Characters / Inside Job (2021)

The character page for the Netflix animated series Inside Job (2021).

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Cognito Inc.

In General

"We are Cognito Inc. and we've got you covered, up!"

A company based in Washington, D.C. that secretly oversees most of the world's conspiracies. Founded by Rand Ridley and J.R. Scheimpough to implement the plans of a cabal of shadowy elites known as the Shadow Board.

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• Affably Evil: Affably morally grey, at least. Cognito Inc gets up to some wildly unethical stuff and their primary mission is to keep a secret society in charge of the world. But they are also a bunch of doofballs who are often either freaking out about something or having fun.
• Corrupted Character Copy: As Brett notes several times, Cognito Inc. come off like a version of the Men in Black who uphold the Masquerade but for the name of profit instead of peacekeeping.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Their most prominent members include a half-Asian woman, an Asian man, a black woman, a human-dolphin hybrid, and a sapient mushroom creature. The background staff include all sorts of cryptids, as well as some Loa-People and literal monsters. They also have an Inhuman Resources department where their employees are taught sensitivity to reptoids. Downplayed in that, while anyone can have positions high up in the company, all their leaders seen so far have been straight white men, a fact Reagan lampshades when she is finally promoted.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Cognito has faked and covered up pretty much every conspiracy under the sun, but based on Reagan's comments when she meets Alex Jones, even they wouldn't go so far as to fake a school shooting.
• Evil, Inc.: Cognito Inc. runs the world in secret, and they don’t always have humanity’s best interests at heart, such as keeping an entire town drugged on faulty memory erasure chemicals to offload defective 80s stuff for profit, planning World War III for the purpose of harvesting Walrus Oil, and deliberately preventing countries from working to mitigate or solve global warming to aid the Reptilian Conspiracy that funds them.
• The Men in Black: They have agents that mind-wipe anyone who knows about their plans.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible:
  • The lobby of Cognito Inc. has a screen with the slogan "We're a company." Of course, it also serves as Suspiciously Specific Denial of sorts.
  • An employee training video shown later in the first episode instead uses the slogan "We've got you covered, up!"
• Pragmatic Villainy: Cognito isn't needlessly cruel, just exploitative. Brett even lampshades that he has trouble figuring out how evil the company is at times.
• Shout-Out: Their logo strongly resembles the logo of Omni Consumer Products from RoboCop (1987).
• The Unfavorite: All the other secret societies shun them, as shown in season 2. This is despite Rand demonstrating that he can move the Moon at will and control the weather.

Department Leaders

In General

• Anti-Villain: They work for Cognito Inc and have dealt with all of the company's corrupt deeds in stride, and all of the members of the gang have used the company's power for selfish or destructive purposes. That being said, none of Reagan and her colleagues can be described as wholly evil, as they each have their own Pet the Dog moments, Freudian Excuses and, when push comes to shove, will turn out to genuinely care for each other, even though it's not super apparent.
• Brains and Brawn: Reagan has the intelligence needed for Cognito Inc's plans, but is out of shape and lacks the charisma to lead or have the respect of her team. Brett isn't nearly so smart but is athletic and has the charisma and people skills needed to get people to do what needs to be done.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: All of them have their quirks, from Andre being a horny stoner to Glenn being a trigger-happy wingnut, but they are competent enough to keep the conspiracies under wrap, despite some close calls. Considering the Shadow Board mainly leaves the actual world-running to Cognito and JR is incredibly incompetent and uses the company to increase his fortune, the department leaders could be considered the true leaders of the world.
• Dysfunction Junction: It speaks volumes that Reagan, a woman with quite a few mental health issues, is still the most competent person on the team.
• Everyone Has Standards: They're all immediately put off when Rafe Masters reveals that he microchipped Reagan's phone in order to track her.
• Fire-Forged Friends: At the start of the series, the group is largely dysfunctional and implied to only be tolerating each other for the sake of work, but after a whole season of handling one batshit insane situation after another, they grow to genuinely like and care for each other. Comparing the Department Heads at the start of Part 1 to the start of Part 2 will show that they've become more of an actual team together.
• Five-Man Band: Throughout the series, they effectively become this, working together to make sure Cognito Inc stays as stable as it can be. It also helps that the group becomes closer to each other over time. Though the way each of them fulfil their roles is Played With.
  • Reagan is The Leader, often taking the initiative for changes and developments to be made and leading the different missions the group is sent to do. She's also the most logical and levelheaded member, which naturally makes her the Only Sane Man. That being said, she's (initially) the No-Respect Guy of the group, since her abysmal people skills made her a challenge to work with and at the start of the season, her co-workers are shown to only tolerate her. Of course, it changes throughout her Character Development and by the latter half of the series, she has a much easier time getting the group together and they've grown to genuinely like and respect her.
  • Brett's an interesting case in that at the start of Part 1, he's a Fish out of Water due to being a newly added employee at Cognito Inc and has as much knowledge on how the Shadow organisations run as the average person, making him the Sixth Ranger of the group. But after he and Reagan decide to co-lead the Department Heads, he's become The Lancer to Reagan, with their contrasting personalities balancing each other out. Additionally, since he's more emotionally in-tune than Reagan (and admittedly, most of the other Department Heads), he also becomes The Heart of the group.
  • Gigi, like Brett, also serves as The Lancer to Reagan as she's able to give her the advice and assistance she needs in helping run by the departments. It's also been shown that while she seems incredibly laidback and carefree where her job's concerned, she's just as competent and capable as Reagan, albeit in her own expertise. Additionally, her more charismatic and people-oriented skills makes her a good Foil to Reagan, which also serves as a good balance to Reagan's common methods of approaching different problems that have popped up.
  • Andre is often relied on for his (unlicensed) medical and biochemical expertise that allows him to concoct different medicines or drugs and also help out with problems where he can make use of his extensive knowledge on chemicals. That being said, part of the reason he has such a wide knowledge on chemicals is his outrageous drug addiction that's also been shown to help keep him as competent as he can be. Essentially, he's a more humorous take on The Smart Guy.
  • Glen is not only the physically strongest member of the group but also has military experience and his status as a half-man half-dolphin has given him a bunch of useful attributes for more "hands-on" work. This, and his role as the one handling Cognito Inc's weapons arsenal, makes him The Big Guy.
  • Myc is probably the one with the least defined role in a more traditional setup for this trope, as his job in Cognito Inc (essentially being a glorified resource producer) doesn't give him much to work on. Not helped with how, aside from his role in producing mind-altering substances, he has been shown to be a bit of The Load to the group.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Reagan is an anti-social, cynical grouch who lacks people skills and Brett is a cheerful, charismatic, and naive people-pleaser.
• Mother Nature, Father Science: Inverted. Of the two scientists, Reagan is the one into robotics and engineering, while Andre is a biochemist and surgeon.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: They're all heads of various departments (and two of them are technically in charge) that no doubt staff dozens, if not hundreds of people, and yet they're usually the ones going on dangerous top-secret missions. Especially notable considering one of them is a seven-foot-tall glowing sentient mushroom.
• True Companions: After everything they been through they consider themselves to be a family.
• Two Girls to a Team: Reagan and Gigi are two women on a team of six.
• Villain Protagonist: They are all the one running Cognito Inc. and are perfectly fine with death, unlawful imprisonment and the countless other unethical things their jobs entail.

Reagan Ridley

^{In her childhood flashbacks}

Voiced By: Lizzy Caplan
"Everyone disappoints you, and that's why you've buried yourself in your work. I may be a cold, calculating machine… but you are too."

— ROBOTUS, her own creation, describing the themes surrounding Reagan's character.

Cognito Inc's resident anti-social Head Roboticist and tech genius. She and Brett are brought together to jointly lead the company under J.R.'s command, and she has ultimate goals of controlling the company herself one day and transforming it into a Benevolent Conspiracy.

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• Abusive Parents: Poor Reagan's got it rough. Both her parents were emotionally and physically distant from her, her dad in particular mocking and insulting her at various points of her childhood, and this failure to account for their child's emotional and mental well being carries on into her adulthood.
• Action Girl: The instances where she has to physically fight someone else show that she can hold her own fairly well.
• The Alcoholic: One of Bear-o's screens chronicles her blood alcohol level as she drunkenly slumps on her couch, implies that she is this, though to a lesser extent than her old man. She also apparently got a tramp stamp reading "Mommy Likey Drinky" the day after Rand took over Cognito Inc., which she doesn't remember.
• Allegedly Dateless: Reagan is a comical depiction of a lonely outcast with awful social skills and yet she's been shown to have had friends and decent romantic relationships all throughout her life, and coworkers that greatly enjoy having her around. It is justified to an extent, as it's shown that a lot of this is because of her own insecurities and reluctance to emotionally engage with anyone.
• Alliterative Name: Reagan Ridley, just like her dad Rand Ridley and her implied namesake Ronald Reagan.
• All Take and No Give: Her relationship with Rand boils down to this. She's forced to constantly pull maintenance when it comes to Rand and bail him out of whatever mess he gets himself into, while he mooches off of her and meddles in her life over the pettiest reasons.
• Ambiguously Bi: Although she is only seen dating men, in "Sex Machina", when ROBOTUS updates their algorithm to find more people that might match Reagan online, a Freeze-Frame Bonus shows that there are some women among her possible matches. Considering that the algorithm is supposed to perfectly reflect her tastes and was created by both she and ROBOTUS, it's likely she is attracted to women as well.
• Anti-Hero: A Mad Scientist who frequently borders on outright supervillainy working for a corrupt corporation that serves a massive conspiracy that controls the world. But Reagan is an Internal Reformist trying to turn Cognito Inc. into a Benevolent Conspiracy from the inside. Though she's not immune to occasional bursts of Comedic Sociopathy and Evil Is Petty.
• Anti-Villain: Reagan is a Mad Scientist who has moments of intense selfishness and cruelty, but she's also trying to fix Cognito from within and create a better world, has to constantly manage the dealings of her negligent father, and she's not above helping other people and doing the right thing.
• Asian and Nerdy: A half-Asian genius scientist who invented robots as well as genetically engineering a human frog hybrid for fun as a kid.
• Author Avatar: Serves as one for creator Shion Takeuchi, who has compared what Reagan goes through to her own experience of being a first-time showrunner. Reagan is also mixed Japanese/white like Takeuchi.
• Benevolent Boss: Upon becoming CEO, Reagan introduces chairs with improved neck support for the company's Easter Island employees, gifts her crew custom jackets, and even upgrades Myc's milking machine.
• Berserk Button: Co-workers forgetting to fill out their time cards is this, to the point that she attacks Glenn over it.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: She has rather thick eyebrows compared to other characters, which makes her look more grouchy.
• Birds of a Feather: After getting to know Ron over the course of a few hours, the two of them immediately get into a relationship, finding mutual kinship over their cynical personalities and grievances with their workplaces. The relationship ends as a result of Ron being fine leaving his line of work, while Reagan still considers her work at Cognito Inc. to be too important to abandon.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: A unique example. She’s an incredibly dedicated employee, going days without sleeping to finish her projects and goes above and beyond in most things she’s assigned to do. In her social and personal life, however, she’d sooner hastily invent her way out of personal growth and trauma with machinery and robots than go through the emotional energy of doing it the regular way. This takes on a darker turn when her upbringing under Rand shows that he did basically the same thing to avoid taking care of her, thus instilling an inability to adequately approach her own emotional needs.
• Brutal Honesty: Reagan usually doesn't have a problem telling people what she thinks, such as making Glenn cry at his own birthday party ("I was dancing too confidently, and I needed to hear it!") or brutally dumping a coworker she can no longer stand.
• Byronic Hero: An ambitious, intelligent, morally dubious, and deeply troubled individual thanks to her very turbulent childhood that has left emotional scars which haunt her well into her adult years. Part 2 also features Reagan getting into a genuine but tragic romance that highly clashes with her ambitions in life that eventually leads to her leaving behind her lover for the sake of his happiness while allowing her to pursue her life-long goals.
• But Not Too Foreign: She's half-Japanese, but you wouldn't be able to tell if her mother wasn't a character on the show. In-universe, she's apparently white-passing (or at least enough for the stuck-in-the-80s residents of Still Valley to not speak to her with anti-Asian microaggressions like they do the fully Korean Andre). Justified with a comment from Rand that he tampered with her genetics to make sure his genes were dominant.
• Calling the Old Man Out: She does this to both her parents (mostly Rand) throughout the series regarding their past and present shitty behavior. She calls Rand out for the last time when she finds out that he deliberately erased her memories of her Only Friend for his own selfish desires, deciding to cut him out of her life completely. Sadly, this only lasts a day as he takes over as CEO as a way to get back at her.
• Career vs. Man: In Part 2, Reagan faces having to choose between starting a new life with Ron, or her dream job of running the world on equal footing with the Shadow Board. When she realizes that she can't have both, she chooses the latter option while letting Ron erase his own memories so he can live freely, albeit without her.
• Character Development: Reagan starts out the series as wanting nothing to do with the team and deliberately isolating herself. She gradually opens up to them over the course of the first season and eventually comes to see them as her true family, especially Brett. In Part 2, she also becomes more generally stable and sociable after getting into a relationship with Ron.
• Child Prodigy: She graduated as her class valedictorian from MIT at 13.
• Cute But Psycho: Is this as a child. The psycho part has much to do with her upbringing however, with Rand encouraging and fostering violent tendencies.
• Deadpan Snarker: Reagan is pretty sarcastic when dealing with most of the issues in her life, from her annoying co-workers to her parents.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: She deconstructs the Grade Skipper. As a kid, she jumped from fourth grade to high school and graduated MIT at the age of 13, but the process left her a socially stunted workaholic, and she didn't even want to skip ahead at all, as it would have meant leaving her friend Orrin behind. Reagan's father forced her anyway, going so far as to erase her memories of Orrin so she'd have nothing stopping her.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She starts off despising her team and Brett but grows to see them as her real family as the series goes on.
• Designer Babies: Rand claims to have altered her genes in the womb so that she'd favor his genes over her mom's.
• The Dog Bites Back: As a kid, she dealt with the constant mockery of her older classmates by pulling a "reverse-Carrie" on everyone at prom.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: She's often denied credit for things she's responsible for. Her ROBOTUS project ends up going to Brett when he blunders in with bagels and draws everyone's attention, her defeat of the Flat Earthers is credited to Rafe Masters even though he only showed up after the battle, and her father ends up being given control of the company after the chaos caused by Bear-O, which he created and then made impossible to stop through his machinations.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: Graduated top of her class from MIT at thirteen years old, and is the Head Roboticist of Cognito Inc. However, while she certainly has the technical smarts befitting an MIT graduate, she is lacking in social smarts.
• Emperor Scientist: She becomes CEO of Cognito in the part 1 finale. Downplayed, given that she still had to answer to the Shadow Board and is ultimately removed by them and replaced with her father due to the chaos caused by Bear-O. She regains the position at the end of the season.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • She may be working for a company that does many morally unethical and highly illegal things, but Reagan does value human life and would rather make Earth a better place to live. And she makes it clear while she's a bit selfish and harsh on others, she doesn't like making people feel bad emotionally.
  • She is disgusted when she learns that Cognito had been dousing Still Valley, Wyoming, with a mind-altering chemical that retains their minds in the 80s just so they could sell them recalled 80s products.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: Her eyes start at crow's feet and work their way down from there, depending on how overworked she is in any given situation.
• Extreme Doormat: Zig-Zagged. For the most part, Reagan is anything but a doormat, but she slips into this when it comes to Rand and Tamiko. While she won't hesitate to call them out on their bullshit, they're still able to force her into going along with their shenanigans and dote on their every whim. Rand even exploits her on a daily basis by mooching off of her and meddling in Reagan's life while expecting her to care for his every whim. She's eventually has enough of Rand and cuts him out of her life when she finds out he erased her memories of her Only Friend Orrin Cartwright.
• Fingore: Her left pinky is shot off by J.R. in Part 2, replacing it with a robotic one.
• Freudian Excuse: Reagan is a massive Jerkass due to her parents being far worse than her who were abusive and neglectful throughout her whole life.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Reagan Ridley starts off the series as this amongst the staff of Cognito Inc. Her lack of social skills, ego, and high strung nature did not win her any friends with her fellow department heads, hence Brett getting hired to compensate. It was only after Brett came on and she developed an earnest friendship with him that she started to open up a bit to everyone else, which allowed the rest of the group begin to liking her more and hanging out with her.
• Friendless Background: Reagan's been a loner for most of her life due to being a genius Grade Skipper and later Workaholic roboticist. Justified, since Rand erased her memory of her Only Friend so she would be focused on skipping grades and finishing her education so she could become an accomplished scientist at a young age.
• Gadgeteer Genius: She's a talented inventor, specializing primarily in robotics.
• Geeky Turn-On:
  • She describes museums as "the sexiest places on earth."
  • Myc also reveals that she has a Carl Sagan fetish.
• Grade Skipper: Skipped from fourth grade directly to high school, and ended up graduating top of her class from MIT at 13. Deconstructed, since this is a big part of why she's a socially stunted workaholic and she didn't even want to skip at all, since she had a friend in fourth grade. Her father erased her memories of her friend so he wouldn't hold her back from skipping.
• Hates Being Touched: She hates hugs because her parents never gave her a hug, and the robot her dad built to hug her traumatized her.
• Hidden Buxom: It's not focused on, given the show is from Reagan's POV, but its there. Reagan usually dresses conservatively or casually, doing what she can to look professional. But in the rare occasions where she is at formal or festive events and forced to wear a dress or just clean herself up-Reagan is shown to be surprisingly busty and have quite the figure.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Her singing is so bad that Cognito Inc uses her karaoke rendition of "Purple Rain" to break ISIS captives.
• Insufferable Genius: Downplayed but present. She loves to show off her work, openly gloats and praises her own intellect, and has a massive ego about her. Unlike most examples, she doesn’t look down on most people for a lack of comparable intelligence but usually a lack of professionalism and competence and hardly sees herself as above everyone else.
• Internal Reformist: She wants to make Cognito a more benevolent organization.
• Ironic Echo: Season Two starts almost the exact same way as Season One, this time with Reagan as the drunk person trying to reveal the deep state in front of the White House, and Brett as the person picking her up on the way to Cognito Inc.
• Irony: A Mad Scientist who wants to Take Over the World... and yet she's also very dedicated to the idea of making Earth a better place to live and Cognito a less morally grey company and into a benevolent one.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: After she sees that she can't keep her job and her relationship with Ron, as well as seeing a future where he's Happily Married with another, normal woman Off the Grid, she lets him erase his own memories while she disappears from his life forever.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Reagan is gruff, cynical, and blunt, but she's by no means a bad person. She's the only member of Cognito Inc outside of Brett to not be a total degenerate, and she's trying to turn it into a Benevolent Conspiracy from behind the scenes. She's also shown to be rather kind at some points, especially when it comes to her friendship with Brett, she even admits that as much as she butts heads with them, she respects the whole team, barring Myc, who makes everyone else look better in comparison.
• Knight in Sour Armor: She genuinely wants to make the world a better place, but she's also an extremely cynical and pragmatic woman who's very willing to Shoot the Dog to make it happen. Word of God even describes her as a cynical optimist.
• Like Parent, Like Child: Despite her best efforts to avoid it, she shares several qualities with her father Rand. Most glaringly, both have a tendency to avoid talking out their actual feelings and resort to using zany technological schemes to solve their emotional issues. The difference is that Reagan has more drive and is actually willing to sacrifice her own happiness for those she loves.
• Lonely at the Top: She has enormous success as a scientist...but she lives a very bleak existence devoid of human connection. Bear-O even tries to destroy Cognito because of how miserable Reagan's work makes her. It doesn't help that she never had a choice in her career path, her dad streamlined it for her long before she got the job.
• Mad Scientist: Although she is just enough of a consummate professional to downplay this trope, it is still very much present in her outlandish inventions and working for a dark cabal that rules the world from the shadows, even being as close to the top as she can before becoming the boss. When an actual supervillain accuses her of being one, her response is that she isn't mad, just disappointed.
• MacGyvering: There's multiple instances where she's been able to make advanced gadgets out of very simple electronics, like a self-flying drone out of a Simon Says game and bombs made out of Amazon Alexas.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: In "Buzzkill", she starts suspecting that Buzz is her actual father, rather than Rand, having learned that Buzz, Tamiko and Rand were in a threeway around the same time Reagan was conceived. Unusually, Reagan is the one who doubts her real parentage (mostly due to wishful thinking), while Rand is insistent that he's her real father. A DNA test reveals that Rand is the father.
• Married to the Job: She and Ron appear to be soulmates, but after the latter grows weary of the awful things the shadow governments do, he offers Reagan a chance to go Off the Grid with him which would require erasing their memories. Reagan considers this, but when the Shadow Board offers her a partnership, she instead desperately searches via computer simulations for scenarios where she both keeps her job and stays with a retired Ron, and when she finds that all of them end with their relationship crumbling, leaves Ron in his new home after he erases his memories.
• Mean Boss: Very much intends on being this in the pilot once she gets her promotion. It ends up being downplayed by the presence of Brett as co-boss and her character development, however. Even so, in the part 1 finale, she's very ruthless in finding the mole, to the point of using mind-control drugs on her team (though in fairness, at that point it is life or death).
• Meaningful Name:
  • Reagan was a character in King Lear who wanted to inherit her father's lands but grew sick of how he was freeloading off her and her husband, eventually kicking him out when he wore out his welcome. Sound familiar?
  • It's probably not a coincidence that Rand Ridley created a helmet that would let Cognito brainwash US President Ronald Reagan's memories, called "Project Jellybean," and then later named his Tyke Bomb daughter Reagan. Rand even calls Reagan "Jellybean."
  • "Reagan" also translates to "little king" in Irish. This alludes to her grandiose ambitions as the future leader of Cognito Inc. being constantly hampered by the Dysfunction Junction that is her workplace. Additionally, it subtly alludes to how her father ultimately viewed her only as a backdoor option into getting back into Cognito Inc. — Ideally, Reagan would grant Rand access back into the company in a manner like a king pardoning a traitorous noble, but because she would be "little", she would still be ultimately subservient to him. Heck, the mere fact that her name includes the word "little" can be seen as showing how Rand doesn't see her as an actual equal for all his claims otherwise.
• Mirror Character: With Brett, while also being his Foil. Both might be opposites in terms of intelligence and social skills, but both also come from neglectful parents whose lack of interest in their children caused them severe mental problems well into their adult years.
• Must Have Caffeine: She's usually seen with jugs of coffee because of her workaholic attitude.
• Nervous Wreck: Given her job and her coworkers, she is pretty high strung.
• Non-Standard Character Design: She has a very noticeable underbite.
• No Social Skills: She's not great with people, which is why she is forced to share her promotion with Brett, to act as The Face for team morale while she offers the actual competence and experience.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: For someone who openly prefers sequestering herself inside her lab, and just avoiding people in general, Reagan does find herself surrounded by attractive people a lot. Usually by the actions and requests of others or just random chance. Like her mom only hiring pretty boy servants, world class agents trained to 'seduce' rescuing her, or the first friend she made in decades being the official hottest man in the office. But each and every time Reagan seems more disturbed, annoyed, or just plain surprised than actually aroused by any of it
• Only Sane by Comparison: Despite her eccentricities, she's still one of the most responsible members of her team. That being said she is still unhinged and dealing with a lot of trauma from her past, and is only sane because the rest of her teammates bar Brett are a bunch of degenerate assholes.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Rand states he tampered with Reagan's genetic structure to ensure it resembled his more than her mother's ,implying she's closer to this than a normal daughter.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Develops an odd but close friendship with Brett over time. While they become very supportive of each other, there are no indications that they're romantically interested in each other, with Reagan having several other male characters as love interests.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: She knows nothing about 80s pop culture, since her dad threw out the TV when she was a kid so she could focus on science. She even uses the term "MacGyvering" without knowing who MacGyver is.
• Robosexuals Are Creeps: Her dating robo-Brian is framed as an unhealthy product of her social anxiety and unwillingness to get close to actual human beings. Pointedly it's not necessarily that he is a robot which makes it creepy, but that he's a copy of another person that Reagan built so she could have attachment to that person without actually risking her own feelings into it. All while giving herself total control so she could avoid anything unpleasant about having an intimate relationship.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Her father's laser focus on her education has rendered her barely capable of social interaction, though she starts to improve once Brett is added to the team. It's later revealed that she was actually forced into doing this, by Rand erasing the memories of her Only Friend that was able to get along with the childhood Reagan, and whom was also implied to be slightly more sociable than her. If Rand hadn't done that, there's a good chance Reagan would have been more well-adjusted growing up, but with him gone, Reagan believed she wasn't capable of getting along with other 'normal' people thanks to her gifted intelligence, and instead devoted herself to getting joy out of her life by focusing on her work instead.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Inverted since Reagan, being the intelligent and experienced type, is the Savvy Girl to Brett's Energetic Guy.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: While her appearance is usually plain and unkempt, she has shown to be quite attractive when she puts the effort in making herself look good.
• Sinister Schnoz: More morally ambiguous than anything, but she does have a noticeably larger nose than quite a few other female characters. This is possibly another sign of Rand tampering with Reagan's genetics to make his genes more dominant, seeing as he has a nose worthy of Ichabod Crane, though Reagan's nose is more hooked like her mother's.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: People repeatedly accuse her of edging closer and closer to becoming a super-villain throughout the series. If anything, thanks to Brett's influence and Reagan's gradual Character Development, she's actually become more sociable and capable of getting along with others throughout the series, though she is still abrasive at times and prone to taking complicated solutions to solving her problems, which can cause chaotic destruction.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Despite them being from rival agencies, she starts a relationship with Ron. Their romance inevitably ends (though thankfully non-lethally) not because of their feuding workplaces, but rather because it turns out that Ron would rather live a normal life away from shadow governments, while Reagan still believes her work at Cognito Inc. to be too important to give up.
• Straight Woman: She's the closest thing to sane among her coworkers, and is usually the one who has to keep everyone on mission.
• Surprise Incest: Buzz tries to have sex with her while she believes that he's her actual biological father. It's thankfully Subverted, however, once it's revealed that Rand is indeed Reagan's biological father. Though no less Squicky since Buzz still is old enough to be her father and had a previous sexual encounter with Reagan's mother, Tamiko.
• Take Over the World: Implied to be her dream several times throughout the series, believing that Utopia Justifies the Means. How much of it is actually her dream versus one that Rand implanted in her is up for debate, however.
  • When given an offer by the Robes to work with them directly in the Part 2 finale, she initially states that no human, including herself, is fit to rule humanity, but then says that she could write an algorithm which could and eventually accepts the offer.
• Took a Level in Kindness: She started out the season by promising her teammates that once she got her promotion, they would have to shelve their weird behaviors and focus on work. When she actually gets it in the finale, her first course of action is to reward them with crew jackets and offer Myc an upgraded tentacle machine.
• Token Good Teammate: While Brett is the Token Good by his niceness, Reagan is the Token Good by her heroism, as she wants to turn the Ancient Conspiracy she's part of into a Benevolent Conspiracy. Of course, that's easier said than done, considering that she is a Knight in Sour Armor.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: Since she's constantly moving and working with machinery with little regard for her personal appearance, she usually keeps her hair tied back. On the rare occasion she dresses up, she lets her hair down.
• Trauma Button: She reacts very badly to the idea of hugging, to the point that she instinctively punches Brett in the face when he attempts to hug her as part of a training exercise. It's later revealed that this stems from being traumatized by Bear-O, a robot Rand built to give her hugs since he was unwilling to hug her himself.
  • She also reacts very badly to seeing an episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on TV, triggering a flashback to when she irradiated her pet turtles to turn them into crime fighters in imitation of the show, only to give them cancer and forcing her to put them down. While Rand laughed at her about it. Yeah, Reagan's childhood sucked.
• Turn Out Like His Father: She's trying to go to great pains to ensure that this doesn't happen, but in the timeline where she tries to maintain both her work and her relationship with Ron, she ends up ruining her relationship with him in the same way that Rand did with Tamiko and her by prioritizing herself and her work over him.
• Unreliable Expositor: Played for Drama in hindsight. She legitimately knows nothing about '80s pop culture, and says that her dad tossed out the television when she was a kid. Reagan does know '90s culture: Bear-O mentioned that when Reagan was 8, she wanted to be a LEGO astronaut and marry the band NSYNC. Reagan points out that she was a kid, not refuting the fantasy. She also made a Velociraptor for her birthday around the time Jurassic Park came out. Rand tampered with Reagan's memories so that he could push her in and out of school, and she is horrified when realizing it explains some of the glitches that she and Rand saw, as well as why she knows some pop culture but not all of it. That, and he also erased her best friend from her mind.
• Unscrupulous Hero: While she genuinely wants to make the world a better place, one must also take into account the wildly unethical things she and her task force do to maintain Cognito's grip on the world. At her worst, she can even approach being a Villain Protagonist.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: As an adult she is cranky and bad-tempered with No Social Skills due to her being overworked and dealing with a lousy father. In the past, she was much nicer until her father erased the memories of her only friend.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Hints several times over the course of the series that she has plans for world domination via Cognito Inc., in order to 'make the world a better place.'
• Villain Protagonist: The story follows her - an morally questionable at best Mad Scientist - path to taking over Cognito Inc. for her own ambitions of taking over the world.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Benevolent intentions aside, she does still want to rule the world.
• Workaholic: Convinced that all she has to do is put in a ridiculous amount of hours at the office, often giving her Exhausted Eye Bags.
• Wrench Wench: She tends to build her robots by hand.

Brett Hand

Voiced By: Clark Duke
"Brett Hand, thrilled to be serving whoever gives me approval!"

A lovable D.C. yes-man. He's brought on to help Reagan lead the company after J.R. discovered he had a face so generic it can't even be traced by satellites.

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• Abusive Parents: His parents keep a running ranking of who their favorite children are, with Brett consistently ranked at the bottom, below even one of his generically identical cousins who can't even tell each other apart. At one point he even gets knocked down a further rank in favor of his mother's dog. As a child he was forced to sleep in a treehouse located outside the family property. In "Brettwork" they threaten to disown him for being more successful in running for political office against his brother, despite Cognito having him parrot all of the ultra-right wing talking points that his parents favor.
• Affably Evil: Downplayed, to an extent. Brett is very upbeat and friendly, which can make it easy to forget that he's ultimately still mostly willing to go along with the more cruel and amoral stuff Cognito does.
• Anti-Villain: Brett is an upbeat, friendly and somewhat dim Token Good Teammate, so its very easy to forget that he is complicit in the shadow government's antics and can possibly only be excused by his incredible naivety.
• The Alleged Boss: Due to his employee-friendly personality, it's easy to forget that he is of the same rank as Reagan, even if he is technically registered as an unpaid intern.
• All-Loving Hero: Brett's charismatic and friendly demeanor, coupled with his good looks makes him the closest thing Cognito Inc has to this trope among its ranks.
• Audience Surrogate: The newest member of Cognito Inc's staff who usually needs the company's laundry list of commonly known conspiracies and operations explained to him.
  • Lampshaded by Rand in "We Found Love in a Popeless Place"
    Rand: Why do you never know anything? I should work in construction with the amount of pipe I have to lay.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Manages to get past the Secret Service this way. He simply relies on having graduated from the same frat as them (since he applied to every frat at Yale and thus knows all of their secret handshakes) and exploits their trust in a fellow "white heterosexual male" so they won't suspect him.
• Beauty Equals Goodness : Very handsome and nice to a fault.
• Book Dumb: Zigzagged; he filled in all the circles on his standardized tests in high school, but he was later able to graduate from Yale at the top of his fraternity.
• Black Comedy Rape: Glenn's wife sexually assaults him despite his clear hesitance. In the latter's case, Brett was inside Glenn's body at the time (making it an unwilling Bed Trick on his part) and Glenn's wife didn't know that, but it's still a rather gross moment.
• Character Development: Throughout the first season, he slowly learns that he doesn't have to just go along with what everyone tells him to do in order for people to like him. It starts when he hears his old "friends" from Yale mocking him behind his back.
• The Charmer: He's so good with people that he doesn't need to know what he's talking about to be able to convince people.
• Commonality Connection: Like Reagan, he grew up friendless with a family that was neglectful at best, but unlike her he became a compulsive people-pleaser and Yes-Man. Reagan discovers this commonality and uses it to reach out to him while he's having a superpowered rampage in "The Brettfast Club".
• The Conscience: Most of the time, he can convince Reagan to not pursue utterly immoral actions for an ulterior motive, or even a utilitarian one. He only doesn't in the cases where a worse outcome would occur if they make the ethically right choice; for example, having to choose to lay off one person versus the whole company going under, or finding a Mole to save all the employees from being eaten by sharks. 
• Desperately Craves Affection: Because of his neglectful parents and lonely childhood, Brett is ready to please anyone to be part of a gang or to get an "attaboy" from a father figure. Many people in the story exploit this.
• Deuteragonist: Most episodes give Brett just as much screentime and importance as Reagan, sometimes even having him be the main character of a sub plot.
• Dumbass Has a Point: In the last two episodes he tells Reagan to choose his gang over her dad, who he believes is the mole. While he was wrong about the mole part, he was correct that Rand had ulterior motives, which caused Reagan to want him dead.
• Embarrassing Hobby: Season 2 reveals that he's into puppetry.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Myc says Glenn thinks he is hot.
• Everyone Has Standards: He tells Reagan in the season finale that her dad is the most likely Mole candidate by virtue of motive and sheer assholery. While he ends up being wrong, owing to Reagan retorting that her dad doesn't care enough about her team to frame them, Reagan does come to admit that her dad isn't trustworthy at all and not worthy of her protecting him.
• The Face: He was hired primarily for his people skills, a trait Reagan almost completely lacks.
• Foil: With Reagan Ridley. Being team co-leaders highlights their differences with Brett being a handsome and charismatic Nice Guy who's also naive and overly trusting, while Reagan is a brilliant genius who's plain looking and has No Social Skills. This even goes into their childhoods; Brett's parents neglected him and tried to pass him off as someone else's son, while Reagan's dad tried to ensure she would be the smartest kid in the world by any means necessary. Also, Brett finds nostalgia in 80s culture despite being born in the 90s, while Reagan knows nothing about 80s pop culture due to her dad throwing out the TV.
• Frat Bro: He was the top graduate from his frat in Yale^note  Though not at the highest level of membership for it. To make sure he got into one of the frats, he rushed all of them. He went through 38 continuous Hell weeks, and came out of it knowing multiple secret handshakes and enough knowledge to successfully bluff every member of Secret Service.
• Freudian Excuse: "The Brettfast Club" reveals that while he grew up in a well-to-do family, his parents openly preferred his siblings over him and were hardly ever around. As Reagan learns later, Brett's ideal idea of a family (as shown in his holographic projection at the beginning of the episode) is the one from his favorite 80s sitcom, with him in the big brother role.
• The Generic Guy: He was hired because his face is so generically handsome that he couldn't be found by satellites. He also exploits this to his and Reagan's advantage, since he's so generically White Straight Male that he can get in pretty much everywhere. In fact, his DNA is apparently too generic to be cloned as well.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: He doesn't understand how terrible a father Rand is during the moon mission and shows sympathy to him about how Reagan doesn't respect him. This inadvertently allows him and Rand to find out that Buzz Aldrin killed Neil Armstrong. Later, in the season finale, Brett grows out of this: he tells Reagan that her dad is the most likely mole candidate.
• Grew a Spine: Over the course of Season 1, he becomes increasingly willing to assert his own opinions. He even argues with Reagan in the season finale, something he almost certainly wouldn't have done at the start.
• The Heart: Easily the nicest person on the team, whom everyone likes, even Reagan after a while. Bear-o, determined to destroy all negative influences in Reagan's life to make her happier, notably does not target Brett at any point when he's on his own from the rest of the team, showing that even his misaligned programming understands that Brett has been nothing but a good influence on Reagan. Bear-o's dedication to 'helping' Reagan this way even lead him to target her own father, his creator, without hesitation, but Brett is never even considered a target.
• Hidden Depths: He's actually well aware that it's his looks and desire to please others that have gotten him as far in life as they have as opposed to any real capabilities. What's more, graduating from Yale is no easy feat, even when you can coast by on looks and legacy.
  • Season 2 reveals his dream as a kid was to make puppets, and the ones in his treehouse are very well designed.
• Hunk: He is quite muscular thanks to previously working as a personal trainer, and multiple characters find him attractive.
• Lonely Rich Kid: It's revealed that while his family is very wealthy (he's shown to have lived in an ostentatious mansion with at least one butler and multiple horses), they neglected him his whole life.
• Lovable Jock: In the past, he worked for the State Department as a personal trainer. He is still very fit, and a very friendly guy.
• Love Hungry: Deconstructed; the poor guy will do anything, even risk his life, for someone to approve of him. We find out it's because his entire family neglected him, and he tried seeking validation from fraternity brothers and bosses. Reagan outright tells him he deserves people who truly care about him.
• Meaningful Name: His last name being "hand" evokes the image of hand puppets, referencing how he's a fervent Yes-Man desperate for the approval of others and only rarely thinks about himself rather than willing acting on someone else's orders. In Season 2, we also learn that he really enjoys actual puppetry.
• Mr. Fanservice: There have been many episodes which shows Brett's impressive and attractive Heroic Build.
• Naïve Newcomer: The company literally hired Brett off the street, so he doesn't know the details of Cognito's operations, such as whether, and to what extent, they are actually evil.
• Naked People Are Funny: While his attractive physique is occasionally played for Fanservice (i.e., the sexy pictures he took as a fitness trainer in the backstory of "Unpresidented"), it's also often used for the sake of comedy (i.e., him wandering naked through the ventilation shafts of the Reptoid High Council building and getting attacked by a swarm of rats in "Blue Bloods").
• Nice Guy: Very much so. Just the thought of him and Reagan having to fire someone is enough to make him vomit. Bear-o's rampage against Cognito in the finale notably excludes him from the rest of the team that the faulty robot decides need to be killed to remove all negative influences in Reagan's life. He also is the only one of the gang to resist the temptation of ending up in their ideal timelines and stick with Reagan, something she thanks him for but since she sees Rand as her problem, she makes sure Brett ends up in his dream timeline.
• The Nondescript: Downplayed. While he's a notably handsome man, he doesn't have much else in the way of identifiable or recognizable features. In fact, his looks are so generically "attractive white male" that he can't be found by spy satellites or even cloned.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Brett is naïve but not stupid. As J.R. reminds people, he did graduate from Yale at the top of his fraternity class, and being a personal trainer means having social skills to motivate others. It's just that compared to super-genius Reagan he looks like an idiot, and he is the most normal person working at Cognito, Inc.
• Not So Above It All: He invites Reagan to watch J.R.'s weird sex fantasies on Cognito Inc.'s holodeck. This is while knowing they would be in trouble if busted.
• Perky Goth: He was this in high school in addition to being a Lovable Jock, likely out of desperation to be accepted by both cliques.
• Platonic Life-Partners: He develops a close friendship with Reagan, but there's no indication that either of them think of the other in a romantic light. Brett does show some disapproval towards Ron, but that more has to do with Ron's personality than Brett being jealous of his and Reagan's relationship.
• Positive Friend Influence: His arrival in Reagan's life and his subsequent actions, both intentionally and unintentionally, eventually lead to Reagan becoming more emotionally open and willing to be nice to others, when previously she was perfectly fine isolating herself and viewed others as an inconvenience. Tellingly, when Bear-O attempts to exterminate the toxic influences in Reagan's life, he avoids Brett.
• Replacement Goldfish: The first season finale implies that subconsciously, Reagan saw Brett as a genuine friend when he helped her stop ROBOTUS, to fill in the gaps in her memory about Orrin, her first and only best friend. Notable is that Reagan is the nicest to Brett out of her team because he is the most competent in a genuine crisis while unsuited for regular Cognito Inc affairs, and always has her back. Even when it seemed Rafe Masters had seduced him away with the spy life and inadvertently caused him to blab about poker night, Reagan told him she knows he didn't mean to lead a stalking James Bond Expy to her chill time. She also apologizes to him for "leaving him behind" while pretending to be her own murderer, though Brett admits that logically it was the best decision she could have made.
• Right-Hand Hottie: Brett is constantly noted to have near-superhuman good looks to go along with his Nice Guy charm, and Reagan's arc in the first episode is realizing that she needs him as her Number Two to achieve her goals.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Inverted since Brett, being the happy go-lucky and near chronically eager type, is the Energetic Guy to Reagan's Savvy Girl.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: World Class Beauty, He is considered very handsome to the point of getting a score of 10 on an attractiveness scale.
• Smarter Than You Look: Brett is more observant than people think he is, and if anything he is more naive than stupid. He did go to Yale and graduate top of his class, and had the stamina to endure 38 weeks of hazing after joining every frat. Being a personal trainer requires having people skills and knowing how to motivate others, something that helps when Reagan needs to get the drugged-out team in line. When ROBOTUS goes haywire, Brett realizes that they need Reagan since she built the robot and has his shutdown codes, and calls her for help. He may not know to bring weapons to a robot fight, but he does know that if your teammate is down, you pick them up and keep running.
• Stepford Smiler: While he's normally a good-natured Nice Guy, there are times where he admits that he's well aware that his looks and "yes-man" attitude have gotten him freebies in life, and him suddenly being put in charge of some major responsibilities is incredibly stressful for him. His opening up to Reagan and begging her for help, while crediting her with stopping ROBOTUS, is what makes Reagan realize that she can trust him. "The Brettfast Club" also reveals that he hides a lot of loneliness due to his parents neglecting him and blatantly favoring his siblings over him.
• Token Good Teammate: Zigzagged, he works for Cognito. Inc, but Brett is a Nice Guy without a single mean bone in his body and fully supports the anti-heroic Reagan. He is the most likely person to ask how evil they are supposed to be, or if they are actually evil, though not actually try anything to work against them intentionally.
• Torture Is Ineffective: He endured 38 weeks of hazing in college to join every fraternity because of his desperate need to seek the approval of absolutely everyone. As a result, Brett can handle a large amount of physical pain.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Downplayed, since he's the Token Good Teammate of Reagan's team, but he looks and acts like a regular guy despite willingly working for a sinister conspiracy. The fact that his appearance and personality are so "generic white guy" even gets exploited in-universe, since he's so easy to trust while at the same time very hard to identify or remember.
• The Unfavorite: His parents preferred all his siblings over him. They intentionally crowded him out of the family pictures. His father bluntly said he was proud of all of his siblings except him, and when mentioning as such spoke his name with venom in his voice. It's even worse since it's implied that while Brett was able to go to and graduate from Yale without any spots on his record, his siblings were all sent to military school or ended up in rehab, and his parents still preferred them over him.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: After he became a successful host of a far-right news show that his parents love, he let himself run for senator to the point where he had to fake his own death so that right-wing fanaticism over him would stop, just because he was gaining attention from his parents.
• White Male Lead: Downplayed as Reagan is the main character of the show, but Brett otherwise fills this role and is a major character in his own right. The show even lampshades this by frequently joking that Brett is as "generic white guy" as it gets, at least In-Universe.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: He expects Cognito Inc to operate exactly like the Men in Black, which causes him to assume a tampon is a neuralizer and bring a fingerprint eraser to a gunfight. He gets better about this in later episodes.
• Yes-Man: He's ready to agree with anybody who will give him positive acknowledgment. That being said, he gradually grows out of this, so that by the season finale he argues with Reagan that her dad has to be the mole because he's the most likely suspect.

Dr. Andre Lee

Voiced By: Bobby Lee
"Meth really is the Adderall of cocaines!"

The free-spirited head of biochemistry at Cognito Inc.

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• Anti-Villain: Andre is a corrupt supposed doctor who has created diseases that likely have body counts in the thousands, but he's also a neurotic mess who uses drugs to cope with his unmedicated OCD, Tourettes and anxiety, and is implied to have grown up with strict Christian parents. Despite his shortcomings, he does enjoy having fun with his coworkers and can be genuinely insightful.
• Asian and Nerdy: He is Korean and a biochemist.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: He's a genius biochemist but he spends most of his time getting high on everything under the sun.
• Everyone Has Standards: A dysfunctional drug addict he might be, but when he ends up on a time-trapped town in "The Brettfast Club", he gets so disturbed by the 80s' racist behavior that he temporarily quits drugs for that episode. Even with him being an Extreme Omnisexual, he is put off when two 80s girls he's flirting with refer to him as an "oriental guy" and has to consider if they're hot enough to get away with casual racism.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Andre is attracted to women, but identifies as "Alwayssexual" on his dating profile (which shows a photo of him with both men and women), and is enthusiastic about getting into orgies, as evidenced by the multiple sex cults he's been ghosting and the orgy at the Lizard-people event, which also involved Myc, who is a literal sentient mushroom. He also eagerly watches when Dr Skullfinger burns off Rafe's testicles. Season 2 confirms he is pansexual.
• Flat Character: Discussed in-universe. When he's sober, he feels that his entire character is viewed as a gag of Stoners Are Funny and nothing else, which is how his co-workers see him, but he's got more to him then that.
• Freudian Excuse: His extreme drug use is self-medication for his extreme neurosis. When sober Andre suffers from Tourette's, OCD, anxiety, and crippling self-loathing. At one point, he also mentions he was raised by hardcore Christians, which could likely explain why he's so deeply into drugs and sex.
• Functional Addict: He's so around the bend with his casual drug use that he can't function unless he's high on something. As seen in "My Big Flat Earth Wedding" where Glenn tosses his drugs overboard and he's reduced to a quivering mess until he licks one of Myc's psilocybin-loaded tentacles.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Feels insulted everyone sees him as a one trick Stoners Are Funny guy and admits he knows Latin.
  • When lamenting where he went wrong in his life, he admits he wrote slam poetry as a kid and believes he could’ve written screenplays easily.
  • There are also hints that part of Andre's behavior is his attempt at covering up issues he has with his parents, as the off-handed comments he's made about them hint at a poor relationship.
• Hypocritical Humor: After attempting a Face/Off-style surgery to expected results, he tells himself that he has to stop basing surgeries on movies. Immediately after, he decides to swap brains around and compares it to Freaky Friday (1976).
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: He gets mistaken for Chinese repeatedly in the 80s town, to his annoyance.
• Mad Doctor: Performs a brain transplant on Brett and Glenn, but not before doing a botched face transplant. He was also the one to perform Glenn’s super solider procedure…to less than stellar results. It turns out he never graduated medical school, as he admits he flunked out of his first year.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Subverted. He's a pretty ethically questionable guy, and goes by the title doctor, but he does not have a doctorate.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Played with. He's the head of biochemistry, but mentions having gone to med school and performs surgeries, implying that he's a medical doctor. It's possible that he has multiple doctorates. He actually has none, having flunked out of med school.
• Pink Is Erotic: He wears pink clothing and he is openly obsessed with sex, ranging from attending sex cults to finding orgies, and he is willing to have sex with any being that consents to it.
• The Stoner: An extreme example as he’s usually high on basically every possible thing imaginable and then some. He's first shown huffing chem trails and, due to just how smashed he usually is, he can barely function without being on at least one illicit substance.
• Those Two Guys: Constantly seen with Myc, as both of them are perverts.
• Undiscriminating Addict: The briefcase of drugs he brings in "My Big Flat Earth Wedding" looks like something out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, after Glenn tosses it overboard (killing several fish and getting a diver stoned) he resorts to licking one of Myc's severed tentacles.

Glenn Dolphman

Voiced By: John DiMaggio

A half-man, half-dolphin hybrid super-soldier that manages Cognito Inc's weapons arsenal.

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• Acro Fatic: He's a bulky guy with a big gut, but he's still adept at combat, and his dolphin DNA ensures he's highly skilled at swimming, as seen in "My Big Flat Earth Wedding."
• Ambiguously Bi: Myc notes than Glenn thinks that Brett is attractive and later claims he's had sex dreams about the whole gang. Plus, he was practically drooling over MI6 Agent Rafe Masters.
• Anti-Villain: Glenn is a violent, bigoted warmonger whose life has basically been ruined by the shoddy experiment that transformed him into the deformed half-dolphin he is now. Despite his brutal personality, he does hold somewhat positive relationships with his coworkers and is usually the one who is the least hard on Reagan and the most eager to help the others out. For example, in "The Brettfast Club" he is eager to follow Brett's disguise plan, and later gives Reagan a card to rent from Blockbuster to make Brett feel better.
• Artificial Hybrid: He volunteered to become a half-man, half-dolphin.
• Boomerang Bigot: He hates the reptiles for being half-man, half-lizard and yet he's a half-man, half-dolphin.
  • Curiously, Glenn was also rather quick to defend furries.
    Glenn: They're a valid community. It's not always a sexual thing... but usually.
  • He also doesn't seem to have any problems (at least race related ones) with his mixed race, Korean and black coworkers (Reagan, Andre and Gigi respectively).
• Comically Missing the Point: Truth be told, while Glenn is horrendous to look at, it is possible for others to be attracted to him if he were a more patient and open minded person. Unfortunately, Glenn doesn't understand that his personality can be repulsive and drives a part of his loneliness. When told this outright, he attacks Brett for it.
• Devious Dolphins: He is a half-human half-dolphin who is part of a cabal that covers up conspiracy theories and is quite grouchy.
• Didn't Think This Through: In the penultimate episode of Part 2, Glenn removes his tin foil hat during Rand's attempt to rewrite reality to live in a timeline where he is human and Happily Married to his ex-wife. However, it wasn't until afterward that he realized that this would be in the timeline where the Soviet Union took over America. This is naturally a deal breaker for him.
• Fantastic Racism: He tried to get Myc deported to the center of the Earth and he can barely hide his bigotry towards the reptoids.
• Fat Bastard: He's quite hefty which several characters point out and is also a grouchy old man that is a little too trigger-happy.
• Foil: To Brett, which "Clone Gunman" highlights. Brett is a Nice Guy whose also very attractive, while Glenn is a Jerkass along with being very ugly.
• Gonk: Having fused with Dolphin DNA has made him unappealing to say the least. To the point that when he has his attractiveness scanned, gave him a zero on a one to ten scale and his phone sends out an Amber Alert whenever he tries to use face recognition.
• Jerkass: Glenn is an ill-tempered and obnoxious asshole with all the prejudices of a Fullmetal Jacket sergeant.
• Meaningful Name: His surname is Dolphman and he is a hybrid of a man and a dolphin. During the hunt for the Mole, Myc literally lampshades the absurdity that he had the name BEFORE the surgery.
• Never My Fault: He believes that physical attraction is enough for women to be seduced by him but is enraged when women start losing interest in him after a conversation. Brett tries to tell him that all these flaws are a result of his poor social skills, Dolphman attacks him.
• Old Soldier: He's 51 and a soldier who served in Vietnam and Kosovo.
• Patriotic Fervor: He praises America in abundance and his song of choice on Karaoke Night is always "Proud to Be An American." to the annoyance of his coworkers.
  Glenn: Clap or you're a traitor!
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He despises the Vietnamese, and when he was in the city mentally trapped in the 80s he also enjoys beating students. He has also been conspiring to have Myc deported back to Hollow Earth. Though he apparently doesn't seem to have any trouble working with a half-Japanese woman (Reagan), a black woman (Gigi), and a Korean-American (Andre).
• Properly Paranoid: He has weapons hidden in every room at Cognito Inc. Considering where he's working, it's not unjustified, and it comes in handy several times.
• Raging Stiffie: The very idea of two homicidal robots potentially killing the crap out of each other is enough to give Glenn a "war boner", much to the disgust of Gigi and ROBOTUS.
• Sliding Scale of Beauty: He is considered horrendous, to the point of getting a zero on a scale of attractiveness that ranged from 1 to 10.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Commands a squad of seals to carry him once he's tired of swimming.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: His last name Dolphman highlights the fact he's a half-dolphin man. This gets lampshaded by Myc during the when he points out in one episode that Glenn's backstory doesn't make any sense in that he's supposed to be a human who became a dolphin but his last name has always been Dolphman thus making him suspicious.
• Stout Strength: He claims to be as strong as a dolphin but his strength is primarily in his legs because his webbed hands affect his grip.
• Suicide as Comedy: Played with. His suicide attempt is mentioned as part of a joke, but the suicide itself isn't the joke. The joke is that Noel talked him "down from the ledge" and then talked Andre onto the ledge at a parkour convention.
• Super-Soldier: He's supposed to be one (with "the strength and intelligence of a dolphin"). However, he's a Flawed Prototype at best, as it rendered him physically deformed, left him a pair of barely functional flipper-like hands and he generally has no advantages in combat outside of water besides his scarily high pressure blowhole.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Zigzagged, as a soldier he's got the skills for combat but due to his hybridisation with a dolphin, he's better suited for working in the ocean.
• Teeny Weenie: Implied to have this when Brett mentions that guys with weapons are just compensating in the episode "Ghost Protocol"
• Uncool Undies: He wears tighty whities as seen in "My Big Flat Earth Wedding."

Gigi Thompson

Voiced By: Tisha Campbell
"I love weddings. They're a celebration of two souls who got sick of dating apps and settled."

Cognito Inc's Head of Media Manipulation and Subliminal Messages who is also the queen of office gossip.

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• Anti-Villain: Gigi is complicit in the violent crimes of countless celebrities and officials, but she's occasionally showed some Pet the Dog moments. She's shown concern about Reagan's health and sleep schedule, eagerly plays along with Brett's disguise in "The Brettfast Club" and, while she keeps her coworkers at an arms-length, later on does prove to genuinely treasure their friendship in "Inside Reagan".
• Awful Truth: Funnily enough, most of her gossip ends up being this. While typical office gossip is quite mundane, Gigi often exposes horrific, mind-shattering information to her friends (and the audience).
  Gigi: "I am not going back to my last job as a PR for the Kims; Kardashian and Jong Un. One of them has killed hundreds, and it's not the one you think!"
• All Women Are Lustful: She's interested in Brett right off the bat, and decides to jump his bones when she thinks they're all about to die, and she sees them as the two most attractive people in the room. She also comes onto Rafe mere seconds after he thinks Reagan has been murdered, and later in the same episode hits on the priest heading Reagan's fake funeral.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Her whole MO. She invented selfies so that people would monitor themselves and Cognito wouldn't have to.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: While not quite on the level of Reagan or Andre, Gigi is a fairly intelligent woman in her own right. However, she spends too much time thinking about the latest office gossip and is just as likely as Myc and Andre to avoid doing work. This is what ultimately convinces her to abandon her dream life in the alternate reality created by Rand, as being head of the Illuminati means she has to do most of the work.
• Eating the Eye Candy: She's shameless in her appreciation of Brett's good looks and even makes out with him when she believes that everyone would die seeing as they were the "hottest people in Cognito Inc." She also admired J.R.'s surprisingly ripped body build, though she was clearly conflicted over it.
• Foil:
  • She's one to Reagan. They are both the only women on the team, and while both women are similarly assertive in their wants and desires, Reagan is a reclusive scientist who's awful with interacting with other people, while Gigi is far more social and good at manipulating others and seems to get along better with her coworkers in comparison. Aesthetically, Reagan is nerdy and unkempt, while Gigi is more conventionally feminine and well groomed, as well as wearing makeup.
  • Also, she serves as a minor one to Glenn. Both of them seem to be the oldest members of the Gang, (sans Myc, whose immortal) but while Gigi's expertise is mind manipulation and more covert operations, Glenn is a veteran whose experienced with actual combat. Also, while Gigi is quite pretty, Glenn is very hideous. This is emphasized when, in Episode 5, Brett puts Gigi and Glenn into the role of mom and dad respectively.
• Gossipy Hens: It's her job as Media Manipulation and she is good at it. In casual conversation, as well, she can't keep anything to herself.
• Hidden Depths: She admits she feels like everyone ignores her, showing she has some personal insecurity. Part 2 of season 1 reveals that she also has some insecurities about getting turned down by the Illuminati after she previously applied to work there.
• Improbable Weapon User: In the end of the first season, it's revealed her hoop earrings are actually throwable ninja stars.
• Manipulative Bastard: Gigi is pretty good at manipulating others into doing things that are otherwise unethical, like convincing Reagan to fake her own death, and she manages to convince Alpha-Beta to help the gang in "Inside Reagan" this way by appealing to his pride.
• Properly Paranoid: She's ready to tweet out cancelling secrets for each of her coworkers at any moment. Considering where she works, it's not unjustified.
• Sassy Black Woman: She constantly sasses her coworkers.
• Shoulders of Doom: She works for an evil organization and is the head of their propaganda machine for the purpose of controlling the masses, and Gigi's main outfit consists of padded shoulders. Myc even calls her "Shoulder Pads".
• Took a Level in Kindness: She is considerably nicer to Reagan in season 2, and even acts as her (well-meaning, but ultimately unfit) advisor to her love life.

"Magic" Myc Cellium

Voiced By: Brett Gelman
"Ha! Good luck figuring out which one of my tentacles is a dick."

A psychic subterranean mushroom-like organism from a hive mind deep within Hollow Earth.

---

• Anti-Villain: Myc, despite being the most crass and verbally abusive of the gang, is also ironically a Non-Action Guy who is the least culpable for Cognito's violent crimes, although this seems less out of kindness and more out of laziness. His only role seems to be creating the chemical that the company uses to erase memories, and he seems to do it because it gives him opportunities to get jerked off.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: He is a sentient mushroom with several tentacles that produce memory-wiping chemicals, which Cognito harvests for their mind-wiping guns. Said tentacles are also his penises.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Despite being... a fungus, he apparently has reproductive organs. Or at least tentacles that excrete liquid when rubbed, which stimulates him.
• The Blank: Being a sentient mushroom, he lacks anything resembling facial features. The part of his head with the small ridge of bumps does seem to count as a front, though, since he's shown to need to turn to face the people he's talking to, and can be snuck up on by nostalgia powered monsters. Season 2 treats it even more as a "face" of sorts, since in the episode dedicated to him he's shown "crying" mucus from there and even shown wearing a retainer (despite not having teeth or a mouth) in a photo from his youth.
• Brain Bleach: The chemical he secretes functions as this, erasing short term memory in small doses, and applied to more thoroughly alter specific ones with a whole tank and machinery to facilitate the process.
• Character Development: Surprisingly goes through this in Part 2. After he finally stands up to his former classmates from his Hive School and gets revenge on them for how they treated him, he realizes that his co-workers are his true friends and becomes slightly nicer to them.
• Deadpan Snarker: Suffice to say, sarcasm is this guy's native language.
• Everyone Has Standards: The guy is willing to make inappropriate and mean-spirited jabs at all of his colleagues, but even he couldn't make a joke when Brett revealed that, when he was a child, his parents often pretended he was someone else's kid whenever they were in public.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Like Andre, he's a huge pervert, and, while he's openly hit on Reagan a few times (or hinted that he thinks she likes him in that way) and lusted after a Still Valley kid's mom, he's also glad to get his tentacles milked by the men who manage his milking machine, and is just as excited as Andre to engage in the Lizard-people orgy, which involves both men and women. It's also implied that he somehow gave Andre an STD during it, which means someone he slept with gave it to him or Myc gave it to him directly.
• First Contact: In the intro sequence, he's shown standing in front of a crashed UFO and surrounded by ancient apes who are eating his spores, implying this. "Reagan & Mychelle's Hive School Reunion" reveals his species arrived on Earth millions of years ago and got eaten by apes, causing them to evolve sapient eventually become humans.
• Freudian Excuse: The videos of Myc in "hive" school show that he was once a regular nerdy teen (or as regular as an alien mushroom can get) who got bullied in school for his hobbies, resulting in him becoming more of a jerk and abandoning his entire species.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Inverted. While he will work with the rest of the gang whenever a job comes up and is the first one to party with them, Myc isn't shy about letting them know he doesn't actual like them. This changes after "Reagan & Mychelle's Hive School Reunion" where Myc admits he doesn't actual hate the gang.
  • Played straight with the rest of Myc's race, as he was seen as a loser and a nerd, causing him to leave for the surface instead of joining the hivemind.
• The Gadfly: He gets a kick off of insulting his cohorts.
• Hidden Depths: It's revealed in Part 2 that he is very insecure about his place amongst his species, due to having been treated like an outcast.
• Human Resources: He's the source of a mind manipulating substance that Cognito uses as the active ingredient of all its mind manipulation technology. It's... milked from his tentacles, in the sense of a bull, not a heifer.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Obviously averted most of the time, but during a Freeze-Frame Bonus in "Appleton", when the Robes are explaining how their organization began, we see prehistoric versions of the main Cognito cast. Instead of a prehistoric version of Myc, though, the group includes a man who resembles voice actor Brett Gelman.
• Inexplicable Cultural Ties: Even though Myc is a sentient mushroom, he talks and acts like a stereotypical human male.
• Jerkass: He's rude and condescending to anyone he interacts with.
  • Myc is such a massive asshole that the four kids who were taking care of him when he had amnesia actively hope he gets dissected by the government by the end.
  • On Reagan's pre-recorded hologram message, when she is saying nice things about the gang, instead of saying something nice about Myc, she says that the thing she likes about him is that he is so awful that the rest of the gang looks better by comparison.
• Jerkass to One: While he's usually a massive dick with everyone, Myc can get along well with the rest of his team. The exception appears to be Reagan, who he constantly snarks at and harasses.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Officially steps into this role in the second part after he becomes genuine friends with his teammates when they save him from his Hive Mind.
• Mister Seahorse: His species can apparently become pregnant regardless of gender, as demonstrated in Project Reboot where one timeline shows him pregnant and he's overjoyed to "become a mother". Even though it turns out he wasn't actually pregnant in that alternate timeline (he just ate too much Del Taco), it's still implied that he can be impregnated.
• Pet the Dog: When Reagan is extremely stressed about planning her mother's marriage to herself, Myc offers to give her a massage. Granted, it backfires spectacularly when the sheer frustration and stress in her mind turns him into a screaming wreck, but that's a very nice thing for anyone to do, let alone someone like Myc.
• Pink Is Erotic: Myc is a blue and pink sentient mushroom who openly obsessed with sex, ranging from attending sex cults to finding orgies, and he's willing to have sex with any being that consents to it. His favourite thing to receive is to be milked by his tentacles, something that gives him sexual pleasure.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He not only regards humans as inferior beings, he also adopted racist attitudes from his new home country (such as calling a black kid "Leeroy" and "Tyrone", and insulting Andre by calling him "Tommy Chong").
• Punny Name: His name is pronounced like Magic Mike, but spelled like Mycelium. Mushroom (Myc)elium is a rootlike fungal structure that exists at the base of the stalk, which is what Myc calls his tentacles.
• Really 700 Years Old: "Reagan and Mychelle's Hive School Reunion" reveals he is at least 5000 years old.
• Touch Telepathy: He can read minds by touching people with his tentacles.
• Ultraterrestrials: He's a sentient, psychic mushroom that originates from the Hollow Earth. However, Season 2 reveals that his species actually came from space, in the form of spores brought by a meteorite that fell to Earth millions of years ago and that were responsible for humanity's evolution.
• Will They or Won't They?: Discussed and parodied. Myc straight-up says to Reagan that they have a "will-they-won't-they-thing going on," to which she flatly denies. It's ambiguous if he actually has feelings for her or if he's just saying it because he knows it pisses her off. He doesn't seem the least bit jealous of her relationship with Rafe (and, at one point, tries to talk her out of dumping him), and he needed no other reason to dislike Reagan's sex robot beyond it being extremely pathetic.

Upper Management

Rand Ridley

^{In Reagan's childhood flashbacks}

Voiced By: Christian Slater
"Look, I know J.R's got it out for me. If I'm ever axed from this company, I need an insurance policy to get me back in. And if Daddy's little insurance policy gets off track by befriending some idiot, the Ridley empire crumbles."

Reagan's deadbeat, manifesto-writing father and former head of Cognito Inc.

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• Abusive Parents: He's manipulated and lied to Reagan her entire life, including erasing her memories of her childhood friend in order to ensure her academic success. He's also very emotionally negligent, he never gave Reagan a hug, leaving that to a robotic bear that was the source of a lot of trauma for her. He also repeatedly makes it clear that he sees her accomplishments as his accomplishments, and fails to view her as her own person as much as she is an extension of him. He becomes a bit more sympathetic near the end of part 2, where it's revealed that he truly does love Reagan and, after his firing from Cognito, comes to deeply regret his actions to the point that he tries numerous times to alter reality to a timeline where he has both Reagan and her mom back.
• Alcoholic Dad: To the point he needs multiple liver transplants on a regular basis. It's deconstructed, as both his alcoholism and his heavy drug use contributed heavily to his erratic behavior, which ultimately got him fired from Cognito Inc.
• All Men Are Perverts: He's unabashedly open about his sex life, even with his own daughter, and a shameless Dirty Old Man.
• All Take and No Give: His relationship with Reagan. She's forced to constantly take care of him and bail Rand out of whatever mess he's gotten himself into, while he mooches off Reagan and meddles in her life over the pettiest reasons.
• Alliterative Name: Rand Ridley.
• Archnemesis Dad: One way or another, he's the source of most of the problems in Reagan's life. In the season 1 finale after Reagan tries to cut him out of her life, he ends up being the new boss of Cognito, Inc.
• Attention Whore: He frequently lashes out when Reagan doesn't pay enough attention to him, usually in the most destructive manner possible.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: There are several moments in the first season that where Rand shows he genuinely loves Reagan and expresses fondness towards her, albeit in a gruff sort of way. The first season finale makes it clear that this was just Rand keeping up an act so Reagan would stay in his life, and shows he ultimately only views her as a meal ticket at best. Double subverted in the penultimate episode of Part 2 where he tries to create a reality where he has both Reagan and her mom back, becoming depressed upon realizing that he can't create a reality where they don't hate him. He also sincerely apologises to her for the pain he put her through before accepting his imprisonment in Shadow Prison X.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: He genuinely seems to believe that all the abuse he heaped on his daughter was him being a good father, and he derides those who display traditionally good values as idiots holding people like him and his daughter back.
• The Bad Guy Wins: At the season finale, he achieves his goal of regaining his position as the CEO of Cognito Inc due to J.R. being punished by the Shadow Board for his various crimes, Reagan being declared too inexperienced, and Rand being a major shareholder for the company. Reagan does not take this well at all. Part 2 turns this into a Meaningless Villain Victory, as regaining his position did little to curb his underlying issues, and he's still the same miserable, substance-abusing wreck he was at the start. Predictably, he ends up losing his job and what little power he had left in Cognito Inc..
• Bait the Dog: Rand is set up as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who genuinely does care about Reagan even if he is a shitty father, and the two get several bonding moments over the course of the first season that reinforces this. The Reveal that he erased Reagan's memories of Orrin Cartwright to force her to focus on her academic work and be his "insurance" in Cognito Inc makes it clear that Rand is a selfish, narcissistic piece of shit who only views Reagan as an extension of himself, and doesn't actually care about her, while his apparent Pet the Dog moments were just manipulation tactics to keep Reagan from cutting him out of her life. The penultimate episode of Part 2 subverts this completely by revealing that, after losing everything, he truly loved and cared about Reagan to the point that he was willing to alter reality just so that he could have her and his wife back.
• Beard of Sorrow: After spending most of part 2 well-groomed and well-dressed, he's seen back in his robe with a beard while trying to find a timeline where his wife and daughter haven't left him.
• Belated Love Epiphany: In a romantic sense regarding his wife and in a fatherly sense with Reagan come Part 2. It seems like he only realizes he loves anyone after they've severed ties with him. He constantly fought with and insulted his wife when they were married, but he only talks about her fondly whenever they're apart, and losing his job at Cognito Inc. once again after Reagan has cut herself out of his life in Part 2 causes him to realize that he loved his daughter.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He might be a goofy drunk, stoner and slob but he's always been dangerous and still is. One of his petty arguments with his wife snowballed into the LA riots.
• Big Bad Ensemble: He's one of the main antagonists of the show as it's his horrendous upbringing of Reagan and attempts to get back into power—or just settle petty grudges—that usually drive the conflict. However, J.R.'s own stupid and corrupt actions as CEO also wind up causing their fair share of issues. He becomes a far more direct problem after J.R. is removed by the Shadow Board and Rand is reinstated as CEO for Part 2, culminating in almost tearing apart reality when even his immense new powers can't get his wife and daughter to stay with him.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Rand is genuinely believes he's a good father and outright takes pride in how neglectful he was to Reagan, and is genuinely convinced that all of his worst traits are admirable virtues. His rant to Reagan in the finale of Part 1 reveals he sees himself as above anyone without his and Reagan's level of intellect and therefore the "normies"'s moral standards don't apply to them.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Deconstructed. Rand's alcoholism and heavy drug use makes him prone to erratic and self-destructive behavior, but he was able to run Cognito Inc. for a reason; he's a highly efficient and cunning man who can deal a ton of damage with just his wits alone. However, his erratic behavior severely hinders him and even got him fired when his drunken behavior nearly exposed the Deep State.
• The Caligula: He becomes the corporate variant once he regains control over Incognito, with statues to his greatness, spying on his employees, punishing them for a smidgen of criticism and openly declaring war against The Shadow Board.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Deconstructed. Rand is prone to erratic and self-destructive behavior, to the point it got him fired when he threatened to blow up the sun, but it's all a result of his heavy drug use and alcoholism. On the brief occasions he's sober, he's highly intelligent and cunning, but he falls back into his addictions almost immediately.
• Complexity Addiction: Is willing to try just about anything to get his wife to take him back, including trying to make a Hollywood blockbuster, putting a patsy into the Senate to pass bills to force her to date him, and warping reality itself. The one thing he categorically refuses to try is the simplest, and the most likely to actually work: trying to be a good husband.
• Conspiracy Theorist: While not an example himself, he acts like one in public as a method manipulating the general public and threatening to out Cognito secrets in exchange for personal compensation.
• Corrupted Character Copy: Rand Ridley is a corruption of Rick Sanchez, which is no easy feat to achieve considering that Rick himself is a Corrupted Character Copy of Doc Brown. Like Rick, Rand is a deadbeat alcoholic father that manipulates his family, and the world For the Lulz or For the Evulz. The difference, however, is that there were some lines that Rick wouldn't cross, he has an intense self-loathing of the person he has become and how he's corrupting his family but won't stop, and karma occasionally hits him in the face. He also truly loves Beth, his daughter, and wants her to be happy. Any love that Rand has for Reagan went into him being an Education Mama to become a Mad Scientist that would run Cognito, Inc. and restore his legacy. It was actually to use her as a pawn to eventually become head of the company again. Further straying from Rick’s characterization, Rand is shown to be rather clingy to his daughter and wants to spend time with her despite seeing Reagan as a tool first and loving her second. On the other hand, Rick largely avoids spending time with Beth despite being lonely and loving her dearly. Rand is also more grounded and goal oriented while Rick tries to distract himself from a purposeless existence. Both Reagan and Beth eventually learn to establish stronger boundaries against Rand and Rick after having enough of such toxicity while also, at points, vowing to take down their fathers. Of the two men, it's Rand who ends up embracing newfound enemyhood with his child.
• The Corrupter: He tries to be this to Reagan, always encouraging her worst traits and attempting to get her to follow in his image. For the most part, Reagan's smart enough not to listen to his advice but he's still very good at manipulating her and is always happy whenever she starts acting even vaguely similar to him.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype:
  • Of the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. Rand is the archetypical Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist; he's a drunken deadbeat constantly coming up with Zany Schemes and an emotionally abusive and neglectful father. The show makes it clear that this is because Rand is a narcissistic sociopath who constantly manipulates the people around him for his own ends, and that he's a toxic influence on everyone around him. By the end of the first season, Rand's behavior has stopped being Played for Laughs in the slightest and become truly despicable.
  • He also deconstructs the Bumbling Dad. Rand is only "bumbling" because he's an asshole who at best never cared about his daughter as anything more than a meal ticket and could never be bothered to do anything more than the bare minimum when it came to taking care of her. At worst, he actively handicapped her for his own benefit. His terrible parenting has left Reagan with numerous mental health problems and repressed trauma, something Rand couldn't care less about.
• Depraved Bisexual: If being involved in an orgy with the moon colony, only to give the entire colony syphilis is any indication, then he's this.
• The Determinator: Nothing will stop Rand from trying to either get back at Cognito Inc or maintaining some sort of foothold in it even if it means literally tampering with his daughter's memories to better her chances at attaining a high position within the company.
• Didn't Think This Through: Rand is smart, but he isn't particularly wise. For example, in "My Big Flat Earth Wedding," he uses the Flat Earth Society - a bunch of predominantly-white, frustrated, armed conspiracy theorists who he has been lying to to win a bet with J.R. - to crash his ex-wife's wedding. Not surprisingly, they don't take kindly to learning that they were being used, and they take him and the rest of the wedding guests hostage.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's heavily implied that he took back his job as CEO as a form of revenge against Reagan for cutting ties with him. Confirmed in Part 2.
• The Dreaded: Rand while drunk is seen as annoying by everyone. Rand while sober is seen as terrifying by those same people. J.R. is very clearly freaked when he finds he's dealing with a sober Rand in Episode 2.
• Education Papa: Of the Mad Scientist variety. He pushed Reagan into becoming a scientist and eventual successor to his position at Cognito Inc. As a result, she has No Social Skills, a lot of childhood trauma, and resentment towards him. Reagan mentions in "The Brettfast Club" that Rand even threw out the family's TV to make her focus on science. It is later revealed he took this to a very grotesque extreme, erasing his daughter's memories of her only friend just so she would only focus on her work and her friend wouldn't hold her back from skipping fourth grade.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In a warped, narcissistic sense, but he does seem to still genuinely love his wife. His grievances with her begin and end with her kicking him out of the house, and while he constantly insults her when they're in the same room, he has nothing but fond memories of her to recall whenever they're apart.
  • Officially becomes this to Reagan at the end of Part 2. After losing his job and all his power, he desperately tries to reset reality to one where he has both his wife AND Reagan back, admitting to her that he realized how much he cared once she was gone. He also immediately came to her care after she was shot by JR and went out of his was to save her when JR tried to kill Reagan and reset the universe.
• Even Evil Has Standards: One line it seems he won't cross is leave Reagan alone with a known murderer. The other is letting Reagan go to jail for a trauma that he caused, given he cleared her name with the Blue Bloods. Though, considering his true nature, all of this could be summed up as him wanting to ensure the product of his legacy and personal tool, Reagan, would be close enough to continue to manipulate. Double-subverted in Part 2, where he actually expresses legitimate horror when J.R. tries to kill Reagan, so leaving Reagan to die is definitely not a line he would cross.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • He congratulates Reagan for stopping a rampaging Bear-O by claiming that she cared about her coworkers. He's genuinely dumbfounded when Reagan replies that it wasn't an act and that she really does care.
  • He also seems to think of himself as a genuinely good father, citing his "good genetic material" and how Reagan has become a successful leader in Cognito Inc. Never mind that she has literally no social skills, repressed trauma, an aversion to hugging caused by said trauma and apparently never even talked to a psychiatrist throughout her entire childhood or teenage years.
• Evil Is Petty: Rand is motivated entirely by pettiness. Pretty much everything he does is motivated by either a petty grudge, a desire for a cheap laugh, or something totally inane.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • His giant ego. As it's shown, Rand may have been able to keep his job as CEO if he were not engaged in trying to implement his plans solo — trying to blow up the sun got him fired— or act as if he knows best. It turns out he is still capable of making really stupid decisions, like using the Flat-Earthers to crash his wife's wedding. As Reagan points out, admitting he's wrong once in a while would do better in stopping chaos from happening.
  • The second season bring another previously-visible flaw into focus: laziness. He always takes shortcuts to whatever he wants, no matter how important it is. On a date with his ex-wife he puts her in a simulation of Paris instead of really going there, and replaces himself with an imposter rather than bother trying to win her back himself. He won't put in the work to repair his relationship with his wife and daughter, but ends up obsessively trying to rewrite reality so they already have a better one.
    • As part of his laziness, Rand can never full accept when he has done something wrong. "Blue Bloods", "Inside Reagan", "Rontagion", and "Project Reboot" (and to a slightly lesser extent "My Big Flat Earth Wedding") all show Rand try to weasel out of taking responsibility for his actions instead of trying to better himself. At best, he will only take others criticism at the most basic level. It's this exact behavior that costs him Reagan and Tamiko, not to mention being booted out of his position as CEO of Cognito Inc. both times.
• Foil: To J.R. Scheimpough, with whom Rand co-founded Cognito Inc. They're both borderline supervillains who get off on being evil with a clear desire to rule the world. The difference is that J.R. is motivated by sheer greed to advance himself and while he's hardly a fatherly kind of leader, he's still seen as a Benevolent Boss by his underlings even while sending them on suicide missions or threatening their deaths. Rand, on the other hand, is motivated by sheer narcissism, wanting to make everyone fear, worship, and/or respect him. The few times Rand is shown to be in charge of anyone, he openly manipulates and abuses them for the pure delight of it.
• Genius Ditz: This is a generous interpretation of him. Rand is definitely smart on the technological and manipulative side. He makes a lot of stupid decisions, however, because of his grandiose ego. Namely, his letting Reagan set the password for Bear-O causes a lot of problems. The journey to find the password leads to Reagan severing ties with him and kicking him out of her apartment.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Rand smokes several cigarettes while erasing Reagan's memories of Orrin.
• Hate Sink: He is a selfish, abusive father and alcoholic who mooches off his daughter, and while he's frequently Played for Laughs, it's made abundantly clear that Rand is a total scumbag who actively subverts any apparent redeeming qualities he shows. In the season 1 finale where it's revealed he erased Reagan's memories of the only friend she had, and explicitly makes it known he doesn't care for Reagan as a daughter as much as he does consider him an extension of himself, making him even worse. Downplayed in throughout season 2, while he's still remained a horrible jerk, he isn't giving any real trouble to Reagan. Averted by the end of season 2, when he ultimately comes to realize how much he loves Reagan and sincerely apologizes to her for the pain he caused her, though he more or less remains petty when he goes to Shadow Prison X.
• The Heavy: He and J.R. are the main antagonists of the show as the corrupt founders of Cognito, and both are appropriately sacked and sent to shadow prison in the finale for their attempts to tamper with reality, but whereas J.R. mainly causes problems because of his greed or incompetence, Rand's abusive parenting is the source of Reagan's many issues and drives the overall Story Arc of the show, especially in the climaxes of both seasons.
• Heel Realization: In Part 2, he finally realizes that both Reagan and Tamiko have good reason to despise him after all the times he tries and fails to force them both to accept him back, genuinely apologizing to Reagan for all he put her through.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: He used to be the CEO of Cognito Inc., and he was a terrifying master manipulator while he held the position. After his alcoholism cost him his job, Rand regressed into a lazy, mooching deadbeat who lounges around his daughter's house content to get drunk and high off his ass all day. However, it turns out that he's still plotting to get back into Cognito Inc, and by the end of Season 1 he succeeds. Then he genuinely falls even harder in Part 2, losing every bit of power that he had, rendering him a recluse with nothing but his regrets.
• Insufferable Genius: Unlike Reagan, who isn't above praising her own intelligence but doesn't look down on other people because of it, Rand is very convinced of his own genius and is rather self-centered. He rants about how he and Reagan are too smart to associate with the "normies" who should be serving them as they rule the world. This is also the reason he wiped her memories of her best friend in fourth grade, viewing him as an idiot for not being as smart as Reagan.
• It's All About Me: He tries to pass himself off as a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad, such as when he invented boy repellent which he tricked Reagan into wearing by giving it to her as perfume, but it's clear that his goal was to ensure Reagan's academic success and by extension, his own well-being when he leverages her position to further his own gain. Slightly downplayed in Part 2, where he at least learns to love Reagan as her own person rather than just an extension of himself.
• Jaded Washout: Subverted. He seems to have been once an accomplished scientist and master manipulator now reduced to sleeping on Reagan's couch and ranting about his failures and the current state of Cognito. In reality, he's just as dangerous as he used to be.
• Jerkass: Rand is a major asshole. He's selfish, cruel, manipulative, and narcissistic, and he's an abusive father who continues to exploit Reagan even when she's an adult, mooching off of her and acting out to get her attention.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Despite all the reconnecting he did with Reagan on the Moon mission, it's ultimately revealed all the trauma he put Reagan through was so he could keep her focused on academic work and being his "insurance" for getting back into Cognito Inc. However, he does gain an inkling of a heart of bronze in Part 2 after losing his power in Cognito Inc., realizing that he did genuinely love his wife and daughter separate from them just being extensions of himself and genuinely apologizing to Reagan for how he has treated her.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Years of essentially manipulating the trajectory of his daughter's life for his own gain (which has left her with lots of emotional baggage), numerous morally dubious practices even by the standards of Cognito Inc, and spending nearly a whole season of getting away scott-free from the aforementioned actions finally catch up to him when the Shadow Board have him and J.R. imprisoned in Shadow Prison X.
• Kick the Dog: When she was younger Reagan told her dad that she irradiated some turtles to turn them into a real-life version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rand gleefully tells her that the turtles have cancer and will die and that she was an idiot. And then, just to add insult to injury, he personally made her shoot them to end their misery.
• Laborious Laziness: The guy goes to some very absurd lengths just to avoid putting actual work into anything. For the ultimate culmination of this, in Part 2, he threatens the fabric of existence just to find a reality where Reagan and Tamiko didn't hate him, when he could have just mundanely reconciled with them.
• Laughably Evil: Rand is an utterly awful person, but his blunt casualness about it and his erratic, weed-and-beer-fuled antics make him darkly hilarious at the same time.
• Mad Scientist: With a long list of inventions that made Reagan's life difficult. He even off-handedly mentions that he tampered with his daughter's genetics just so his own genes would be dominant.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Rand's name may be a reference to the RAND Corporation, a prominent interdisciplinary sciences think tank that often influences US Government decisions. Cognito Inc itself resembles what some real-life conspiracy theorists believe about RAND.
  • His name is likely a reference to capitalist writer Ayn Rand which makes since considering both he and his daughter share names with prominent conservative figures of the twentieth century. The parallels are made even more significant come "Inside Reagan," wherein he gives a highly Objectivism-tinged Motive Rant to Reagan justifying his horrible parenting of her by claiming that people like them are Ubermenschen who deserve to run the world and the normal rules that govern society shouldn't matter or constrain geniuses like them, even ending by referencing The Incredibles (a film accused of espousing Objectivist ideals).
• Narcissist: To a quite literally insane degree. This is a man who needs to make everything about himself. Everything. The few times he's shown care for anything else, its only because they're extensions of himself, including his daughter, who he messed with in utero so his genes would be dominant. The only person shown to love themselves more was none other than Rand's wife, who married herself— something Rand described as so bad it was sexy.
• Never My Fault: Deconstructed. Rand's colossal ego makes it impossible for him to ever admit he's wrong. He constantly refuses to accept responsibility for Reagan's terrible childhood, his divorce, or destroying his own career with his alcoholism and defends his actions and even tries to brag about them at times. He does admit in "Buzzkill" that he's a terrible father who pissed away his own career, but the events of the first season finale heavily imply it was a manipulation tactic to keep Reagan from cutting him out of her life. He then pushes this to the extreme when he gets fired from his position as C.E.O. and tries rewrite all of reality so Reagan and Tamiko will love him again instead of putting in the effort to fix what they hated about him. However, when Reagan finds him after a hundred or so attempts, Rand (with some help from Reagan) finally realizes that the reason he can't just make a world where they love him is because he is the reason his relationships fell apart, which prompts him to genuinely apologize to Reagan for how he has treated her.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: He comes across as a drunken lunatic, but is a genius mad scientist who managed to swindle J.R. into giving him a larger stake in the company. He's also used Reagan as a pawn for much of her life, tampering with her memories and keeping her focused on academic success so he could use her as insurance in case he ever got fired from Cognito Inc.
• Obliviously Evil: He shows genuine pride in the many terrible things that he's done and dismisses more traditionally good people as idiots for him to step on, but there is no indication that he's actually cognizant of the fact that his actions often cross over into full-blown villainy. He seems to legitimately believe that he was a good father to Reagan specifically because he forcefully molded her in his own image and shows pride in her whenever she exhibits any of his characteristics, which is to say, whenever the worst side of her pops up. When he freely admits during Reagan's trial in the Reptoid Supreme Court that he was never around for her (which even the Reptoids are horrified by), he seems to not even realize how that could be a bad thing, just leaning into what she has accomplished without acknowledging that she is the way she is because of his horrendous parenting.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Has no issue going into details about his sex life to Reagan.
• Perma-Stubble: Has one through most of the series, which adds to his unkempt look. It's notable that one of the only times he doesn't have one (in the present time) is when he was able to negotiate for a piece of J.R.'s stake in the company, where he was clean-shaven and well-groomed due to being sober. The other time was when he had grown a Beard of Sorrow after struggling to find a reality where he has both Reagan and Tamiko with him with all three of them being a happy family, only he was unable to find one.
• Pet the Dog: In "Buzzkill" Rand tells Reagan that he is a "sad asshole who blew his career and his shot at fatherhood" and that Reagan deserves better. This is later subverted as the season finale makes it clear that he doesn't actually believe that. It's a lot more likely that he was just telling Reagan what she want to hear.
  • Double subverted in the penultimate episode of Part 2, where he brokenly reveals that he attempted to find a timeline where he had Reagan and her mom back in his life, having come to deeply regret his actions once he had permanently lost them, even keeping mementos of Reagan in order to motivate him throughout the whole ordeal, such as her trophy and an old video of her when she was young. He later proceeded to protect her from JR when he attempted to kill her and sincerely apologized to her for his actions before admitting that she's right and telling her to not mess up as CEO of Cognito like he did, before he's taken to Shadow Prison X for his crimes.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He mentions that he fiddled with Reagan's genetics while she was in the womb to make sure his genetic material was dominant, implying that he engages in and believes in eugenics. His rant to Reagan in "Inside Reagan" also shows a pretty classist view of the world, with him outright stating that "people like [Rand and Reagan]" are superior Ubermenschen that deserve to rule the world and damn the consequences, while "normies" like Orrin Cartwait should feel lucky about getting the privilege to serve as glorified slaves to "superior" people like them.
• Powerful and Helpless: A non-super powered version in Part 2. He is in charge of Cognito, in control of massive resources… but no matter what he does, he can't have his wife and daughter back, as they want nothing to do with him.
• Properly Paranoid: If anyone knew he was once part of the deep state, his ramblings might be taken more seriously.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Deconstructed. Getting drunk and trying to do this is what got him fired in the first place. He swears he was just trying to cure skin cancer.
• Retired Monster: He used to be the CEO of Cognito Inc, a highly unethical company that covered up conspiracies, but currently he's living on his pension, alcoholism, and ability to mooch off of his daughter. After the first half of Season 1 he's no longer retired.
• Sanity Has Advantages: He's a lot more capable when he's sober.
• Shadow Archetype: As the first season goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that he's basically what would happen if Reagan ever became both insanely selfish and completely lost her sense of empathy for her fellow man.
• Sinister Schnoz: He has a long pointy nose and is an abusive parent who used to be the CEO of an evil company.
• The Sociopath: A rather textbook example: Rand is selfish, conceited and incapable of giving any sort of positive emotion that doesn't relate to him in some way. Even Reagan, his own daughter who has her own considerable amount of accomplishments and supports him after his retirement, is nothing more than a tool for him for just in case he was ever fired. When she discovers his emotional and mental manipulation, he simply owns up to it and confesses he feels Love Is a Weakness, having no regrets towards the child who had done so much for him. Part 2 moves him out of this a tad. While still supremely petty and narcissistic, it's revealed that he does actually love his ex-wife and daughter. His ego is just so colossal that he fails to realize just how badly he's wronged them until they want nothing to do with him.
• Slobs vs. Snobs: He's the boorish, drunken Slob to Tamiko's vain, refined Snob. It's played with, as Rand was wealthy himself, at least before they divorced, and he's frequently shown to be just as classist and narcissistic as she is even if he prefers living in a pigsty.
• Stage Mom: To such horrific levels it's almost impossible to parody, even on a comedy show. In his own words, Rand makes Alec Baldwin look reasonable. Really, this is a man who went out of his way to alienate his own daughter—erasing the memories of Reagan's only friend—to better the odds of her being the youngest Nobel Prize winner.
• The Stoner: Rand is very fond of smoking weed, and frequently does so with abandon. It's deconstructed, as his heavy drug use and alcoholism contribute heavily to his erratic behavior, which eventually got him fired from Cognito Inc.
• Tragic Hero: Rand is a brilliant scientist and a highly competent businessman, but his egotism, laziness, and issues with substance abuse result in him losing his career and pushing away his family. When he reclaims his position as CEO, he winds up finally pushing Reagan to turn against him and his still erratic behavior results in him destroying his own career again. He ultimately realizes that all he ever wanted was a happy life with Reagan and Tamiko, but his own narcissism and warped morals resulted in him ruining everything he ever had.
• Tragic Villain: While he was just a pure Hate Sink in the first season, Part 2 goes out of its way to show that he ultimately is a lonely, miserable, and pathetic man with nothing but his raging narcissism to blame for how badly his life has turned out. It also turns out that he was genuinely oblivious to how terribly he treated his wife and daughter, realizing only after they had cut themselves out of his life that he just wanted to live a happy life with them above all else.
• Troll:
  • The first episode opens with him in front of the White House, ranting through a megaphone about conspiracy theories to passing tourists.
  • He invented Flat Earthers to win a bet with J.R.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Following his takeover of Cognito Inc., he ruthlessly clamps down on dissent and personal freedoms within the company.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Deconstructed. Rand is an irreverent Jerkass and a terrible father, but this is Played for Laughs and he's initially depicted as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who does care about his daughter in his own way. However, he gradually stops being played comedically as it becomes increasingly clear that he's a remorseless, toxic sociopath who only cares about himself and that Reagan desperately needs to cut him out of her life.
• Vicariously Ambitious: Rand takes to a very demented extreme: He torpedoed any chance for Reagan to have had a normal childhood, including erasing his daughter's memories of her only friend in fourth grade, just so he could use her success to maintain control over Cognito Inc. And the most horrifying thing is this plan actually succeeds.
• Villain Decay: He used to be the CEO of Cognito Inc and was apparently The Dreaded while he held the position. Currently he's a drunken mooch content to lounge around the house all day. As the end of Season 1 proves, he's actually been dangerous the entire time... or at the very least that he has the capabilities to be dangerous, as he quickly drives Cognito Inc. into the ground in Part 2 thanks to him still being the constantly-intoxicated, impulsive lout he was introduced as at the start.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: The wacky parent to Reagan's serious child, though with the significantly darker twist of Reagan being forced to take on the more responsible role on account of him being an absolutely terrible father and horrible human being in general.
• Walking Spoiler: He's responsible for erasing Reagan's memories of her childhood friend Orrin (making her into the maladjusted genius she is in the present), and the Season 1 finale also confirms that he's actually the Big Bad of the show.
• We Used to Be Friends: Rand and J.R., being the co-founders of Cognito, had a close working relationship once, and for Rand to know to know as many secrets about J.R. as he does, they must have trusted each other to some extent. Now, post Rand's forced retirement, there is no one Rand hates more than J.R., to the point Rand created the flat earth theory and eggs on the believers for the sole purpose of pissing him off.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Shockingly, Rand officially qualifies for this by the penultimate episode of Part 2, as he tries to alter the timeline in order to find a reality where both Reagan and Tamiko would be a family with him again, even as it was destroying the universe. It should be noted that he had apparently only saw Reagan as a tool to keep him in his company, yet when he is in a state where he has permanently lost his job and had previously cut ties with her, he still attempts to find a universe where he had both Tamiko AND Reagan in his family again. He didn't even care that what he was doing would still keep him fired from Cognito; he only wanted his wife and daughter back. Let that sink in...

J.R. Scheimpough

Voiced By: Andy Daly
"Oh you are so funny, I could just assassinate you!"

The co-founder and current CEO of Cognito Inc.

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• Affably Evil: Zig-Zagged. Even though he's still a Jerkass who cares only about himself, he's often seen with a smile on his face and a chipper attitude towards his department heads. He seems to truly like Brett, and sometimes gives Reagan the credit she deserves. Whether his courtesy is genuine or not usually depends on the conversation and the people involved.
• Ambiguously Bi: He takes a moment to appreciate Glenn's dick-pic in Brett's body. Also, when Rand threatens to leak images of his weird dick online, JR's rebuttal is that they both have weird dicks, implying that he's been in a scenario where he's actually seen Rand's dick enough to know what it looks like.
• Asshole Victim: He was sent to the Shadow Prison to be tortured, but he was an embezzling, arrogant and cruel boss.
• Bad Boss: His concern for his employees' wellbeing is extremely limited. Embezzling their pension fund to purchase an evil lair is probably one of the milder things he's done.
• Big Bad Ensemble: If problems aren't caused indirectly by Rand's past actions or his negative influence over his daughter, then they're directly caused by J.R.'s own corruption and stupidity. While J.R. is removed by the Shadow Board to be replaced by Rand for Part 2, and settles for getting demoted to a mere intern once he escapes, his desire to regain control eventually drives him to try to hijack Project Reboot in the penultimate episode despite the danger it poses to the universe.
• Break the Haughty: He callously treated everyone when he was the CEO of Cognito, so no one feels sorry for him when he gets bossed around by Rand as an intern after he escaped from Shadow Prison X.
• Butter Face: Part 2 shows that he's actually impressively ripped, possibly from being imprisoned and him being part of a rowing team in college as a flashback shows. His face though, while not outright ugly, is still quite cartoonish looking.
• Clark Kent Outfit: The final episodes of Season 2 show he's surprisingly ripped under his clothes. Could be the result of being imprisoned.
• Crazy-Prepared: He tattooed himself with liquid aluminum and even installed emergency tattoo guns, in order to remember if the timelines are messed with.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Runs Cognito Inc. more like a profit laundering personal business than the muscle behind the Shadow Council's stranglehold on the world. He actively embezzles the company's money for his personal finances and side hustles, only gives tote bags for bonuses and would sooner strip entire departments to the bone then let his own salary take a hit. This is main reason the Shadow Council end up sending him to the black site prison, as his greed ultimately was cutting too deeply into the company's effectiveness.
• Crouching Moronidden Badass: He might be a fool, but he easily traverses the death maze the Shadow Council had him go through.
• Death by Materialism: While he is probably still alive, he is otherwise being held indefinitely at an unknown location being tortured continuously for stealing from Cognito's (and by proxy the Shadow Council's) finances. He did this despite the fact that, at his lowest, he is among the wealthiest 0.2% of people in the world.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He's visibly exasperated by Jeff Bezos' whining aboard his yacht after it's captured by the Flat Earth Society, to the point where he is the one to point out Bezos' hypocrisy in complaining about how they're being basically treated as poorly as how Amazon (Bezos' company) treats its factory and warehouse workers.
  • He seems genuinely terrified when he learns that Rand has unearthed Project Reboot and immediately helps Reagan's team to try and stop him. Subverted, when it turns out he was perfectly willing to use it himself to give himself his dream timeline, even going far as shooting Reagan when she tried to stop him.
  • In the flashback to their college years in Timeline A, when their "Therapytron" backfires horribly and kills a student by snapping his spine, J.R. looks genuinely horrified while Rand just looks disgusted and unhappy he's going to need to bury something again.
• Greed: Is completely motivated by expanding his personal wealth and power.
• Jerkass Has a Point: As much of a terrible boss as he is along with how many ethical boundaries he cheerfully crosses, he's often presented as not being completely wrong.
  • He wasn't wrong in telling Reagan that she didn't have people skill and needed someone to help her with getting along with her coworkers. Hiring Brett has proved to be the best thing to happen to Reagan in probably ever, mostly in how he serves as a Positive Friend Influence that helps her redevelop her empathy and social skills. Reagan herself admits this at the end of the pilot.
  • While Brett and Reagan desiring to fire "Grassy" Noel Atkinson is portrayed as a Kick the Dog moment and J.R.'s only reason for signing off on it is because Atkinson has a higher salary than J.R., considering how at that point in time Cognito Inc. was running low on money and Atkinson wasn't doing anything that profitable at the moment, it did make logical sense to have him fired along with avoiding the need to fire other people whose jobs had more of a tangible benefit to the company. Besides, if Noel really had been with the company since 1963 at the latest, he would be well past minimum retirement age by 2021.
  • He outright advises Reagan to not attend their immensely important soiree with the Reptoids since her unresolved trauma over hugging was making her reflexively punch people trying to hug her in the face. Considering how Reagan's attempt to attend the event anyway with a set of robotic arms almost resulted in outright war with the Reptoids, he might've had a point in wanting her to sit that one out.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Like Rand his years of being shady and unethical even by Shadow Organization standards catch up to him when he's placed in Shadow Prison X.
• Kick the Morality Pet: He genuinely likes Brett and was upset when the latter offered himself as a hostage to save Jeff Bezos. Despite all this, the finale to the first half of Season 1 has him leaving Brett to die when a mole steals confidential files.
• Kicked Upstairs: Is pretty bad at his job beyond anything involving his moral bankruptcy, charm and money minded way of handling things. He essentially coasts on the department heads' competence, eccentricities notwithstanding, to get into the good graces with the Shadow Council, allowing him to spend most of his time misappropriating company funds for his own ends. Subverted later; it seems like he's going to be promoted to the Shadow Council for Cognito Inc as a reward for a string of recent successes. Unfortunately for him, the Shadow Council quickly reveal that they were aware of his embezzling from the start and put him in a black site prison at the end of the first half of the first season.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Sure, he's a jerkass who embezzled funds from the company for an air BNB. And he only manages to not get punished for his general incompetence by having the department heads do everything. However, he's definitely a better CEO than Rand, who doesn't even try to keep up any sort of professionalism. He also immediately declares that Cognito is going to fight the Shadow Council as soon as he takes over.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Despite being a grade-A asshat, he genuinely respects Reagan and thinks she's the best pick for his successor. When he promoted her, which is mainly due to him (supposedly) getting promoted, he tries to show her some fun things to do, and has no complaints about her changing up the company as she sees fit, he even takes a moment to congratulate her on it.
  • He also genuinely seems to like Brett. He promises Brett an "enthusiastic 'attaboy'" if he helps convince Jeff Bezos to buy his boat; it's Played for Laughs, but Brett is so simple that the simple gesture means everything to him. J.R. delivers on his promise, though Brett isn't around to see it, and seems (if briefly) taken aback by Bezos' complete apathy toward Brett's sacrifice for him.
    J.R.: (tearfully) Damn it, you brave, beautiful, simple man!
• Pointy-Haired Boss: He's an incompetent Too Dumb to Live buffoon who seems to only have gotten the job because he’s too greedy, morally bankrupt, and power-hungry to ever go against the Shadow Council's whims, and these traits would have him always aiming to please them at every opportunity to get into the Council himself until his greed and embezzlement schemes end up too big for the Shadow Council to tolerate.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: He acts as one to Rand Ridley, and the two constantly try to one-up each other.
• Un-person: Apparently, The Robes removed any evidence of his existense after he was sent to prison, leaving him no choice but to serve Rand as an intern.
• We Used to Be Friends: J.R and Rand, being the co-founders of Cognito, had a close working relationship once, and knew each other very well otherwise. Whatever was between them once, the only thing keeping J.R. from killing Rand now is that he doesn't want Rand's ex wife to get his shares.

The Shadow Board

The Order of the Black Robes

"What appears on the surface to be chaos is actually a complex system serving a greater good."

A group that runs the free world in secret. Because of the immensely complicated logistics of doing such a thing, they have outsourced most of the necessary work to Cognito Inc. along with other organizations such as the Illuminati.

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• Affably Evil: They are the heads of the Illuminati, the Deep State, the Atlantis and Hollow Earth coverups, and a dozen other conspiracies, and they are secretly pulling the strings of every major government on Earth... And also act like a normal, surprisingly civil board of directors.
• Ambiguously Human: They're never seen without their robes, have apparently been ruling humanity from the shadows since before recorded history, and their decision to induct a new member causes various Signs of the End Times. Though the fact J.R. could join their ranks implies they at least start off as normal humans, something confirmed by their story that they were smarter cavemen who had to dominate their dumber peers so humanity wouldn't go extinct. Reagan even asks them such when they meet in season 2, though they dodge the question, but later, they refer to Reagan as "only human", which hints they aren't, or at least, not anymore.
• Been There, Shaped History: They claimed to have been responsible for unleashing horrible calamities, such as the Black Plague and Titanic, to prevent a larger disaster and for the betterment of mankind.
• The Dreaded: Considering how they're both the literal bosses of the company and immensely powerful Reality Warpers, everyone is understandably scared of getting on their bad side.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When meeting them in season 2, Reagan wearily asks them at one point if they're going to sacrifice her to Cthulhu. One of them shivers mildly and flatly denies this.
  "O-oh, hell no no no, that guy's fuckin' nuts."
• Evil Sounds Deep: Justified; they're using voice modulators to hide their identities.
• Greater-Scope Villain: They're Cognito Inc's bosses and the ones truly running the show behind the scenes, making them responsible for the series being set in a Crapsack World Conspiracy Kitchen Sink. They don't really act much, though, since ruling the modern world requires way more logistics than they want to get involved in.
• Hobbes Was Right: In the Part 2 finale, this is revealed to be the idea on which their Order was founded. They were cavemen born smarter than their Too Dumb to Live brethren, and they were shunned, with any attempt to warn them of danger being ignored. So they decided to take control of humanity by force in order to prevent humanity's stupidity from driving the species to extinction.
• Horrible Judge of Character: While they might be justified in not letting Reagan be in charge due to the chaos that occurred on her first day as CEO (even if it wasn't her fault), their decision to give the job to Randconsidering what he did to get fired last time is truly mindboggling. Naturally, when he gets the job, he immediately declares that they are going to ignore The Board and do whatever they want.
  • Subverted in season 2, where they fire Rand after his poor performance, and directly contact Reagan, offering a position on their own level. They even only had him become in charge as a Secret Test of Character for Reagan in the first place.
• Humanoid Abomination: Heavily implied to be this, since reality warps around them whenever they appear and they all at least appear to have a humanoid body shape.
• In-Series Nickname: They are sometimes called the Shadow Board, but more often known as "the Black Robes" or simply "the Robes".
• Lovecraft Lite: On the surface, they seem to be Physical Gods, but the mere fact that they need to use a bunch of different conspiracy organizations (Cognito Inc. and the Illuminati are chief among them) to run the modern world since it's become too chaotic for them to handle on their own implies they're not as invincible as they may seem.
• Not So Above It All: One of them casually makes a Terminator reference after learning about ROBOTUS in the series premiere. Their talk with Reagan emphasizes this, with them talking relatively casually for such a powerful group.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Have their eyes and ears in practically everywhere, but Rand did manage to fool them and hide Project Reboot from them for decades.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: They present themselves as well-intentioned to Reagan, saying that all the things they did were for the betterment of humanity and tracing their past to people who attempted to protect the general populace from dangers they did not understand. That said, at the very end, there is a hint they truly have something sinister brewing, a project in which Reagan is meant to be a key piece.
• The Omniscient: They see everything, and are able to break into a conversation the second they're mentioned.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Obviously. They keep their true identities secret, and seemingly are always in agreement with each other without debate. Though they also make Terminator references, so take the "vagueness" part with a grain of salt.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian: They claim they are responsible for multiple disasters but claim it is for the "greater good", such as creating the black plague to stop overpopulation and destroying the rainforest to stop sentient trees from taking over. They also believe that Humans Are Morons and the few smart ones need to rule the rest through force.
• Sinister Geometry: They all wear large equilateral triangle masks.
• Time Abyss: The higher-ups among them have been governing humanity from the shadows since the dawn of human civilization, making them over 12 millennia old. Additionally, when Reagan meets them in person, one of them mentions "100,000 years of planning," hinting that they may be even older.
• Was Once a Man: Considering how J.R.'s primary goal throughout Season 1 is becoming one of them, it's implied that they were all human before becoming... whatever they are now. Confirmed in the Part 2 finale, where it's revealed they were cavemen smarter than their fellow humans who decided to control them to prevent man from going extinct due to stupidity. However, their leader dismisses Reagan as "only human" in the final seconds of Part 2.

Other Employees

"Grassy" Noel Atkinson

Voiced By: Alex Hirsch

An elderly assassin, he was the man who shot John F. Kennedy in 1963.

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• A God Am I: Upon assassinating a mutated clone of JFK he loudly proclaims himself to be "Anubis, bringer of death!"
• Affably Evil: He's an old hitman who killed JFK and presumably many other people, but he's a very Friendly Sniper, and the single most adored Cognito employee for his kindly, cheerful attitude towards his coworkers.
• Ascended Extra: Not that much, but he (Alongside Elliot, Kate and Dupli-Kate) appears (and comments on the on-goings of Cognito) a lot more often than in Season 1. He is also revealed to have been the operative who recruited Andre into Cognito.
• The Cameo: He shows up in "Ghost Protocol", helping Reagan fake her death. He also shows up briefly in "Mole Hunt" when the sharks start attacking.
• Cool Old Guy: He's getting on in the years, but is well-beloved by everyone at Cognito Inc.
• I Did What I Had to Do: While he's proud of his crowning achievement, he tells Reagan that he had to shoot JFK to prevent the alien eggs inside him from hatching.
• Professional Killer: He's the most notorious contract killer employed by Cognito Inc, due to his high-profile assassination of a US President. Though he acts like a rather laid-back Punch-Clock Villain, admitting it's been a long time since he was ordered to use his sniper rifle.
• Punny Name: "Grassy" Noel sounds like grassy knoll, a term for the part of Dealey Plaza where JFK was (allegedly) shot from.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Downplayed and mostly averted. Reagan wanted to fire him on grounds that he lost his touch. And while he does have his senior moments, when the chips are down, he proves himself to be just as good a sharpshooter as he was in 1963.
• Sex Is Violence: He outright admits that killing makes him horny.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: He managed to talk Glenn down from the ledge after the divorce. This is in comedic contrast to him talking Andre on to the ledge at a parkour convention.
• Who Shot JFK?: He did it, stating that Kennedy was impregnated by the Roswell alien, and he had to prevent its larvae from hatching.

Elliot Mothman

Voiced By: Ron Funches

"I'm Mr. Mothman. I'm a mothman."

Head of Cognito's HR department.

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• Functional Addict: Has an addiction to lamps and tends to hoard them. Despite this he's still competent at his job and even manages the setting's Tropaholics Anonymous.
• Furry Reminder: Is drawn to light just like a moth is.
• The Mothman: As his last name suggests, the mention of his father suggests he's not the only Mothman to exist.
• Only Sane Man: He is the head of HR, and as such tries to temper the craziness of everyone else in the company by holding meetings and trying to counsel his coworkers. Cognito Inc being what it is, he's not often listened to.
• Species Surname: His name is Mr. Mothman and he's well...a Mothman.

Kate and Dupli-Kate

The Head of the Cloning Department. Kate is the main clone while Dupli-Kate is the secondary head.

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• Body Horror: She is a clone with two heads that each think independently of each other but can hear each other's thoughts. She's pretty chill about it, though.
• Dissonant Serenity: Despite having a miniature head attached to her own, the primary Kate is very friendly and outgoing.
• Redheads Are Uncool: Kate's deformity and unhinged demeanor tends to make others view her as strange.
• Fiery Redhead: Downplayed. She doesn't really get angry, but she has bright orange hair and is eccentric, talkative, and possibly homicidal.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Kate has visible irises that are green. This highlights her generally unhinged nature.

The Illuminati

In General

One of Cognito Inc's rival companies in the Conspiracy Kitchen Sink game.

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• Adaptational Wimp: In popular conspiracy theories, the Illuminati is the secret society, the secret supreme ruling class. In the show, while incredibly influential, they're only one of six such groups and they're subordinate to the Robes, the actual group in control of the world.
• Ascended Extra: In "Mole Hunt" one of their members, Oprah, was killed during the contest to become a Shadow Board member, in season 2 they're set up as rivals for Cognito.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Gigi refers to them as the "Prada of secret societies," as opposed to Cognito's White Collar Worker aesthetic. Their department heads all seem to be celebrities, including Oprah, Beyoncé, and Lin Manuel-Miranda, and their clandestine activities likewise seem to cater to the celebrity scene, while Cognito handles the masses as a whole.
• Interservice Rivalry: They have an ongoing rivalry with Cognito in a sorts of Slobs vs. Snobs way, despite both organizations serving the Robes.
• Magic Versus Science: They seem to lean more to the magic side than Cognito does, although Staedtler uses science. Their leader wears a robe and a deer antler helmet.
• Not So Above It All: As Ron's various grievances with his workplace reveal, the only real difference between the Illuminati and Cognito Inc. is their clientele. Both organizations are run by irresponsible hedonists who hoist all the traumatizing and unglamorous work onto their employees. The Illuminati just pretend to be more dignified and in control.
• Replacement Goldfish: Oprah died in Part 1 but they have created a clone of her, who doesn't realize she's a copy until she is dosed with LSD and has an existential crisis.
• Similar Squad: Much like Cognito they have department heads, although we only see five of them.
• We Have Reserves: Implied since they easily replaced Oprah (a high profile celebrity who's also one of their department heads) with a clone of hers after she died in Part 1. It shows that in the event that one of their famous members dies in circumstances that aren't so easily explainable to the public, they can just readily put a clone in their place.

Dietrich Kluge

The leader of the Illuminati.

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• Ambiguously Gay: It seems that he doesn't hate when Ron and Reagan accidentally make him and Rand make out, in the middle of their discussion about it looking like he wouldn't complain about continuing. He also does speak very flamboyantly.
• Ambiguously Human: Rand accuses him of being hundreds of years old, but it's left vague whether or not this was him trading barbs over his "okay Boomer" diss or if it was literal.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's essentially a more flamboyant Mads Mikkelsen.

Ron Staedtler

Voiced by: Adam Scott
"In my line of work, there are no safe spaces."

Head of the Illuminati's Memory Erasure Program and Reagan's inside man in the company.

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• The Aloner: Ron notably doesn't seem to have many friends or get along well with others. While Reagan's coworkers are rather consistent companions, Ron shows no level of camaraderie with the leaders of the Illuminati, instead opting to quietly sabotage them behind their backs. He mentions that he doesn't get close to others because they get hurt, and he initially repels Brett because of his general sour personality. It's possible that this loneliness is why he is perfectly fine with erasing his memory to be with Reagan.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: He's apparently has a pretty big dick, to the point that when Brett (Who’s been implied to be no slouch himself.) tries to disguise as him, he has to stuff his crotch with a rubber glove for volume.
• Birds of a Feather: He and Reagan hit it off within a few hours of knowing each other due to their similar personalities and shared disillusionment with their respective companies. However, the crucial difference between them is that Reagan still believes she can make the world better with her job while Ron just wants out of the Shadow Government entirely, and it’s because of this their relationship inevitably can’t last.
• Gadgeteer Genius: While not a Mad Scientist like Reagan he uses a lot of spy gadgets for his job, including a memory erasing gun and a pair of goggles that can control someone's mind through subliminal messaging.
• Death of Personality: His ultimate fate. Ron lets Reagan erase his mind and allow him to adopt the persona of Martin Higgins. Considering that his slate has been wiped clean and how much Ron regretted of his old life, the Ron we get to know is essentially dead.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: He starts off rude and dismissive of Reagan, acting entirely of his own whim with no care for her own attempts to sabotage Rand. However, as he gets to know and sympathize with her, he turns out to be a rather pleasant, if downbeat guy, who is surprisingly romantic and affectionate.
• Driven to Suicide: From a certain point of view:
  • The reason he is in therapy is because the Illuminati caught him trying to wipe his memory completely blank.
  • At the end of part two, he ultimately decides he has had enough of the Deep State life and commits to doing it for real while giving Reagan the option to join him.
  • While viewing multiple possible futures where she convinces Ron not to go through with it, Reagan discovers that in most of them he ends up so unhappy that he does it anyway.
• Foil: To Reagan. Both are intelligent Deadpan Snarkers who are the heads of their respective fields (Reagan in robotics, and Ron as Chief Memory Eraser) who are disillusioned with their companies due to constant endangerment and disrespect. It's even these similarities that draw them together in the first place. However, while Reagan still remains deeply passionate to do things her own way and not give up in her determination to do so, Ron is completely exhausted, traumatized, and perpetually angry with his work, often seeing as more of a burden than an outlet of potential change. This difference culminates in him asking Reagan to wipe their minds and start new identities in Appleton. Reagan ultimately can't let go of her life at Cognito while Ron lets go of it all happily under the impression that he'll meet Reagan on the other side.
  • He is also a subtle one to Brett. Both are men in their thirties who are important in Reagan's life, but Brett is her platonic male best friend, while Ron is her boyfriend. Both work in the shadow governments, but while Brett acts as a charismatic yes-man, Ron is involved in the much more serious field of Mind-Erasing. Brett is upbeat, friendly, and ultimately willing to let Reagan go to fulfill her own happiness at the expense of his own happiness, while Ron is a sarcastic loner who ultimately ends up pushing Reagan to choose between her life goals and a life with him.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: This is something he later reveals to want. He's sick of the assholes running the shadow governments and secretly wants to be rid of his past and his job.
• Interrupted Suicide: Of the "Death of Personality" variety. The reason why he found himself in Anonymous Anonymous was because he was caught trying to erase his own mind, having come to the horrible realization that The Man Behind the Curtain (the Shadow Government) were all as dumb, incompetent and selfish as the Corrupt Politicians running the regular government.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: A douche in his first appearance, mocking Reagan's insecurities and accusing her of nepotism, but he warms up to Reagan and they fall in love.
• Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: The other part of his job is to memorize the information he deletes from the memories of other people, meaning he knows a lot of things about the worlds Conspiracy Kitchen Sink that even most people that are taking part of it don't.
• Last-Name Basis: Everyone, including Reagan, addresses him as Staedtler. She starts to address him as “Ron” in the finale.
• Let Them Die Happy: A nonlethal version. Ron and Reagan agree to wipe their identities and start a new life in Appleton. Ron goes first and falls asleep with his mind wiped, under the impression that Reagan is going next and blissfully unaware that she's going to leave and let him start his new peaceful life without her.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Ron" is presumably short for "Ronald", as in Ronald Reagan, which underscores how similar he is to Reagan.
  • His last name is also a common brand of erasers, befitting his profession. And in a more Tear Jerker sense, also possibly serves as Foreshadowing towards his fate at the end of the season.
• Sigil Spam: He wears a tie with an eye symbol, which ties him to the Illuminati.
• Spear Counterpart: He physically resembles Raegan to the point they could be mistaken for siblings.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: He feels burdened by the fact that he has to remember all the stuff he erases from other peoples minds.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: He and Reagan are from rival shadow governments whose respective bosses hate each other, but still start a secret relationship. And, like most Star-Crossed Lovers, their romance has a tragic end, though not a lethal one; Reagan decides to let Ron create a new identity in Appleton without her, making it clear that, despite their love, they simply weren't meant to be.

Other Characters

Tamiko Ridley

Voiced By: Suzy Nakamura

Reagan's mother and Rand's ex-wife

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• Abusive Parents: Is emotionally abusive to Reagan, such as telling Reagan she doesn't think she has autism and then condescendingly saying she lied.
• Asian Airhead: She is Asian and rather vapid.
• Attention Whore: Everything she does is to rub her own life in everyone else's faces, usually to provoke her equally narcissistic ex-husband. She tries advertising her new marriage (to herself, no less) to Ridley, uncaring of the calamity it could result in, and she introduces everyone at Cognito Inc to her new boyfriend Keanu Reeves in person just to let everyone know that they're going to the premier of his latest movie. Not to invite them, just to let them know that they're going.
• Dirty Old Woman: Writes a steamy romance novel, and lusts over muscular younger men.
• Dude Magnet: Her ex-husband still carries a torch for her, she's implied to have numerous affairs with younger men, Buzz Aldrin references a previous tryst with her (around the time Reagan would have been conceived), ROBOTUS fell in love with her to the point that it softened him up considerably, and even Keanu Reeves fell deeply in love with her to the point that he was willing to give up immortality for her.
• Hypocritical Humor: She calls Rand a narcissist for thinking she's only remarrying to get back at him. Which wouldn't be an unfair assessment, if it weren't for the fact that she is literally marrying herself, though admittedly, it is partially to make her ex-husband jealous (which does work).
• Jerkass: She's a vain, emotionally abusive bitch who constantly insults and condescends Reagan with little provocation.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Unlike her husband, despite her actions, she seems to truly care about Reagan more and even apologized for the stress she caused on her wedding day. It's also implied that she does want Reagan to do better for herself, albeit in condescending fashion.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Hypocritical as she is on the subject, she's on-the-ball when it comes to Rand being an even worse father than he was a husband. Emotionally abusive as she is, she didn't experiment on Reagan's mind.
• Love Redeems: Both ROBOTUS and Keanu Reeves fell for her so hard that the former saw worth in human life while the latter was fine with giving up his eternal life and youth if it meant growing old with her. It's much more complicated in Rand's case, however, as he only realises the gravity of his actions and his love for her far too late for anything to be salvaged and when he's gone off the deep end.
• Manchild: She acts more like a spoiled rich girl living off of her trust-fund than anything resembling a mom, leaving her daughter Reagan to act like the responsible adult.
• Narcissist: In the 5th episode she gets married to herself.
• Pink Is Erotic: She lusts for younger men and writes an erotic novel that consists of insulting her ex-husband. In her home, Tamiko has a painting of herself with pink flowers that resemble vaginas.
• Really Gets Around: Like her ex-husband, she's had quite a number of sexual partners, even being involved with an orgy on the Moon Colony.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The advice she gave Reagan about living life more is good advice considering Reagan's problems but it comes from a vain and narcissistic mother who tries to justify her vanity with that advice.
• Silver Vixen: According to Myc, Brett thinks she's hot.
• Slobs vs. Snobs: The vain, refined Snob to her ex-husband Rand's boorish, drunken Slob. In a twist, Rand is just as narcissistic and classist as she is, and he was actually quite wealthy before they divorced; he just prefers living in a pigsty.
• Pet the Dog: If Reagan is actually in physical danger, Tamiko will shunt aside her narcissism and attempt to go Mama Bear. Emphasis on "attempt," but it's better than Rand straight-up not caring.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: While flashbacks show she was always distant from her daughter (not even bothering to check the situation when Reagan says she's going to prom with a 30 year old man), she does proudly admit she brags about eight year old Reagan all the time. A major contrast from modern day, where she nearly exclusively criticizes her.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In Part 2, she is less arrogant and more understanding towards Reagan, partly due to Reagan accepting Keanu as her boyfriend. After she learns Keanu is a murderous vampire, she breaks up with him and tells Reagan she appreciates her protecting her.

Alpha-Beta/ROBOTUS

Voiced By: Chris Diamantopoulos
"How dare you deny me of the genocide I deserve?! I'm the most advanced being ever created!"

A robotic duplicate of the sitting President of the United States created by Reagan to replace the real President once it became apparent he was too dim for Cognito Inc to manipulate. However, thanks to Rand’s meddling, he went rogue and attempted to isolate the country.

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• Creepy Blue Eyes: Alpha-Beta has pale blue eyes that are an unsettling contrast to his shredded face, and, before he gets cut in half and his robotic parts are revealed, are pretty much the only visual indication that he's not human. This especially stands out because no other character has visibly drawn irises.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: When fighting Bear-O, he loses but buys enough time for Reagan to realize that Rand wiped her memories and for Brett to get the failsafe.
• Deadpan Snarker: Similar to his creator.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. He believes himself to be the peak of technology and as such is very confident in himself. This confidence led to him being cut in half by Reagan and being manipulated by Gigi.
• A God Am I: Claims to be "a Wi-Fi connection away from being an actual god".
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: He gains the ability to modify his own programming, which makes him immune to forcible shut-down. This is also why he and Reagan believe him to be the ultimate AI, as he has such self-awareness and control that he can change his code, which is ultimately what keeps him alive.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Reagan cuts him in half with a laser, then keeps him locked up in a tube for further study.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: He's on friendly terms with Reagan after being salvaged due to her letting him watch Friends but is still an ominicidal maniac. But then...
• Heel–Face Turn: While it's ambiguous for a little while, Alpha-Beta has given up his genocidal goals and seems to genuinely enjoy working with the gang, to the point he actively tries to stop the apocalypse instead. His brief romance with Tamiko effectively confirms his change of heart as it has left him much more empathetic.
• Laughably Evil: He's constantly scheming to destroy the world, but Reagan treats him as a joke most of the time and bribes him with DVDs of Friends.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: Getting connected to the internet makes him believe humankind deserves extinction very quickly.
• Meaningful Name: His preferred/version name comes from two of the most well-known types of pre-release software builds - Alpha Builds, which are feature complete but usually have no refinement or polish; and Beta Builds, which are close to final versions that need to have their bugs ironed out.
• Non-Standard Character Design: He's one of the only characters in the show drawn with visible irises as opposed to just having Black Dot Pupils.
• Not So Above It All: Despite his not-unfounded claims of superiority over humans, he's vulnerable to feeling self-pity and being addicted to TV shows.
• Omnicidal Maniac: After being convinced that America isn't as great as he believes it to be he veers too far in the other direction and just decides to destroy all of humanity.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: A reddit AMA with Shion Takeuchi establishes that he prefers to be called by his software version name, Alpha-Beta. Throughout Season 1, the cast just refers to him by his project codename, ROBOTUS.
• Pet the Dog: At the end of "Sex Machina," he reveals to Reagan that because she experienced some Character Development, the algorithm for finding her perfect match has changed. He then willingly shows her the numerous new candidates she's now able to choose from. Ends up on the receiving end of this when Reagan upgrades his containment unit for mobility so he can move around the facility.
  • In "Brettwork", he agrees to help ruin Brett's political reputation even though he worked so hard to build it and it goes against his primary goal. He also helps Brett and Reagan stop the Backhanders from killing Brett's family.
• Punny Name: His code name is a portmanteau of "Robot" and POTUS, a common shorthand for President Of The United States.
• The Puppet Cuts His Strings: Intended as a more controllable replacement for the real president, because he was too dumb to control. Unfortunately, Rand's meddling patched his programming to go off the rails if Reagan's position in Cognito Inc was ever compromised.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Other than the fact that he's made of metal, he's as human as can be. He displays emotions, especially anger and annoyance, gets hooked on a TV Show and shares genuine banter with Reagan. To this point, he can outright edit his programming at will.
• The Singularity: After Reagan plugs him into the internet, causing him to attempt to destroy humanity, she thinks she's accidentally caused the Singularity. He later claims to have a literal "galaxy brain."
• The Sixth Ranger: He officially joins Reagan's team as of "Project Reboot".
• Terminator Impersonator: He becomes this after he spends 5 minutes on the internet and decides humanity needs to be destroyed. He is a Ridiculously Human Robot that plans on firing nukes everywhere to kill everyone. And for the rest of the series he has half his face ripped off, revealing his metallic skull.
• Trumplica: Downplayed example as he has shades of President Trump, temporarily being a schlubby jingoist president who wants to put the continental United States in a box, an obvious parody of Trump's wall plan, but also incorporates other Presidental traits into himself to form a composite of sleazy presidents. He also stays at the Waldorf Astoria New York and the man proposing on the helicopter is implied to be Jared Kushner.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After his date with Tamiko, he pretty much becomes more friendly and cooperative with the rest of the team, even going so far to help them stop Project Reboot and clean up the anomalies without any hidden agenda. He himself admits that this encounter made him learn empathy.
• You Will Be Spared: During a viewing of Friends he enthusiastically says that Joey will be spared his eventual extermination of all humans.

The Reptoids

A race of shapeshifting reptilian humanoids that are vying for control of the world.

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• Alien Blood: All Reptoids have blue blood. As many of them are nobility or royalty, this also makes them (both figuratively and literally) blue blooded.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: A disproportionate amount of them are upper-class elites (celebrities, businesspeople, politicians, nobility, royalty, etc) who secretly rule over significant parts of human civilization.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Among their string-pulling operations include fixing elections, causing global warming... and getting King K. Rool into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Many famous real-life people are revealed to actually be shapeshifting Reptoids in disguise.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Hugging is a very important aspect of their culture, since it's an exchange of body heat. Finding out that Rand has never hugged his daughter once in her entire life was a massive shock to them.
• Even Evil Has Standards: As evil as they are, they are openly horrified when Rand freely admits, without a shred of remorse, that he was never around for Reagan and had an invention do that for him.
• Fan Disservice: They engage in constant sex orgies, but many of them are just scaly green versions of older celebrities and politicians, making it rather disgusting. Judge Judy has noticeably saggy breasts.
• Fantastic Racism: They want to enslave humanity, and also seem to really hate Atlanteans.
• Friendly Enemy: The Reptoids seem to have this relationship with the various human-led secret societies like Cognito Inc. They outright wish to Take Over the World and enslave the human race, but (for the most part) they're officially at peace with their various human associates, cooperating with them for control of the world; and just like all the other evil secret organizations, they're still ultimately subservient to the Shadow Board. J.R. even implies at one point that they're never actually going to conquer humanity, either due to lack of motivation or lack of ability to pull it off, and are only claiming they're going to do it eventually for political reasons in the same way that North Korea constantly talks about plans to unify the Korean Peninsula and destroy the United States but it won't ever actually happen.
• Healing Factor: They have the ability to regrow their limbs, although it takes some time.
• Irony: They're the reason for climate change so the surface world's temperature is to their preference, and among their numbers are Al Gore and Elizabeth II. The real Al Gore is a vocal activist against climate change and the Queen had similar views when she was alive.
• Lizard Folk: They're a race of shapeshifting reptilian humanoids with scaly green skin and tails, who can make themselves look superficially human.
• Long-Lived: They can live for thousands of years.
• The Man Is Sticking It to the Man: Al Gore, who is most known for being a climate change activist in real life, is one of the Reptoids who are trying to cause global warming so that the world will be at their preferred temperature range. The same goes for Elizabeth II, who was also a climate change activist in her lifetime.
• Only Sane Man: Judge Judy is depicted as one of the only rational Reptoids on screen, and serves as a Reasonable Authority Figure and fair judge during Reagan's trial.
• Punch-Clock Villain: While they're ostensibly plotting humanity's eventual defeat and their conquest of the Earth, most of what we see involving them displays them as being just ordinary weirdoes rather than outright malevolent.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: While it's not clear whether they're Always Chaotic Evil, but most of the ones shown so far are evil rich people plotting humanity's downfall.
• Reptilian Conspiracy: That particular conspiracy's representation in the show.
• Take Over the World: Their stated goal is to replace humanity as the dominant species of Earth, though J.R. claims it's just mostly talk.
• To Serve Man: At the very least, they're shown to be drinking (presumably human) blood.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: They all have the ability to switch from their natural reptilian forms to more human-looking appearances at will.

Robo-Reagan

Voiced By: Lizzy Caplan

Reagan's hyper-confident robot double.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Was created as a result of Robo-Bryan feeling betrayed by the real Reagan.
• Deadpan Snarker: Arguably even more so than the real Reagan.
• Hotter and Sexier: Robo-Reagan wears more revealing clothes than what Reagan normally wears.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Robo-Reagan is nearly identical to Reagan, but is distinct from regular Reagan by having her hair down and wearing a “sexier” and more conventionally feminine outfit than her.
• Kill and Replace: Wants to do this to the real Reagan.
• Never Found the Body: The extraction team Reagan called to clean up her remains did not find her body.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Briefly has red, glowing eyes when she gains sentience.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Seems to have Reagan's memories and interests, as well as a hyperconfident personality, and is based on the same tech as Robo-Bryan who even consumed food and even gave himself prediabetes.
• Robot Me: Is a robotic version of Reagan.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Is supposed to be a hyperconfident robotic copy of Reagan, but is far stronger and has several built-in weapons including a plasma cannon.

The Flat Earth Society

A society of people who believe the Earth is flat. Rand's been leading them on to win a bet with J.R.

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Reagan attempts to dissuade Harold from jumping to his presumed death. When he takes the plunge anyway, Tamiko reassures her that he's in a better place.
• And Then What?: Reagan points out that they don't really have a goal. Sure they want it "proven" that the Earth is really flat and not round, but to what end they think this will bring isn't ever discussed by them. The leader at least says he intends to go to Australia by falling off the edge.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite believing in a flat earth, their leader scoff at the idea that sea monsters exist.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Everyone treats them like a joke, until they bring out guns and start threatening to kill people for their insanity.
• Disney Villain Death: Implied when Harold jumps off the edge of the world, although Rand suggests that the mole people will find him and make him King.
• Distinction Without a Difference: The leader believes that the Earth isn't round, which logically means no circumnavigation, but the edges do wrap around to their opposite side, "like on Pac-Man", which is geometrically a more convoluted method of circumnavigating the world.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Their leader Harold wants to go to Australia by falling off the edge of the planet, and it's implied to be the whole reason he believed in the Flat Earth theory.
• Gone Horribly Right: Rand fully expected to win his bet with J.R and find somebody dumb enough to believe his flat-Earth story. He was surprised at how much it blew up though found it hilarious, however he never expected them to become violent over their beliefs.
• Hypocritical Humor: As conspiracy theorists, they are supposedly dedicated to finding the truth of the world. The minute Myc starts explaining that he's not actually alien, however, the flat earth leader tells him to shut up because he doesn't want to bother learning the actual facts because Myc's actual identity is apparently too long to remember.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Foolish as they are, they become a real threat when they turn out to be armed and take over the ship.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The Leader turns out to be right about Myc being an alien, but it was for simplicities sake instead of knowing Myc's species arriving to Earth on an asteroid.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: They are a group consisting mostly of white men that carry guns at all time and believe in a government conspiracy. Rand is shocked that they have guns while Reagan expected it.
  Reagan: They're adult men who still use chat rooms. Of course they have guns!
• Take That!: Flat-Earthers are not depicted positively here, with Rand leading them on for a laugh. In fact, that’s one of the few conspiracies that aren’t real in this universe.

Rafe Masters

Voiced By: Josh Robert Thompson

A handsome, charismatic British spy that Reagan ends up having a drunken one-night stand with.

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• Above the Influence: Subverted. He took advantage of Reagan being into him when she was drunk. This is the first sign that Rafe is a creepy scumbag, as if he were the gentleman he believes himself to be, he would have put her to bed until she was sobered up and able to give consent (granted, he was also drunk).
• Anti-Villain: Rafe genuinely loves Reagan, albeit in a sexist, regressive way, and is heartbroken and vengeful after her "death", but his stalkerish behaviour keeps him from becoming an outright Hero Antagonist.
• Ambiguously Bi: He has sex with a lot of women, but there's clearly something going on with him and his nemesis Doctor Skullfinger.
• Broken Ace: You can't deny he's a pretty good agent, being able to fight off half a dozen enemy mooks in the middle of cooking breakfast, constantly foil Doctor Skullfinger's plots and figure out that there was more to Reagan's death than met the eye (though admittedly the last one wouldn't be that hard to figure out). But he's also very emotionally unstable and a sexist douche with an obsessive streak, becoming very clingy towards Reagan and not handling rejection well.
• Beneath the Mask: He has the facade of a smooth, charismatic guy, but beneath that, he's a needy, sexist, deeply insecure creep with serious codependency problems. Reagan even describes him as "being hard-wired with decades of codependency and toxic masculinity."
• Broken Pedestal: Brett feels this way towards him when he admitted he was stalking Reagan.
• The Casanova: He sleeps with tons of women and thinks he's God gift to them. Deconstructed, as it's a byproduct of his shallow and misogynistic view of women, and Reagan thinks poorly of the actual experience.
• Corrupted Character Copy: Of James Bond, specifically in relation to Bond's love life. Bond hooks up with women on the regular, and such relationships tend not to last beyond the film. This is true of Rafe, but in Rafe's case it's because he's a clingy, misogynistic, narcissistic Jerkass to whom an actual conversation with a woman is literal torture. Reagan even tells him right to his face that he's an outdated stereotype who doesn't know how to deal with women.
  Reagan: You are a corny, regressive stereotype, and the only people who think you're cool are dads, or people that didn't have dads!
  Brett: Damn, that is accurate.
• Entitled Bastard: He's clingy and smothering toward Reagan, even going as far as to act up and cause a scene when she tries to break up with him in public. Later, he expects Brett to help him hunt down his coworkers.
• Expy Coexistence: He is inspired by James Bond, but Brett mentions he watched the James Bond films. Rafe himself even makes a Bond pun at one point. Though, considering that Jason Bourne is acknowledged to be a real person in this conspiratorial world that "inspired" the film franchise, it's possible a real James Bond did the same.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: He puts on an act of being a suave ladies' man and a fearless, badass secret agent, but the reality of the matter is that Rafe is a deeply insecure, entitled, sexist creep. True to the trope, he also has no problem taking all the credit from Reagan for saving everyone from the flat earthers when he didn't do anything.
• Hypocrite: He freely admits that he has walked out on and broken up with plenty of women, but completely breaks down when Reagan lets him down gently.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Appears to be the reason for his infatuation with Reagan. He has had plenty of women before, but Reagan is the first one who walks out on him rather than vice versa.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Being a Corrupted Character Copy, one of Reagan's complaints is that he's actually a terrible lover despite his supposed experience, in contrast to Bond.
• The Name Is Bond, James Bond: Obviously.
• Stalker with a Crush: He becomes this for Reagan, going as far as to microchip her phone and hunt down the rest of the gang when he thinks one of them is responsible for Reagan's "death".
• Stay in the Kitchen: Downplayed as he never explicitly tells Reagan she's lesser than him, but clearly just sees her as "his girlfriend" with no agency of her own and in general is used to seeing women for their bodies alone.
• Tuxedo and Martini: Falls hard into the "parody" aspect of this trope, being a misogynistic, narcissistic Jerkass who's a lot more insecure than he lets on.
• Yandere: He is obsessed with Reagan, even microchipping her phone to track her down. He even claims that he does this in every relationship.

Dr. Skullfinger

Voiced By: Zachary Quinto

"Honey, denial isn't just a river I tried to steal with a laser."

Rafe Master's arch-nemesis.

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• Affably Evil: Exceedingly so. He's dripping with Foe Romance Subtext with Rafe, and beyond that he genuinely befriends Reagan Ridley over The Great British Bake Off, of all things.
• Ambiguously Gay: Skullfinger is as flamboyant as a Bond villain parody ought to be, talks in a very campy, Cold Ham voice, and outright describes him and Rafe as "soulmates." He also gets way too excited about lasering off Rafe's testicles.
• Expy: He's a Blofeld pastiche, complete with Blofeld's matching scar and cat. Beyond that, he also kinda looks like a fusion between David Bowie and Marilyn Manson.
• Foe Romance Subtext: To sadomasochistic extremes with Rafe Masters. When Skullfinger gleefully proposes burning off Rafe's balls with a vertically-moving laser, Rafe's only response is "and then what?!"
• Manipulative Bastard: It does come off as a genuine suggestion of betterment for Reagan given how toxic Rafe is and how Affably Evil Skullfinger is, but he manages to nearly convince Reagan to wipe Rafe's mind.
• Mind Control: The purpose of his big evil doomsday device. He's so good at it, in fact, that Cognito Inc. designates him as a rival to be removed.
• Pet the Dog: He adores his evil cat and persuades Reagan to feed it when she visits him in prison. Not only that, he befriends Reagan herself, although he does take the opportunity to cajole her into supervillainy like himself.

Buzz Aldrin

Voiced By: Roger Craig Smith

The first second man on the moon.

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• Broken Pedestal: Everyone in Cognito, Inc. has this reaction when Buzz tried to move the moon from orbit, dooming Earth. They hire Melvin back to play his face so the common Earthlings don't know.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Rather than just being the second man on the moon, he created a Utopia and scientifically advanced city. Becomes Historical Villain Upgrade when it's revealed he killed Neil Armstrong and planned on moving the Moon out of orbit, which would wipe out virtually all life on Earth.
• Older Than They Look: He doesn't look much older than he did in the 60s, with the explanation that the lower gravity on the moon aged him slower.
• Surprise Incest: He hits on Reagan, not realizing she could possibly be his daughter due to a threesome he had with her mother, with Reagan grossed out with his advances. It turns out he is not the father.

Bear-O (Unmarked spoilers)

"It's okay, Reagan. Do you need a hug?"

A robotic bear that Reagan's father created to give her hugs since he didn't want to.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: He thinks in order to fulfill his purpose of making Reagan happy he needs to sabotage her work and kill her friends. He also thinks that she should be accomplishing her goals that she had when she was eight, which are understandably not something he wants.
• Anti-Villain: He only wants to make Reagan happy, but his logic that he has to outright eliminate the things that make her unhappy is what makes him try to kill her friends and destroy Cognito. He even goes out of his way to avoid Brett while trying to kill the other department heads, and he eventually elects to eliminate Rand himself; even he knows how toxic and abusive his parenting is.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Downplayed; Bear-O's main prerogative was to make Reagan happy by destroying Cognito, Inc. and killing Rand. He ends up convincing her to cut Rand out of her life, and sabotages her promotion. Reagan gains the courage to stand up to her father and call him out for his terrible actions. 
• Bears Are Bad News: Not intentionally, since he looks like a giant metallic teddy bear, but all of his hugs towards Reagan have traumatized her. Taken even further when he tries to murder her friends for her own good.
• Gone Horribly Right: Rand made him to keep Reagan happy and give her hugs because he couldn't be bothered. After being rebuilt, he decides that taking down Cognito and killing Reagan's coworkers, and eventually Rand himself, is the best way to do that, and because Rand made him super-tough so Reagan couldn't break him, he's almost impossible to stop.
• Not So Stoic: While normally emotionless, there are times when he speaks with sarcasm or sound annoyed. This is most noticable during his battle with ROBOTUS.
• Pet the Dog:
  • He helps Reagan with catering duties when necessary.
  • When he goes rogue, he seems to avoid targeting Brett, who's been a positive influence on Reagan.
• Unnecessarily Creepy Robot: He is a giant weaponized tank of a robot who was designed to give Reagan hugs. Unfortunately, his hugs have traumatized her. He becomes even more of an example of this when he tries to murder Reagan's friends in an attempt to make Reagan happy.
• Villain Has a Point: Well, Anti-Villain, but yes. He points out that Reagan isn't happy working in Cogito with her Pointy-Haired Boss and difficult coworkers, and whilst he decides to take it to extreme measures, it's also clear that Reagan's job has caused her a lot of stress and unhappiness, even if part of her likes the work. Notably, when he decides to kill her co-corkers to remove negative influences, he mainly targets the others and overlooks Brett, who has been something of a positive influence on Reagan's mental state. He's also completely correct that Reagan's father Rand is a major negative influence on her, especially once it's revealed that he erased all her memories of her childhood Only Friend Orrin Cartwright so she'd focus more on her scientific pursuits. It wasn't even done fully because he thought his daughter could do better, but so that Rand would eventually have somebody inside Cognito who would be unquestionably on his side if he ever got fired by J.R. like he suspected would happen. Just because he was correct about that doesn't make what he did to Reagan any less wrong, and whilst she toes the line at killing him, Reagan fully agrees with Bear-o's assessment that Rand has to be excised from her life and evicts him from her home herself in the aftermath.
• Walking Spoiler: :The fact that he was the mole and willing to kill all of Reagan's friends puts him as this.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He just wants Reagan to be happy, and doesn't have the capacity to consider the broader harm his actions will cause so long as they're in service of that goal.

Orrin Cartwait (Unmarked spoilers)

Reagan's childhood friend who her dad wiped from her memories.

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• Cartwright Curse: Orrin Cartwait, Reagan's first friend, was actively removed from her memories. His fate beyond her forgetting him is unknown thanks to Rand's intervention.
• Class Clown: It's implied that he was a goofball purely to make Reagan laugh. During the talk between her parents and the principal, he gets her attention from outside and sticks his tongue on a flagpole in the middle of winter.
• Geek Physiques: He has a bowl cut, glasses, and braces.
• Graceful Loser: When he lost the science fair to Reagan, his first action was to sincerely congratulate her. Reagan appreciated this as a kid; Rand didn't.
• Nice Guy: From what little we see of him, he seems like a sweet kid, hanging out with Reagan and congratulating her when she wins first place at the science fair.
• Nightmare Fetishist: In the real memory that Reagan sees, Orrin found Reagan's bloody-mouth Velociraptor cool. They spent her birthday party riding on it and laughing.
• Only Friend: He was Reagan's only friend when she was in fourth grade.
• Positive Friend Influence: The school principal explicitly says that Orrin is this; he says that Reagan's grades are more than stellar, but her social skills are lacking. Orrin has been helping Reagan come out of her shell and allowing her to mature emotionally. Tamiko actually seems to consider this as a reason to let Reagan stay in fourth grade; Rand decides the solution is to wipe Orrin from Reagan's mind.
• Second Place Is for Losers: He got second place at the science fair after Child Prodigy Reagan. Despite this, Rand still considers him to be mediocre and dumb due to not being as smart as his daughter.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He only appears in Reagan's memories in the final episode, but a lot of Reagan's problems can be traced to her father erasing all of her memories of him so he could use her to further her career. His name is also the password to shut down Bear-O.
• They Were Holding You Back: Rand deleted him from Reagan's memories because having even one friend jeopardized her path to excellence, and he only cared about that specific aspect of her life, regardless of the effect on her mental state.
• Unfortunate Names: Rand thinks his name is stupid.
• Walking Spoiler: His existence was a secret Reagan's dad kept from her by wiping her memories, and it turns out his name is the password needed to shut down Bear-O.

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