Characters / MCU: The High Evolutionary

Main Character Index > Villainous Organizations > Cosmic Threats > Thanos' Forces (Thanos) | Ravagers | Kree (Ronan) > (The High Evolutionary | Ego | Hela Odinsdottir | Gorr)

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The High Evolutionary

"My sacred mission is to create the perfect society."

Species: Unknown

Portrayed By: Chukwudi Iwuji

Voiced By: Kazuya Nakai (Japanese dub)

Appearances: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

"THERE IS NO GOD! THAT'S WHY I STEPPED IN!"

A galactically famous scientist who's obsessed with "perfecting the galaxy", and who was responsible for the creation of multiple planetary civilisations including the Sovereign. Rocket is an escaped test subject of his.

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A-C

• Abusive Parents: His interactions with his creations just scream this trope. Besides subjecting actual alien and animal children to horribly painful experimentation, he constantly berates them for the smallest perceived infractions, shows no hesitance in coldly telling them that they're ultimately expendable, and remorselessly kills them after they've served their purpose. It's rather telling that Nebula thinks he's worse than Thanos in this regard. Ultimately, he considers himself less as a parent but more as a creator god who thinks he has the privilege to decide the fate of all his creations.
• Achievements in Ignorance: His various multilayered mental issues mean that he's almost completely incapable of correctly assessing the value of anything, and can't really tell when one of his experiments has succeeded or failed. He has a complete mental breakdown when he realises that he's somehow given an uplifted raccoon Super-Intelligence that exceeds his own, and he seems completely apathetic to Adam Warlock (his most powerful weapon by a very wide margin), letting him and his 'mother' Ayesha do their own thing with little care or oversight until Adam eventually pulls a Heel–Face Turn after the Evolutionary accidentally kills Ayesha as collateral damage.
• Adapted Out: In addition to not being from Earth, the High Evolutionary never goes by the name Herbert Wyndham, his civilian identity in the comics.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: The High Evolutionary of the comics was a British man that was born and raised on Earth before experimenting on his own DNA to become the Mad Scientist Anti-Villain he'd be known for. Here, while the High Evolutionary looks human, he makes it clear that he's not originally from there, and doesn't do anything to enhance himself outside of fixing his own face after Rocket mauled it.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: His metallic suit is a pinkish-red in the comics ^note If you want to get really pendantic, its a silver armored bodysuit with magenta boots, gloves, helmet, breastplace, and tabard . In the MCU, it’s a straight (and completely) violet.
• Adaptational Dumbass: The High Evolutionary of the comics was a similarly impulsive, mentally unstable scientist responsible for inventing broadly similar technologies, but generally comes across as far more intelligent. As a human geneticist from 1930s Earth, becoming a cosmic-scale power-player with near-magical tech was a far greater achievement, and he had a true scientific mindset that let him conduct methodologically sound research and properly assess value without being blinded by his own arrogance, obsessions, and personal inadequacies (give or take the occasional lapse into insanity due to using himself as Professor Guinea Pig a few times too often). Even in combat, the comic Evolutionary is a considerably more skilled and experienced fighter who's given himself a considerably more powerful and versatile arsenal than this one (a Squishy Wizard with Gravity Master powers that he only uses in the crudest possible ways).
• Adaptational Jerkass: The High Evolutionary in the comics was more of an Anti-Villain who could be Affably Evil and act civil when he wanted to. This High Evolutionary doesn't even bother to pretend to be polite, being particularly condescending towards those he sees beneath him, especially his creations.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: In the comics, the High Evolutionary is an Evilutionary Biologist from Earth who has absolutely no relation to Rocket. Here, he's the mad scientist behind Rocket's creation.
• Adaptation Species Change: Implied. Herbert Wyndham was human in the comics but may not be so in the MCU, as he refers to Earth as Quill's planet and claims that he only visited it. This makes clear he doesn't originate from Earth in the movie universe, though whether he's actually an alien or just a human that happened to live somewhere other than Earth is unknown.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: The High Evolutionary and Rocket don't share any connection in the comics, while in here, the former is responsible both for the latter's transformation into a humanoid raccoon and all the pain and misery he suffered in his backstory. The High Evolutionary also does not appear to have any connection to Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, who were turned into mutants by him in the comics.
• Adaptational Ugliness: The High Evolutionary typically has his face covered by his mask in most of his incarnations, but the few that depict him without it show him with a fairly ordinary face (translation: classically handsome in accordance with superhero comics' typical Generic Cuteness). While this appears to be the case with the MCU version, said face turns out to be a Latex Perfection of his real face, created to cover his face after Rocket mutilated it off following the death of Lylla. What's behind said mask is a horrific skull-like cranium that would make even the Red Skull gasp in horror.
• Adaptational Villainy: To extremes matching Ego from the previous movie. While the High Evolutionary of the comics isn't a saint, he's more often than not an Anti-Villain, and more importantly a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist who usually is placed as A Lighter Shade of Black to more ambitious villains. The High Evolutionary of the MCU retains the obsession with evolutionary perfection but none of the genuine intent, torturing and experimenting on billions of sapient entities and inevitably killing them off when they fail to fit his standards.
• Adaptational Wimp: The High Evolutionary of the comics gained quite a number of powers and abilities after subjecting himself to his own evolutionary serum, including a Healing Factor, Astral Projection, Super-Strength, and other psychic abilities. In the MCU, the High Evolutionary has no physical fighting capabilities to speak of, and only has the power to manipulate gravity. Furthermore, his control of gravity is only granted to him after he obtains technology that allows him to do so, not because he has an innate ability to do so.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: He enjoys human culture and art even though he doesn't think highly of humanity itself.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Despite his human appearance, he is actually an alien of an unknown species and is quite the loathsome bastard to say the very least.
• Aliens of London: He's an alien of unknown species who speaks with a British accent.
• All Take and No Give: His relationship with his creations in a nutshell. The High Evolutionary expects them to comply with his every whim, worship him as a god, and constantly live up to his impossibly high standards of perfection. In return, he abuses them for the slightest failure and makes it very clear that he'll kill them if they ever disappoint them.
• Ambiguous Situation: When he runs into Batch 89 screaming for Rocket, his underlings mention him needing to undergo a "treatment". Is it so he can live longer, or is it something else? We don't get the answer.
• Ambiguously Human: He is very much human in appearance, but he himself does not originate from Earth. He did visit Earth years ago, however and it seems Counter-Earth is highly adapted from the original, making it possible he's at least descended from humans. Whatever he truly is remains unconfirmed, though the fact that he refers to Earth as "your planet" while talking to Quill suggests that, at least, he wasn't born on Earth. Word of God confirms◊ that he's from an alien planet (though this doesn't necessarily discount the possibility of him being a Transplanted Human), and that he doesn't share his comic counterpart's name of Herbert Wyndham.
• AM/FM Characterization: Like Star-Lord and Ego, the High Evolutionary has a fondness for Earth's music, and considers it (along with Earth's other cultural and artistic endeavors) to be the best in all the galaxy. Rather than songs that come from The '70s or The '80s however, the High Evolutionary prefers to listen to classical and opera music, emphasizing his admiration for the technical aspects of musical composition over the latter two's interest in lyrical themes and instrumentation.
• Animals Hate Him: A variation of the trope. The High Evolutionary uses primarily animals in order to do his experiments to achieve perfection, and those who don't end up fearing him like a divine entity come to hate his guts and want nothing more than to tear him apart, with Rocket being a prime example.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: He states there is no God though the MCU has established that there are a number of deities from multiple mythologies — with Gorr being a villain solely dedicated to hunting them down. Furthermore, he himself refers to the dead Celestial whose head makes up Knowhere as a "dead god".
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Rocket. He created him with the purpose of learning from the flaws in his biology so he could create the perfect race, only keeping him alive because his intelligence proved unique and non-replicable. He's the one who performed his painful experiments on him, kept him locked up for years, killed Rocket's friends and chased Rocket endlessly out of a desire to study his brain and get revenge for mutilating his face. Rocket finally decides to stop running and face him head-on with the intent to bring him down for good.
  • For the Guardians as a whole, The High Evolutionary manages to replace Thanos as their most hated and personal enemy. For individual contempt, Peter, Nebula, and Groot absolutely despise the High Evolutionary after learning just how much pain and agony the High Evolutionary put their Best Friend, Rocket, through for all of his life to the point where Peter is utterly disgusted with him and simmering with rage just by being in the same room with as while Nebula even says that his horrid treatment of Rocket is far worse than what Thanos did to her. The whole team outright declares that he's Beyond Redemption because of his wanton cruelty as displayed by his destruction of Counter-Earth. In the High Evolutionary's case, he looks down on the Guardians for trying to rescue what he believes is rightfully his, and by the climax of the movie, begins jumping off the deep end to destroy them for ruining his life's work.
  • Could be a contender for Adam Warlock as well. He's directly responsible for Adam's stunted mental growth by taking him out of his cocoon too early, treats him with nothing but cruelty and violence, threatened to exterminate his people if he doesn't do as he says and indirectly murders his mother Ayesha when he destroys Counter-Earth. While Adam never fights the High Evolutionary, it'd be no surprise to hear that he hates him as much as Rocket and Star-Lord do.
• Asshole Victim: Given all that's he done, it's nigh impossible to feel sorry for him when he gets subjected to Cruel Mercy by Rocket and the Guardians. Once they thrash the ever-living shit out of him and Gamora tears his mask off to reveal the pathetic monstrosity underneath, Rocket decides killing him both isn't worth it and beneath him when they could use that time to save his other experiments instead. They leave him lying there in agony; critically injured, humiliated and utterly defeated — though Drax hauls his broken, defeated form off of the ship so he can rot in Knowhere's prison.
• Ax-Crazy: He carries himself as a rational and dignified scientist, but quickly shows his true colors. Whenever slighted by Rocket's intelligence or the failures and excuses of his subordinates, the High Evolutionary screams at the top of his lungs and can become unnecessarily cruel. By the climax he loses it completely, destroying his own minions who stand against him and being reduced to a bloodthirsty madman who wants nothing but the Guardians eliminated and Rocket recaptured.
• Bad Boss: His staff and the Sovereign are all terrified of him, especially considering his tendency to hurl them around with his gravity powers should they displease him. By the end of the film, all his remaining staff have turned on him and threaten mutiny. He replies by causing an explosion so large it vaporises them all and destroys the central hub of the ship; the survivors who didn't bear witness to this, he orders them to kill the intruders and retrieve Rocket instead of abandoning ship. Even seeing Theel, the one that shares his cruelty to his experiments, be sent by Quill to his Disney Villain Death doesn't concern him in the least.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: He has no qualms with immoral experimentation on animals, such as Rocket. He also gladly kills them himself once they outlive their use. Some of his more dangerous experiments are also kept under lock and key until his explicit command. Many of them aren't even violent, they're just bred by him to be used as The Brute even when they don't want to be.
• Bait the Dog: Rocket's flashbacks initially imply that the High Evolutionary genuinely cares about Rocket and even views him as a son. It's harshly subverted when he gleefully mocks Rocket for thinking he and his friends would have a place in his perfect world and casually orders to have them all killed.
• Bald of Evil: He's a vile son of a bitch and he doesn't have a single hair on his head. He did have hair during Rocket's childhood, though, implying Rocket scalped him during his mauling.
• Batman Gambit: If there's one thing the High Evolutionary is unquestionably good at, it's his ability to predict what his enemies will do and where they will go and exploit it accordingly.
  • A particularly twisted one occurs after he revealed to Rocket that he intended to have him and his friends killed; he predicts that Rocket will try and break himself and his friends out. He then waits for Rocket to open their cages just so he can shoot Lylla in front of him and force him back into his cage to wait until his extermination the following morning. All because he was jealous Rocket was able to figure out something he couldn't.
  • He accurately predicted the Guardians would go to the Orgoscope once Adam's attack on Rocket went awry.
  • When inviting Peter and Groot to his headquarters, he knew the Guardians would have Rocket with them and had his henchmen War Pig target Rocket when all the Guardians were separated and distracted. Were it not for Adam showing up and Gamora fighting back, he could have gotten Rocket before anyone could do anything.
• Beneath Notice: For someone with so much power and scope, he's gone completely unchallenged and largely unnoticed by the galaxy's authority (i.e. the Nova Corps, Captain Marvel and up until the movie, the Guardians). However, it is justified because he's never stepped out of his own personal sandbox in the galaxy and keeps to himself when it comes to his heinous acts. Since he's never left a trace of what he's done behind once he eliminates his experiments and OrgoCorp is a legitimate Biotech business, it's likely that none of them ever felt a need to investigate him any further. Good lord they should have.
• Berserk Button: It pisses him off when someone outsmarts him. As seen by how he has a meltdown over Rocket figuring out how to fix the fatal flaw in his evolution chambers.
• Big Bad: He is the main villain of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and as it turns out he's the Sovereign's and thus Ayesha's master.
• Blasphemous Boast: Reflecting his god complex, the High Evolutionary proclaims himself to be the equivalent to God.
  High Evolutionary: THERE IS NO GOD! THAT'S WHY I STEPPED IN!
• Boomerang Bigot:
  • He has an Irrational Hatred for all organic life forms, yet even with his own enhancements, he himself is a biological organism (though of unknown origin) and even employs other humanoid or organic life forms. The fact that he traffics almost entirely in Biotech certainly doesn't help.
  • He shows contempt for humans and only cares about the culture they formed, but he himself is human (at least in appearance) and strives to build a society similar if not identical to their own.
• The Bully: At the end of the day, underneath his claims of good intentions, the High Evolutionary is this. He is a petulant, childish and spiteful being who feels the need to constantly throw his weight around, seen best when he informs a young Rocket he and his friends are not welcome on Counter-Earth, taking every moment to twist the knife in deeper.
• Bullying a Dragon: Why yes, mock an anguished cyborg animal-man after you've just murdered one of his loved ones. That will surely end well for your face.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Doctor Who has been referenced many times in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Chukwudi Iwuji portrayed Joshua Sembeke in an audio drama and Carl Peterson in two episodes of the show.
  • The DCU was also referenced a number of times across the MCU, including a Batman reference in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Chukwudi Iwuji played Clemson Murn in Peacemaker, a show made by James Gunn.
• Civilization Destroyer: Not only has the High Evolutionary created multiple civilizations in his quest to build the perfect society, but he's also willing to utterly annihilate them if they fail to live up to his expectations, threatening the Sovereign with such a fate to get Ayesha and Adam Warlock to do his dirty work and destroying all life on Counter-Earth before departing to try and build yet another new society. Even Gamora, who has seen Thanos decimate countless worlds, is utterly horrified at the sight, and the High Evolutionary admits that he has committed such atrocities many times before.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: Inverted. In the comics, the High Evolutionary was a British man named Herbert Wyndham, who studied at Oxford university before transforming himself into his Anti-Villain moniker. In the MCU, the High Evolutionary doesn't seem to have any kind of civilian identity, and so is only referred to by his supervillain name.
• Composite Character: He was behind the creation of Ayesha and the Sovereign; in the comics, that was the Enclave's doing. His armor and his overall look are reminiscent of the Psycho-Man, an enemy of the Fantastic Four.
• Comically Missing the Point: In a Comically Serious moment for The High Evolutionary he's oblivious to Quill's insult instead being more concern of correcting Quill's claims of wanting to conquer the universe.
• Comically Serious: He has his moments of this in the form of remaining stoic when doing something rather petulant. Moments of this includes stepping on a stool to make himself taller than Ayesha and being completely oblivious to Peter Quill calling him an "impotent wack-job" all while keeping a straight face. Note that these are the ONLY moments that the High Evolutionary can come across as humorous.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • To Ronan the Accuser. They are both inclined to slaughter entire worlds and civilizations they hold contempt towards, though Ronan was driven by fanaticism and the ancient ways of his people while the High Evolutionary is driven by science. Also, Ronan's ultimate goal was the destruction of Xandar whereas the High Evolutionary eliminates Counter-Earth as a step towards his ultimate plan that is the construction of an utopia. Ronan rejected peace and sought war on his own accord but the High Evolutionary wants to eradicate violence and build (his own idea of) peace. Last but not least, Ronan doesn't think highly of Earth and humanity and attempted to destroy the planet while the High Evolutionary at least appreciates humans' culture and art and creates his own version of Earth as a result.
  • To Ego the Living Planet. Both are highly powerful and intelligent beings with grand designs, both display highly narcissistic and controlling behaviour, both have a very important connection to the Guardians (Star-Lord and Rocket respectively) and both pose a serious threat to the galaxy as a whole. However, while Ego was a planet of unmatched beauty and wonder and had a reason to want to keep Peter isolated from the others (so he could have his son embrace his powers and use said power to give him (Ego) enough power to start his Evil Plan), the High Evolutionary kept Rocket and his friends in bleak cages in a dark and miserable prison deprived even of sight of the sky, simply because he saw them as property and unworthy of any decent treatment. Also, while Ego did have a (admittedly twisted) capacity for love and deep down yearned for companionship, even falling for a human woman (though his love for her is not enough to spare her from him giving her cancer so he can move forward with his Evil Plan), the High Evolutionary despises all organic life and considers humanity little more than bigoted savages. Finally, for all of Ego's many, many negative traits, he was legitimately funny and likeable (at first), while there isn't a shred of humour to be found in the High Evolutionary aside from a few Comically Serious moments and he's thoroughly incapable of being charming for longer than a few minutes before his patience wears thin.
  • Unlike all other foes of the Guardians (Ronan, Ego, Ayesha, Thanos, Adam Warlock), the High Evolutionary has absolutely no attachments or loyalty to anyone or anything, except his mad, narcissistic dream of "perfection" and the means to achieve it. He also has no desire to conquer or destroy anything, except his "failed" experiments, up to a planetary scale, and no "family" to speak of. In fact, he's so abusive Nebula thinks he makes Thanos look like Father of the Year. The High Evolutionary is also mainly a builder, not a destroyer.
  • Despite being the most loathsome of the three Guardians villains, he's the only one to not be killed by them. Ronan was killed when the Guardians used the Power Stone, Ego was killed when they implanted a bomb in his celestial core, but the High Evolutionary, though put through an utterly humiliating and painful defeat, was spared from death and instead sent to prison on Knowhere.
• Control Freak: His vision of a perfect society comes with the condition that he is the supreme ruler of all within it. As Rocket himself said, he doesn't do what he does because he wants to make the world a better place, he just wants it to be how he likes it.
• Cool Ship: His main base of operations, the Atare, also serves as his ship. It's a slick, red base that's absolutely gargantuan, absolutely dwarfing the likes of the Bowie, visible from the bat-people's family home miles away and comparable in size with Knowhere itself.
• Copycat Mockery: A particularly cruel example. When Rocket cries over Lylla's death, the High Evolutionary mocks him by mimicking his wailing. It comes to painfully bite him in the ass (or rather, face).
  High Evolutionary: UAAAHH! UAAAHH! UAAAALL RIGHT, P13! You win the crying contest! Get back in the cage!
• Cornered Rattlesnake: The movie stresses that he isn't nearly as intelligent or even competent as he fancies himself being, but when the tables are turned against him, he doesn't cower; he just gets even angrier. When his bridge try to mutiny against him, he immediately vaporizes all of them with a gravity pulse. And though he is visibly frightened when Rocket figures out how to overcome his gravity manipulation and shoots him in the chest, he still chooses to charge at Rocket even though Rocket's blast, by all appearances, destroyed his gravity tech.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He's the CEO and founder of OrgoCorp, and under his watch the corporation is responsible for countless crimes including genocide, animal abuse, and gruesome experimentation. According to Gamora, the whole reason he founded OrgoCorp to begin with was to fund his twisted and illegal experiments and shield or hide them from galactic law.
• Create Your Own Hero: He is responsible for creating Rocket, a super-intelligent raccoon. Said raccoon went on to help defeat a fanatic, a living planet, a mad titan (twice) and ultimately, himself.
• Creative Sterility:
  • Ironically, for all the High Evolutionary's hatred of his creations' inability to create something for themselves rather than rote copying, most of his own creations are highly derivative of humanity. Notably, Counter-Earth is almost an exact copy of Earth with his presence as the local god being the only difference. It's implied that this is why he gets so enraged by Rocket innovating his technology, as he can't grasp how Rocket could come up with an actually new idea, something he cannot do.
  • Interestingly, when one looks at all of his creations, virtually none of them are truly original. The alien civilizations he's created are all made with humanity in mind (even the Sovereign are just elite gold-skinned humans with superior technology and a different form of procreation) and all of his "successful" experiments are simply Uplifted Animals made from specimens he kidnapped from other planets, including Earth. So in reality, the High Evolutionary has never actually created anything truly unique in his career.
• Crippling Overspecialization: His only superpower is control over gravity, so the moment Rocket turns on his own device which does the same, he doesn't last long.
• Cruel Mercy: Rocket spares his life and he is imprisoned in Knowhere. Given that this means he has to live with the knowledge that he is a prisoner, a failure, and that his flawed, "freak" experiment Rocket is a better person than he could ever hope to be, death arguably would have been kinder for him.
• Cult of Personality: Exploited for all it's worth. Across the universe, many civilizations owe their existence to him, including the Sovereign, Counter-Earth and the Orgoscope. In all of these, the High Evolutionary depicts himself as their unquestioned ruler and constantly has his societies and company sing praises of his "altruism" and "benevolence". Even Rocket himself - and all of batch 89 - thought him a kind and noble master at first. Sadly (of course) it's all a lie. Behind all the propaganda lies a cruel, capricious, vile psychopath who has nothing but contempt for the very lives he creates.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: On the giving and receiving end of this.
  • Typically, his use of gravity and telekinesis or just his superior technology is enough for him to have the advantage over pretty much any opponent, as he displays by one-shotting Star-Lord and Groot with a wave of his hand. His confidence with this also implies he's done this to many a would-be challenger before. He also effortlessly one-shots Mantis, Drax and Nebula and swiftly imprisons them in the cells of his ship without hardly breaking a sweat, but it should be noted he caught them completely off-guard, so they had no time to react.
  • When Vim and the other henchmen attempt to pull The Mutiny on him after seeing him for the obsessed and maniacal despot he truly is, not a single one of them even get a chance to lay a finger on him as he vaporizes them all on the spot with a destructive surge of energy.
  • On the receiving end, the Guardians arrive just in time to back up Rocket's Last Stand against his greatest enemy. And because he's both suffering a severe Villainous Breakdown and Rocket just shot one hell of a hole through his chest, he's hardly in a position to fight back. What happens next is one of the most cathartic No-Holds-Barred Beatdowns in the MCU to date.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: The High Evolutionary has incredible resources, wealth and scope, but his obsession with his poisonous dream of creating a perfect society means the only thing his immense resources ever go into is his warped experiments and the subjugation of innocents; be they animal, human or alien (really anything organic). If he wasn't the psychopathic monster he is, he could truly do wonders for the whole galaxy with the tools at his disposal. Interestingly, exactly how he accumulated all this is never explained.

D-J

• Dark Lord on Life Support:
  • Implied. One of Rocket's flashbacks has a dazed and erratic High Evolutionary stumble out of unspecified treatments with his underlings trying to persuade him to come back. It's hinted that these are necessary to keep him alive, and likely how he's become essentially immortal.
  • When confronted by Star-Lord and Groot, he claims ruefully that he let his guard down once and only once; he doesn't say it outright, but he's clearly referring to when he misjudged young Rocket's Rage Breaking Point. The entire incident left him both traumatized and extremely vengeful towards Rocket and it's implied his enhancements are because he's sworn to never let something like that happening again. It's also quite telling that the damage done to him was so extensive his body didn't even try to heal it (and it seems even OrgoCorp didn't have the resources to do so).
• Deadpan Snarker: Downplayed. He is capable of a dry wit though hardly displays it. He does, however, comment wryly on how insane Peter's act of jumping out of a window in his ship and down towards the exploding Counter-Earth was.
• Dehumanization: He views his creations more like experiments than sentient beings capable of thought and emotion. He constantly refers to Rocket by his subject number rather than his real name, treats Ayesha like livestock, and thinks nothing of disposing of them when they inevitably fail to live up to his standards.
• Demiurge Archetype: In a universe where gods unambiguously exist, he seems to liken himself to a god (or thinks himself superior to them) for his desire to genetically engineer the perfect society. While he feigns benevolence to most of his creations, he has no real respect for them as sentient and sapient beings and will perform inhumane experiments on them, only to eventually have them euthanized when they no longer serve the purpose he gave them or fail to live up to his standards Old Testament-style.
• Detrimental Determination: The High Evolutionary expends a large amount of his resources and manpower trying to recapture Rocket and dissect his brain, because his ego can't handle the one time Rocket got an answer when he couldn't. Some of his own men turn on him when he wants to continue the pursuit as their ship is being destroyed rather than die foolishly for his hurt pride.
• Didn't Think This Through: Despite hating humanity itself for its bigotry and savagery, the High Evolutionary still modeled Counter-Earth exactly off of human culture. It never occurred to him that this could wind up resulting in the inhabitants developing the same flaws.
• Disproportionate Retribution: More than once he considers punishment for entire groups for the actions of a few individuals:
  • He forces Adam Warlock and Ayesha to do his bidding under the threat of eliminating their entire race, even though he blames only the High Priestess for not informing him of Rocket's whereabouts.
  • Upon learning of the imperfections of Counter-Earth he chooses to destroy the entire planet rather than just eliminating the imperfect individuals. And he casually admits that he has done so several times in the past to many other of his created societies.
  • It's implied the High Evolutionary ordered Rocket and his friends killed not because he thought they were imperfect, but because he was seething over Rocket having figured out how to fix a design flaw that he couldn't fix himself.
• Ditzy Genius: He's a scientist whose is supposed to be an expert in biology and runs a corporation that deals with bio-prosthetics, but makes incredibly short-sighted and stupid mistakes that could easily be avoided, his knowledge in science and biology is actually very limited, has no idea how to solve problems on his own, and constantly needs help from others for any of his plans to progress.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • A large part of what makes the High Evolutionary so horrifying is that, outside of the more overtly fantastical elements (i.e., grafting prosthetic limbs onto walruses and rabbits), many of his hideous genetic experiments and glorified torture sessions are a parallel to brutal and unethical animal testing as performed by cosmetic companies. Heck, the scene where a weeping and partially shaved young Rocket is callously shoved back into a tiny, miserable little cage almost looks directly lifted out of an animal rights PSA.
  • A large part of High Evolutionary's insecurity is a result of his implied lack of creativity, as all he does is recycle ideas that already exist. He is incapable of actual innovation, which directly mirrors the actual "innovation gap" humans are currently going through. In many ways, this makes him similar to corporations trying to use AI content generators like ChatGPT, which has to steal people's work to come up with something that "appears" new.
• Dramatically Missing the Point:
  • He wants to create the perfect society, but the High Evolutionary just fundamentally doesn't understand how to do it because of his Lack of Empathy. He wants a Perfect Pacifist People, but he values his creations being aesthetically pleasing over the moral character he claims to desire. He also wants his creations to be pillars of moral character, while also demanding they commit murder at the drop of a hat for him without any cognitive dissonance.
  • Blinded by rage, he interrogates Rocket about how he could have come up with a new idea, seemingly not realizing that creativity is often spontaneous. This hints that none of his ideas and technologies are his own creations.
• The Dreaded:
  • As the creator and ruler of many of the galaxy's civilizations, even the Sovereign, he is greatly feared among the millions of communities for his power and scope. His wrath is something that none of them ever want to cross, as Gamora and Ayesha stated themselves. His own henchmen (even the other Mad Scientists) are terrified of him, Rocket himself has lived in fear and hatred of him ever since his youth (to the point even just hearing his voice gives Rocket a panic attack), Star-Lord and Groot take their chances leaping 1,000 feet off the ledge rather than face him directly by themselves and even Gamora expresses reluctance to actually take him on.
  • In a meta sense, many fans have also commended Chukwudi Iwuji for being genuinely terrifying and realistic; many consider him the scariest MCU villain to date. That's right, he's even more frightening than Thanos, Gorr and Kang.
• Driven by Envy: Though he was always an evil bastard, he's extremely jealous that Rocket figured out how to fix the one problem with his evolution chamber and decides then and there that he and his animal friends are failures.
• Enemy to All Living Things: Unsurprising given his hatred for all organic life, but he's horrifically abusive towards animals, destroys entire planets with no hesitation and treats alien and human alike as either beneath him or a threat to be permanently neutralized.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Subverted. The High Evolutionary can certainly act fatherly towards his more promising creations and he can express some level of admiration or favouritism for others (especially Rocket, whom he prized above all his other creations for his intellect and creativity). However, as a narcissistic psychopath with a heavy god complex, he's utterly incapable of loving them for who they are and the second they become an inconvenience or disappoint him in any way, shape or form, he is quick to callously have them vivisected and forget them by morning. He also never gives any of them names and only refers to them by the subject serial number, as he sees them as nothing more than just that; an experiment for him to use at his own leisure. He's also never shown speaking of any family of his own (it seems like the very idea doesn't even appeal to him in the slightest) and he treats even his most loyal henchmen like disposable morons. The film makes it very clear that there is only one person the High Evolutionary genuinely cares about: The High Evolutionary.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Subverted. He does have a twisted ethical code, but his hypocrisy and Ax-Crazy nature means that whatever moral standard he may have, he'll probably do far worse anyway.
  • He's disgusted when he learns of drug dealing and homelessness on Counter-Earth, but his solution is to kill everyone on the planet. It doesn't seem to click for him that committing genocide is infinitely worse than any of Counter-Earth's social problems.
  • The High Evolutionary also claims that he has no intentions of trying to be a Galactic Conqueror like Thanos was, and takes offense when Quill accuses him as such. That said, considering that he's eradicated life on a planetary scale many times before, he's certainly no better than Thanos and even commits similar crimes (he's arguably even worse since Thanos at least gave the planets he targeted a chance to thrive again), he simply does it on a smaller scale. In all fairness, the galaxy should be thanking its lucky stars he does have such a standard, or not even the Guardians could contain that carnage.
• Evil Brit: Being an alien, he's not actually British, but he speaks with a British accent and is very evil.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Zigzagged. He understands the evils of bigotry and violence and values peace and tolerance, wanting to create a society composed of both. However, he believes that a peaceful and orderly world only comes through his iron will made absolute. On a personal level, he mocks Rocket Raccoon's grief over the deaths of his friends, not comprehending his feeling but only regarding it as an annoyance — and is baffled when Rocket reacts in anger and viciously brutalizes his face.
  • He also absurdly questions why Quill is so angry with him despite literally dissecting his best friend Rocket and treating him with nothing but inhumane cruelty. This also shows the High Evolutionary's disdain for others who call out his methods as he genuinely believes what he's doing is for the betterment of the universe.
• Eviler than Thou: To Ayesha. After Ayesha spent much of her time screwing with the Guardians in the second film, the High Evolutionary constantly belittles and abuses her and her "son" Adam, and he ultimately kills her when he decides to blow up Counter-Earth with her still on it.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: The only moment that could be him trying to be deliberately humorous is when he mocks Rocket's crying over the death of his friends by saying he won the crying contest. That alone reveals how utterly vile and irredeemable he is.
• Evil Is Hammy: Iwuji somehow chews more scenery than Lee Pace as Ronan. His two default moods are "grandiloquent, posturing sociopath" and "murderous freak-out," and Iwuji plays both moods, appropriately enough for the character's narcissistic and overblown personality, without a grain of subtlety.
• Evil Is Petty: The High Evolutionary turns this trope into an art form. Most notably he makes Peter and Groot wait until he was ready for them... despite making it obvious he's not really busy at all. Also, when speaking with Ayesha, he has a servant bring out a stool for him to stand on purely so that he can be taller than her... so he can examine her mouth like she's livestock. And when Rocket shatters his fragile ego by figuring out how to create animal people without turning them violently aggressive, something the High Evolutionary failed to do, he tells Rocket that he and his friends are "mistakes", that he was never going to let them live in his utopian world, and that he was planning from the beginning to kill them as soon as they outlive their usefulness, just to hurt him. And he then mocks Rocket for not being smart enough to figure that out himself.
• The Evils of Free Will: He recognizes the dangers of things such as bigotry and political unrest, and feels that the only way to deal with it is to force all of his subjects into subjugation with no room to think for themselves. Hence, when he's alerted of an impurity amongst his created civilization, he proceeds to destroy Counter-Earth.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Not only is he a foremost expert in all fields of biology (as well as being a vile and psychopathic asshole), he has created a device that can accelerate biological entities to levels of evolution and mutation previously unknowable. However, while he does use it to create "perfect" species, he also uses this breakthrough to create monsters that blindly do his bidding.
• Evolutionary Levels: He's a firm believer in this, complete with the classic "more humanoid = more evolved" trope. Ironically, it's shown quite a few times in the film that there is no connection between a humanoid form and high intelligence, suggesting it really just comes down to his belief that a "perfect" species would look like he does.
• Expy: Chukwudi Iwuji drew inspiration from The Professional's Norman Stansfield while portraying The High Evolutionary. And the similarities are rather apparent; as they both are highly unstable individuals who attempt to pass themselves off as Wicked Cultured through their love of classical/opera music.
• Facial Horror: After he killed Lylla during Rocket and his friends' original escape, the infuriated raccoon attacked him and mauled his face to shreds. The apparent face he has by the time of this film is actually a rubber mask; he's completely skinless underneath it. When he's unmasked at the end of the movie, it's a horrifying sight to behold. Not that he didn't absolutely deserve it of course.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Chukwudi Iwuji has stated that the High Evolutionary's efforts to create the perfect society will always fail, since his standards are so impossibly high and contradictory that nothing could ever live up to them.
• Fatal Flaw: Ultimately, the High Evolutionary's perfectism is the cause of his downfall. He can't accept his own flaws and projects them onto everyone and everything but him. This need for perfection drives his mistreatment of his creations, leading to Rocket mauling him. A combination of his inability to accept his own flaws and seeing everyone else as beneath him causes him to underestimate them. This leads to him being left completely helpless when Rocket turns the tables on him.
• Fate Worse than Death: With how much of a vile scumbag he is, it would be so easy for Rocket to kill this monster. Instead, Rocket spares the High Evolutionary's life and then throws him to rot in a prison cell on Knowhere. Fitting karma for a narcissistic psychopath like him.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Guardians 3 and his role in it essentially asks the question of "what if Josef Mengele had his own biotech empire and used it to design civilisations" and answers "it would be an even more horrendous catastrophe than you'd expect". The High Evolutionary is a Lethally Stupid Bad Boss who runs his empire through fear and cultish sycophancy while failing to nurture genuine loyalty and competence, and the end result is that he engages in grand, expensive, and staggeringly cruel flights of fancy with zero pushback until they inevitably fall apart on contact with reality. The Guardians' confrontation with him is less of a war and more of a rescue mission where they're trying to get as many people as possible out of the collapsing ruins of the dangerously brittle world he's created.
• Faux Affably Evil: He would often cradle Rocket in his lap akin to a father and his son and tell him of the wonders he has envisioned for the future. He's very calm and patient with Rocket when he's still a child, praises his intellect and presents himself in a very paternal and nurturing manner. However, every positive or affirming trait he has in the film is entirely undone when he coldly tells Rocket he was always nothing more than just an experiment he'll discard as a failure once he creates something better and he never actually intended for Rocket or his friends to join in his new world. He can be deceptively charming even to those who know of his true nature, as he is also surprisingly open and honest with Star-Lord and Groot when he speaks with them, he's oddly jovial in his demeanour; not even getting angry when Peter is openly hostile and rude to him and promises not to cause any further suffering if they hand Rocket over to him... but then he acknowledges that Counter-Earth is a failure and casually and remorselessly orders it and everyone in it destroyed, before having his men corner Peter and Groot to execute them without a second thought and not batting an eye at the planet he just blew up. It's clear that he's only polite and patient with those who serve a purpose to him. Those who don't, he'll gladly incinerate.
• Final Boss: He is the final enemy that the original iteration of Guardians of the Galaxy faces as a team before they go their separate ways.
• Final Solution: As soon as he discovers that his precious Counter-Earth has actual social problems, his first idea is to completely wipe it out and start anew. In general, annihilating a society is his go-to solution for the perceived problem of imperfection, as he casually states that he had done it many times before destroying Counter-Earth.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Within the MCU, the existence of gods is intergalactic knowledge and they have firmly made their presence known, even having their own city. The High Evolutionary nevertheless believes that gods aren't real — and that he's the closest equivalent. The closest he ever gets to acknowledging something god-like is when Kraglin is piloting Knowhere to attack him — at which point he declares it to be a dead god.
• Foil:
  • To Quill, of all people. Like Quill, the High Evolutionary is a huge fan of retro Earth culture, so much that his utopian society, Counter-Earth, is built to look just like Earth down to the urban planning. He also talks about how he considers Earth's culture and creative arts to be the greatest in the galaxy, and Quill — who just a moment ago had been angrily shouting in his face — quietly concurs. However, while Quill's love for Earth culture is genuine because he was born there, and he loves 70s and 80s aesthetics because it's the only culture he knew before he was abducted, the High Evolutionary's interest is purely an academic one, as he only sees it as a template on which to base his utopian civilizations and doesn't have any personal interest in it. His attempt to emulate Earth's society even contrasts Peter's oft-invoking of Earth pop culture, but in a much darker and more sinister tone. Also, Quill loves Rocket and sees him as a family member and his best friend, while the High Evolutionary despises Rocket and sees him as nothing more than a failed experiment and a freakish monster. Quill is a man driven largely by his attachments to others, yet THE only feels real attachment to his vague concept of "perfection". And while Quill ultimately grows to understand that Gamora will never be the woman he loved, and stops trying to mould her into a copy of the original, the High Evolutionary will stop at absolutely nothing to mould the entire universe to fit his vision of perfection.
  • To Rocket. They developed a love for Earth's music, have hidden insecurities they hide behind a mask of arrogance and stoicism, and are both geniuses. However, Rocket is foul-mouthed, uncouth, and uneducated yet still has a genuinely compassionate side behind the act and cares deeply about his friends. Meanwhile, the High Evolutionary acts polite and sophisticated but is evil to the core and views everyone else as beneath him. Both of them are horribly scarred, mentally and physically, by each other. Both of them are good at building and destroying things. THE just does it on a bigger scale.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: After a visit to the planet, the High Evolutionary took such a liking to Earth culture that he created Counter-Earth to serve as his own version of it. Fitting his shallow appreciation of Earth and its culture, the High Evolutionary ultimately doesn't have any attachment to Counter-Earth, incinerating it and the inhabitants without a second thought.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Discussed. We never even get to find out whether he has a Freudian Excuse, because Star-Lord cuts off his Motive Rant before he can work up a proper head of steam.
  Star-Lord: I don't need another speech by some impotent whackjob whose mother didn't love him rationalizing why he needs to conquer the universe.
• General Failure: His competence in many fields is questionable, but rarely more so than in military matters. His complete inability to accurately assess value tends to lead him to underestimate his greatest threats (like the Guardians) and his greatest assets (like Adam Warlock), while overestimating other elements like his cyborg legions. He's enough of a Bad Boss that he has no loyalty or morale to rely upon from his sapient personnel when things go wrong, and his tactics are simplistic and obvious enough that Peter turns out to be entirely correct in describing his attempted traps as nothing more than "face-offs". In the end, the Guardians' efforts to dismantle his operation end up as less of a war and more of a rescue mission.
• Glass Cannon: His gravity powers are undoubtedly deadly — they can annihilate an entire roomful of enemies in a Sphere of Destruction at maximum output — but they (and his combat skills in general) are so crude and simple that they offer him zero defensive options. Once you get past that, he's a lightly-armoured Human Alien with perfectly ordinary durability and pain tolerance — which is even more of a problem than it sounds, since being a Gravity Master apparently requires some level of concentration on his part. Any reasonably serious injury will distract him so much that he essentially loses any meaningful ability to fight back against whoever injured him, leaving him entirely dependent on his first-strike capabilities. There's a reason his "fight" against the Guardians can be summarised as "Rocket shoots him, and then a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown ensues".
• Godhood Seeker: The High Evolutionary believes there is no God, and thus concluded he would be perfect to take up the role for real.
• God Is Evil: Zig-Zagged. The High Evolutionary isn't a god, but he ensures that his creations worship him as one. He'll also kill them on a whim and clearly doesn't even see them as people, instead using them to feed his god complex. Even the Celestials can't match him for sheer disregard of his creations' lives and autonomy.
• A God Am I: He doesn't believe there are any true deities out there (though of course he's wrong about that, and his behavior is clearly no different from most of them) and outright declares himself one in their place.
  High Evolutionary: THERE IS NO GOD! THAT'S WHY I STEPPED IN!
• Gravity Master: He states that his technology and biological advancements are so great he has complete control over gravity itself. A feat he backs up more than once.
• Green-Eyed Monster: It’s never said aloud, but his sadistic and pointlessly cruel abuse of Rocket once the raccoon solves his problem with experiments being mentally unstable reflects that of a would-be envying his creation growing beyond him in some way, igniting an insane wrath against Rocket.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Although he doesn't appear in person until the third film, the High Evolutionary's presence is subtly built up to throughout the Guardians trilogy.
  • It is mentioned in the third film that OrgoCorp has been the leading manufacturer of bionic prosthetics in the galaxy, implying that most of the robotic enhancements that have been shown throughout the trilogy, such as the ones worn by Nebula and the various Ravagers, were designed and bought from the High Evolutionary's company.
  • More directly, he is revealed to have been the creator of the Sovereign planet and its population, who the Guardians had previously ran afoul of in the second instalment. Ayesha and Adam answer to the High Evolutionary directly during the third film's events.
  • Rocket's traumatic history of being forcibly enhanced in a lab was first has been strongly hinted at ever since the first film. His history is finally explored with the High Evolutionary's introduction in the third instalment, with it also being revealed that Rocket was only one of countless innocent animals that endured such torturous experimentation.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The High Evolutionary has an extremely violent temper. In multiple scenes he is seen shouting at the top of his lungs and berating others. His temper is what makes him highly unpredictable to where it shocks anyone who is unfortunate enough to witness his fury, due to him keeping his composure most of the time until he decides to lose it.
• Hated by All: By the time he starts destroying his own ship in his attempts to kill the Guardians, he has alienated even his own staff by showing his true colors as a dangerous lunatic who cannot be reasoned with.
• Hates Everyone Equally: To The High Evolutionary, anything that doesn't fit his vision of "perfection" is both beneath him and detestable, and his impossibly high standards means that this applies to just everyone he comes across, especially his own creations.
• Hate Sink: Oh yes. He is by far one of the most loathsome, vile, and despicable villains in the entire MCU. He's a selfish, abusive, genocidal maniac who sees his creations as mere products he can throw away at a whim, and his claims of creating a perfect world are ultimately just a byproduct of his contempt for all existing life. Unlike most other MCU villains, no excuses are given for his behavior and he lacks any redeeming traits. He's just a Psychopathic Manchild who wants to play God. James Gunn even admitted in a pre-release interview that he deliberately wrote him to be the cruelest MCU villain the franchise has ever seen.
• His Own Worst Enemy: While his Lack of Empathy and Lethally Stupid tendencies mean he's a pretty dangerous enemy to the rest of the galaxy too, this is his main problem — he's obsessed with "perfecting the galaxy", but he's too deeply warped to have the faintest idea what a "perfect galaxy" would look like, and he's only got a limited interest in finding out what he's getting wrong before he tries and fails yet again.
  Chukwudi Iwuji: What he doesn’t realize is that the flaw is in him. He’s deeply unhappy with himself and projects it outward… He would always see a flaw that he needs to fix. It would never stop.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His cruelty, narcissism, complete Lack of Empathy, or even basic caring for his test subjects are what leads to his downfall. Additionally, he is so repulsed by the perceived flaws innate in biological life that he cannot see the strengths. He is so obsessed with imbuing his creations with the power of imagination and creativity that he fails to see that it's already there - and any time he's confronted by the creativity that he thinks his creations don't have, he gets violenty offended and angry that they dare to become more than what he made them to be. If the High Evolutionary had just cared about his creations, if he had shown even the tiniest shred of love or pride in them and especially Rocket, then he would have had loyal followers to the end of his days who would have had the genius to help him achieve his ultimate goal.
• Hollywood Atheist: He (wrongfully) believes and declares that there are no Gods in the MCU, therefore belives he should step in to create perfection in their absence. His mortality notwithstanding, The High Evolutionary's monstrous hubris and pride from his self-perceived sceientific superiority would let him fit comfortably among the equally cruel and cynical Gods like Rapu and Zeus of Omnipotence City. Made doubly hilarious by him acknowledging that the approaching Knowhere is "that severed head of a god" in the final battle
• Hope Crusher: When Rocket curiously asks when he and his friends will be allowed to join the High Evolutionary's new world, the Evolutionary takes great joy in crushing Rocket's hopes and making it clear that he'll never be allowed in it because the Evolutionary views him as nothing but a failed experiment. He goes even further when — predicting Rocket would escape — he waits for him to make his move just so he can shoot Lylla in front of him and force him back into his cage.
• Hypocrite:
  • The High Evolutionary venomously criticizes the bigotry and violence of humanity, which is a bit rich coming from a man who looks down on everyone, treats Rocket and his ilk as failed experiments simply for not looking humanoid, and who brutally incinerates those who fail to live up to his standards. Up to and including planets.
  • He claims to value intelligence, creativity, and compassion in his creations. However, Lylla and especially Rocket exhibit plenty of these traits, yet he orders them killed for their physical defects. It's notably implied the reason he wants Rocket dead is because he may be smarter than the High Evolutionary. If his goals were genuine, he would have been happy, but since the High Evolutionary's goals are to feed his own narcissism, he instead lashes out.
  • He deems The Sovereign failures for being Brainless Beauties with an inflated sense of self-importance. Never mind the fact that he deliberately made them that way (on top of his own narcissism), so what was he expecting? The only reason he keeps them around instead of eradicating them like he did with various other "failed experiments" is because they are still useful to him as grunts, showing that he's also inconsistent. Also, his description of them describes himself too.
  • He claims to be a wise and cultured man of science, but he proves to be rather incompetent at it. He's incapable of remaining objective, his experiments are often haphazard and needlessly brutal, and he barely seems to comprehend science and medicine himself without outside help.
  • He wants his creations to be compassionate and pillars of moral character, while he is utterly immoral and thinks nothing of committing genocide at the drop of a hat. Notably, he expects his creations to kill for him and sees absolutely no contradiction in this.
  • Finally, for a self-proclaimed atheist, he certainly has the pride and aspirations of omnipotence of a God, with a hubris and monstrously large ego to match. Not to mention openly acknowledging that Knowhere is the severed head of a dead god moments after declaring his atheism; implying that he does not so much deny the existence of Gods as he considers himself to be a God above all others.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He meets his demise when Gamora drives the Godslayer through his torso and the Guardians elect to leave him behind to bleed to death. Subverted as he's confirmed to be alive, though now a prisoner on Knowhere.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Chukwudi Iwuji has stated that underneath the High Evolutionary's narcissism and god complex lies a well of self-loathing and insecurity. It's what leads him to lash out at his creations for being "imperfect": in his view it reflects badly on him, which leads to him lashing out violently at them rather than self-reflecting. This is best shown when he crawls to Rocket's cage in the middle of the night, sputtering about how Rocket pointed out the problem with his evolution chambers making his subjects violent and how to fix it; on the one hand he's genuinely shocked that Rocket figured it out, but he's also clearly jealous and furious that his creation, a genetically and cybernetically altered Earth raccoon, solved a problem that he couldn't.
• Insistent Terminology: As he tells Quill, he's not trying to conquer the universe. Rather, he's "perfecting" it.
• Insufferable Genius: The High Evolutionary's ego is so great that when someone manages to solve a problem that he couldn't, one of his failed experiments in fact, he becomes unhinged and unable to sleep.
• Intrigued by Humanity: As he tells Quill, he's not trying to conquer the universe. Rather, he's "perfecting" it.
• Inventional Wisdom: As a Lethally Stupid deconstruction of The Unfettered, this is something that he simply does not pay attention to until it's time to dispose of yet another failure. How does giving robotic spider legs to the rabbit or prosthetic arms to an otter (who already had paws she could have used like Rocket) you're using in your Uplifted Animal experiments contribute to your mission to "perfect the galaxy"? It just does, don't worry about it.
• Ironic Hell: He's now imprisoned on Knowhere, badly injured, humiliated, ruined, his horrific mutilation is now shown to the world, he has little by means of escape and nothing in redemption or mercy. Fitting punishment for a man who spent his whole life abducting, mutilating, torturing and imprisoning innocent animals, children and people from all sides of the galaxy.
• Ironic Name: Mainly due to his catastrophic inability to live up to his own standards. "High Evolutionary" implies growth and purity of purpose, not an unstable, Lethally Stupid perfectionist who keeps accidentally getting surpassed by his own creations. Moreover the concept of "Evolution" does not stem to achieving perfection but towards continuous improvement via natural selection where organisms grow, adapt, and think for themselves through time and progress. This completely contrasts with the High Evolutionary's thinking where his creations must be perfect from the get go or else he'll destroy them while he refuses to ever let them grow and improve, especially if this means surpassing him, showing that despite his title his knowledge of evolution is actually extremely skewed, limited, and revolving solely around his own ego.
• Irony:
  • Turns out Rocket scarred him — in both senses — about as badly as he hurt Rocket. Except Rocket was a lot more efficient about it.
  • He wants to create a race of people that will surpass him, or any other race in the galaxy. Rocket — a "failed" experiment who's utterly unique — keeps surpassing the High Evolutionary in every single way.
  • Considering that he fashions himself as a very cultured being above the species that he's uplifted, he acts absolutely bestial whenever he doesn't get his way. His "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Rocket sounds absolutely animalistic.
  • While the High Evolutionary vocally believes that there is no God (and that he himself is the next best thing), Rocket's near-death experience heavily implies that there is a genuine God, and what's more, that said God guided the High Evolutionary to create Rocket in the first place.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: When Peter coldly tells The High Evolutionary "I don't need another speech by some impotent whack-job whose mother didn't love him rationalizing why he needs to conquer the Universe!", he retorts to the latter part of the accusation, declaring that he is trying to perfect society, not conquer it. Possibly unintentional, as the madman is so narcissistic and self-assured that he does not even register the fact he was called "an impotent whack-job", much less take offense at it.
• It's All About Me: For all his claims of nobility, it's very clear that the High Evolutionary's main priority is feeding his own ego. He expects everyone to live and die on his command regardless of whether it's even necessary, and gets angry when it isn't done. It's also notable that his main requirement for all his creations is that they worship him as a god, and that he actually takes offense when Rocket displays any goals beyond serving him and his aims.
• I Was Quite the Looker: Played With. In Rocket's flashbacks, he carried himself in an elegant manner and was a lean and well-groomed man who dressed neatly. In the present day, he's notably more rigid and rage-driven in his posture, he wears a rather unflattering purple armour, his face is stitched with the augmentations that give his head an odd and uncomfortable look and his face now has an Uncanny Valley quality to it. It's later revealed that Rocket mauled his face off after he killed Lyla and his friends, with his face in the present day now just a mask of his former visage (a man like him would accept no substitute after all) and what's underneath will make his original face look like an Adonis in comparison.
• Jerkass: Beneath his thin veneer of politeness, the High Evolutionary is a petty, narcissistic, childish bully. To call him a Jerkass would be an immense understatement of how much of a deliberately vile, spiteful and monstrous individual he is. He even makes Ronan and Ego seem like pleasant company by comparison.

K-P

• Karmic Death: Subverted. It would be a quite fitting end for a self-proclaimed god to be skewered by a sword called the Godslayer, and for a man who incinerated his creations to himself be incinerated in his spaceship... but Drax hauled him out of his exploding ship to put him in prison at Rocket's behest.
• Kick the Dog: Good lord. The man just cannot walk past a dog without kicking (or hyper-mutating) it:
  • His treatment of Adam Warlock is basically nothing but this, especially considering he pulled Adam out of his incubation chamber early, all but ensuring his stunted mental growth. Shown more explicitly when he tortures him just for talking back to him.
  • The second he believes Counter-Earth is no longer up to his delusional standards and isn't needed for his trap, he orders the whole planet incinerated and watches in an almost bored way as innocents are violently and abruptly killed in fiery explosions, earthquakes and collapsing buildings.
  • When Rocket embarrasses him by perfecting his evolution process, he tells Rocket that he is an ugly mistake, that he was never going to let him and his friends live in his utopian world, and that he's been planning from the beginning to kill them as soon as he no longer needs them, just to spite him out of petty jealousy. He then mocks Rocket for not being smart enough to figure it out himself.
  • He personally kills Lylla right in front of Rocket just as they've finally been freed from their cages. Then to kick the pup even harder, he mocks Rocket's cries and screams to his face and outright calls him pathetic for being upset.
  • When he finally corners Rocket in the ship, he ragdolls Rocket around the room like an angry child throwing his toy, all the while ranting about how much of an insignificant failure and freak he thinks Rocket is.
  • He kept an entire dungeon full of children inside his ship and callously left them inside it to die when it became clear it was going to be destroyed.
  • When his henchmen pull a mutiny in order to evacuate a ship that's minutes from collapsing, he kills them all in a blind rage because they understandably don't want to go after Rocket.
• Knight of Cerebus: The darkest MCU film villain to date, as James Gunn intended which considering the competition says a lot. The second he's on screen, the movie goes from fantastical, good-humoured and wondrous to sinister, bleak, gritty and outright terrifying. Especially during the flashbacks to Rocket's nightmarish childhood as his experiment. Aside from a few Comically Serious moments, the High Evolutionary is a villain where there is no humor to be found.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: He's definitely not as smart as he wants people to think he is. A young Rocket was able to figure out what was wrong with the chambers used to hyper-evolve animals without the aggression when he couldn't. This made the High Evolutionary both go batshit crazy and believe there's something unique about Rocket's brain. There's also the fact that he's never seen doing any science and runs a huge organization, leaving his scientific genius even more in doubt.
• Kubrick Stare: Does one in the trailers.
• Lack of Empathy: His core problem as a person. He wants to "perfect the galaxy" without caring about the people he "perfects" or the consequences if he gets it wrong (which he usually does in one way or another). The general implication is that creating his perfect society is impossible because he wouldn't have any idea what healthy sapient interaction looked like if was wearing a nametag, had two forms of ID, and had its name tattooed on its forehead. This is perhaps best demonstrated when he sees Rocket crying over the death of Lylla as some kind of crying contest rather than an understandable emotional reaction to trauma.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • For all his claims otherwise, the High Evolutionary is obsessed with appearance and his reputation above all else and lashes out at his creations whenever they — in his eyes — reflect badly on him. He even decides to kill Rocket, Lylla, Teefs, and Floor simply because they don't measure up to his standards of beauty. Therefore, it's quite karmic that Rocket's mauling of him left him permanently disfigured, something he tries desperately to hide.
  • His ultimate fate, according to Word of God, after his humiliating Curb-Stomp Battle inflicted on him by the Guardians, is also very poetic as Rocket—the person he tormented and locked away growing up—decides to return the favor by sparing him to only lock him up inside Knowhere where he can be left to suffer his own wounded ego with no hope of ever escaping a hell essentially of his own making.
• Latex Perfection: The face that he has in the present day is nothing more than a mask, hence why it looks so unnaturally stretched out. His real face is horribly mangled and disfigured, thanks to Rocket. Fittingly, he resembles the Red Skull, another MCU character who had this treatment.
• Laughably Evil: Heavily downplayed. While all of the atrocities he commits and the cruelty he inflicts on others are all played dead seriously, his petty immaturity can make the High Evolutionary somewhat humorous in the form of being Comically Serious. That being said, even on the very rare occasions he's given a humorous line or Chukwudi Iwuji hams it up to the maximum, the High Evolutionary is such a vile character it's unlikely the audience will find him all that funny.
• Lethally Stupid: For a scientist whose goal is to "create the perfect society", he's rather bad at it and his repeated self-perceived failures often lead to him committing many senseless mass murders and leaving behind many destroyed settlements out of dissatisfaction. Once the Guardians start ruining his future plans, he basically turns on the self-destruct sequence on his entire ship while he and his crew are still on it in order to kill the Guardians. And when he kills his crew for mutiny, he also destroys the controls to his ship, ensuring his own death.
• Levitating Lotus Position: His augmentations give him control over gravity, which he flaunts by doing this.
• Logical Weakness: The power to control gravity means nothing to someone who wears anti-gravity equipment.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: The High Evolutionary prefers to keep his victims wide wake as they are painfully ripped apart and modified with invasive metallic implants, all the while held down and screeching in agony, with no logical scientific reason to do so other than to take pleasure in their pain and humiliation (or just plain indifference). This is made most evident by him mockingly imitating Rocket's cries of grief after murdering Lyla, his first love, as she expires in front of the poor raccoon.
• Mad Artist: He may be a Mad Scientist by profession, but his approach and goals have far more to do with art. His idea of "perfection" seems to be largely aesthetic rather than material, with the societies he builds basically being gigantic art installations that he throws away when they fail to meet his particular standards of beauty.
• Mad Scientist: He's basically what happens when you give a Mad Artist a biology PhD, a god complex, and enough starter capital to found a biotech empire. He's obsessed with "perfecting the galaxy" through biotech, which he does with a complete lack of ethics, rigour, or most other forms of scientific merit that's left mountains of corpses and hordes of miserable, twisted monstrosities in his wake. The film leaves it very ambiguous how good he actually is at the whole "scientist" thing, given his massive organisation of talented flunkies, his incredibly unstable personality, his long string of failures, and how easily his creation Rocket is able to outthink him.
• Malicious Misnaming: A variant. The High Evolutionary only ever refers to Rocket as "Subject 89P13". Even when confronting Quill, the High Evolutionary simply calls him "[Quill's] friend", clearly going out of his way to avoid using the name Rocket gave himself.
• The Man Behind the Man: As it turns out, he's the master and creator of the Sovereign, the beings who bedeviled the Guardians in Vol. 2.
• Masking the Deformity: At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, it's revealed that the High Evolutionary had been wearing a Latex Perfection mask of his own face to hide his real one after Rocket shredded it in a Rage Breaking Point years ago. His real face is an unsightly mess with no nose, eyelids, or lips, and very little skin left everywhere else.
• Mask of Sanity: He would like to present himself as a rational man, dedicated to a lofty but logical goal. It quickly becomes apparent however that he's actually a very irrational and mentally disturbed individual, and many of his actions are driven entirely by his own ego, obsessions and childish pettiness. He is frequently called out on this by his minions, but he never listens. This also becomes a very literal example at the end of the movie, as after having a massive Villainous Breakdown and being beaten by the Guardians, Gamora removes his mask and show us the true face of a disfigured, maniacal sociopath.
• Meat Grinder Surgery: One of the galaxy's foremost proponents thanks to his Lack of Empathy and questionable medical competence. His cyborg experiments are messy, graceless, and grotesque affairs with messy, graceless and grotesque results — it says a lot that Nebula, a patchwork woman whose augmentation surgery was deliberately sloppy as a form of torture, comes across as considerably more advanced and better-put-together than most of his creations.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Thinks nothing of blowing up Counter-Earth and its inhabitants once he thinks they've served their purpose, with the strong implication that he's performed similar genocides of his own experiments numerous times because they all fell short of his standards for the perfect species. He casually states to have destroyed other planets before in order to start again another attempt at an utopia.
• Mind over Matter: His mastery over gravity grants him powerful telekinesis.
• Missing Steps Plan: Prone to these, as a result of his generally messy, impulsive approach towards his goals. It's one of multiple reasons for his projects' horrendously high failure rate. As an example, it's never made particularly clear how replicating 1950s America with animal-people was supposed to improve the galaxy, especially since the Guardians (and the audience) show up long after it turned out that it hadn't done any such thing.
• Mocking the Mourner: He has the audacity to mock a grieving Rocket after having just murdered Lylla in front of him. This earns him a savage disfiguring courtesy of Rocket himself.
• Mood-Swinger: He goes from polite and soft-spoken to shouting like a lunatic at the drop of a hat.
• Moral Myopia:
  • As far as the High Evolutionary is concerned, murdering Rocket's friends is fine because they're all failed experiments. Rocket attacking him in retaliation, however, is an unforgivable slight; during the climax, he genuinely can't seem to understand why Rocket did it.
    High Evolutionary: Look what you did to me! For what? All I wanted to do... was make things... perfect!
  • He admits his disgust with Counter-Earth's social problems, but believes the best and most moral solution is to kill everyone on the planet. It doesn't occur to him that this is far worse than anything the planet's denizens have ever done.
• Moral Sociopathy: A tremendous sociopath with a sense of right and wrong. In his mind, he considers the bigotry and violence he found in humanity wrong and aims to build a peaceful and tolerant utopia, even if he has to submit kidnapped lifeforms to horrific experiments and slaughter entire civilizations he deems imperfect along the way. His sense of morality does nothing to dissuade his utter lack of empathy and humanity.
• Morton's Fork: Ultimately, it becomes apparent that nothing his creations do will satisfy the High Evolutionary. Any evidence of imperfection leads to him murdering them with no remorse. However, when Rocket demonstrates the creativity and intelligence the High Evolutionary claims he wants in his creations, it instead bruises his ego that one of his creations could be better than him in a single area and orders him killed.
• Motherly Scientist: Subverted with extreme prejudice. He is shown cradling Rocket in his lap and treating him like a son, but it's all an act. To him, Rocket — and all of his other experiments — are all tools for his goals or failures to be eliminated. He says Rocket has no worth on his own, kills his animal friends and even mocks his grief over their deaths.
• Moving the Goalposts: He does this to himself unconsciously. With each attempt to create his so-called perfect world, he immediately singles out a previously unseen flaw that convinces him that the current world is a failure and needs to be destroyed so he can start over with a new one. According to his actor, this is because the High Evolutionary knows he's flawed, but is incapable of accepting it. Instead he projects it outward and as a result can never be satisfied with any of his creations because he'll never be satisfied with himself.
• Mysterious Past: Lampshaded and justified. What's his real name? Where did he come from? We have no idea, because he's the sort of guy who constantly lives in the present, and because the horrors he's responsible for have made everyone else aggressively disinterested in what his journey to this point might have been. Star-Lord even cuts him off before he has a chance to deliver anything resembling a detailed backstory for himself. The fact that any trace of his history is incinerated along with everything else once he decides to start over only compounds this.
• Narcissist: He believes himself a supreme being whose actions are far above anything anyone else can comprehend. He also never forgave Rocket for mauling his face and it's heavily implied his intense grudge against him is owed greatly to the fact Rocket actually defied and hurt him. According to his actor, he's also aware he's flawed but pathologically incapable of ever admitting it, prompting him to project his self-hatred onto everyone and everything else.
• Never Be Hurt Again: In the most literal sense. After killing his friends and betraying his trust in the worst way possible, kit Rocket savagely mauls him and leaves him a broken, mutilated mess. Traumatized, paranoid and utterly enraged by the event, the High Evolutionary spent the next few decades developing enhancements that gave him control over gravity itself, giving him powerful telekinetic and physics-based powers. His enhancements weren't just for lording over his subjects more effectively, but because in his own words, he let his guard down once in his whole life — and it cost him dearly. A mistake he never wants to repeat again.
• Never My Fault: Thanks to being a massive narcissist, he never accepts the blame for any of his mistakes:
  • After deciding Counter-Earth is imperfect, he blames the inhabitants for it and decides to kill them all. It never occurs to him that, as the man responsible for setting up their society, these systemic failures could potentially be his fault.
  • When Ayesha points out that by removing Adam Warlock from his cocoon early the High Evolutionary has left him with the mind of a child, he immediately insists that it's not his fault and that there's something else wrong with Adam instead.
  • After being fatally wounded and having his true face revealed, he all but accuses Rocket of having mauled him for no reason and genuinely asks why he and the Guardians ruined his life's work. It never occurs to him that he was ultimately responsible for his own suffering because of his abominable treatment of his creations, which both led to Rocket attacking him and the Guardians later trying to stop him.
• Nightmare Face: His true face is a disfigured, bloody mess with exposed tissue and bone. He looks like the Red Skull after being beaten to a pulp.
• No Name Given: His real name is not revealed.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Unlike Ronan and Ego, the High Evolutionary isn't remotely a combatant and usually resorts to sending waves of genetically-altered minions at enemies to dispose of them. His showdown with a young Rocket, for instance, was downright embarrassing — he started with his gun pointed at a tiny, weedy, and unarmed cyborg raccoon who he'd just inflicted severe emotional trauma on, and ended it on the ground unconscious with half his face clawed off. His one and only means of offense are the anti-gravity powers he equipped himself with after the above incident, and while they're great at incapacitating opponents and blowing up a room full of disobedient minions, they're almost instantly no-selled by Rocket's anti-gravity boots, leaving him open to the Guardians curbstomping him.
• The Noseless: After Rocket mauled his actual face, the High Evolutionary is revealed to have a pit in the center of his face where his nose should be, going all the way down to the bone.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The High Evolutionary is never treated like a Harmless Villain, but the movie does stress that he's nowhere near as powerful (or even as intelligent and cultured) as his Cult of Personality make him out to be and it's shown more than once that his combat ability is lacking to say the least, especially when compared to villains like Ronan, Thanos and Kang. However, make no mistake, the High Evolutionary is the last man on Earth (or Counter-Earth) that you want to mess with. In fact, even without his powers, his mental instability, immense resources, incredible reach and scope, his cruel, sadistic, psychopathic nature, his delusional, narcissistic goal of perfection and the sheer lengths he will go to in pursuit of his desires (including revenge) make him one of the most dangerous men in the entire MCU to date.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: As Rocket eventually puts it, "You didn't want to make things perfect, you just hated things the way they are." It's obvious from the first moment he appears on screen that he's much more interested in insulting, torturing and eventually killing the universe for failing to meet his nonsensical, contradictory standards than he is in his ostensible mission of improving it, to the point where he's more likely to react with outrage or disinterest than joy when something goes unexpectedly well in his experiments.
• Obliviously Evil: He genuinely believes that what the universe will be better off once he creates the perfect society, and that all the countless atrocities he commits along the way are simply necessary casualties. He even calls his goals part of a "sacred mission" and, by his own standards, is guilty of the same violence and bigotry he hates in humanity. The thought never occurs to him, though.
• Oh, Crap!: Has three over the course of the film no less as the only times his sheer smug confidence in himself goes completely out the window.
  • The first is when the young Rocket lunges at him and severely disfigures him in a rage. Granted, he doesn't really have time to properly react since it's so sudden, but brief flashes of his attempts to fight Rocket off show him quite clearly frightened and shocked. For good reason.
  • The second is when he sees the entirety of Knowhere ambush his ship with a giant gun aimed directly at him. The image of the Celestial's skull baring down on him is the first time in the film he outright panics and is all but screeching to return fire and get rid of the very large threat in front of him.
  • The final one and capper of it is when Rocket manages to overpower his anti-gravity with his own boots on a whim before having a slug put right through him point-blank in the chest. It's one hell of a satisfying look of both sheer bewilderment and terror that Iwuji displays before he gets his ass handed to him.
• Order Is Not Good: He wants his civilizations and creations to be orderly as possible at it suits his ideals of perfections. However this also means that he'll completely wipe them out if there is even one thing out of place in said ideals.
• Our Founder: As a testament to his narcissism, a statue of him is prominently displayed in Counter-Earth, a civilization he created.
• Paper Tiger: The High Evolutionary is the Emperor Scientist of a galactic N.G.O. Superpower who's revered as the creator-deity of multiple civilisations, but it should have been something of a warning that the only creations of his that viewers encountered before this movie were the Spoiled Brat Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Sovereign and the frail, sickly cyborg Rocket. Once you get past the mystique, he's really just a Lethally Stupid General Failure Psychopathic Manchild who has no idea how to use or retain the vast resources at his disposal, and is more of a threat to the galaxy by accident than he is on purpose. It says a lot that the Guardians' fight against him is a completely one-sided No-Holds-Barred Beatdown after he's done most of the hard work of dismantling his own forces for them, whereas evacuating the thousands of victims of his crumbling empire is a true challenge that tests them to their limits. The general implication is that he's only got away with his murderous nonsense for so long because most of his victims are his own creations or employees, meaning he's rarely (if ever) attracted the ire of anyone with actual backing.
• The Perfectionist: He demands absolute perfection out of his creations, considering anyone that isn't perfect a failure or a worthless stepping stone, and he destroys any of his creations he considers failures. He's subconsciously equally demanding of himself; when a young Rocket solved a problem that the High Evolutionary couldn't figure out, the High Evolutionary couldn't deal with being reminded of his own imperfection and took it out on Rocket. His actor points out this perfectionism is the root of his cruelty: he's aware he's flawed but will never admit it, instead projecting it on others. As a result, no matter how perfect he's made something, he'll never be satisfied because he's incapable of fixing the true flaw within himself.
• Playing the Victim Card: When the true extent of the damage Rocket did to his face is revealed, the High Evolutionary has the gall to act like he's the real victim and Rocket did it entirely For the Evulz rather than because he had just murdered Rocket's friends in front of him.
• Politically Correct Villain: Subverted; he claims to be out to create a world without the bigotry and violence he observed on Earth, but he looks down on everyone else, even treating his own creations with barely (if at all) disguised contempt, having no qualms or regrets about committing mass genocide of them at the drop of a hat.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: It's implied he views Lylla, Teefs, and Floor as failures partially because he needed to install prosthetics to make them more humanoid, thereby making them imperfect in his eyes.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He does indulge in this occasionally:
  • Throughout the majority of the movie, he wants Rocket brought to him in one piece, not because of any paternal affection of any kind, but because he'll need his brain intact so he can study it (he also more than likely wants to make sure he suffers in retribution for what he did to his face). Only when Rocket destroys everything he's ever worked for does he actively try to kill him.
  • In Rocket's flashbacks, we see that the High Evolutionary wanted to ensure his evolution machine would create enhanced life forms that were not overly aggressive or violent and needed Rocket's help to figure out how to correct the issue. This is not because of any morality on his part, it's simply because he cannot build a society if the subjects tear each other apart within the first few minutes.
  • He shows contempt for the likes of Adam Warlock and his sniveling subordinates, but it's not out of any ethical standard, he just likes to see results and dislikes incompetence.
  • As domineering and unscrupulous as The High Evolutionary is, he limits his cruelty and perfectionism to his own creations. For instance, as much as he loves human culture but despises humanity he doesn't try to subjugate or "change" the existing Earth, instead attempting his own version of it. This is because he both prefers to mould his creations from the ground up and also that he avoids conflicts with the likes of the Avengers, the Asgardians, the Nova Corps. or the Guardians of the Galaxy.
• Psychological Projection: The reason he abuses his creations and kills them for any imperfection isn't just because of his impossibly high standards, but because he projects his own self-hatred onto them and takes it out on them whenever they demonstrate any sort of flaw.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Though he presents himself as a wise, cultured and knowledgeable man of science, the High Evolutionary is one of the most childish supervillains in the MCU, quick to throw psychotic tantrums whenever he doesn't get what he wants and showing himself to be a petty and petulant man at heart.
• Put on a Prison Bus: Though we don't actually see it outside of a Freeze-Frame Bonus of Drax carrying his body in the background, James Gunn has confirmed◊ that the High Evolutionary was imprisoned on Knowhere after being defeated by the Guardians of the Galaxy.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When he finally finds Rocket again, he screams his "name" as "Eight! Nine! P! One! Three!"
• Punished with Ugly: An unintentional example. Rocket's mauling of him was impulsive and fueled by rage and grief, but for someone as vain and obsessed with appearance as the High Evolutionary, his now-disfigured face was torturous.
• Purple Is Powerful: The High Evolutionary wears a purple robotic suit, and is a powerful Mad Scientist who has mutilated and terraformed all sorts of beings in an attempt to rule over them as a god.
• Pyromaniac: Downplayed; the High Evolutionary's preferred method for disposing of his failed experiments is by incineration (never mind that a scientist of his supposed ability could euthanize them in a variety of ways that are less painful, wasteful, or horrific). Whether it's an individual failed Humanimal or even the entirety of Counter-Earth's population, the High Evolutionary uses a massive amount of fire to remove any trace of them from the universe, presumably to destroy any indication that he's capable of such failures. That said, he's perfectly willing to use other methods to kill when it's convenient, and he doesn't go out of his way to burn other people or things.

R-Y

• Race Lift: Herbert Wyndham was originally a British white man in the comics, before eventually transforming himself into his High Evolutionary persona. The MCU's depiction of the character has him being played by Chukwudi Iwuji, who is British of Nigerian descent, and has the implication that this version of the character isn't human (considering that he mentions having visited Earth in the past instead of describing himself as being from Earth).
• Really 700 Years Old: He looks like an ordinary middle-aged man, but as he reveals he's actually 300 years old. It's implied his mysterious "treatments" are what he's using to extend his lifespan.
• Remember the New Guy?: He's infamous enough that Ravager Gamora knew about him, and it's outright stated he runs a huge corporation and several species call him God. Yet, outside of some vague references from Yondu and Rocket himself, we've never heard of him until now. This is justified however as the High Evolutionary, while a very personal and emotional threat to Rocket, he's never been an actual point on the radar for the Guardians due to being a geneticist who mostly plays within his own sandbox instead of being some cosmic threat like Ronan and Ego were prior and had no reason to cross paths with them up until the moment Adam Warlock was sent to Knowhere.
• Revenge Before Reason: It's heavily implied that the reason he truly wants Rocket recaptured is revenge for him having defied him and mauled his face in the past. His obsession is such that, in the climax, he forces his minions to put their efforts in helping him recapture the raccoon at all costs- even ignoring the damages his ship suffers or the rightful complaints of his subordinates.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: The High Evolutionary has connections to and fought various heroes in his comics history (including the likes of Spider-Woman, the Maximoff Twins and the Avengers), but he has never faced the Guardians of the Galaxy. However, he does have a connection to Adam Warlock (who also appears in the film), and he also played a role in Annihilation: Conquest (the story in which the film's version of the Guardians were founded).
• Sadist: Zigzagged. On the one hand, his Meat Grinder Surgery methods are sure to inflict tremendous pain and psychological damage on the subject (and as a scientist he would know damn well that surgery is better when someone is given anesthetic because it renders them unconscious, unfeeling and unmoving) and his tendency to kill and destroy anything he deems as a failure heavily implies there's a level of sadism at play. On the other hand, when he kills, he does so rather emotionlessly and there's not really anything to suggest he outright enjoys killing, it's more that he's totally indifferent to organic life and therefore will have no issue or moral qualm with murder or endangering their physical wellbeing. That being said, he does have quite a vengeful side and expresses a desire to inflict horrors on Rocket and the Guardians for all the trouble they cause him and his prisoners are all terrified of what he has in store for them as they know it won't be good. Given what a psychopathic monster the High Evolutionary is, it's still possible he gets a kick out of hurting others and simply hides it well.
• Sanity Slippage: He devolves over the course of the film, especially as his attempts to recapture Rocket go repeatedly awry. Eventually, he becomes so irredeemably irrational that his own crew turns on him for their own survival, though in vain.
  Recorder Vim: Sire, you have an irrational obsession with this animal! You must stop for God's sake!
  The High Evolutionary: There is no God! That's why I stepped in!
• Satanic Archetype: A mix of this and Demiurge Archetype; a prideful, materially wealthy would-be god that disdains everything not like himself as lesser but deeply envious of everything that even approaches his mind, especially Rocket, who was able to diagnose an easily missed mechanical problem. To that end, he is obsessed with creating a "better" version of sentient life than what was naturally created, but all he can do is twist other life in his image and the image of preexisting worlds, and the moment his creations show any degree of deviation from his impossible standards, he annihilates them carelessly, showing for all his pretensions of being the Creator, he's ultimately an abusive and careless one who shows why he does not deserve to be the God he thinks he should be with every moment of his life, and is ultimately undone by his own hubris twice, marring his beauty forever. He even calls his elite corps the Hell Spawn.
• Save the Villain: Drax is seen carrying him out of his exploding ship at the end. He had wanted Rocket to kill him, but Rocket insisted on saving him to prove that he and the Guardians are better than the High Evolutionary... a Cruel Mercy given how that fact must torment a man like him.
• Science Is Bad: He's far from emotionless, and he's only cold in the Lack of Empathy way instead of the emotional way.
• Scully Box: In-universe, he stands on a box while speaking to Ayesha, who would normally tower over him (this is the case for the real-life actors, as well — Elizabeth Debicki is really tall). The fact that his employees carry around a box so he can stand on it and nobody draws attention to this is an early showing of both his egotistic immaturity and how much his servants genuinely fear him. Especially when he uses it to inspect Ayesha's mouth like a farmer inspecting livestock.
• Secondary Color Nemesis: In contrast to the Guardians' red-and-blue uniforms, he wears a purple outfit that makes him come off as sinister.
• Secretly Selfish: It's very clear to everyone outside his Cult of Personality that his idea of a perfect society is one where everyone worships him as a god, never thinks for themselves, and does whatever he wants all the time. Unfortunately, his darwinistic moral code means he isn't satisfied even by this, while also lashing out violently when he gets the creative beings he supposedly wants because they could potentially be more skilled than he is.
• Skewed Priorities: The High Evolutionary continues to insist on Rocket's capture even while his ship is burning in space. This makes his much saner subordinates turn on him, but he simply kills them all.
• Smug Snake: He's legitimately threatening due to his resources and power, but his sense of invincibility is his downfall. He outright tells Rocket that he and his friends are to be killed rather than bothering with subtlety, and after this predictably leads to Rocket trying to escape he confronts Rocket alone with just a sidearm; he even states that he thought Rocket would try to escape, he just doesn't think the hyper-intelligent raccoon wouldn't fight back. He outright allows Quill and Groot into his command center because he assumes them both disarmed, with only a token force to deal with them when they turn out to be not so unarmed after all. He treats his minions like garbage and throws around orders that get them killed pointlessly, and then is shocked when they turn on him. None of this ever seems to blunt his ego at all.
• The Social Darwinist: Played With. As a scientist obsessed with creating the perfect species and society, he believes that only the most beautiful and advanced (i.e. humanoid) of his creations deserve a spot in his utopia. However, he wants a Perfect Pacifist People for his world, not ones who are supreme simply because they are strong and ruthless (but there is a heavy implication that he wants them peaceful because he wants their total obedience). If any of them display anything close to rebellion, superior intelligence or even individual thought, he sees it as a threat or a failure and wipes them out in the blink of an eye. Having said that, he does breed extremely dangerous and powerful creations (i.e. War Pig and the Abilisks) to do his bidding and anything he deems weak or useless is either kept in cages or vivisected by morning, so he does play this straight in some capacity.
• The Sociopath: To a disturbing degree. The High Evolutionary can act charming and patient, but underneath this façade, he is a ruthless, controlling, power-hungry despot and sees every living thing as nothing more than an experiment for him to study and discard as he sees fit. He has no true empathy for anyone besides himself and he doesn't truly care for the civilizations he builds; he just wants to make everything his idea of perfect.
• Start My Own: The High Evolutionary took quite a liking to Earth when he visited it, but, disliking the bigotry and flaws of humanity, opted to create his own version, Counter-Earth, to be occupied by humanoid animals. When the planet fails to live up to his standards, however, the High Evolutionary annihilates it and every living soul upon it without a shred of remorse.
• Stepford Suburbia: What his idea of a perfect society is. Counter-Earth is a planet of nothing but Nuclear Families living in stock suburban towns, purged of The Evils of Free Will.
• Stupid Evil: Unlike Ego and Thanos before him, the High Evolutionary isn't dangerous out of intelligence but because he's a dangerously impulsive, incompetent fringe scientist who barely seems to have a grasp on the concepts he espouses, which aren't even that advanced by the standards of the setting. It's just that he has the weaponry and resources of a massive corporation to assist him in committing genocide because of what amounts to a temper tantrum. When the Guardians decide to personally face him, bringing his operation down proves far less challenging than cleaning up the gigantic humanitarian catastrophe it's built on.
• Suddenly Shouting: Chukwudi Iwuji is very good at making the High Evolutionary calm one second, then absolutely raving the next.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Played with. THE is willing to discard people, his creations, and at least one entire planet without a second thought. But he won't give up on his dream of "perfection", even though someone as intelligent as him should know it's impossible.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: His grudge against Rocket stems from Rocket having been able to figure out a mathematical error that he couldn't. The High Evolutionary's ego can't tolerate someone being better than him at anything, so he tries to torment and murder Rocket as revenge for the supposed "slight".
• Tech Bro: He doesn't show the usual Silicon Valley stereotype characteristics, but comes across as a particularly nasty version of this trope — a wealthy biotech tycoon who thinks he's a scientific genius who also knows what's best for society, when he actually has little scientific talent of his own, depends for his advances on employees who he treats like disposable minions, and rather than actually making technical progress or improving society begins and drops ill-thought-out projects on his own unpredictable and irrational whims.
• This Cannot Be!: Has this reaction when the Guardians actually begin putting a Spanner in the Works for his plans to build another new society. The High Evolutionary thought the Guardians puny, weak and dumb. He was wrong.
• Too Dumb to Live: When angered enough, his impulsivity can override his self-preservation. One of his last ditch attempts at killing the Guardians is activating a catastropic defense mechanism that can tear his whole ship apart from the inside, and he does this while he's still in the ship and with no escape plan. When he kills his mutinying underlings, he also destroys the ship's controls, cementing his doom.
• Took a Level in Badass: Downplayed. He developed powerful anti-gravity abilities following Rocket's attack on him, which made him an even bigger threat in the present. However, he still falls short of being an actual combatant and his true power continues to lie on the various minions and creatures under his command. He can destroy a room full of rebellious underlings but can hardly put up a fight against the Guardians unless he catches them off-guard.
• The Unfettered: Deconstructed. He goes about his quest to 'perfect the galaxy' blissfully untroubled by questions like 'is this ethical', 'how much will this cost', 'is this likely to work', and 'is this on any conceivable level a good and useful idea'. In the end, he's mostly responsible for making the galaxy worse, not better.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • When Rocket figures out how to fix his evolution chambers, allowing him to create his perfect world, instead of thanking Rocket, he becomes enraged that Rocket did something he failed to do and plans to have Rocket killed.
  • The High Evolutionary's creations all but deify him, giving the mad scientist's ego all the fuel he could ever want. Not that he appreciates their adoration, of course; the moment any of his creations outlive their usefulness, fail to fulfill his insane standards, or have the bad luck of making him look foolish by comparison, the High Evolutionary brutally kills them, often by incineration.
• Underestimating Badassery: He does this twice in the movie:
  • He callously dismisses Rocket (even as a kit) as nothing more than a failed experiment that just happens to be far more intelligent and gifted than his other creations. He believes Rocket an easy target especially when alone and his final rampage against him shows him at his most outwardly violent in an attempt to get Rocket to submit (or just kill him). Rocket easily outsmarts and outguns him. Perhaps the biggest example is after his murder of Lylla, when kit Rocket is despondent with grief and being the nice guy he is, decides to mock him for it and order him back in his cage. His face is never the same again after that moment.
  • To Star-Lord (and the rest of the team to a lesser extent). He treats Star-Lord with both contempt and a dismissive air borne of arrogance as he believes Peter Quill, a mere human, could never hope to match him in wit or even raw power. He's also very condescending towards Star-Lord and his team even without the upper hand, seemingly convinced there's nothing Peter can do to him. He is wrong. Very wrong.
• Unknown Rival:
  • Though understandably haunted by memories of his imprisonment and the deaths of his fellow test subjects, Rocket has done his best to move away from his origins, and for as many powerful allies and heavy ordinance he's acquired since then, has been content to leave his creator alone. The High Evolutionary has spent the intervening years utterly despising Rocket for destroying his face, obsessing over how he unintentionally bested him by solving a problem in his lab he was unable to, and coveting how he has actual intelligence capable of growth and inspiration.
  • Conversely, The High Evolutionary thinks very little of the Guardians of the Galaxy themselves, only taking mild interest in them due to their exploits at Orgocorp and because they have Rocket with him. By contrast, the Guardians (especially Quill) consider the High Evolutionary to be a mortal enemy even greater than Thanos, due to his horrific experiments and torture he put through someone they consider to be family.
• Unreliable Expositor:
  • He claims to his underlings that he wants Rocket captured because he's the only one of his creations not to be affected by Creative Sterility. However, it's implied the real reason is because the High Evolutionary holds a grudge against Rocket for tearing his face off and feels personally slighted that Rocket was able to fix a design flaw in his evolution chamber that he couldn’t, which, due to his narcissism, he views as a huge insult.
  • There's hints his creations' supposed Creative Sterility is actually just the High Evolutionary's impossibly high standards. He even brings this up for the first time after witnessing two of his latest creations make their own video game. He's unimpressed because other species have invented similar games, ignorant to the fact that creating one still takes incredible skill, effort, and indeed creativity.
• Unseen No More: The horrendous treatment Rocket suffered at the hands of unnamed "scientists" was alluded to in both previous Guardians of the Galaxy films, but it isn't until Vol. 3 that the High Evolutionary is finally named and makes an appearance.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The High Evolutionary isn't really all that skilled in combat and once he's overwhelmed the Guardians are quick to finish him, but his power over gravity, telekinetic abilities and the sheer scope of his technology and resources make him an extremely deadly opponent.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Deconstructed. The Lack of Empathy necessary to allow him to ignore any cost in pursuit of his "perfect society" also makes it impossible for him to envisage that perfect society in a way that's accurate, practical and consistent enough to be useful. To put it another way, if you're committing serial genocide to make people's lives better, then that's probably a sign that you don't understand or care about people enough to improve their lives (and that the first step to improving their lives would actually be to get rid of the guy who keeps trying to torture and murder them).
• Vicious Cycle: He inevitably destroys his own creations for supposed imperfections because of his impossibly high standards, and then starts over to repeat the process. Word of God says that if the Guardians didn't step in, he would have kept going forever because nothing he creates will ever live up to his expectations.
• Viler New Villain: Compared to Thanos, of all people; while they share a superficially similar goal of bettering societies, the High Evolutionary lacks any of Thanos' more noble qualities, such as the Mad Titan's affection for his children, his genuine respect for his enemies, his desire (however twisted) to make the universe a better place, or even his courtesy. Even when it comes to their shared crimes of mass murder and bodily mutilation, the High Evolutionary's methods are worse than Thanos'; when Thanos attacked a population, his modus operandi was to spare half of it to allow for a better allocation of resources, whereas the High Evolutionary will exterminate the entirety of civilizations he himself created the moment they fail to live up to his impossible standards, and Nebula explicitly states that the High Evolutionary's treatment of his subjects is even worse than what Thanos did to her.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Vol. 3 is a more personal and somber story than the previous movies thanks to him for the most part. Every scene with him darkens the mood of the story completely, with no comedy coming from his crimes. Even the usually snarky and funny Guardians become dead serious in his presence and want nothing but his horrible and painful death. ^note Well, except for Peter, who also mocks THE to try and hurt him emotionally.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Downplayed, but he's right that every species needs to have the capacity for originality and design, as if they don't they will never be able to truly progress and evolve as a species or a society, which is why he is so fascinated by Rocket's brain. His latest creations are effectively superhuman in most regards, but he's furious that they do not have the spark and their intelligence (as his scientists try to use as proof to leave for the next colony) is just rote learning.
  • He also isn't exactly wrong when he mentions how the bigotry on Earth is a serious problem, but he doesn't exactly have much room to pass judgment considering his general xenophobia towards all life outside of his control. And his bigotry toward the life that is.
  • Inverted when Peter calls him out for the supposed "utopia" of Counter-Earth being badly flawed in many of the same ways the original Earth is. The High Evolutionary agrees, thus acknowledging that the hero has a point, but, true to his nature, opts to correct these flaws by razing Counter-Earth to the ground and starting over somewhere else.
• Villainous Breakdown: Has a tremendous one by the end of the movie. When the Guardians thwart his plans, Knowhere threatens to destroy his entire ship and his own people turn on him after seeing just how irrationally obsessed he truly is, he destroys the central hub of his own ship (killing everyone present) and assaults Rocket with passionate rage, ranting that Rocket is nothing more than a failed experiment and "a step in [his] path". Naturally, he lives just long enough to eat those words.
  High Evolutionary: You thought you could escape me? No! You think you have some worth in and of yourself without me?! NO! YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION! NOTHING MORE THAN A STEP ON MY PATH, YOU FREAKISH LITTLE MONSTER! HOW DARE YOU THINK YOU ARE MORE, 8! 9! P! 1! 3?!?!?!
• Villain Respect: Both subverted and played with:
  • Regarding the former, he prizes Rocket above all his other creations because while most of his other creations can fix and build complex things in a matter of minutes, Rocket is the only one with the ability to design anything original. However, he covets Rocket's brain only for study and possible replication, not because he respects Rocket as a person. In fact, knowing that Rocket was smart enough to do something that he failed to do, despite him having deemed Rocket a failed experiment, utterly infuriates him.
  • As for the latter, he notes that he visited earth years ago and was very impressed with their culture. He enjoyed their art, music and literature, considering it among the best in the universe and the prime example of what he wanted his own ideal civilization to look like. That being said, he considered humans beneath him and thought them bigoted savages to either rule over, destroy or just ignore. It's fairly safe to say he admires what others can build or conceptualize, but doesn't admire them as living, thinking beings.
  • Subverted with the Guardians themselves. They're the only ones to ever pose a significant threat to his operation and when they arrive in the Bowie to fight him head-on aboard the Arete, despite being hopelessly outgunned, outnumbered and outsized, he admits a small part of him admires their tenacity. However, it's clear this is in a mocking "they really think they stand a chance" kind of way rather than out of any genuine respect and he clearly wants them all dead and will gleefully do so himself.
  High Evolutionary: (smiling smugly) You almost have to admire their pluck.
• Villain with Good Publicity: His creations worship him as a god and OrgoCorp's advertisements present him as a benevolent figure, but in truth the High Evolutionary is a narcissistic monster who doesn't care about any of his creations.
• Villainous Valor: The one (kind of) nice thing that can be said about him is that, unlike Ronan and Ego, he isn't a coward. When the chips are down and his creations fight back, he doesn't run or flee and when defeated by Rocket, he doesn't beg for mercy and looks him in the eye unshakably while his fate is decided, showing he isn't afraid of death.
• Visionary Villain: As he states that he aims "to create the perfect society". Rocket refutes this however, saying that he actually just hates the way things are.
• Wanting Is Better Than Having: He claims to want to create the perfect society, but it becomes increasingly clear that his ego couldn't handle it if he actually did. The second it appears Rocket's intelligence exceeds his, rather than be happy he's created such an intelligent being, the High Evolutionary throws a narcissism-fueled hissy fit and orders Rocket killed.
• Weaksauce Weakness: His Gravity Master abilities are completely nullified by gravity boots, which are shown in the world of the film to be a fairly common invention used for assistance in spacewalking.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: What happens to him after Drax hauls his body off of his ship is not established, although out-of-universe materials indicate that he was put into Knowhere's prison.
• Wicked Cultured: He has a fondness for classical music and opera, and frequently plays both. He also extols Earth's art and literature to Peter when he meets with him and Groot.
• Wicked Pretentious: At the same time, while the High Evolutionary claims to appreciate Earth culture to the point of trying to adopt it, his vile, monstrous behavior indicates that his prestigious personality is little more than an act, and has difficulty creating actual artistic and scientific endeavors that aren't horrifically mutilated or dismissed as failed experiments. His decision to destroy Counter-Earth when he realizes that it isn't meeting its expectations further solidifies his general lack of understanding of what real culture is.
• Would Hit a Girl: He cruelly murders Lylla in front of Rocket and later destroys Counter Earth which has women in it like Earth, and one of the most notable casualties of said destruction is Ayesha.
• Would Hurt a Child: Among the several lifeforms he captured across the galaxy are alien children. He leaves them all to die when his ship is about to get destroyed. He also blew up Counter-Earth knowing there were kids, as Peter stating he saw teenagers buying drugs is what convinced the High Evolutionary that Counter-Earth was a failure.^note That, or he always planned to, he just waited until he thought he had Rocket.
• You Are Number 6: He always calls Rocket "89P13" and the rest of Batch 89 by their alphanumeric designations to show that he only sees them as experiments, not people.
• You Have Failed Me: If any of his creations fail him or even disappoint him, he'll kill them on the spot. He bluntly tells Ayesha and Adam that if they don't capture Rocket, he'll kill them and the rest of the Sovereign. He later wipes out Counter-Earth once it becomes clear they're not the perfect society he wanted, and he admits he's done so to prior civilizations that he created.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Once anyone or anything defies him or no longer serves a purpose, he kills them by his own hand.
• You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum: The High Evolutionary's gravity control makes him virtually unstoppable, able to restrain even Adam Warlock. When that advantage is negated, however, he's pretty much just a normal person. Rocket viciously mauled his face prior to him having powers, hence why he devised them in the first place, and when Rocket uses his anti-gravity boots to counter the tech (before shooting him in the chest to destroy it), he's manhandled by the combined Guardians of the Galaxy without so much as landing a single punch.

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"All I wanted to do... was make things... perfect!"

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