months earlier — and Joey even uses Lauren's real engagement ring as a prop for this scene.
• All Cavemen Were Neanderthals: Played with. Konk is described as the "missing link" between modern humans and Homo erectus; he speaks with stereotypical Hulk Speak, has the clumsy social graces of a Wild Child, and has Super-Strength, but is surprisingly visually indistinguishable from a human. Because it's a con job and that's what he is.
• Beard of Barbarism: Joey Richter's "quarantine beard" is early Foreshadowing he plays the Ape-Man. When it turns out he's a fake, he even complains about Hidgens making him grow it to help sell the illusion, and says that if he'd had the same Porn Stache he did in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals he and Lucy would already be married. Of course, Jeff Blim, who plays the actual Ape-Man, has always had a beard like this, which may have been a bit of even more subtle Foreshadowing for the fans.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The black-furred Wooly-Foot is Hatchetfield's local version.
• Coconut Superpowers: While Konk being portrayed by a naked Joey with a scraggly beard turns out to be accurate to what he looks like in-universe, Chumby is just portrayed by Jeff wearing a vest.
• The Con: Prof. Hidgens turns out to have had an absurdly involved plot to present an ordinary naked human man as the famous Hatchetfield Ape-Man, to manipulate Lucy Stockworth into marrying him, upon which he planned to murder her and take her fortune.
• Contrived Coincidence: When Hidgens and Ted are discussing their scam, Hidgens remarks that the plan was for the Ape-Man's name to be Chumby, but Ted ad-libbed that his name was Konk. When Lucy meets the real Wooly-Foot, he gives his name as Chumby — meaning that despite not believing that the Ape-Man exists, Hidgens somehow guessed his name.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Ted/Konk, who, in some of the purest Black Comedy Starkid has done yet, chooses to "die as Konk" rather than let Lucy learn anything about the sleazeball human he's been up till now.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Konk/Ted's last words to Lucy are a Silent Whisper inaudible to the audience, possibly a blooper due to Joey Richter accidentally muting himself while acting out his Taking the Bullet scene. The script reveals they were meant to be "Lucy... very... beautiful..."
• First Girl Wins: Well, first — and real — Ape-Man wins.
• Gentle Giant: Lucy's repeated line about the Ape-Man is remembering his "kind eyes" and "I know he would never hurt me".
• Hulk Speak: The way Konk the Ape-Man speaks — he's apparently learned English very rapidly but still incompletely in the past few months. It's an act, from Ted imitating stereotypical Hulk Speak "cavemen" on TV, which explains the many inconsistencies in just how well he knows English. But then the real Ape-Man turns out to talk the same way.
• Human All Along: Konk the Ape-Man was, in fact, just Paul's co-worker Ted, naked with a scraggly beard.
• Human Subspecies: The "Ape-Man" is mostly a misnomer, and more accurately described as one of these, since he's obviously far more closely related to humans than any other existing species of ape. At least that's how Hidgens describes him, in order to pull off his con. The jury's completely out on what Chumby's biology is like.
• Informed Attribute: The Ape-Man is supposed to have "thick, woolly black fur", but when we meet him almost all of his fur has been shaved off, minus the hair on his head and face, making him look remarkably similar to a human with a scruffy beard. Hilariously, what information we're given from the narration tells us that Konk/Ted looks exactly like a naked Joey Richter in Real Life, whereas the real Ape-Man, Chumby, looks almost nothing like his actor Jeff Blim, who portrays his thick coat of fur by just putting on a fuzzy vest.
• Mayfly–December Romance: If there really is just one Ape-Man, then he must be centuries old. Regardless, this particular Ape-Man was obviously an adult when Lucy was a little girl, and there must be some degree of age gap in their relationship — but, as usual, no one seems to care that much.
• Naked People Are Funny: The Ape-Man, of course, wasn't wearing any clothes when it saved Lucy's life when she was a kid, and still isn't now after Prof. Hidgens shaved him and Lucy can now see everything. Bizarrely, no one ever brings up the question of whether she should be training him to wear clothes — he is, after all, an Ape-Man, not a man. This gets even funnier when Ted tells us that his dick is hard most of the time when he's around Lucy, and is yet another reason that this seems to be a script that was written to be impossible to actually film or stage.
• Noble Savage: The Ape-Man storyline plays out like a classic one of these narratives, like Tarzan and The Jungle Book.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Hatchetfield Ape-Man, like many cryptids, is either just known as "the Ape-Man" or by his local nickname, "Woolly-Foot" (apparently to contrast him from the Bigfeet they have in other states). His name turns out to be "Konk". Which is something Ted improvised on the spot and has a Seinfeldian Conversation with Prof. Hidgens about, who insists the Ape-Man's name would be more along the lines of "Chumby". He turns out to be right.
• Perma-Shave: Hidgens initially tells Lucy he shaved the Ape-Man to more easily dress its wounds. As Jonathan points out, if this happened thirteen months ago his fur would've grown back by now, forcing Hidgens to hastily add that he's had to keep on shaving him to apply ointment because he was developing a rash. Jonathan doesn't buy that either. He was right.
• Perverted Sniffing: Konk engages pretty blatantly in some of this on Lucy when he first meets her, and follows it up by trying to lift up her skirt. But that's okay because he is, after all, an Ape-Man and doesn't know better. Which just makes it all the more amazing to find out he's everyone's favorite Lovable Sex Maniac Ted.
• Precision F-Strike: How "Konk" gives away his true identity — Lucy, being a proper English Rose, has never included swear words in her English lessons to him and yet when Hidgens reveals he's a fraud he tells him to "go fuck himself".
• Real After All: This being a series with a whole lot of paranormal stuff in it, it's probably not a huge spoiler to confirm that Lucy is right and Wooly-Foot does exist.
• The Real Remington Steele: The Deus ex Machina that saves Lucy at the end of the story is the real Ape-Man appearing and saving her life again just as he did when she was a girl. He looks a lot more convincingly apelike than Ted/Konk did, although he does talk the same way Konk did, and his real name turns out to be the name Hidgens preferred for an Ape-Man, "Chumby".
• Shirtless Scene: One of the biggest laughs of all of Nightmare Time that got a huge crowd response was Joey Richter suddenly appearing actually shirtless to play Konk the Ape-Man. (The script says he's fully nude, but since he's still seated at his desk fans will have to decide whether to imagine him as such or not.)
• Shrouded in Myth: The Hatchetfield Ape-Man, to the point where no one even really agrees on his physical description. (The Ending Theme is pretty much a joke about this fact.) Basically Lucy, who isn't even from Hatchetfield, is the only person in the world who seriously thinks he exists. Including Professor Hidgens, much to his chagrin in the end.
• Super-Strength: One of the few things everyone knows about the Ape-Man, that he's strong enough to dismember a human effortlessly. Tragically fails to be true of Ted/Konk, but very much is true of Chumby the real Ape-Man.
• Walking Spoiler: "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" is loaded with plot twists about Wooly-Foot's true nature.
• Your Size May Vary: In-universe. As with many cryptids, no one seems clear on whether the Hatchetfield Ape-Man is the kind of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti that's substantially larger than a human, or whether he's a stooped, stunted Frazetta Man who's closer to the size of a Real Life chimpanzee. It turns out Konk is right in the middle, around the size of an average human man. Because that's what he is, of course — and the size of the real Ape-Man, Chumby, remains ambiguous.
  Chorus: He's five-foot-ten or he's four-foot-eight! ^note Joey Richter is six-foot-two.

Tree-People

The Tree-People

Played by: Mariah Rose Faith (Casey) | Corey Dorris | Jon Matteson | James Tolbert

Appears in: "The Witch in the Web"

Hannah: "They all had a touch of the gift. Some of them didn't want to be planted, but the Hatchetmen did it anyway. Their roots made a web."

Spirits who haunt the Witchwood, planted by Human Sacrifice across the centuries by the mysterious Hatchetmen in order to imprison the Witch in the Web.

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• And I Must Scream: The fate of the Tree-People is to be bound to a tree and trapped in a gray, unchanging afterlife for eternity, until their consciousness and memories fade away. Many saw this as a necessary sacrifice they were willing to pay to stop the Witch from ending the world; many didn't but were forced to pay it anyway.
• Army of The Ages: They're a collection of ghostly people in everyday dress from different time periods, ranging from the present day all the way back to the 1820s, arranged in rough chronological order of when they lived.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: It's questionable whether the creation of the Witchwood would've been ethical even if all of the souls in it were volunteers — but some of them weren't, and were murdered by the Hatchetmen anyway.
• Dark World: Miss Holloway gets a shock that when she sees the Witchwood through Hannah's eyes in Nightmare Time, it looks the same except all the trees have been replaced with people "planted" in the ground — each individual tree in the Witchwood is haunted by the ghost of someone sacrificed in the woods long ago.
• Disco Dan: In Nightmare Time Hannah and Miss Holloway know they're traveling in the right direction because as the ghosts get older their clothes get more "dated". One particular ghost is called out, Casey, a teenager who died in 1986 and whose Fun T-Shirt has the logo of a pop star "the world has long forgotten".
• Don't Go in the Woods: The Tree-People literally give this warning to Hannah in "The Witch in the Web". It's implied that the reason so many people meet an unfortunate end in the Witchwood is because of the influence of Willabella Muckwab's vengeful ghost trapped inside it by the Tree-People.
• Enchanted Forest: The Witchwood Forest is haunted by spirits and was intentionally created this way by magic, in order to seal Willabella Muckwab's soul inside and keep it from escaping.
• The Fog of Ages: Hannah says that once she goes back more than a century or so, the Tree-People no longer remember anything about their lives, not even their own names.
• Human Sacrifice: All of the souls bound to the Witchwood were sacrificed because they had "a touch of the Gift" that made it possible for their souls to survive bound to trees. Not all of them went to this fate willingly.
• Leaking Can of Evil: The Witchwood has successfully prevented Willabella Muckwab's soul from resurrecting or reincarnating itself for almost two hundred years — but it hasn't been enough to keep her from reaching out and influencing the outside world, especially through dreams. Without Webby acting through Hannah's songs to help them, the Tree-People warn Hannah that they aren't strong enough on their own to stop Willabella breaking through and possessing her.
• Night of the Living Mooks: They're a huge army of ghosts who spend their afterlives as part of a metaphysical can sealing an ancient evil — not all of them by choice.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Hannah can see them even when she's awake, and sitting around "talking to trees" is one of her daily pastimes, much to Duke's dismay. They seem to know who she is and are generally friendly to her.
• Soul-Powered Engine: The "roots" of the souls "planted" in the Witchwood make a "web" that holds the Witch at bay; as the ghosts fade away the Witchwood must be periodically replenished with new Human Sacrifices.
• The Trees Have Faces: Hannah can communicate with the trees in the Witchwood while awake; when she's asleep and in Nightmare Time she can fully see them for who they originally were.
• Volumetric Mouth: When they start screaming in terror as the Witch escapes and takes over Hannah's mind, their mouths stretch out to enormous size, exposing their unnaturally glowing innards as their screams fill the air.

Psionic Nighthawks

Checker-Tailed Nighthawks

Played by: Joey Richter (Ezekiel) | Dylan Saunders (Issac) | Nick Lang | Jon Matteson | James Tolbert

Appears in: "Perky's Buds"

Ezekiel: "We will care for you. Nourish you. And you will use your opposable thumbs to grow weed. This is the contract."

The checker-tailed nighthawk is a small crepuscular bird, an endangered species which only inhabits Hatchetfield and is one of the island's most iconic features. This entry is concerned with a population of them who develop a taste for Emma's cannabis plants which, being grown in the Witchwood, grant the birds telepathy and other psionic powers.

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• A God Am I: Ezekiel develops this mindset in the climax when he finds he's developed powerful telekinesis.
• Adorable Evil Minions: They're pretty darn cute...at least until they enslave you.
• Airborne Mook: As the Metzgers will tell you, the entire population of the species all at once is plenty dangerous without the psychic powers.
• Biblical Motifs: The two nighthawks who are named in the story are given the very biblical names of Ezekiel and Isaac (though it's spelled "Issac", an endemic misspelling that anyone named Isaac will be painfully familiar with), and Ezekiel's mannerisms are generally those of a gentle preacher, leading a flock and making commandments.
• Cavalry Betrayal: The nighthawks save Emma and Ziggs from the Metzgers only to enslave them to grow marijuana for them.
• Continuity Nod: They get one in Nerdy Prudes Must Die, which reveals the mascot of Hatchetfield High School is called Zeke the Fighting Nighthawk. The name Zeke is traditionally short for Ezekiel, the name of the leader of this flock.
• Enmity with an Object: Emma and Ziggs, out of desperation, fashion a scarecrow. It's actually a pretty successful distraction; the nighthawks aren't afraid of it, but are enraged by its lack of conversational skills.
• Erudite Stoner: Having been granted their sapience by magic weed, the birds mix in a bit of stoner lingo with their unsettlingly formal manner of speech.
• Evil Evolves: As they continue consuming Perky's Buds, the hawks go from being able to speak telepathically, to reading other's minds, to controlling Ziggs's body. Finally, Ezekiel develops telekinesis powerful enough that he can wield an entire armory of guns at once.
• Feathered Fiend: Innocent-looking little birdies (despite the cool name, nighthawks are more akin to swifts than to actual hawks) who see nothing wrong with slavery and murder.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The nighthawks in "Perky's Buds" are played to perfection by a multitude of tiny prop birds, which are in equal parts adorable and unsettling.
• Zerg Rush: They're tiny little birds, but they're a coordinated flock of thousands.

Lumber Axe

Lumber Axe, the Mad Woodsman / Little Jerry

Played by: Nick Lang

Appears in: "Abstinence Camp"

Mentioned in: "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man"

Narrator: "No forgiveness. Not in these woods."

He's got the size that humbles
He's got the hands that rumble
He's got the steps that crumble ground
Oh, the sound!
He's got the time for trouble
He's got the mind of a psycho
Hе's bound to stab you in the back
Oh, he's the axе man
Oh my god, he's the axe man!

A giant demonic woodsman, said to roam the Witchwood around Camp Idonwannabang, where he murders any camper who fails to honor the camp's abstinence pledge.

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• Ax-Crazy: As must be said for just about any character wielding an actual axe.
• Badass Normal: While not normal by any stretch, in combat terms he's simply a really huge man. Despite this, Word of God has cited him as the most powerful earthly being seen so far in the Hatchetfield series, that is to say, of every entity seen as of the end of Nightmare Time 2, only the Lords in Black themselves could beat him in a fight. He's probably lost this status as of the introduction of the ghost of Max Jägerman, whose complete unstoppability is a major plot point, but this still means Lumber Axe could defeat Uncle Wiley or Miss Holloway despite not having any magic himself.
• Breakout Character: Lumber Axe was the most promoted part of Nightmare Time 2 before its release, and multiple members of Team StarKid hype him as their favorite addition to the Hatchetfield mythos.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Having grown up in the woods around Abstinence Camp and raised by its counselors, abstinence is the most important thing to him. Anyone who is lustful, in his eyes, must be murdered.
• Early-Bird Cameo: His name is first mentioned by Donna in "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" as just one of Hatchetfield's local paranormal legends, alongside the Witch in the Web and the Ape-Man himself.
• Expy: He's the Jason Voorhees of Hatchetfield's "nerdy prudes" spiritual trilogy (Max Jägerman being the Freddy Krueger equivalent), being a summer camp slasher villain and a deconstruction of the classic Sex Signals Death trope.
• Rapid Aging: He was born human, but being raised in the Witchwood and fed with its plants, he grew to adult size at a rapid pace, and into a deformed eight-foot demon shortly after.
• Sex Signals Death: As befits a summer camp slasher villain, taken to the logical extreme — he haunts an abstinence camp, thus this is his actual motivation for his murders.
• Self-Made Orphan: When he discovers that his parents had him out of wedlock, he keeps to the values they taught him and kills them both.
• Super-Senses: It's unclear if he can hear everything so keenly or if his supernatural senses are specialized, but the sound of anyone undressing, kissing, touching, or otherwise being intimate is always described as echoing across the woods to reach his ears.
• Super-Strength: Eight feet tall and grown in the Witchwood, Lumber Axe's strength is superhuman, enabling him to not only effortlessly murder people with axes, but also rip full-grown trees right out of the ground.
• The Voiceless: He vocalizes only in grunts and growls, despite clearly being able to understand others' words and taunt them silently.

CCRP

Executive Kilgore

Executive Andrew Kilgore, Manager-in-Chief of Sector-19

Played by: Jeff Blim

Appears in: "Time Bastard"

"Here, I am judge, jury, and at times, to my great satisfaction... executioner."

The cyborg ruler of CCRP's Western Hemisphere division in the year 2104.

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• Achilles' Heel: Unfortunately, the replacement of most of his vital organs with cybernetic parts hasn't been a strict upgrade — it includes an arrangement of tubes on his face necessary for him to breathe that are unfortunately pretty vulnerable to being ripped out. Apparently he's mostly used to torturing helpless, restrained victims rather than actual combat. (This is, of course, a Shout-Out to Bane.)
• Best Served Cold: Kilgore tells Ted that he's been patiently waiting for his revenge against him for a full one hundred years.
• Coconut Superpowers: Hilariously, Kilgore's nature as a horrific Cyborg barely clinging to life after over a century is represented just by sticking a few pieces of aluminum foil to Jeff Blim's face (and putting a filter over his voice).
• Cold Ham: In contrast to Jeff Blim's other character in "Time Bastard", Tinky, who's more like a red-hot deviled ham.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Cyberpunk version of this trope, exaggerated into being an inhuman Cyborg supervillain.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Ted shoots him with a Disintegrator Ray that seems specifically designed to inflict this on the target, causing them to slowly crumble to dust from the bottom up, taking the head (and brain) last, in agonizing pain the whole time.
• Cyborg: A more classic type than the new synthetic humanoid his company is inventing in 2104 — he was born human, has lived for over 120 years, and his body is a cobbled-together mess of accumulated replacement parts and upgrades.
• Electronic Eye: His left eye is one of these. Turns out to be the first organ he lost, a hundred years ago, after Ted smashed him in the face with a crowbar.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Kilgore started off as Andy, a rival to Ted for Jenny's affections. When Ted from the future disfigured his face with a crowbar and told him to remember that the Time Bastard was responsible, Andy took that to heart. One hundred years later, Kilgore not only still remembers Ted, but has discovered the science behind the Time Bastard and knows Tinky to be responsible.
• Hero of Another Story: From his perspective, he's the one with the Lost Lenore who's been on a long, fruitless quest for long-delayed revenge for the past hundred years.
• It's Personal: Ted's Oh, Crap! realization during Kilgore's interrogation when he realizes Kilgore has it in for him personally, even though he's eighty-five years in the future and has never met him before.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Invokes this trope by name — as the executive in charge of the Western Hemisphere of Earth, under a corporate regime where the concept of "inalienable rights" is obsolete, all humans in his territory are his property to do with as he wishes.
• Large and in Charge: He was an ordinary-sized man as Andy — one unable to fight off a brutal assault from Ted, who's hardly a combat machine — and, perhaps to compensate for this weakness in his past, by the year 2104 he's become a towering mechanical giant who makes the ground shake as he walks.
• Machine Monotone: His voice isn't completely monotone, but it never shows much animation beyond Tranquil Fury, enhanced by having a flanging effect placed on his voice by a filter. Becomes some serious Black Comedy when his last words are a death cry so cold and monotone it sounds like someone playing a note on a keyboard.
• Meaningful Echo: From his perspective, Kilgore has been brooding on Ted's words to him after beating the shit out of him a century ago, waiting to throw them back in his face — even though, thanks to his tangled personal timeline, Ted has never heard them before.
  Kilgore: Now, you shall remember me, BASTARD!
• Mirthless Laughter: He lets some out when he hears Ted start talking about the concept of "constitutional rights".
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Kilgore" is a very scary-sounding name, although it's hardly uncommon in Real Life. (Like the similarly ominous name Kilgrave, it's a Scottish name, with "kill" meaning "church".) It turns out that, a hundred years ago, the Manager-in-Chief of Sector-19 really was just a regular guy named Andy Kilgore.
• The Slow Path: He's been searching for the secret of Time Travel for a century, after Ted revealed its existence to him in 2004, but never found it — meaning his only way to get his long-delayed revenge is to simply wait.
• The Stoic: The Narrator tells us that the news of the time traveler from the past he's been waiting for stirs the first emotion he's felt in ages. He tells Ted the only thing that gives him real pleasure these days is executing employees who've defied CCRP's interests.
• Torture Technician: His bionic arms are filled with devices and instruments designed to facilitate elaborate vivisection, both to extract as many different kinds of information as he can from his victims as well as give him the satisfaction of causing them intense pain.
• Tragic Keepsake: He's held onto the locket he meant to give Jenny for a hundred years.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Despite the way Ted built up in his mind the man who stole Jenny from him into some kind of domineering alpha male, Andy seems to have been nothing but a sweet, decent, romantic guy in the past who genuinely loved Jenny. It's Ted's vicious assault on him that sends him From Nobody to Nightmare — as is his belief that Ted stole Jenny from him.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Kilgore speaks with a stiff, overly-formal, somewhat British-sounding (but not actually British) cadence, like an old-timey "trans-Atlantic" stage actor's accent. When filtered through a Machine Monotone it sounds horribly menacing — hilariously, when we meet Andy in the past, it just makes him sound like an Endearingly Dorky pretentious fop.

The Android (SPOILER CHARACTER)

"Emma 2"

Played by: Lauren Lopez

Appears in: "Forever & Always" | "Time Bastard"

"I'm not Emma Perkins, and I never was."

An android from the future.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The scientist in charge of creating her we meet in "Time Bastard" boasts that her creation will be both more "efficient" and "compliant" than any human operative could possibly be. Seems like if that was the plan, they shouldn't have made her with the DNA of Emma Perkins.
• Action Girl: When she has to get rid of a bunch of witnesses, she goes full Terminator on them.
• Action Girlfriend: Ends up being this for Non-Action Guy Paul, although his Dark Secret subverts this somewhat.
• Affably Evil: As a result of having all the memories and thinking processes of the real Emma, she's easygoing and fairly nice... just don't get in her way.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • "Forever & Always" makes every other appearance of Emma in the Hatchetfield universe a bit suspect.^note This fear is most pronounced in those with the common misconception that the Point of Divergence for the Hatchetfield multiverse is Jane's accident, while Emma 2's bus sabotage happened in very close proximity to that event. The divergence is in fact Hannah's birth, which is much earlier. Unlike "Time Bastard"'s twist ending, which happens in every timeline due to having gone back in time to before Hannah's birth, Emma 2 can't exist in any other universe than the one in which "Time Bastard"'s Bad Future occurs.
  • How she discovered time travel is unclear. "Time Bastard" makes it clear that the CCRP of 2104 is desperate to crack the secret of it, but Emma 2 (who was still in development that year) glosses over how she came to the present.
• Bad Future: Her final confession to Paul sheds some light on her crimes; she was built to be a slave in the Cyberpunk dystopia of 2104 where life was cheap and human rights were nonexistent. (Which we immediately get more clarity on in "Time Bastard".) Paul 23's reveal that CCRP is already doing shady stuff with Artificial Human slave labor in the underworld of 2019 shows they're similar.
• Confess to a Lesser Crime: When the Homeless Man first reveals she's not the real Emma, she tells Paul that she and Emma just happened to look really, really similar, and when Emma died in a bus crash, she decided to steal her identity. The truth is way nastier than that.
• Cyborg: She's more commonly referred to as a "robot" or "android" but she's clearly this, since the whole plot revolves around her organic outer layer being cloned from Emma's DNA and having Emma's Genetic Memory.
• Dark Secret: The preview for "Forever & Always" hooked the audience with the idea that the Wedding Episode would be disrupted by finding out that Emma's been keeping a Dark Secret from Paul all this time. Subverted, in that the real Emma Perkins' backstory from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals was accurate — the Dark Secret is this isn't Emma.
• Double Speak: Her initial confession to Paul that she's "not Emma Perkins" is both true and false — it absolutely is true that, yes, she's not the woman who was born and raised Emma Perkins in Hatchetfield (and who unknown to her is still alive and kicking), but for all intents and purposes she has the real Emma's body, mind and memories — give or take the modifications necessary to make her into a monstrous killing machine. Whether this makes her initial deception of Paul better or worse is left up in the air.
• Electronic Eye: Inverted; she loses one of her mechanical eyes in a fight with the real Emma and replaces it with the biological eye of one of the people she's massacred. Her eyes, one blue in addition to Emma's natural brown, serve as a Red Right Hand to distinguish her from the real Emma in the audience's imagination, and provides The Reveal, after a few minutes of suspense, that Paul chose to spare the Emma he was married to and kill the real one.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She sincerely falls in love with Paul.
• Evil Doppelgänger: For Emma, although Emma's conviction that she's evil doesn't get confirmed until she admits to sabotaging the bus's brake lines and starts killing innocent bystanders right in front of us.
• Evil Vegetarian: After massacring dozens of innocent people and the real Emma Perkins, she segues casually into a lecture that she and Paul 23 need to go vegan to lower their carbon footprint, because coming from the Bad Future she's witnessed the results of Global Warming firsthand.
• Eye Scream: Despite her robotic nature, Real Emma manages to find a logical Achilles' Heel for her, driving a pool cue hard through her eye socket. Unfortunately, while this does stop her in her tracks, it doesn't kill her the way it would a human, and once she pulls the pool cue out it unambiguously reveals her inner workings are mechanical and not organic — and while she's able to apply a temporary fix for this with with an impromptu transplant, the mismatched eyes it leaves her with are a telltale giveaway she's not the real Emma.
• Fidelity Test: Her knowledge of the inner workings of Emma's mind means she easily predicts where Emma and Paul are going and lays an ambush for them there — and then decides to hold off on attacking Emma just to see if Paul will choose the real Emma over her.
• Genetic Memory: Robot Emma knows all the details of Emma's personal life and has all of her personality traits, right down to even having the same favorite band as hers and the same private inside joke about always booking room 311 in tribute. (This indicates that even though Robot Emma's brain is clearly partly computerized it must also be partly organic.)
• Human Resources: She has a Healing Factor of sorts that lets her come back from even major, seemingly-permanent injuries like gouging her eye out... and it requires harvesting replacement parts from other humans and assimilating them into her own body, which she does without hesitation or compunction.
• I Did What I Had to Do: She at no point questions that she needs to murder the real Emma and any witnesses to her true identity in order to protect herself — and hilariously blames the real Emma for surviving and "forcing" her to burn down her favorite bar.
• I Hate Past Me: The real Emma isn't literally her past self, but the situation is close enough — Emma 2 has all her memories and personality — and Emma 2's attitude toward Emma 1 absolutely fits this trope. Her justification for murdering the real Emma isn't just I Did What I Had to Do to have any chance of living a normal life; she fully believes her "past self" was a useless failure who didn't deserve the gifts she was squandering.
  Emma 1: You stole my life!
  Emma 2: You don't deserve your life! You weren't living it, you were running away from it!
• Insistent Terminology: When Paul 23 calls her a "robot", she gets mildly offended and corrects him that she's an android, even though the narration goes on to call her "Robot Emma" anyway. The head scientist on the team that creates her makes the same irritated correction, saying she's either an "android" or a "synthetic organism". Given how Ridiculously Human she is, it's a fair correction to make.
• Kill and Replace: She thought she did this to the real Emma Perkins. She gets a nasty surprise when she shows back up years later, wanting her life back.
• Lack of Empathy: She shows a disturbing lack of sympathy for the real Emma, and has no qualms about killing an entire bar full of witnesses, or killing the Homeless Guy because He Knows Too Much, even though his story is too incoherent and absurd to be believed. It's unclear whether her casual comfort with killing is because she's part machine or because of the desperation of her situation and the Bad Future she escaped from — the Reveal that Paul 23 (who is completely human) shares it implies it's the latter.
• Leave No Witnesses: Any and all "loose ends" who are aware of her true nature, even if they're innocent bystanders no one would believe, must die.
• The Maiden Name Debate: Paul 23 calls her "Emma Matthews", and she jokingly replies calling him "Paul Perkins", which gets a Call-Back at the end of the story where they use those as pet names. Since this is an interaction that, as far as we know, the real Paul and Emma never had, "Emma Matthews" is as close as we get to a canon name distinguishing her from the real Emma Perkins.
• No Name Given: She freely admits at the beginning of "Forever & Always" that she isn't really Emma Perkins and that name shouldn't apply to her, but no one gives her a new name at any point in the story — the script and the credits just say "Emma 2" (and, at one point, "Robot Emma"). She even lampshades this, telling Paul that even though she isn't Emma he must swear to never ask her what her real name is (because she wouldn't have an answer to give him.) The closest thing to a unique name she has is "Emma Matthews", although she hasn't actually legally changed her name upon marrying Paul (see The Maiden Name Debate).
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: The real Emma was already this despite her tiny stature and lack of interest in athletics or martial arts (or much of anything else). Give her a hydraulic metal endoskeleton and preprogrammed combat protocols, and she can Curb-Stomp Battle a whole bar full of bikers in a matter of seconds.
• Red String of Fate: It seems like she had no awareness of whether the real Emma would've met and married Paul after coming back to Hatchetfield (since the real Paul and Emma's romance happened in the Alternate Timeline that led to The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday) and she ended up falling in love with him all on her own, which seems to indicate that — as the song "Forever & Always" implies — their love really is predestined. She herself seems to think as much, when she successfully predicts the real Emma would start to fall for Paul as soon as they were alone together for a while.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: She can eat, sleep, have sex, fall in love, and definitely has a mind of her own. Partially justified in that she was created partially from DNA, making her a cross between a traditional robot and a clone.
• Robocam: Alluded to. The Narrator "reads out" the message "Calibrating... Calibrating... Potential match found" when Emma 2 is "scanning" the corpses in the Birdhouse for a candidate for an emergency eye transplant, as though this is the message literally appearing on her internal heads-up display.
• Robot Girl: Team Starkid's second foray into this trope, after Mega-Girl in Starship.
• Robot Me: For Emma. She's not just a robot that was built to look like her, she was made from her DNA.
• Sex Bot: Played with. In "Time Bastard" Ted argues — pretty convincingly — that there's no reason to make a robot as Ridiculously Human as Emdroid is unless you intend to fuck it at some point, while the highly offended head scientist insists that Emdroid was designed to be "aesthetically pleasing," nothing more. This argument doesn't really hold water when you remember that Emdroid has had sex with Paul 23, meaning that for some reason, her creators decided to give her working genitalia, as well as the capability for all the physical sensations one would need to actually enjoy sex. We don't know if this was the intent of the scientists who came up with the initial plans, but it's pretty obvious that someone at CCRP decided to make her way more than "aesthetically pleasing." Which does make you wonder why they would do this...
• Super-Strength: The Reveal that she clearly isn't human comes when she casually lops off a grown man's head in one swipe with a kitchen knife.
• Terminator Impersonator: Part of the joke in "Forever & Always" is our slow realization that this trope is completely being Played Straight.
• That Man Is Dead: Her wedding vows describe marrying Paul as choosing to leave the old Emma Perkins behind and become a completely different person. It turns out this was true in a much more literal sense — murdering the "old Emma" by cutting the brake lines on her bus — than anyone suspected.
• Time Travel: She came back from the year 2104 to Kill and Replace the woman her genetic info was harvested from 85 years ago. How she did this is Hand Waved. (It's especially notable because in "Time Bastard" the secret of Time Travel is something Executive Kilgore was trying to murder Ted for and never actually found.)
• Turned Against Their Masters: In her backstory, she says this phrase nearly verbatim when describing her rebellion against CCRP.
• Unholy Matrimony: She and Paul 23 remain together, their relationship arguably stronger than it was once all the murderous cards are on the table.
• Unwilling Roboticization: A downplayed but present trope. A lot of her angst that explains her horrifying actions comes from how, from her POV, she has all of Emma's memories and then suddenly wakes up in a Bad Future and a Cyborg body she never wanted or asked for.
• Villains Blend in Better: Emma 2 planned her Kill and Replace very well and could've gotten away with it indefinitely if real Emma hadn't come back. Meanwhile, real Emma immediately blows up the situation — and gets herself killed — because she just shows up in Hatchetfield without any preparation or research, while if she'd at least, say, tried to get in touch with Tom while she was still out of town, she could've made things very inconvenient for Emma 2 and at least given herself a better chance of survival.

The Clone (SPOILER CHARACTER)

Paul 23

Played by: Jon Matteson

Appears in: "Forever & Always" | "Time Bastard"

"I know things aren’t perfect. We’ve hurt each other. We’re murderers. But... do you still love me?"

A clone created by CCRP.

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• Affably Evil: Don't threaten the life he has built for himself and he's just a nice, easygoing guy who loves his wife. He shows at least some reservations about killing the real Emma — though not enough to save her.
• Ambiguous Situation: A deleted scene (that everyone who bought a livestream/digital ticket saw when the show first went up) revealed that Paul 23 killed Paul three months after Paul and Emdroid started dating, and replaced him midway through his relationship with her, forcing her to accept that his murder of Paul was technically murder of her real boyfriend, an even bigger moral quandary than she put him through. It's not clear whether deleting this was meant to Retcon this fact away or just to address Pacing Problems — if it is a Retcon, it removes some fans' discomfort with this scene while adding back in the haunting possibility that the Pauls of other timelines have also been killed and replaced.
• Badass Normal: Well, being a clone isn't exactly normal, but he doesn't have any of Emma 2's Cyborg upgrades from the year 2104 — he's just a copy of Ridiculously Average Guy Paul Matthews whose horrible situation drove him to snap and become capable of leading a violent uprising.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: CCRP probably picked Paul for cloning because he seems like such a quiet, passive Ridiculously Average Guy... until they got to Paul 23 and found themselves with a clone rebellion on their hands.
• Clones Are People, Too: He's just as emotive and social as the real Paul, and is definitely an independent being.
• Clone Angst:
  • He has all of Paul's memories and pretty much thinks of himself as Paul... which is why he was driven to the extremely un-Paul-like action of pulling a Kill and Replace on his original, because of the classic clone angst that he couldn't accept that the real Paul deserved his life more than him.
  • The deleted scene from "Forever & Always" raises some pretty heavy moral/philosophical questions about his Grand Theft Me on Paul — namely, he killed Paul after he started dating Emma 2, which means he did in fact murder Emma's boyfriend and is asking her to accept him as a replacement because he has (mostly) the same body and mind. Emma 2 ends up accepting this because she doesn't really have a choice.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He loves his wife to the point of being willing to kill to stay with her.
• Expendable Clone: CCRP saw him as one, planning to use him as slave labor in space.
• Flock of Wolves: Near the end of the story, after Emma has fully explained that she's an android who stole the real Emma's life, Paul 23 admits that he, too, isn't the real Paul, that they're both experiments created by CCRP.
• Gaining the Will to Kill: Subverted. The plot of "Forever & Always" looks like it's about mild-mannered Paul being put through this — faced with the Sadistic Choice that only one of Robot Emma and Real Emma can live, and being forced in the end to make that choice himself. Then The Ending Changes Everything, revealing that Paul 23 has already killed — plenty — in order to secure the peaceful life he has now, including horribly murdering his own original counterpart, and that his anxiety and hesitancy throughout the story has been that of a Retired Monster desperate to finish Becoming the Mask of the real Paul and avoid being sucked back into the game.
• Genetic Memory: Explicitly tells us he has this. (The deleted scene from "Forever & Always" reveals this, logically, only goes up to the moment the DNA sample was taken, and he doesn't actually remember Paul's first meeting with Emma and had to fake it.)
• I Did What I Had to Do: How he justifies the murders he's committed; they're "the only way" to stay under the radar and live a normal life.
• Hidden Depths: Multiply subverted. Ridiculously Average Guy Paul ends up being willing to murder an innocent person to protect his wife and his marriage after all... and then it turns out he has killed before and even led a clone uprising. Which is then even more of a twist when you realize he's still an exact copy of Paul who, a few months after waking up as a clone and being subjected to CCRP's oppression, became capable of violently busting out of his prison and pulling a Kill and Replace on his original.
• Kill and Replace: Casually admits to having done this to the real Paul.
• Out-of-Character Alert: One of the first major clues that something is wrong with Paul is that he not only accepts Emma after she admits she isn't who she says she is, but gets over it in a matter of seconds, and doesn't seem all that freaked out. Turns out this sort of thing isn't all that new to him.
• Slave Brand: He's marked with a tattoo of the number "23" on the inside of his right wrist. Hilariously, this Slave Brand doesn't seem to have worked — no one's ever noticed or asked him about it, not even Emma 2, who at this point has seen him naked and slept with him tons of times. (And it's not like the real Paul is the type of guy who'd be likely to get a tattoo.)
• Space Station: He casually reveals his original purpose was to be sent to a labor camp on the Moon that CCRP apparently owns, a reference to the plot of the movie Moon and a reveal that even in 2019 CCRP is elbow-deep in Sci-Fi Horror.
• Unholy Matrimony: By the end, he and the android Emma have settled into this, accepting that they're both murderers and not great people overall, but they love each other, so they'll make it work.
• You Are Number 6: Paul 23's "real name" is just a dehumanizing numerical designation indicating he's the 23rd successful clone (or 22nd, if the real Paul counts) they've made of Paul Matthews.

Other Paranormal Beings

Haunted Car (SPOILER CHARACTER)

Jane Perkins (as Tom Houston's 1986 Fox-Body Mustang)

Played by: Jaime Lyn Beatty (Jane's ghost) | Kim Whalen (possessed Becky)

Appears in: "Jane's a Car"

"I'm not dead, Tom... I'm a car."

Tom: I’ve traded in for new
(I’ve traded it in for something new, yeah)
I come right back to you

Tom's prized classic car he's had since high school, in which he had the tragic accident where his wife died. After it's finally repaired, it starts behaving oddly as though it has a mind of its own...

For Jane's mortal form, see Families.

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• Ambiguous Situation:
  • How much of her Psycho Ex-Girlfriend behavior is her actual personality, and how much is the result of her coming back wrong? Spending an entire year being repaired in Tony's shop is also implied to be a factor. The fandom has even floated the idea that she may not actually be Jane at all, much like the situation with Wiggly sending Ethan's "Bad Double" to torment Hannah in Black Friday, though if she's not Jane she sure as hell does a convincing enough impersonation to fool her husband.
  • Much of the story even plays with the idea the car isn't really talking at all and Tom is just having a nervous breakdown of some kind. Of course, the fact that the first scene has the car "coming to life" without Tom even present and trying to kill Ethan just for insulting it always made this unlikely — and it's eventually disproven with the Wham Line in the ending, meant to confirm the car really was haunted because the Through the Eyes of Madness explanation is too much of a Downer Ending, since it makes Tom actually responsible for Becky's attempted murder.
• Ambiguously Bi: We get a hilarious scene of Jane making Tom drive them down to the beach at Starry Cove so they can stare at women in bathing suits and Jane can get Tom's opinion on which of them he finds hottest. Her appreciation of the female form seems suggestively earnest... although it gets a lot darker when we realize she's picking out bodies she wants to inhabit.
• And I Must Scream: The idea of being killed and then reborn as some kind of inanimate object is a classic example of this trope, although this story downplays it slightly for Black Comedy. Jane listing off all the negatives about waking up as a car ends with Lex calling her a "junk heap" like it's the worst thing of all.
• The Bad Guy Wins: "Jane's a Car" ends with Jane having fully succeeded in her Evil Plan, Tom being institutionalized for the foreseeable future, and Becky being killed and replaced by her with the world none the wiser. (Perhaps because of how upsetting this ending is, fans immediately began pointing out all the logistical obstacles to Jane trying to live Becky's life while knowing nothing about her — and the difficulties of trying to become Tim's new mother when she has no family connection to him now that Tom's gone.)
• Become a Real Boy: Understandably, she wants out of the car body and back into a human one, as soon as possible, and she's pretty unconcerned with any ethical considerations that might get in the way.
• Body Surf: Jane's resurrection is due to a Contrived Coincidence where the car's tape deck was playing a recorded incantation for a spell intended to do this, at the moment another car collided with them and killed Jane's body. It's unclear if this is how the spell was intended to work, but the car accident "jarred her soul loose" and caused it to lodge in the nearest unoccupied vessel, which, somehow, was the car itself.
• Came Back Wrong: Tom outright says "She's not acting like herself!" It would definitely make sense for a Body Surf ritual from the Black Book invoking the powers of the Lords in Black to have nasty side effects of some kind, although Jane is very much insistent she's the same woman Tom married and that all her actions are perfectly rational from her perspective. (And unless you personally have had your soul ripped out and bound to an inanimate object it's kind of hard to argue with her.)
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Her making Tom drive around while she points out attractive young women and asks him if he's into them has overtones of a wife testing her husband, as he points out. It turns out it's not a test but it's something much worse — the reason she seems so chill about wanting to hear about her husband being turned on by other women is she has an Evil Plan to become that other woman. And then when she finds out Tom actually has been dating Becky while she's been dead, the jealousy comes out full force, with Jane ranting that she's going to cut the knot and become Becky so Tom's loyalties are no longer divided.
• Cool Car: The Narrator doesn't hold back when describing what a sweet car a 1986 Fox-body Mustang is, and neither do the lyrics of the Title Theme Tune. Unfortunately, her age means that not everyone agrees, with Lex and Ethan's dismissal of her as an obsolete "junk heap" driving her into a murderous rage.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Played with. She loves and wants to reunite with Tom and Tim, but displays incredibly possessive behavior, is sometimes rather mean to her husband, and can be very irrational — for example, treating Tom like he deliberately cheated on her even though he didn't start seeing Becky until over a year after Jane died. It also doesn't seem to occur to her that the circumstances of her resurrection might be confusing or even traumatic for her son, being too focused on getting back in his life at any cost. She also makes no mention of Emma, her little sister; granted, they weren't close, but it's still rather cold that Jane never asks how she is or seems to want to let her know she's back. All of this becomes all the more murky when you remember that we still have basically no baseline for how Jane acted when she was alive; all we have is Tom and Emma's recollections, and they're certainly biased.
• Evil Matriarch: Whatever kind of mom she was to Tim in life, she's obviously become this for the Houston household by the end of the story.
• Ghost in the Machine: Both literally describes Jane's situation in "Jane's a Car" and is the trope for how she's portrayed in that story — with Jaime Lyn Beatty dressed as Jane appeared in life, standing in front of a Zoom background depicting the car.
• Grand Theft Me: Jane's Evil Plan — repeat the circumstances of the original car accident that stripped her soul from her body and trapped it in the car, by deliberately running someone over while playing the tape of the incantation. Hilariously, she tries to argue that this isn't murder because the goal isn't to physically kill the body but just damage it enough to "jar the soul loose"; Tom plaintively asks where the original soul goes after Jane's soul displaces it, and Jane dismissively guesses "Heaven?"
• Haunted Technology: The Mustang has Jane's ghost inside it, as anyone who read the title of the episode might have predicted.
• Hollywood Atheist: The Black Comedy about Jane's total amorality when it comes to her Evil Plan comes to a head when Tom presses her about what will happen to the original soul of the woman she "dislodges" to take her place and she dismissively says it'll go to Heaven, then admits that she doesn't even believe in Heaven and said that just to make Tom happy because he believes in it. (Given that Team Starkid has expressed pretty strident atheist views themselves in the past, it seems unlikely they're implying Jane is evil because she's an atheist, but still.)
• Humanity Ensues: Her ultimate goal is to kill some woman and take over her body, trapping the other's soul in the car instead. She succeeds with Becky in the end.
• Insecure Love Interest: Her rage toward Becky Barnes is partly because she always suspected Tom preferred his First Love to her and only settled for her because Becky had become unavailable when he came home from Iraq. She twists the knife in Tom's ribs by asking him point-blank if a small part of him wasn't glad she died at the same time Becky's husband disappeared so he could go after her again.
• Lack of Empathy: Jane's attitude since awakening as a car is so self-centered she doesn't even consider for a moment that there might be something morally objectionable about murdering someone and stealing their body, and actually gets pissed off at Tom's traumatized reaction to her revealing herself and roping him into her Evil Plan. Even when her supposed One True Love has been Driven to Madness and institutionalized, she seems to accept this calmly as a small price to pay for her resurrection. It reaches the point where she comes off as The Sociopath.
• Manipulative Bastard: She obviously knows how to push Tom's buttons, and uses that ability shamelessly to pressure him into going along with her Evil Plan — including the extremely harsh below-the-belt maneuver of exploiting his Guilt Complex over the idea her death was his fault. It's not just with him, either — she exhibits some deeply creepy chessmaster traits as she plots other women's deaths, figuring out what the best way is to get them alone and vulnerable. It's especially notable that her pushing Tom into breaking things off with Becky was a successful Batman Gambit to get Becky into the street where she could run her over (after Tom had thought his confession to Becky meant she was finally safe).
• Murder Into Malevolence: She is completely obsessed with regaining her humanity with a total Lack of Empathy for anyone who might be harmed (including the new vessel who has to be murdered) for this to happen, and she lashes out emotionally against Tom repeatedly during this process even as he does nothing but try to help her. Her situation might be bad enough to explain this behavior without the need to appeal to some kind of corruption from the soul-transfer spell itself, but whatever the explanation, she is very much the villain of the story.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: An even worse variant — Jane's final Evil Plan is to resolve the Tom/Jane/Becky Love Triangle by becoming the hypotenuse, pulling a Grand Theft Me on Becky so that Tom will have both of the women he's in love with combined.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Jane never "speaks" mentally to anyone but Tom, and all of her actions involving telekinetically controlling the car's systems (after the prologue with Lex and Ethan, anyway) take place with Tom in the driver's seat and could be passed off as something Tom did. It's all part of the intentional ambiguity over whether Jane's ghost even exists or Tom is just having a nervous breakdown, although after The Reveal that Jane is unambiguously real, it comes off as Jane strategically making sure any crimes she committed Tom would end up getting blamed for.
• Obliviously Evil: Jane's perspective is so warped — whether because she Came Back Wrong or because she was Driven to Madness by being trapped in a car's body for 18 months — that she actually doesn't seem to realize her actions are morally questionable. For all her The Chessmaster traits this is a detriment to her Evil Plan, with her obliviously prattling on to Tom about picking a woman to murder and steal the body of without any awareness this might shock or upset him. (Ironically for a psychiatrist, she comes off a lot like an undiagnosed sociopath who isn't aware Tom doesn't share her sociopathy.)
• The Precious, Precious Car: There are few things in the world Tom values more than his red 1986 Fox-Body Mustang V-6 hatchback, which was the Hero's Classic Car for him back when he was a golden boy in high school. After it gets totaled, this love becomes an obsession and the car a Tragic Keepsake of the life he had before everything went wrong, with Tom spending huge amounts of money he can't afford in order to get the car restored exactly as it was before the accident. From his POV, the car beginning to talk to him in Jane's voice is a clear case of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane, since the car being a personification of his refusal to move on from the past is a pretty obvious metaphor.
• Psychic Link: Jane has the ability to speak via Telepathy, but apparently only to her husband Tom — whether this is because of the link between them as spouses or because she chooses to only speak to Tom is unclear. (See Not-So-Imaginary Friend.)
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: She is pissed when she finds out Tom has moved on with his life, to the point of trying to run down Becky.
• Psycho Psychologist: Jane is a trained psychiatrist and knows full well how PTSD works, and she's Tom's wife and according to his song "If I Fail You" in Black Friday spent years dissecting his trauma and learning in detail how it affects him. She knows what his Trauma Buttons are, how to press them to get a reaction out of him to get what she wants, and what the long-term damage to him of doing this repeatedly will be. And she goes ahead and does it anyway.
• Sentient Vehicle: Albeit a highly malevolent one.
• Sinister Car: Oh yes. From the moment she tries to kill Ethan we know not to trust her.
• Stock Footage: Jane's physical form — which appears as Jaime's Zoom background throughout "Jane's a Car" — is just a stock photo of a 1986 Mustang pulled from Google Image Search.
• They Would Cut You Up: The reason Jane gives for forbidding Tom from telling anyone she's a car — hilariously, she imagines the result of this not being impounded for scientific tests by an organization like PEIP but as being put on display at an auto show.
• Undying Loyalty: The whole plot of "Jane's a Car" is Jane demanding this from Tom, and refusing to let up no matter how unreasonable the demands seem — from demanding he keep secrets from his own son, to breaking up with his new girlfriend (and First Love), to committing outright murder, to having sex with her in her car form.

The Ghost

Ghost of Max Jägerman

Played by: Will Branner

Appears in: Nerdy Prudes Must Die

"I used to worry my life would be over after high school. Now I see the afterlife's not so bad... it's just poundin' nerds!"

You think I seek revenge?
I could give two shits that you buried and left me
Defiled my body
You pushed me off the edge!
I'm on a new crusade
The world is just too well-behaved
It needs to be saved
And you're too weak to be enslaved!

Following Max Jägerman's accidental death in the old Waylon place, the magic left behind there by the Church of the Starry Children brings his spirit to life as an unstoppable demonic ghost, devoted to fulfilling Max's last words: "Nerdy prudes must die."

For Max's mortal form, see Main Residents.

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• A God Am I: The ghost takes this more literally than Max ever did in life, and what's worse is that he now has the powers to back it up. In his delusions of godhood, Max has decided that he not only gets to decide who and what people are in Hatchetfield High, but who lives and dies across the planet- and nerdy prudes, the weakest of the human species, have got to be the first to go.
• Defiant to the End: Facing down the true forms of the Lords in Black and moments from being Dragged Off to Hell, his last words are a declaration that "it was fuckin' worth it!" and a roar of "GO NIGHTHAWKS!"
• Dragged Off to Hell: Pulled into the Black and White forever by the Lords in Black.
• Expy: As confirmed by the creators, he's the Freddy Krueger to Lumber Axe's Jason Voorhees, demonstrated by his love of Pre-Mortem One-Liners, the word "bitch," and his Reality Warper powers.
• Godzilla Threshold: The danger posed to the world by this entity is so great that Mayor Lauter's first resort for stopping him is appealing to a Deal with the Devil with the Lords in Black. Note that he doesn't intend to make the deal himself; Instead, he expects his daughter and her friends to do it.
• Implacable Man: By Mayor Lauter's estimation, he's completely unstoppable by anything less than a bargain with the Lords in Black themselves.
• Just Toying with Them: The only reason there's any hope of stopping him at all is that he's taking his sweet-ass time building an atmosphere of terror by picking off his five chosen victims one at a time. It's likely that if he had successfully taken down all five, his massacre of the rest of the world's nerds would have been fast and efficient.
• Monster from Beyond the Veil: It's heavily implied that not much of the original Max actually remains in the ghost. Mayor Lauter describes the apparition as "it" about as much as he uses "him," and states that "killing is all he is now." Notably, Max acts far more boisterously and over-the-top after death than he does in life, going from merely being a loud-mouthed abuser with a god complex to a "bitch"-screaming, one-liner-spewing, genocidal literal monster. This is later subverted, however, as the ghost turns out to retain Max's attraction towards Grace.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: It's not entirely clear if "ghost" would be the best description of what he is, but it's the one the teens go with. Mayor Lauter notes that "demon" would be equally appropriate, and his appearance is zombie-like, though he's clearly a spiritual entity distinct from his defiled body. Whatever he is, he's solid enough to murder people with his bare hands and for Grace to have sex with him.
• Reality Warper: The ghost is seen to be capable of Offscreen Teleportation, offensive telekinesis, Complete Immortality to the point where the Lords in Black don't consider destroying him a viable option, the Super-Strength to wedgie Ruth to the point of bisection, and stopping time in order to prevent Pete's Heroic Sacrifice. In his presence, Ominous Fog rises, and Dramatic Thunder cracks. It's implied that when Max died on the Waylon property, his inner violence was "freed" from his physical body- allowing him to commit any atrocity his imagination could come up with.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: As you can see in the quote at the top of this entry, he claims that he doesn't seek revenge and then goes on to list some things that the protagonists did to him that he absolutely doesn't hold against them, things that Richie never mentioned at all during that conversation.
• The Grunting Orgasm: Although perhaps this one might fit better under The Immodest Orgasm.
  The Ghost: I AM JÄGERMAAAAAN! IIIII AAAAAM GOOOOOOOD!!!
• The Unfettered: His image quote.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: You thought he was foul-mouthed before he died?
  The Ghost: HEYYY, NERDS! WELCOME TO GYM CLASS! TODAY WE'RE GONNA PLAY KICKBALL! A-MAH FOOT, A-YOUR BALLS, BITCH!
• Undignified Death: Being the ghost of a school bully, he murders his victims with lethal and gruesome versions of classic bully techniques such as purple nurples, swirlies, and wedgies.
• Undying Loyalty: Hilariously, to his football team, the Hatchetfield Nighthawks. Ensnared by the Lords in Black, he picks "GOOOOO NIGHTHAAAAAWKS!" as his "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner.

Three-Girl Creature

The Three-Girl Creature

Played by: Jaime Lyn Beatty | Mariah Rose Faith | Lauren Lopez

Appears in: "The Witch in the Web"

Miss Holloway: "Three girls I couldn't save."

Three teenage girls Miss Holloway once tried and failed to help, who somehow used magic to fuse themselves into one horrifying inhuman monster.

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• Actor Allusion: They're played by the same three actresses who played Alice, Deb and the unnamed third girl (the "Hatchetfield Bee") in "Not Your Seed" in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, who both sang in unison and, hilariously, tried to Speak in Unison the whole time. This scene took place at the high school, not at the Starlight Theater, which only shows up at the climax of TGWDLM, but this is still a pretty blatant Call-Back to that show.
• Bodyguard Babes: They become an ironic, grotesque parody of this trope for Uncle Wiley once Hannah unwittingly revives Miss Holloway's memory of him too.
• Body Horror: Some of the most visceral body horror yet in any Hatchetfield show, and it's only vaguely described to us rather than seen.
• Living Memory: We never see the Three-Girl Creature in the (horrifically deformed) flesh — the version we encounter is just Miss Holloway's memory of them, given power and autonomy by the psychic energies emanating from Hannah making everyone's nightmares come to life in what she calls "Nightmare Time".
• Merging Mistake: Presumably what happened with these three girls was some kind of Fusion Dance Gone Horribly Wrong.
• My Greatest Failure: We don't know anything about where they came from, what happened when Miss Holloway encountered them or what became of them in the end, just that she regrets that she "couldn't save" them.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever the hell happened to create this thing, we know it involved black magic and that Uncle Wiley was somehow involved.
• Not Even Human: The creature had a human brain at one point — three of them, in fact — but now seems to be little more than a mindlessly aggressive starving animal.
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: The creature isn't just made by horribly merging three human bodies together — somehow this process led to draining most of the flesh from their bodies, leaving them as emaciated, withered skin and bones, apparently driven by Horror Hunger. The Narrator compares the way they look and move to some kind of giant insect.
• Take Our Word for It: Thankfully, we don't actually get to see the creature portrayed in any way other than the actresses making zombie faces and noises. (The editing for the YouTube release of Nightmare Time Episode Three means we don't even actually get to see Jaime Lyn Beatty's face during the creature's scenes; we had to make do here on this page by showing Jaime a split second before getting into character as Pamela.)
• Was Once a Man: Miss Holloway is very clear that this "monster" started off as three ordinary human girls who needed her help.

Marco

Marco

Played by: Jaime Lyn Beatty

Appears in: "Daddy"

Sherman: "Don't mind Marco. He's a big softie."

The Young family's monstrous butler.

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• Ambiguously Human: A silent giant of a man, with a gaunt, corpselike face and immense strength. His death scene solidifies it: his blood is black, and Sheila is momentarily upset before deciding she can make another. Basically, the only thing left to suggest he actually is human is Sherman's claim that he used to be an Olympic javelin-thrower — but that's likely the Youngs' cover story to explain his supernatural strength and skill with his weapon of choice.
• Battle Butler: A monstrous butler, who goes after the Youngs' foes with a javelin.
• Black Blood: His blood is black.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Frank kills him with his own javelin.
• Javelin Thrower: Sherman is quick to tell Frank that Marco used to throw javelins in the Olympics. Seemingly, this is merely a cover story to explain the rather odd fact that this particular Battle Butler's weapon of choice is the javelin of all things, with which he cripples the Man in a Hurry and very nearly skewers Frank.
• Shout-Out: As a giant butler with Frankenstein's Monster vibes, he seems to be a reference to Lurch, the butler to The Addams Family.
• The Voiceless: As you'd expect from a Lurch-style butler, he speaks only in zombie-like groans.

Killer Track

Killer Track

Played by: Jeff Blim

Appears in: "Killer Track"

"Light it up. Burn it down. Wah-ah-ah-ah. What's the point of it anyway?"

Ride to hell and back
Rip that shit with a killer track
Ride to hell and back
Rip that shit with a killer track

An entity of pure sound. A hunter that takes the form of a death-metal song which endlessly torments the listener for seven days before killing them.

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• Brown Note: Listening to the song kills you, though not immediately — it taunts you for a while first.
• Incessant Music Madness: It tortures its victims by playing on full blast in their minds, making them desperately try to destroy every source of noise they can find.
• Phrase Salad Lyrics: The song itself really doesn't seem to be about anything in particular; It's as if someone fed the lyrics of dozens of metal songs into an AI and it spit out the lyrics of this song as a result. Justified, as it wasn't meant to impress anybody, just kill them.
• Villain Song: A living one at that!