Characters / Remedy Connected Universe: FBC

Remedy Connected Universe Character Index
Alan Wake | Bright Falls | Federal Bureau of Control | Paranatural Phenomena | The Dark Place

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Federal Bureau of Control

Appearances: Night Springs | Control | Alan Wake II

Invenio Investigatio Imperium

"Our mission is to expand the limits of human understanding and contain those elements we cannot yet control."

— Zachariah Trench

The Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) is a United States government organization tasked with the containment, study, and control of paranatural phenomena. Operating on an international scale, the FBC investigates events and objects which violate the scientific laws of nature, with the goal of understanding and controlling these elements.

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In General

• Added Alliterative Appeal: Their Pretentious Latin Motto: "Invenio Investigatio Imperium", somewhat strangely conjugated Latin for "Discover, Research, Control".
• Ambiguous Situation: Alan Wake seems to know who Jesse and the Bureau both are, writing the events of the AWE DLC in real time. Is his parautility allowing him to see what's happening so that he can nudge the story along, or did he create the Bureau and everything in it using the power of Cauldron Lake?
• Anti-Hero: The FBC has kidnapped children and serves as a rather ruthless case of The Men in Black, but is one of the only known forces standing between humanity and The End of the World as We Know It.
• Arc Symbol: An inverted black pyramid. It is the form the Board that controls the Bureau takes, a black triangle is on their seal, a giant black pyramid is attached to the ceiling of the Executive Sector and the door Bureau staff use at the Oceanview Motel and Casino has a black triangle on it.
• Artifact Collection Agency: Their job is to find, contain, study and (if necessary or possible) destroy objects and/or people that exhibit paranatural properties. If a practical purpose can be gleaned from these objects, they are sure to find a use for them. If the objects prove dangerous, they are given specialized holding places to lower the danger. If they are really dangerous, they are contained in the Panopticon in the Containment Sector.
• Beneath Notice: Between the generic name of the organization and the obfuscating influence that comes from being based in the Oldest House, the Bureau is largely unnoticed by other government arms unless it is necessary. In particular, the Oldest House has an odd effect on people reading documents about the Bureau of Control, causing them to barely acknowledge its existence and casually sign off on budgets or equipment requisitions without looking too closely. The Oldest House itself sits out in the open in the middle of New York City with the Bureau's name on the front, but no one seems to notice it or be able to find it unless they know what to look for or are allowed to find the Bureau.
• Crazy Workplace: The day to day for the majority of their faculty is simple desk jobs and paperwork like any other office. Despite this, the anomalous objects, shifting building, and intergalactic gateways they are exposed to makes an Action Survivor out of anyone who can survive their 9 to 5 at the Oldest House.
• Enforced Technology Levels: The Federal Bureau of Control specifically forbids "anything smart" (including cell phones) from being brought into the Oldest House, and there are even posters warning employees of the Bureau to be on the lookout for modern technology because it does not react well to the supernatural phenomena within. The desktop computers are big and bulky in the style of an early '80s "micro" or IBM PC, mainframes are absolutely huge and covered in analog switches and blinkenlights, the Bureau uses reel-to-reels and film projectors, data is transferred between departments via an immense pneumatic tube system (even if it does lose things sometimes), and even the firearms used by Agents and Rangers are outdated. Nothing can be seen in use that dates back to later than the 1970s or '80s.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • The Bureau has conducted a lot of morally questionable actions, but even they know that the Dark Presence is not to be tampered with. When Hartman wanted to form a partnership with them, they instead confiscated his research, property and revoked his medical license to prevent him from conducting any more unethical experiments.
  • Alan Wake II reveals they actually started doing their own experiments on using the lake's power to turn fiction into reality, after all, so either they intend to be more responsible about their research than Hartman would have been, or they just didn't want to work with that asshole.
• Expy: They're pretty clearly one for the SCP Foundation, right down to being a mysterious and semi-ruthless Artifact Collection Agency tasked with preserving The Masquerade by examining the supernatural world through a scientific lens, and prominently features numerous documents with several redactions detailing how to contain a certain paranatural threat from the public. Heck, even their acronyms are vaguely similar to each other.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • The Bureau's mission is made to maintain normalcy amongst the populace and ensure that paranatural phenomena causes as few problems as possible (problems ranging from a Broken Masquerade to mass loss of life and "full collapse of reality"), but the Bureau's methods can seem morally questionable at times, including Sinister Surveillance, UnPersoning, unlawful arrests, incarceration and experimentation. Jesse is aware of this and seems intent on changing that after accepting her role as Director.
  • In Alan Wake II, it's revealed that the Bureau had Cauldron Lake blocked off from the general public to protect everyone from the paranatural phenomena it creates. This had a negative effect on the local economy, leaving Bright Falls and Watery to drop off the map and lose its tourism.
• Government Agency of Fiction: The Bureau is a government organization that operates beyond the public's knowledge, their entire M.O. being that they ensure that all paranatural content — including themselves — stay a secret. Trench even implies that the Bureau itself possesses a Perception Filter (provided by the Oldest House, according to Darling) and as long as they don't ask for a sudden spike in budget, the US Government won't even know that they are there.
• Non-Indicative Name: Don't let the name fool you. The Federal Bureau of Control doesn't really control anything. It contains things, but often not for long, there's constant implications it exists at the mercy of the Oldest House, the Board, and whatever eldritch forces are at play — even one of the benign beings it "controls" is there willingly. Even Director Trench says that their main purpose is to expand what humanity knows about unreality. Files mention that this is intentional; when the IRS or other government budgets start looking for things to cut, they'll overlook an agency with a simple name and purpose (as far as the Federal government is concerned, the FBC just helps transport other agencies around) suddenly asking for more budget.
• Organization with Unlimited Funding: They have facilities across the globe, a massive staff, and near endless resources for coverups and research. A document from Trench notes the FBC and their annual budget is "another line in another spreadsheet" to the US Treasury as long as it isn't an obviously bloated request. It helps that they also use various Altered Items and OOPs as cost-cutting measures.
• Pragmatic Hero: The FBC as a whole are willing to cross moral boundaries, break laws, and sacrifice lives in the name of keeping the world safe from the paranatural. Sentiment will get you killed — that's "Bureau 101" according to Emily Pope. Notably, they're somewhat less squeamish about using anomalous items and people than their inspiration, employing various parahumans and in one case, entombing the former Director in the NSC to provide the building with its own power and save on energy costs.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: The Bureau's motto is "Invenio Investigatio Imperium", somewhat strangely conjugated Latin for "Discover, Research, Control" (or, more literally, "I find, I investigate, power/government" or "I find the government research").
• Properly Paranoid: Invoked, though not always with success, by the Bureau's regulations and work culture — seeing as The Oldest House contains lots and lots of stuff that can literally kill you if you look at it funny. For example, the FBC work posters direct the staff to never take items out of the building (because they might be Altered Items), watch out for Building Shifts (because their workplace is a Mobile Maze), and avoid current-day technology (because The Oldest House makes it malfunction spectacularly) — all things that it pays to be paranoid about.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: The Federal Bureau of Control has various sectors that each specialize in certain fields that are each integral to the Bureau's overall mission. Because of this overspecialization model, combined with the increasing intricacies and red tape that comes with clearance levels, schisms emerge between departments and complications arise when staff of one department are kept from sharing information to the others. This is brought to its natural conclusion when it was revealed that the Hiss was able to invade after it and Dylan fed on Trench's preexisting paranoia towards the rest of the Bureau, Darling unwilling to tell anyone aside from create a limited number of HRAs in a desperate attempt at helping regardless and the rest of the Bureau completely in the dark in matters involving the Ordinary AWE and the Slide Projector.
• Seen It All: The Bureau has long since become accustomed to bizarre events just happening and rolling with it. Trench killing himself and Jesse taking over is treated with all the fanfare of someone getting promoted to management.
• Straw Vulcan: The Federal Bureau of Control is a government agency founded to study and contain paranatural phenomena. While the Bureau's methods were more traditionally esoteric, by the time the Bureau was officially recognized by the federal government, its methods leaned closer to that of scientific research until it based all of its protocols on objective, empirical research. It's implied that this acts as more of a hindrance because paranatural phenomena are unquantifiable by design, being things that rely on subjective perspective.
• Unwitting Pawn: AWE heavily implies that the entire Bureau was written into existence and/or manipulated by Alan Wake as part of him playing The Long Game in order to get Jesse Faden to become enough of a badass to help him escape from The Dark Place and finally defeat the Dark Presence once and for all.
• Vast Bureaucracy: Everything the Bureau does is compartmentalized and documented in completely mundane ways. This results in most of the Oldest House being used as a giant office space, with thousands of employees being office drones who never see combat. This is revealed to be part of its own undoing, as Trench resents the part of the Bureau he can't control or comprehend in spite of being the Director, Dylan poking and prodding at his paranoia so that he could let the Hiss invade.

FBC Directors

Jesse Faden & Polaris

Jesse Faden

Appearances: Control | Alan Wake II (cameo)

Portrayed by: Courtney Hope (English)

"It feels sane. Or just the right kind of insane."

The main protagonist of Control. Jesse finds herself within the walls of the Federal Bureau of Control while seeking answers regarding her younger brother, Dylan's, disappearance. However, unseen circumstances have forced her to become the Bureau's new Director. With the aid of Polaris and Bureau employees, Jesse must defeat the Hiss and remove the lockdown off of the Bureau's Oldest House.

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• Action Girl: As being the female protagonist, Jesse beats back an Eldritch Abomination throughout the game.
• Alien Geometries: The Service Weapon she picks up functions like a pistol in its default mode, but it's made out of shifting, slightly vibrating cubes and other shapes that can float apart and come back together into a new shape. There's no iron sights, for example, just smaller cubes that pop up when she aims it. It's heavily implied it's made of the same inscrutable materials as the Oldest House itself.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Her therapist after the Ordinary Incident was Locked Out of the Loop, and believed that her story was merely a fantasy Jesse concocted to distract herself from Abusive Parents.
• Alternate Self: She is suggested to be one to Quantum Break's Beth Wilder. As well as being portrayed by the same actress, Tim Breaker from Alan Wake II alludes to dreaming of an alternate life as Jack Joyce from the same game, and notes seeing visions of a familiar red-haired woman associated with a polyhedron in both worlds (Presumably Hedron and the Countermeasure, for Jesse and Beth respectively).
• Ambiguously Gay: Jesse is quite fond of Emily, it would seem. During her expedition into the Foundation, every new sight is met by Jesse with wistful thoughts of Emily, how Jesse wishes she were here, how smart she is, how much she would love this, etc. It's to the point where it's implied that that desire to see Emily actually called her to the Foundation! (Polaris playing wing-entity, perhaps?) Notably, Emily is the only major Bureau employee whose first name Jesse calls her by, and Emily even returns the favor! Remedy even threw more fuel on the fire during an AMA, saying that Jesse has "a lot of love for Emily", and the two share a "very special bond". Rather tellingly, in her Nightmare of Normality, she overhears Emily gushing about a handsome man in the office.
• Audience Surrogate: You will probably find yourself thinking exactly what she's saying more than once. Particularly after the Ashtray Maze sequence, where you have to blast your way through the Hiss while listening to an Old Gods of Asgard song. She shares the general opinion of players on that:
  Jesse: That was awesome.
  • She's also, despite the tension of the situation and her uncertainty about who to trust, delighted to be in the Bureau of Control and says she never wants to leave.
• Badass Adorable: She may look quite beautiful and has a dorky side out of missions, but this supernatural-powered Action Girl officially became the Director of the FBC.
• Banishing Ritual: On-top of being immune to the Hiss' possession thanks to Polaris, she is also capable of exorcising the Hiss' influence elsewhere. She is able to cleanse control points and Altered Items with no ill effects. With possessed people, it tends to Kill the Host Body as "[r]ipping it out rips them apart", causing a passive possessed woman to die and disappear while it leaves Dylan in a coma, Emily is unable to tell if there is any of Dylan left.
• Barrier Maiden: By the end of the game, she's the only source of Hedron resonance, which means that she is the only thing keeping the surviving FBC staff from being corrupted by the Hiss.
• Benevolent Boss: Unlike her predecessors, she's very reasonable, generally tries to be kind to the people working under her, and tries her best to keep as many people alive as she can. Several times she risks her own life to save Agents in harms way, and generally prefers to handle dangerous situations herself rather than risk their lives. After accepting her role as Director, she promotes Pope to Darling's old position and actively desires to reform the Bureau overall.
• Berserk Button: She's very protective of Polaris, and hates the thought of losing her. When she protects Hedron from the Hiss, she's furious and snarling at them to "Get the fuck away!"
• Big Brother Is Employing You: Jesse was effectively forced by the Board to work for The Men in Black who kidnapped her brother. Downplayed in that she doesn't seem to mind.
• Big Sister Instinct: Jesse is looking for her younger brother, Dylan, who was taken by the Bureau in the past.
• The Cameo: In Alan Wake II, she's heard calling 'Hello?' when Alan and Zane are in Room 665 of the Oceanview, with the implication being that she's calling into them during the early moments of the AWE expansion from Control.
• Character Tic: In one of Jesse's idle animations, she uses her left hand to massage her right shoulder.
• The Chosen One: The game does refer to her as the Chosen One and it uses the Service Weapon accepting her as evidence. Anyone who's not chosen as the rightful Director, ends up getting shot in the head by the Service Weapon.
• Contrasting Sequel Protagonist: To Alan Wake. Wake was a normal guy forcibly dragged into the plot of his game by circumstances while Jesse wanted to break into the world of the supernatural. Wake is just a normal guy while Jesse is a supernatural powerhouse and One-Man Army. Justified, as Alan seemed to have intentionally written Jesse's story to turn her into a hero capable of defeating the Dark Presence and saving him.
• Deadpan Snarker: A lot of her dialogue consists of snarking at the events occurring around her. Particularly, her thoughts are the biggest source of her snark.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: She has no problem calling out The Board when they're getting in the way of her mission, such as when they yell at her for taking both powers in The Foundation:
  The Board: < Do not be ignorant/thick. You are being reckless/disobedient. >
  Jesse: I don't like you deciding what I can-slash-can't have.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: If the player does all the quests, Jesse has punched out multiple Cthulhus by herself by game's end. Seemingly Invoked by Alan Wake, who is implied to have written the story into existence to create a hero capable of punching out the Dark Presence and saving him.
• Dishing Out Dirt:
  • The Shield Barrage and Shield Rush upgrades to her Shield ability let her throw the rocky debris that makes up her Orbiting Particle Shield at nearby enemies, or smash into them at high speed like the Vanguard class from Mass Effect 2 onwards, respectively.
  • During the Foundation DLC, she gains the ability to create platforms, walls and spikes out of specific types of regenerating rock growing out of the walls and floors and the ability to destroy similar rock formations by shooting at them with her Service Weapon. Both abilities can be used in combat, either by shooting out the floor underneath enemies or flash-growing spiky crystal from the floor to One-Hit Kill most enemies caught in the area of effect.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": Being generally uncomfortable with her unsolicited promotion to Director, Jesse puts quite a bit of effort into getting the FBC personnel to stop going formal on her. Emily is the only one who actually switches to First-Name Basis communication, with the others either settling for Last-Name Basis or ignoring the request altogether.
• Experienced Protagonist: She may be new to the FBC but she's no stranger to weird-ass paranormal events, having been on the run from them ever since her Doomed Hometown was torn apart by extra-dimensional forces as a kid. She's actually delighted to finally get confirmation that all her adventures are real when she finally gets into the FBC.
• Fanservice Pack: While Jesse is very attractive in just her modest default outfit of street clothes, her PS4-exclusive Astral Dive suit is noticeably form-fitting, to the point where it looks more like a Spy Catsuit than anything else.
• Fantastically Indifferent: She grows into this by the end of the game like the rest of the Bureau have, but it's averted at the start. Jesse, who starts the game with some psychic power exposure, is still constantly surprised by all the weird shit that happens in the Oldest House. She lampshades this after she kills Mold-1:
  Jesse: I need to stop being surprised by all the weird shit in this place.
• Fragile Speedster: She can't take much damage even with her health fully upgraded, but she's significantly faster than almost all enemies she faces, allowing her to outmaneuver them with her superior agility, especially once she's learned how to levitate.
• Fiery Redhead: Downplayed. Jesse is definitely confident and driven, but she isn't exactly a hothead. In fact, she's insecure and has low self-confidence throughout most of the game. She also has noticeably red hair.
• Frontline General: Despite being Director, she tends to take care of problems personally rather than send other people to handle it. This is Justified, as she's far stronger than anyone else in the Bureau and thus better capable of handling situations without endangering the lives of others, in some cases being the only one powerful enough to actually do so at all.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Jesse's use of the control points to fast travel. Jesse asks Emily if anyone has done this before and Emily comments no one has ever done it. She concludes it is unique to Jesse, and even she might only be able to do it thanks to Polaris.
• Gender-Blender Name: This is lampshaded by Dylan, who notes they both have names that could be used for either gender, his way of showing how they could easily be in each other's shoes for want of a twist of fate.
• Glass Cannon: Jesse's paranatural abilities and weaponry can inflict horrendous damage in no time, but without her debris shield (which isn't all that strong and also prevents her from using most of her attacks) she's about as durable as an unarmored human can be expected to be when faced with hordes of enemies wielding firearms and supernatural abilities like her own. Her main defense consists of always being on the move to avoid getting hit in the first place. Downplayed if the Debris Shield is fully upgraded, as it becomes much tankier and can be used offensively.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: If her powers are upgraded enough, she can grab weakened enemies with her telekinesis and use them as projectiles.
• Hates Small Talk: During the "Talk to the Plants" side mission, Jesse admits small talk was never her strong suit, but later admits she liked conversing and confiding with said plants.
• Heroic BSoD: When she thinks that the destruction of the Hedron killed Polaris, she has one of these... right before the Hiss starts overtaking her.
• Heroic Host: It's ambiguous whether Jesse's power comes from the auspices of hosting Polaris or she can only host Polaris at all because she's already powerful. She's implicitly written by Alan Wake to be capable of channeling immense power, so probably a little of both.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Jesse repeatedly states that she doesn't feel like she's fit to be the new Director, essentially having the role thrust upon her by the Board once she picks up the Service Weapon.
  Jesse: [narrating] Funny thing is, I've been a janitor. I'm more at home in that role than as the Director. Only Ahti here seems to see that.
• Ink-Suit Actor: She is modeled after her voice actress.
• Internal Reformist: After becoming Director, she makes it clear she has no intention to be like her predecessors, and seeks to reform and change the Bureau into something more moral.
• Jumped at the Call: Played With. While her timing at the Bureau is a total coincidence (maybe) and she isn't comfortable in being in a position of authority, she has spent her entire life actively seeking the Bureau out to rescue her brother. When she becomes the Director, she becomes an Instant Expert with the Service Weapon and very quickly adjusts her reality to the Bureau's New Weird way of looking at the universe. She even admits several times that she prefers this new and exciting life in-spite of the dangers.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: A rare female example, she has a prominent squared jawline.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: When she walks into the Oldest House at the start of the game, her only life-skills include menial labor and surviving the Ordinary Incident as a child, only being able to find the Oldest House in the first place with Polaris' help. With this in mind, the moment she becomes Director, she manages to survive waves and waves of heavily-armed and superpowered Hiss infected, cleanses and bonds with seven Objects of Power and purges every sector of the FBC herself. Considering paranatural phenomena operates more on belief than logic, there could be any number of reasons why this is the case.
• Meaningful Name: The Hebrew masculine name "Jesse" means "God's gift". However, if one uses her name as a diminutive of "Jessica", then it could mean "to behold". Jesse herself has powerful psychic abilities and the story involves her uncovering the secrets and lore surrounding the Bureau. It can also specifically mean 'Gift From God', which Jesse received from Polaris.
• Medium Blending: Courtney Hope appears in live-action footage when the Hiss almost overtakes Jesse at the start of the game, before being driven out by Polaris. This happens again when Hedron dies, and Jesse feels like she's lost control.
• Mind over Matter: Most of the powers granted to her by O.o.Ps revolve around manipulating the environment with her mind, such as picking up objects and throwing them. Even her innate melee attack is actually a short-ranged telekinetic blast strong enough to shatter solid concrete walls in a single hit.
• Nice Girl: Lack of social skills and distain for conversation aside, Jesse generally tries to be kind and polite to those she speaks to. When they’re not trying to kill her anyway.
• Nice to the Waiter: Since she's been a janitor herself she's immediately inclined to think of Ahti as friendly and likes Arish more upon hearing about his respect for the maintenance staff. While she's uncertain about some of the higher-ranking people she works with over the course of the game, she's concerned about the various grunts she finds in peril.
• Nightmare of Normality: The climax of the game features her being infected by the Hiss in the aftermath of Hedron's destruction, resulting in Jesse finding herself trapped in a nightmarish illusion where she never became the superpowered director of the Federal Bureau of Control, but instead lives out her days as an office temp at the FBC. However, with a little encouragement from Ahti, Jesse gradually begins to notice that something's wrong; after figuring out what's going on, she finally breaks free by rediscovering the power of Polaris within her, backdooring into the Oceanview Motel thanks to Dr Darling, and unleashing her renewed powers on the Hiss.
• Not Quite Flight: Jesse gains the Levitate ability from binding the Benicoff TV, allowing her to lift herself off the ground a few meters and hover for a bit before slowing drifting back down. Once upgraded, it can be used to chain into a powerful Ground Pound move.
• One-Man Army: Jesse is likely the most powerful psychic the Bureau has ever seen with only Dylan matching her and more than capable of mowing down legions of Hiss by herself. Keep in mind the Bureau, an organization specifically trained for combating the supernatural, are near powerless against the Hiss, even with devices to shield them from the Hiss's corrupting power.
• Psychic Powers: Aside from possibly the Service Weapon and the Hotline, every Object of Power Jesse binds herself with gives her some kind of psychic ability, not to mention the innate power of resisting the Hiss that Polaris gives her. She also may have had some low-grade telekinesis thanks to Polaris since her default melee strike is a short-range blast and she opens up treasure boxes by gesturing at them. Not as much as the O.o.P.s gave her, of course. It's also noted In-Universe that while the O.o.P.s give her powers, her natural abilities are off the charts and she's far stronger than anyone else, hence why those powers are so much more effective in her hands than anyone else's.
• Redeeming Replacement: Northmoor was an egomaniac with a borderline God Complex and Trench was, while more moral than Northmoor, still thoroughly unpleasant, paranoid, and a Control Freak who ultimately let the Hiss loose. Jesse, on the other hand, is moral, generally on friendly terms with those under her, and prefers to handle dangerous situations herself rather than endanger the lives of Bureau agents if she can help it. She also decides to reform the Bureau and make it more moral in general.
• Reluctant Hero: Initially, Jesse doesn't feel comfortable becoming the new Director.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: A subtle, but quite impressive instance. One of Jesse's therapy interviews reveals that she is somehow familiar with the poems of Thomas Zane, despite the fact that Zane wrote himself, and all of his work, out of existence over twenty years before Jesse was even born. It gets weirder in the AWE expansion, where someone shows up claiming to be Zane, but saying that he's a filmmaker, and Jesse's memory of Zane the poet seems to be "adjusted" to remembering him being a filmmaker, as she calls him a poet and then corrects herself, saying "I always make that mistake." One of Jesse's favorite lines by Zane is repeated as a Meaningful Echo, similar as it is to Jesse's metaphor of the poster:
  Zane: Beyond the shadow you settle for, there is a miracle illuminated.
• The Runaway: After the Slide Projector decimates the population of Ordinary, she runs away from both there and the FBC. She's implied to have ended up in a psych ward at some point, but beyond that, she's been on the run for the past 17 years.
• Secretly Earmarked for Greatness: Jesse was being considered for the position of Director for the Federal Bureau of Control long before she set foot in the Oldest House. In fact, the Bureau were having her watched ever since the Altered World Event in her hometown of Ordinary, though only as an emergency backup for her little brother Dylan, who the Bureau outright abducted so they could groom him into the next Director. Of course, Jesse doesn't realize this until the Hiss-corrupted Dylan points her to a sector of the Oldest House where more than a decade's worth of surveillance records on her have been kept - including the tapes of her therapy sessions in which doctors attempted to gaslight her into believing that the Bureau wasn't real.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: While it's not as frequent as Arish, Jesse uses profanity on a constant basis — only exasperated by the utterly bizarre things she encounters throughout the game.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Jesse is able to approach people, but is notably awkward and clipped in her first impressions. Additionally, her stony demeanor gives the audience the impression she's not used to voicing actual thoughts. She even finds it easier to talk to plants since they "can't talk back." This gradually goes away when she becomes more confident in herself and her role as the Director.
• Statuesque Stunner: A tweet from Remedy revealed Jesse to be fairly tall for an American woman at 175cm.
• Superior Successor: To Trench and Northmoor as Director. She is far stronger than either could ever be... but she's also far saner and more moral than either of them ever were. Several agents even outright acknowledge she's done a better job in her short time running the place than her predecessors, and they definitely tend to like her better than the distant Trench and the megalomaniac Northmoor. The Foundation DLC implies the Board is aware of this, calling her their favorite Director. Given she's far more competent at the job than her predecessors ever were, this makes sense.
• Swiss-Army Gun: The Service Weapon is always a gun, at least for Jesse, but can morph into many kinds of guns to suit the situation. Whether you need a shotgun, sniper rifle, or even a grenade launcher, the Service Weapon will oblige.
• The Unchosen One: While everyone at the FBC was grooming Dylan for years to become the new Director, they were almost totally hands-off with Jesse, merely observing her from a distance and considering her a "backup" to Dylan. The Board decides to appoint her, but even this is a choice on her behalf: as the Board says, she has to "choose to be chosen." Willingly stepping into the FBC and the weird world it represents (rather than being unwillingly stuck in it like Dylan) seems to be one of the deciding factors.
• Working-Class Hero: Has been working whatever menial jobs she could find in the 17 years she's been searching for the FBC, so suddenly being made Director is an uncomfortable leap for her. She feels far more at ease with being Ahti's "assistant janitor" than with being in charge of the FBC. Though considering Ahti, the two jobs could very well be the same thing.
• World's Best Warrior: Jesse's power is off the charts in the Bureau's books; for example, before Jesse came along, the previous record holder for largest object Launched was Director Northmoor, who threw a bowling ball six yards (although this glosses over his pyrokinetic powers, which Jesse doesn't have — presumably they would still be bound to Northmoor). Compare to Jesse, who can pick up forklifts and rip chunks of concrete out of the walls and hurl them dozens of feet. Her only real competition is Dylan, and the player never gets a clear idea of how strong he is beyond 'very.' Also note, Northmoor's sheer power is comparable to a nuclear reactor, and Jesse is still much stronger than him. It's implied she's about the only person who could stand up to the Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman.

Polaris

Appearances: Control

"You called me, so here I am."

— Jesse

Jesse's guide and guardian entity. The two first met during the Ordinary AWE, with Polaris saving Jesse from the creatures the Slide Projector had unleashed and planting herself in the latter's mind. Seventeen years later, Polaris guides Jesse to the FBC.

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• Anti-Magic: Specifically for the Hiss, being able to drive it out of anything it corrupts and passively protecting Jesse from its influence, though areas that have become overwhelmingly Hiss will still hurt her.
• Arch-Enemy: Of the Hiss, which explains why Jesse is able to cleanse it.
• Barrier Maiden: As said in Darling's Final Message, through Hedron, she kept the Hiss mostly at bay in Slidescape-36. Hedron's removal, and the subsequent reopening of Slidescape-36 within the Oldest House, is what allowed it to invade on such a large scale.
• Benevolent Abomination: Polaris is a resonance-based entity that hitched a ride in Jesse's head and "she" has been nothing but comforting and helpful to Jesse her entire life.
• Big Good: She helped Jesse and Dylan defeat the Not-Mother in their youth and has been guiding Jesse ever since, including through the events of the game. She's also the only reason that the Hiss didn't win completely the moment they entered reality, as her resonance through Hedron is the only thing keeping them at bay. She's also one of the only beings period Jesse has complete trust in. Unlike The Board, there's far less ambiguity about her benevolence, as while Dylan warns Jesse not to trust her, he's not exactly someone to be trusted about Polaris given how much the Hiss despises her.
• Blue Is Heroic: Contrasting to the Hiss's unsettling red aura, Polaris' is a silverish-blue spiral that highlights objects of interest.
• Destruction Equals Off-Switch: After Hedron (implied to be Polaris' previous physical avatar) is destroyed, the HRAs stop working, which leads to the Hiss almost entirely overtaking the Oldest House... until Jesse re-awakens Polaris inside her and becomes her physical avatar instead.
• Eldritch Abomination: Like the Hiss, Polaris is a resonance-based lifeform from outside conventional reality that can either grant or awaken Psychic Powers in humans through Symbiotic Possession. She is beyond normal human comprehension, usually only being depicted as a glowing "swirl" of polygons. Notably, unlike both the Hiss and Dark Presence, she's quite benevolent.
• Energy Beings: As she's a "resonance-based" lifeform, she has no real physical body.
• Enigmatic Empowering Entity: Polaris is a non-corporeal entity that has hitched a ride in Jesse's mind during the Ordinary Incident and she is explicitly the reason why Jesse is immune to the Hiss. In fact, she's the reason why anyone is immune to the Hiss, through Hedron and the HRAs. Presumably her presence is also why Jesse's paranatural abilities are off the charts, since the only one who can really compete with her is Dylan, who has also been touched by Polaris.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: All of Jesse's "dialogue" with Polaris, while one-sided, can be easily interpreted as Addressing the Player.
• Good Counterpart: To the Hiss. Both are resonance-based lifeforms that dwell inside hosts, but whereas the Hiss possesses and corrupts its hosts, Polaris never controls Jesse, only guides her, and instead protects her and anyone her resonance is connected to. While both empower their hosts, Polaris does so to aid Jesse while the Hiss does it to use its victims as weapons.
• Light Is Good: She is a friendly and benevolent Eldritch Abomination depicted as a swirling series of whitish-blue triangles.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Well, she's supernatural regardless, but how much so is a bit ambiguous. By the end of the game, Jesse isn't sure whether Hedron inserted Polaris into her head, or if Polaris was always there and Hedron just awakened her.
• Meaningful Name: "Polaris" is another term for the North Star, which is often used by travelers to safely navigate through the world at nighttime. Appropriately enough, Polaris literally guides Jesse through the Oldest House (to the point where it's heavily implied she's actually the game's UI) and helps protect her from the Hiss. According to Dylan, Jesse chose this name because she was studying stars in school at the time when they had discovered the entity.
• Medium Awareness: Jesse's one-sided discussions with Polaris can also sound like she's talking to the player more often than not, and as noted above it's heavily implied that the game's user interface is actually Polaris altering Jesse's perception of her own reality.
• Notice This: Polaris will highlight certain objects in the environment that you can interact with, namely unclaimed control points and Objects of Power.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Jesse gave Polaris her name. When Darling finds it, he calls it Hedron because of its polyhedron shape. Subverted, as this wasn't actually Polaris, merely something that allowed her to share her resonance with the Bureau (think basically another physical avatar in a similar vein to Jesse herself).
• Quantity vs. Quality: Polaris only has one actual host in the form of Jesse compared to the seemingly endless number of people the Hiss is controlling. However, Jesse is far stronger than any individual Hiss host with the possible exception of Dylan, who also got his powers from her in the first place.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Jesse and Dylan summoned her to help them turn off the Projector and banish the Not-Mother and her monsters back to her dimension.
• Survival Mantra: Turns out Polaris has her own mantra, which is revealed when Jesse manages to gain back control of her power within the Oceanview Motel. In contrast to the Hiss's nonsensical yet sinister chants, Polaris' is only two sentences, but spoken with calming benevolence. Tellingly, Polaris is represented as Jesse talking and comforting herself.
  Polaris: [the remnant within Jesse] Grow brighter. Around one constant, they revolve.
• Symbiotic Possession: She resides inside Jesse like the Hiss do inside their hosts, but unlike them and the Dark Presence, she's benevolent, protects Jesse, grants her supernatural powers, and counters the Hiss.
• The Smurfette Principle: Polaris is the only cosmic entity in the game to be coded as female, with the others all being explicitly genderless (The Board, Hiss and Dark Presence).
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Dylan implies that he helped summon the Hiss via the slide projector specifically to banish Polaris from his mind, Polaris having been sending him visions of Jesse throughout his stay at the Bureau.
• The Voiceless: Polaris never speaks. Any clues into what she's "saying" can be implied through Jesse's monologues. Ambiguously averted when Jesse manages to regain her power, since it's depicted as Jesse talking to herself, but with a different demeanor.

Zachariah Trench

Director Zachariah Trench

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: James McCaffrey

"I didn't see it coming, the traitor in our midst, a conspiracy plotted right behind me."

The former director of the Federal Bureau of Control. At the start of the game, Jesse finds him dead in his office, but through unknown means, he's capable of communicating with her from beyond the grave (Emily hypothesizes that it's because of the bullet from the Service Weapon still lodged in his head), simultaneously giving advice and recounting his (and the Bureau's) descent into disaster.

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• Ambiguous Situation: He's found dead, apparently by his own hand. Muddying the waters is that apparently the Service Weapon will kill anyone it deems "unworthy" of being a Director (Dr. Darling calls it Russian Roulette) so it's unclear if he deliberately did it, was compelled to do it by the weapon, or if Dylan influenced him to do it that way. AWE, specifically the script of one of Alan's old Night Springs episodes, implies that his suicide was in fact intentional. After realizing that the Hiss played him for a sucker and that he was actually helping out the bad guys the whole time, he killed himself out of guilt.
• Badass Normal: Compared to Jesse and Northmoor, Zachariah had little in the way of superpowers. He wasn't even bound to most of the telekinetic OOPs Jesse picks up over the course of the game, and wasn't particularly strong in their use. He's also never described as using much in the way of pyrokinesis like Northmoor. In fact the reason he started the Prime Candidate program and brought Dylan into the fold was because he didn't believe he had the power to serve as the Director in the first place. He may have been more special than he realized, however, with a possible special connection to the Service Weapon — others suggest it looked different and was far more powerful when he wielded it, though whether this was simply one of the later forms Jesse unlocks is never stated. At the very least after killing himself with the gun, he's able to speak to Jesse through it even before she binds the Hotline.
• Broken Pedestal: Marshall, in her first Hotline call in The Foundation, says he was, "the epitome of a good agent; smart, decisive, selfless"; but all that seemed to change when he "picked up that damn gun".
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Hinted as to one of the reasons he is always smoking is because of his Control Freak personality.
• The Chains of Command: Much like with Jesse, him becoming Director was more a stroke of bad luck than a desired promotion. While this affords him a variety of paranatural abilities and clearance for the entire Bureau, it meant that he would be trapped working there for the remainder of his life. Having full-clearance in the Bureau also meant he got a front-row seat to every classified piece of information the Bureau had and made him realize just how little control he really had, making him progressively distrustful and paranoid of his subordinates. The Prime Candidate Program was made for the express purpose of selecting his replacement in a manner so that no one else had to go through what he did.
• Control Freak: Trench, in life, hated the fact that he couldn't fully comprehend or control the Oldest House, Objects of Power, or the Board. This led to him becoming paranoid, being able to only trust Dr. Darling, becoming corrupted by the Hiss, and unleashing it into the Oldest House because he thought Hedron was the evil force and The Hiss were the good guys.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Working in the FBC has taken its toll on Trench psychologically. Not only has becoming Director killed any chance of him having a life outside of work, there was also an incident where an OoP or Altered Item followed him home one day and killed his daughter, which led to his wife divorcing him.
• Driven to Suicide: The AWE DLC implies that after he realized that the Hiss had played him for a fool, he'd killed himself out of guilt.
• Empathic Weapon: While he didn't have much in the way of other powers, he's said to have been particularly connected to the Service Weapon, which changed in some unclear way when he first picked it up and became Director. Even after killing himself with it, Emily speculates that he may have remained connected it to it through the bullet lodged in his brain:
  Jesse: This Trench guy. I keep hearing him in my head. Is he a ghost? Haunting me?
  Pope: I doubt we're talking about a ghost in the traditional sense. But an echo, maybe. See, if he was killed by the Service Weapon, your gun, maybe it's his final thoughts recorded by the bullet in his brain. Like a deep space probe sending back data.
• Empty Shell: By the end of his life, Trench is completely emotionally dead. His final Hotline call bleakly describes complete, miserable apathy toward life as he goes through his daily routine, having lost his family, his trust in his friends and the sense of integrity he feels working with the FBC. Only temptation from the Hiss kept him going, which leads to him killing himself when he realizes it was the danger he was always afraid was lurking to destroy the FBC.
• Face Framed in Shadow: Even more so than other characters you speak to over the Hotline, as we see Trench from a number of angles, many of them backlit with much of his face in heavy Chiaroscuro.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In the intro CGI which plays after Jesse enters the elevator to reach the Bureau proper, one of the action report files onscreen details an Altered Item incident which Trench singlehandedly prevented before becoming Director.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: He is always seen smoking and on the side of good running the FBC. He is later revealed to have been the first one corrupted by the Hiss and let it invade the FBC. So we have one of the few instances where a character is on both sides of this trope.
• Grief-Induced Split: In a late-game hotline call, Trench reveals that his daughter Susanna died of a paranatural cause after something came home from work with him. His wife Kate refused FBC intervention and civilian doctors were useless. Kate left him after Susanna's death, so the FBC was all he had left.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: His Hotline calls reveal a massive case of imposter syndrome and deep regrets over the toll his work has taken on his home life. How much of this is true versus the manipulations of the Board, and the later corruption of the Hiss, is unclear.
  Trench: The only person you should fail is yourself.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: In one hotline call, he says the only difference between the beginning and end of his work day is whether he's drinking coffee or whiskey.
• Ink-Suit Actor: He's directly based on James McCaffrey, who plays him in the live-action Hotline calls.
• Jurisdiction Friction: The AWE expansion reveals that he had a personal grudge against the Investigations Sector, because they also handled internal investigations and were cottoning on to his looming Hiss infection making him paranoid and spiteful. They also vehemently disapproved of the "Prime Candidate" program as it involved basically snatching individuals with psychic powers and grooming them for directorship. It is heavily implied this is why he just let Investigations stay sealed and let it rot rather than recover it from The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Trench hated being Director, because it meant that he had to rely on other people and that other people had to rely on him, which flew in the face of his philosophy, "the only person you should fail is yourself." He was still dedicated to saving the world from extra-dimensional threats, but he was never happy about it. He even says early on that he never wanted to be Director in the first place, but was the only one willing to take the chance on doing it when the previous Director was removed from the position (and since the gun killed anyone "unsuitable" who picked it up, it wasn't something most people wanted to gamble on in the first place).
• Madness Mantra: Done subtly, but if you read some of his correspondences that you find in the Investigations sector, you can spot phrases from the Hiss incantation peppered into them, such as "you are a worm", "the truth will emerge out of you", or "this happens more and more now."
• Meaningful Name: Trench has spent his life traveling in deep, dark places and has a certain foxhole mentality when it comes to the FBC, running on survival mode. He's also dug the Bureau into a very big hole at the time of his death.
• Motifs: Cigarettes and smoke. The only Object of Power that is still bound to him by the end of the game is the Ashtray, all of his Hotline messages show him smoking and being surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and he's the only member of the Bureau "allowed" to smoke inside the Oldest House (he's not actually allowed, he just does it anyway and nobody else wants to risk pissing off their boss by objecting).
• Medium Blending: Outside of the opening cutscene and the sequence in Take Control where Jesse drives The Hiss from her mind, all of Trench's appearances are live-action as opposed to being an in-game model.
• Motive Rant: The first run through Jesse's Nightmare of Normality, he acts just like a regular boss, but the second time through, he rambles about how he distrusts Hedron and how anyone wearing an HRA is probably infected by otherworldly forces, so he's gonna unleash the Hiss to stop it. Once he's done with that, though, he seems to forget what he just said and talks confusedly about how he's tired and doesn't know what's going on.
• Murder by Suicide: Due to the fact that Jesse's test with the Service Weapon has her holding the gun to her head outside of the Astral Plane, and the fact that the Board has the ability to decide who is and isn't worthy of being Director, there's an implication that the Board 'fired' Trench by forcing him to shoot himself when they realized what he'd done. Later cutscenes suggest it might have been the Hiss/Dylan possessing him which drove him to it. In AWE, however, the final suggestion seems to be that Trench really did kill himself in despair upon the realization that he might have doomed the world in allowing the Hiss to exploit his paranoia.
• Must Have Nicotine: The Bureau has a no-smoking policy which Trench long ignored, despite a memo you find saying that smoking in some areas of The Oldest House (such as the Black Rock Quarry) is a very bad idea.
  Langston: Did you know the Bureau has a no smoking policy? It does. Just not for Trench.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: He had the Prime Candidate Program made specifically so that the Bureau could have a hands-on role in choosing its new director, trying various different methods on various different candidates in an effort to find the right method and the right candidate. Their methods with Candidate P6 — Dylan Faden — were basically treating the boy like a criminal in a Super-Max prison and turning him into a Psychopathic Manchild with Psychic Powers and a knee-jerk, homicidal hatred of the Bureau. This, combined with his own growing paranoia of the Bureau, led to Trench being possessed and unleashing the Hiss onto the Bureau.
• Outliving One's Offspring: A late-game hotline call reveals Trench's daughter died from a paranatural cause while he was Director. It just pushed him further into his work.
  Trench: We weren’t careful enough back then. Something came home with me. I took work home. My Susanna got sick. When I realized my mistake, I wanted to bring her [to the Oldest House], for Darling to do what he could. Kate flat out refused. Civilian doctors treated our daughter, but they didn’t have a clue. She died.
• The Paranoiac: A deconstruction. Toward the end of his life, he trusted absolutely no one. The lesson Jesse learns is that you need to be able to trust some people, that no one does anything alone, no matter how powerful, and that perhaps Trench and the Bureau would have been less vulnerable as a whole if not for the multilayered secrecy that pitted the FBC against each other and kept them from being able to mobilize against a threat too classified for them to know about.
• The Peter Principle:
  • Invoked by Trench himself. He never wanted to be Director and doesn't think he's particularly well-suited to the job, but there was no better candidate at the time — and no one else he'd trust now. He seems to miss his field agent days.
  • In the Foundation DLC, his old colleague and closest confidant Marshall confirms during a Hotline call that Trench was one of the best working agents in the Bureau, but expresses doubts about his decisions as a leader. "Ever since he picked up that damned gun..." Marshall does have some suspicions that the Board themselves might have played a part in Trench's deterioration, however, rather than Trench being naturally unsuited for command.
• Private Eye Monologue: Trench's Hotline narratives lean on hard-bitten clichés of the genre, colored by Occult Detective and Spy Fiction tropes. This includes the heavy metaphors, bitter self-recrimination, gravelly voice and smoke constantly swirling around him, his Face Framed in Shadow. Entirely deliberate on the devs' part, as Remedy brought back the voice of their original noir detective, James "Max Payne" McCaffrey, specifically to channel that aesthetic.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers a scathing one by way of a letter to Kirklund, former Head of Investigations, after one too many failures accumulate at his feet. (The anger is more motivated by Kirklund looking too deep into Trench's shady secret projects, and Trench also going mad from the Hiss' influence.)
  Trench: I am growing tired of your blatant attempts to lay your incompetence at my doorstep. I know you want this to be true, but you are Head of Investigations. This failure is your responsibility. What did you think would happen, holding a dangerous specimen in Investigations? The Containment Sector exists for a reason. They are better trained and better equipped for this type of work. In fact, they have admirably taken on certain AWE monitoring responsibilities that your staff are no longer capable of. This happens more and more now. And don't think your petty internal investigations have gone past my notice. You are a worm! Everything I've done has been for the benefit of the Bureau. The Prime Candidate Program only failed because of Darling. You are both failures, plotting against me! You are traitors, but the truth will emerge out of you! You are choosing to become my enemy, Kirklund. You don't want to be.
• Rejected by the Empathic Weapon: Suggested to be the reason why the Service Weapon disposes of him at the start of the game. It (and in his final lucid thoughts as the Hiss takes him over, Trench himself) recognizes his failure to protect the Bureau and the gun promptly turns itself on him so Jesse can take over.
• Smoky Voice: With every Hotline call he sends to Jesse, we get to hear the low, cigarette-tinged rumble of the hardnosed field agent he used to be.
• Spirit Advisor: He kills himself just as Jesse arrives, but his musings or memories, transmitted to Jesse through the Service Weapon and the Hotline, allow him to impart his own experiences and regrets as Director.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Hiss had tricked him into thinking they were the good guys and Hedron was the evil corrupting force so that he'd open the portal for them.
• You Are What You Hate: He was so obsessed with the idea that the FBC would be invaded that he unleashed the Hiss against the "invading" Hedron. He also hated being Director so much that he spent innumerable resources searching for another director for years.

Broderick Northmoor

Director Broderick Northmoor

Appearances: Control

The Director before Trench, who is usually only mentioned in passing and is considered a "forbidden" subject judging by some of the uncomfortable remarks people like Darling make. Most notably, he was the first Director to be chosen by the Board and not the United States government. Unmarked spoilers follow.

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• Bad Boss: From what is revealed, Northmoor was an arrogant, domineering prick with a short temper and a god complex. Trench even outright describes him as a megalomaniac at one point.
  Trench: Northmoor was all about power. A man like an explosion, hungry for authority, for order, for more, until it was too much.
• Brief Accent Imitation: A variant occurs in the Northmoor: Final Warning document, where he uses the speaking patterns of the Board to refer to himself as their "chosen representative / liaison / benefactor." He also uses it in other notes, such as warning staff to stop peeing into the Astral Plane by using "Bodily fluids/urinating/God-given liquids".
• The Chosen One: Foundation reveals that he was the first Director to be presented with the Service Weapon by a monolith found beneath the Oldest House, and thus the first one the Board chose. There were other directors prior to him, but those were just guys appointed by humans in government. Naturally everyone thought he was crazy for talking about "The Board" at first until they realized it was for real.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Heavily implied to be this. While he was proven to be right, his comments about himself can come off as this to the common person. Not to mention his whole A God Am I shtick.
• Control Freak: Rather than Trench's pathological need for order, the ability to rely on an external system, Northmoor just needed everyone to do what he told them, since he was chosen by the Board and God.
• Foil: Much like other directors Jesse and Trench, Northmoor is defined by how and why he exercises control. The difference between the three of them is that unlike Trench (who spurned items he couldn't control) and Jesse, (who struggles with responsibility and confidence at first) Northmoor seemingly craved control, binding numerous items and vastly overestimating his ability to control them. This eventually backfired, as you can see from The NSC.
• Foreshadowing: Jesse asks what happens if the NSC overloads; the initial "response" by the echo of Trench uses the word "explosion" and "power," but the actual Hotline video that gets unlocked is mostly Trench griping about his predecessor, "all about the power, an explosion in human form." He also acknowledges that Northmoor at least knew when to step down, to his credit, and that, as Director, he did manage to "keep the lights on." This is Not Hyperbole, as it turns out — Northmoor is a walking not-quite-atomic pyre after losing control of a pyrokinesis parautility. From his refuge/prison in the NSC, he powers the whole of the Oldest House.
• A God Am I: Aside from deriding all other Directors before him as being "impostors", Northmoor was unique in that he took his relationship with the Board very seriously. He literally tells the staff physician inspecting him that his feats are "the product of divine collaboration", and that the Board has "awoken in him a power beyond his understanding that will only continue to grow". Recordings from Dr. Ash also noted that his dedication to the Board was fanatical, with Ash referring to him as ranting and raving.
• Personality Powers: A Christian obsessed with the light of God and a Control Freak with a Hair-Trigger Temper who gained fire-based powers.
• Playing with Fire: While his telekinetic potential was limited, his pyrokinetic powers are described as rivaling Jesse's power levels in their own right.
• Person of Mass Destruction: When you have enough energy to be comparable to a nuclear power plant, you're this. And note that at his strongest Northmoor was still a weaker parautilitarian than Jesse.
• Power Incontinence: At some point, Northmoor stopped being able to turn his pyrokinetic powers off, and when the Hiss start sabotaging Maintenance, Jesse is warned that if she can't get the cooling and conversion systems back online in the next few hours, the entire building will explode.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: An easily missed comment from Ahti when you're approaching the NSC Energy Converters to fix them, a document found near the Black Rock Quarry, lines from Trench over the Hotline, and faded letters written higher up on the structure reveal Northmoor's fate. The "NSC" of the NSC Power Plant stands for "Northmoor Sarcophagus Container". He is the power plant and the actual structure is just "humane housing" built to keep him contained. Apparently over-use of Objects of Power lead to him becoming a fountain of uncontrollable energy. Below the letters, you can find images of the inside of the container — the being within appears to be chained up, and also on fire.
• Real Men Love Jesus: Devoutly Christian, he conflates being granted power by the Board with being chosen by God, and several of his lines incorporate biblical allusions.
• Reluctant Retiree: He only stepped down as Director when he absolutely had to. Because he was literally in the process of exploding and needed to be entombed alive inside the NSC to protect the rest of the Bureau. He went voluntarily, if not happily. Ahti refers to him — obliquely, as it's not quite clear who he's referring to at first — as "the pensioner".
• Superhero Speciation: Jesse is described as having Northmoor-level power readings at one point, but for all his firepower, Northmoor had nothing resembling Jesse's telekinetic might — while she can eventually lift objects the size of forklifts and hurl them hundreds of yards, Northmoor being able to heft a bowling ball six yards away was considered a major accomplishment. On the other hand, Northmoor apparently had heat manipulation abilities Jesse never displays. The thermal energy Northmoor gives off passively is sufficient to power the entirety of the Oldest House, with plenty left over. It's unclear whether this power comes from a bound object (which Jesse could theoretically bind herself) or some other source, however.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: After finding the Service Weapon, he goes on a rant where he insults every Director to come before him, including the explicitly deceased Theodore Ash Sr.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the plot regarding Northmoor is heavily obscured. Nobody who brings him up in conversation wants to elaborate openly, and usually change the subject. It's up to the player and Jesse to put together the dots regarding what he did and why nobody likes him. The Foundation DLC elaborates on his personality, at least, which was "pure megalomaniac" according to the documents.
• Transhuman Abomination: While the details are left vague, by the time his tenure as Director ended, he became a living explosion of paranatural energy and had to be contained for everyone's safety. The second containment cell — NSC-02 — had to be outfitted with spacial anchors because he spontaneously teleported the first one to the Black Rock Quarry, and he is somehow still alive after decades of being used as a living reactor to power the Oldest House.
• Wreathed in Flames: The thermal imaging cameras of the interior of the NSC show a human figure whose body temperature indicates he is literally superheated.

Theodore Ash, Sr.

Director Theodore Ash, Sr.

Appearances: Control ^note Mentioned and pictured only

The father of Dr. Theodore Ash, Jr. and the Director before Northmoor. Notably the only Director of the FBC known to have been actually appointed by the U.S. federal government.

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• End of an Age: His death marked one for the Bureau in two ways. First, Ash was the final Director of the FBC to be chosen by the United States government, as Northmoor became the acting director until the Service Weapon was discovered, linking him, and all future Directors, to the Board. Second, the Oldest House was discovered just after his death, and after the Bureau moved into the Oldest House, they effectively disappeared from the eye of both the public and the federal government. From that point on, the Bureau's oversight by the federal government was pretty much in name only.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Considered Ash Jr. to be one, if the latter's musings are to be believed.
• Irony: Dedicated his life to searching for places of occult significance (later known as "Places of Power") and the Oldest House was discovered a week after his funeral.
• Posthumous Character: Died in 1964, long before the events of Control.
• Science Is Wrong: Ash lived in an "esoteric world" (read: was a supporter of occult/mysticism), and the FBC's practices under him reflected this.

Research

Dr. Casper Darling

Dr. Casper Darling

Appearances: Control | Alan Wake II

Portrayed by: Matthew Porretta

"What's the cause, and what's the effect? Are we the starting point, or just a necessary evil in this? A byproduct, a reflection? A projection? We'll struggle to find the answers to these hard questions... or die trying."

Head of the FBC Research division and a member of Trench's inner circle. He's one of the most brilliant minds in the FBC, and the man behind the Hedron Resonance Amplifiers. We never meet him in person, but plenty of his recordings remain scattered around The Oldest House.

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• Absent-Minded Professor: A brilliant scientist and competent administrator, more socially awkward than forgetful, but plays upon the archetype, with his Nerd Glasses, bow ties and knit sweaters, and lively exposition of bizarre and sometimes horrible discoveries.
• Admiring the Abomination: He is consistently enraptured by the various paranatural beings the FBC come across. He develops a reverential obsession with Hedron, and geeks out at the capabilities of the Dark Presence in an old presentation Alan finds in Alan Wake II.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: His possible fate, suggested to be due to massive exposure to the Hedron resonance. In "Take Control", he calls Jesse through the Hotline, which is something only the Board and Trench can do, but that sequence was in Jesse's head, and she remains unsure whether or not it actually happened. Though given everything she's seen by that point, she also doesn't discount it. Ultimately confirmed in Alan Wake II, although "ascend" is a bit of a misnomer — he's wound up in the Dark Place.
• Break the Comedian: Almost incongruously cheerful, his videos on the numerous Objects of Power featuring him excitedly ranting about the weirdness of the setting while making silly jokes and cheekily tossing pencils at the camera. However, Darling grows increasingly haggard and nervous while charting the events of his dealings with Dylan Faden and Hedron Resonance. His final video features him almost too shell-shocked to speak and too traumatized to be funny anymore... and then he apparently ascends, and remotely guides Jesse into the Oceanview Motel, where he spurs her on to victory with the single most gloriously cheesy rendition of "Dynamite" ever.
• The Cameo: In Alan Wake II, a book penned by him about alternate worlds is in Door's dressing room. Brief flashes of him also sporadically appear on the televisions of the Oceanview Hotel, and he has a larger role in "The Final Draft".
• Clark Kent Outfit: During his final message, detailing his interaction with Hedron, he's only wearing boxers and turns out to be surprisingly jacked, with Thomas Zane / Seine complimenting his physique and calling him "swole" during their encounter. Hedron is apparently changing him in some way which has him frequently shedding his clothing; it's never mentioned if the muscles are related or not.
• Educational Short: Most of the projectors throughout the building are playing the many short films the FBC had disseminated to staff to inform them about the various Altered World Events, Altered Items, Objects of Power, Places of Power, and other paranatural subjects the Bureau deals with on a daily basis — some of which might be running loose and wreaking havoc in the Oldest House on any given day, up to and including the Oldest House itself. You never see Darling in person; Jesse only sees him in the form of these films and one brief Hotline call.
• Endearingly Dorky: Through several of her comments, Jesse shows she can't help but come to like the guy as she comes to know him through his awkwardly enthusiastic Educational Shorts spread throughout the building. This culminates in her watching a goofy recording of Darling cheering her on in a homemade music video in the Oceanview Motel/her own mind, as he sings The '70s Glam Rock hit "Dyna-Mite" (substituting "Jesse" for "Dinah").
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: Following his meeting with Hedron, he continues to appear by way of electromagnetic waves. In Control, a projector shows a video of him cheering Jesse on, and flashes of him show up on television sets in the Dark Place throughout Alan Wake II. Interestingly, this appears to be exclusive to the Oceanview, which is noted to have access to several different realities.
• A Father to His Men: Downplayed example, but he cared enough about his subordinates to hand out HRAs to them.
• Friend to All Children: In one of the videos concerning Dylan, Casper defends his outbursts by saying that he's Just a Kid and that the Bureau needs to give him a break. He also had high hopes for Dylan becoming a great successor for Trench.
• Foreshadowing: His presentation on the Hotline begins with him saying "Ring Ring, it's Dr. Darling calling". He later calls Jesse through it in the last mission of the game.
• The Ghost: Downplayed; he's a very prominent character who players get to see through a lot of video footage, but at no point does Jesse encounter him in person. This is because some time before the start of the game, he locked himself in with Hedron, and it's heavily implied that directly exposing himself to Hedron's resonance caused him to transcend physical reality, at least putting him in a place where he could contact Jesse through the Hotline.
• Hero of Another Story: In "The Final Draft" mode of Alan Wake II, his broadcasts reveal he has been on his own adventures in the Dark Place, endeavoring to find out more about how the dimension works. The brief glimpses of him seen in the Oceanview televisions were him in a pocket unaffected by the loop, perfecting a means of contact which only caught the right frequency when the final loop of the spiral began.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Pope notes that he was highly secretive toward her, and we hear about a few examples where he turned her ideas for research projects down flat with no explanation. However, one document has him praising her diligence and curiosity as well as strongly recommending her for promotion. Speculatively, her projects may have touched upon things she wasn't allowed to study without a higher clearance.
• Homemade Sweater from Hell: He's usually seen wearing a garish, battered sweater along with his bow tie and labcoat.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • In Control, he considers Dr. Edna Pierse for the role of member of the Dimensional Research staff. Pierse can be heard in an audio log Hearing Voices from the furnace in Maintenance, and judging by what she says, was going to try and find a Human Sacrifice to feed to the fire.
  • In Alan Wake II, he immediately places his faith in Tom the Filmmaker and instantly enters into a collaboration with him. Downplayed, however, as with how similarly Tom's "sales pitch" to Darling plays out to how he approached Alan during AWE, Darling's mind may be influenced or altered in some way by Tom.
• Jerkass to One: Downplayed. He was a bit cold to Pope, despite her enthusiasm and after having hand-picked her as his assistant straight out of university. Later memos and his last few recordings indicate that he regretted keeping her at arm's length, but seemed oddly protective of her. He kept her Locked Out of the Loop out of fear of putting her in danger, a level of concern he shows for no one else.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: His basic wardrobe is a pristine white labcoat with the FBC logo on the front pocket.
• Lampshade Hanging: After building a device that is able to pick up Alan's voice in the Dark Place and listening to a bit of his monologue, he notes that the author's voice sounds quite a bit like his own. Later, Zane notes that the scientist sounds familiar, with Darling countering that Zane looks familiar.
• Large Ham: He can be pretty dramatic in his videos. Emily recalls that when he came to recruit her in college, he interrupted her professor's lecture by loudly declaring him a fool for believing that there's such a thing as "laws" of thermodynamics.
• Lies to Children: When Dylan was first brought to the Bureau, Darling assured him that Jesse could come to the Bureau if she wanted to. In truth, they had decided to observe Jesse's life from a distance and had no intention of bringing her to the FBC.
• MacGyvering: Part of his struggle to broadcast himself and hear other broadcasts in the Dark Place come from lack of materials. He mentions having to scavenge extensively just to make the dingy radio with coat hanger attached he proudly shows off to the camera.
• Mad Scientist: By most of the outside world's standards, everything the Bureau works with is well outside the scope of normal science — by necessity, as much of the paranatural world is more conceptual than scientific. The working conditions and experimental methods at the Oldest House are often less than humane.
• The Mentor: Zigzagged. He recruited Emily into the FBC straight out of college and viewed her as the future of the Research Department, yet he also kept her in the dark on much of his own work.
• Mr. Exposition: Many of Darling's videos can be found throughout the Oldest House and provide insight into the lore.
• My Greatest Failure: While Darling was well-intentioned and did his best to ensure that Dylan grew up to be a worthy Director, he eventually reached the end of his rope and declared Dylan a lost cause after too many agents were killed by his violent outbursts. All he can do is put Dylan in containment, shift his focus onto dimensional research, and lament what he could have done but failed to do.
• Naked Nutter: Having been growing progressively less composed throughout his video messages, is reduced to stripping down to his boxers in a shell-shocked trance as he acknowledges the disaster that lies before them and the fact that he's beginning to transcend reality as a result of exposure to Hedron Resonance.
• Nerd Glasses: Thick circular brown horn-rim frames, about as nerdy as they can be.
• Nice Guy: Blithely good-humored despite the mortal danger often facing him and his colleagues, nevertheless Darling is shown to care for his fellow man, and even stuck up for Dylan during the child's time in the FBC.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In most videos he's cheerful, silly, and neatly put-together. By the one about why he's passing out HRA devices, he's visibly disheveled and exhausted, showing more insecure, fearful body language.
  • This is also true in his video discussing Dylan slaughtering several researchers and guards, being extremely quiet, and wishing he listened to Marshall's advice when he had the chance
• Pragmatic Hero: He might mean well, but he's the Head of Research for an organization with some highly questionable practices, not the least of them being keeping Dylan more or less as a prisoner after promising to teach him how to control his powers.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: He relays his Hotline message in the finale in a loud and deliberately enunciated manner, obviously trying to make himself come through clearly, either due to an unstable connection thanks to the Hiss or just from his own unfamiliarity with communicating this way.
• Red Herring: The first half of the game implies that he may have inadvertently been responsible for the Hiss incursion, whether by accident or otherwise. While it's true he was researching the Slide Projector, and largely failed as a father figure and teacher to Dylan, Darling could nevertheless qualify as one of the Big Goods of the game (along with the Board, Ahti, and the missing parautilitarian). The second half of the game reveals that Director Trench had been compromised by the Hiss for some time already, with Darling working feverishly to protect those he could from The Corruption without tipping his hand to Trench; in the end, however, there wasn't enough time to more than distribute a handful of HRAs to those who would take them.
• Scientist Video Journal: Littered throughout the Oldest House are his various Educational Shorts which give lighthearted, quirky exposition of core topics of the Federal Bureau of Control. In videos recorded closer to the main events of Control, the tone becomes increasingly anxious as Darling realizes something horrible is about to happen with his last public log warning faculty to suit up in Hedron Resonance Amplifiers to stay safe. His chronologically final videos were done in private, with him visibly haggard and almost in a trance, but revealing just before the Hiss invasion, he had come into direct contact with Hedron, and shortly thereafter, it pulled him into an alternate plane of reality.
• Significant Double Casting: Matthew Porretta is both Darling's actor but also Alan Wake's voice actor. Initially, this doesn't seem particularly meaningful, just a fun reusing of an actor, but in Alan Wake 2, we learn that Darling has ended up in the Dark Place, and when he hears a recording of Alan, he notes that Alan sounds suspiciously similar to him. Later, he meets Tom the Filmmaker who also notes that Darling sounds familiar, with Darling noting that Tom looks familiar. They then decide to work together. There has been a possibility since the first game that Alan was a creation of Tom the Poet to fight the Dark Presence, and this meeting potentially means that Darling was in on it if it's so.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • We never discover his exact fate, but it's strongly implied based on his exposure to Hedron and him contacting Jesse via Hotline that he disappeared into a different plane of existence. If we interpret his goofy music video found in the Oceanview Motel not as Jesse's imagination, but a direct message from beyond, we can at least infer that wherever he is, he's probably doing just fine. Emily certainly seems to think so, and says that as long as he still has a form that is able to perceive his surroundings, he's probably having the time of his life.
  • Alan Wake II has revealed he's somehow ended up in the Dark Place, and Zane the filmmaker has approached him with an offer of artistic collaboration.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • His insistence on researching the Slide Projector and trying to train Dylan to be the next Director, even after the boy killed someone with his outbursts, almost got the Bureau and everything else destroyed by the Hiss. Played with, however, in that this also lead to the discovery of Hedron, which was the only thing that gave the Bureau, and the world, any chance against the Hiss at all.
  • His lie to Dylan about Jesse being able to come to the FBC anytime she wanted led to Dylan growing to resent and then hate both Jesse and Polaris as more and more time passed, eventually giving himself willingly to the Hiss.
• We Have Reserves: While mostly a Nice Guy who does care about his staff's general wellbeing and morale, his reaction to imminent danger or actual deaths is often quite cavalier. He seems to take it for granted that everyone at the Bureau is well aware they could die at any time, and while genuinely saddened by their loss, believes that their priority must be to carry on, not to stop and mourn.

Emily Pope

Dr. Emily Pope

Appearances: Control

Voiced by: Antonia Bernath

"The work we do here is essential, but unstable."

Dr. Darling's top research specialist and assistant. After Jesse saves her and her team from the Hiss, she becomes the latter's guide into the world of the Federal Bureau of Control.

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• Crazy-Prepared: When Saba mentions normal microscopes are ineffective in studying the Foundation's crystals, Pope reveals she brought one carved from Black Rock as a contingency.
• For Science!: Her character can be summed up as this. She loves running tests, cataloging information, thinking up applications, everything. Even being proven wrong is just part of the process, and she'll immediately switch gears to another theory. A few times she has to quickly Verbal Backspace when gushing about some of the research the FBC has done that Jesse obviously considers immoral.
• Genki Girl: Gets really excited every time Jesse tells her of yet another weird paranatural crap she came across. In fact, despite clearly being affected by the horror the Hiss has wrought on the FBC, she also seems to be having the time of her life.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She's an unfailingly polite, nice and helpful woman with blonde hair.
• Hidden Depths: Pope, despite being a Nice Girl, has a surprising enthusiasm for finding and utilizing combat applications, from a researcher noting how she wants to find a way to weaponize HRAs, to excitedly discussing Black Rock knifes with Jesse, which is even lampshaded by Jesse herself.
  Jesse: Wow. Did not expect that from her.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Give Antonia Bernath a neatly slicked back haircut and she and Emily are all but identical.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Given her general scientific enthusiasm, it was probably inevitable that she would try to find practical applications for even the most horrific paranatural phenomena. However, even Jesse is taken aback when Emily muses about the Hiss' mastery in warping the human form to suit its needs, and how it could possibly be utilized to make unprecedented advances in genetic engineering.
• Locked Out of the Loop: She was unaware of Dylan's existence, the Hedron project, and the slide projector, as Darling viewed those projects as dangerous and kept her away out of concern. Prior to the start of the Hiss invasion Emily was beginning to get irritated with being left out of Darling's secret projects despite him having personally recruited her and promising access to all of his cutting-edge research.
• Mad Scientist: Jesse wonders early on how often the words "mad scientist" get dropped around the Bureau after the first of many of Emily's rapid-fire diatribes on the potential applications for the latest bit of weird science uncovered over the course of the game. These are often combat-related.
• Mission Control: She doesn't guide you over the radio like most examples of this trope do, but she's Jesse's go-to contact person and mission giver for most of the game, as well as her primary source of intel and exposition on the weird world they live in.
• Motor Mouth: Not all the time, but when she gets a hold of a new bit of science or Bureau lore, she's prone to heading off on a tangent on all the possible explanations, connections, applications, solutions, and so on before reining herself back in.
• Ms. Exposition: Done subtly — she's the author of the majority of database entries about the Hiss and numerous other aspects of the FBC, so although she doesn't dump tons of exposition on you verbally, she writes about it instead. Also, being Jesse's most frequent contact person, her dialogue tends to contain a lot of useful intel as well.
• Nice Girl: She strikes up a friendship with Jesse almost immediately and is gregarious and supportive throughout.
• Odd Friendship: With Jesse, although only in the sense (which Jesse points out) that Emily belongs to the organization that kidnapped her brother when they were children. Still, despite being the first person from the bureau aside from Ahti that Jesse meets in person, her and Emily begin to bond almost immediately.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: A requirement to work at the Bureau, which routinely has to develop new fields of science due to the nature of their work.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: While Emily speaks with a neutral American accent, there are times where she pronounces words like someone with a British (or similar) accent would. An example would be the word "research"; sometimes, instead of saying it like "REE-search", she says it like "re-SEARCH".
• Rage Against the Mentor: After finding out the full extent of what Darling was hiding from her, Emily is outraged and upset that he did not include her into the research on the slide projector and Hedron despite the morally questionable and dangerous actions taken in that project, declaring he should have trusted her not to potentially have hang-ups about the morality or fear of the potential danger. Darling actually agrees with her in his final recorded message.
• Rank Up: After the main story wraps up, Jesse promotes her to Head of Research in Darling's stead.
• Workaholic: Emily's entire life is focused on her job at the FBC. When Jesse suggests she might consider taking a vacation after excitedly declaring that it would take her weeks to decode an old document left behind by Theodore Ash, Jr., Emily informs Jesse that her work is her vacation.

Dr. Raya Underhill

Dr. Raya Underhill

Appearances: Control

Voiced by: Charlotte Randle

"This is exactly the Bureau's problem. My work is always interrupted by these, these... superfluous matters!"

An FBC senior researcher. She left several years before the events of the game out of frustration at the Bureau's management, but Dr. Darling calling her with news of a mysterious alien mold infestation brought her right back.

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• Admiring the Abomination: A true scientist, she is fascinated by the opportunity to learn as much as she can about the Mold. She does not stoop to sentiment, however, and tempers this with a certainty that it must be stopped.
  Underhill: That said, the Mold itself appears to be the product of complex micro-organisms. They spin the Mold, building structures like minuscule cities, swiftly colonizing our dimension. And the speed of these tiny engineers relative to their size. Simply staggering!
• Bad Boss: She seems to have a low opinion of the rangers under her command, being completely indifferent to discovering most of them had been infected by Mold, and making a rude remark at the expense of the guards outside her lab.
  Underhill: [While talking about Hosts sneaking past them] There's a reason I didn't send "Steve" and "Andy" to find the Mold source with the others.
• Expert Consultant: She had previously left the Bureau for a life as an academic, but none of the FBC's replacements for her could compare as Threshold researchers. When the Mold outbreak started taking over the lower levels of Research, Darling called to ask her for help, and she Jumped at the Call.
• For Science!: When Darling found out how far the Mold had spread, he wasn't happy and had Marshall immediately send Rangers to contain the mess. Underhill got irritated because they were preventing her from completing her experiments on it.
• Friendly Rivalry: With Dr. Darling. As scientists, they seem to be completely at odds, and Underhill is constantly debating Darling's points and work ethic. However, they still have a strangely close relationship, even believed by Bureau personnel to be a romantic one (and it caused an ethics investigation, too.)
• Hazmat Suit: Underhill wears the standard FBC hazmat suit◊, save for the protective headgear.
• Ignored Expert: A good chunk of FBC staff believed she was greatly overexaggerating the dangers of the Mold, and a few employees believed she was completely wrong about what it was. By the time of the game, she is the only scientist left to handle the problem, and she successfully synthesizes a counter agent for its tantalizing effects.
• Insufferable Genius: If you're not interested in her Mold experiments then you're wasting her precious time. The other extradimensional threat overcoming the Bureau? Incidental!
• Ironic Name: Her first name, Raya, translates to "friend". Of the FBC staff Jesse meets, Dr. Underhill is the coldest and least friendly among them.
• Jumped at the Call: Dr. Underhill had left the Bureau for a life as a university teacher, which she had been living for several years when Darling asked if she'd be willing to help with the Mold. Apparently, she dropped everything she was doing and returned to the Oldest House.
  Underhill: He called me, and I booked a flight. I've never been able to say no to a man with a dangerous alien biosphere.
• Just Think of the Potential!: Very annoyed by Darling's insistence on simply containing and destroying the Mold instead of making use of it. The things it could build!
• Meaningful Name: Underhill — you find her deep below Research, in a part of the Oldest House where the glaring artificiality of the architecture has been overtaken by the rampantly organic growth of the Mold.
• Only Friend: It is implied that Darling was hers, as her personality drives everyone else away and she is so focused on her work. The one time she shows any emotion besides excitement over the Mold or annoyance is when Jesse tells her that Darling likely Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence. Underhill gets very quiet and requests that if Jesse ever manages to make contact with Darling again, that she tell him that Underhill hopes he finally found what he was looking for.
• Phlebotinum Pills: After Jesse finds the five samples of Mold she wanted, she is able to concoct a pill to neutralize the tempting smell and injuring effects of the stronger areas of Mold, like the Pit.
• Pragmatic Hero: She's priggish and cold, seemingly unmoved by the danger to Jesse or the Bureau at large, and shrugs off the deaths of the Rangers sent to protect her and gather samples for her. For all that she thrills at every new discovery about the Mold, however, she is laser-focused on learning more specifically so that it can be fought and contained (and exploited), as she is certain it represents an existential threat to life on Earth.
• Skewed Priorities: After you kill Mold-1, Underhill is immediately annoyed that she never got the chance to study it in person. She's somewhat mollified that Jesse brought back a sample, at least.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Very English, with her posh accent and superficial politeness, and unflappable to the point of coldness.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: Will insist on being called Dr. Underhill whenever Jesse calls her Raya when leaving conversations with her.
• Ungrateful Bitch: After Jesse fights through the entire Threshold for her research, as well as fight Mold-1, she is more concerned about Mold-1 being dead before she studied it than Jesse herself. Even when Jesse gives her the sample she needed from Mold-1, she only briskly instructs Jesse to go find the escaped Mold Hosts remaining in the FBC, without as much as a thank you.
  Jesse: I'll go take care of them.
  Underhill: Good. And do be quick about it.
  Jesse: [Inner Monologue] There's a polite way to say that.

Dr. Theodore Ash, Jr.

Dr. Theodore Ash, Jr.

Appearances: Control (voice only)

Voiced by: Jonathan Harden

"My life's been a strange one. Certainly stranger than I'd like. But this place... it's something else."

An FBC scientist, engineer, and later Head of Research for the FBC, who was sent to study the Foundation in the 60s and chose to stay there even after the rest of the Bureau left. His late father, Theodore Ash, Sr., was the Director before Northmoor.

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• Ancestral Name: He shares his name with his father, the former Director.
• Apocalyptic Log: Subverted; his recordings seem to devolve into this especially after the rest of the Bureau leaves the Foundation and he chooses to stay, but it instead ends on a bright note as he simply chooses to leave the Foundation and rejoin the rest of the FBC.
• Ascended Extra: From a quote on a wall in the Research Sector in the base game, to the narrator of the main audio logs collected during the Foundation DLC.
• Barefoot Loon: Notes in his seventh log that he has started to traverse the Foundation with bare feet, and by then has already started undergoing Sanity Slippage from spending time in the Foundation alone. Given how he also notes that he has been able to see the "veins" of the Foundation he once needed tools for, this may be a mix with Magical Barefooter.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Ash notes how his father was unsupportive of his dream to become a researcher of the "mundane" science, and after Sr. passed, he dedicated one of his greatest achievements, the Power Core, to him, wishing he "scowl in peace!"
• The Engineer: According to Emily he was a gifted engineer, who even managed to build a miniature version of The Nail in his secret laboratory. He is also responsible for all those cubical power cores you use throughout the game, as well as "inventing" the Control Points to stabilize the Oldest House's leylines.
• Hard on Soft Science: He originally focused almost entirely on practical science, which irritated his father, who wanted the more mystical aspects of weird occult Altered Events to be explored. Ash dedicated his power core cubes to his father as an ironic joke. Later, however, spending much time in the Foundation and researching the history of the Oldest House caused him to double back on his beliefs and start erecting primitive Control Point stabilizers out of rock cairns.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Saw himself as one compared to his father, the bold hero of the FBC, while he described himself as a cowardly bookworm.
• Internal Reformist: His reason for leaving the Foundation and rejoining the FBC; as Head of Research, he believed he could use his influence to try and steer the FBC on the right track from inside, away from Northmoor's and the Board's meddling. It's implied he also tried to make sure the FBC would eventually return to the Foundation and find his information on the Board's true nature.
  Ash's Plaque in Research Sector: For who among us has touched the foundations of the world and deemed them solid?
• The Mole: His notes have him communicating with someone named "F" behind the FBC's back, possibly FORMER.
• Odd Friendship: Ash formed a close friendship with several of the Id, a race of sentient statues found deep within the Foundation, even giving several of them names.
• The Resenter: He disliked the idea of Northmoor becoming director, mostly because he thought letting The Board pick directors had all kinds of potential problems but also partly because Northmoor became a self-important asshole who was dismissive of the efforts of his predecessors; they didn't accomplish as much as Northmoor did with the Board's support, but they were at least well-liked and respected for doing the best with what they had.
• Room Full of Crazy: He's responsible for the various cave paintings around the Foundation. Where it gets weird is that the paintings were already there when he first showed up, but the results of his carbon-dating said that they were made after he arrived. Time may be a bit warped in the Foundation.
• Sleep Deprivation: In his third audio log, Ash notes how little sleep he's gotten in the Foundation, and mentions being too tired to listen to Northmoor's inane ramblings about the Oldest House.
• Vindicated by History: The logs and notes you find indicate that Ash was disliked by his contemporaries, with Northmoor even saying he only tolerates him out of respect for his late father. In the present, Emily highly respects his engineering skills, and his power core invention is still widely used, while his father's occultist leaning have been largely discarded for a more scientific approach.
• The Voice: Unlike most story-important characters, Ash has absolutely no physical appearance or representation, with his presence and influence in the Foundation only known through his audio logs and other collectibles.

Dr. Saba

Dr. Saba

Appearances: Control

An FBC researcher who accompanies Emily and the rangers into the Foundation during The Foundation DLC.

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• Asian and Nerdy: Asian and a dedicated researcher for the FBC.
• Flat Character: The only thing we learn about Saba is his name and that he is a Nervous Wreck, and his role in the story amounts to set-dressing.
• Freak Out: After Jesse fixes the four nodes of the Nail and the Foundation begins to be destroyed completely by the Astral Plane, he can be heard freaking out, to which Pope tells him that FBC researchers do not panic.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: As seems to be standard uniform with FBC researchers, Saba is seen wearing a labcoat while examining the depths of the Foundation.
• Number Two: Serves this role for Pope, being the only other scientist to enter the Foundation, and as you can find Pope back in Executive, the only researcher to be there at all times.
• Prematurely Grey-Haired: Seems to be either Older Than They Look or this trope, as despite having a youthful appearance his hair is a noticeable shade of grey. Seeing how his pace of employ is the Oldest House, this isn’t very surprising.

Dr. Tan & Dr. Vaughn

Dr. Hubert Tan & Dr. Carla Vaughn

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: Robert Hedengren (Hubert) & Hannaleena Bensky (Carla)

Dr. Hubert Tan and Dr. Carla Vaughn are two FBC researchers that serve as assistants to Dr. Darling, often seen in the background of his many presentations.

---

• All Love Is Unrequited: Hubert has a fairly obvious infatuation with Carla, awkwardly asking her out through a research correspondence, which Carla either doesn't recognize as such or politely ignores/declines.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Neither of them seem very comfortable with the camera on them, glancing towards it often. The Spare Footage tape is this to its logical extreme, being nothing but a minute of these moments in complete silence.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Downplayed, but according to Tan, Darling "insists" they appear in his presentations without lines or any real purpose for being there, which he finds odd. Otherwise, they seem to hold a positive opinion of him.
• Consummate Professional: Carla appears to be one of these, not holding any strong opinions on Darling, seemingly refusing Hubert asking her out, and attempting to continue a psych eval with a very distressed Dylan.
• The Ghost: Neither of them appear in person during the game, their only traces being through the Darling tapes and several of the collectibles in-game being written by them.
• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Both of them wear these in the Darling presentations.
• Medium Blending: Both of them make their only physical appearances through screens, in the numerous live action Darling presentations.
• Oblivious to Love: Possibly. Carla's response to Hubert's attempt to ask her out is dry and professional, not even acknowledging the tangents he went into regarding his feelings for her. She may be avoiding the subject or they may have all gone over her head.
• Uncertain Doom: Carla may have been killed in Dylan's second case of Power Incontinence, which left, according to Darling, "so many dead." Tan also may have succumbed to the Hiss if he was still alive by the events of the game.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Carla testing Dylan in a psych eval in place of Dr. Darling, and then coldly brushing off his concerned questions causes Dylan to have another case of Power Incontinence, and convince Darling to pull the plug on making him Director.
• Real Men Eat Meat: Based on his date proposal to Carla in the document Hubert: Black Rock Analysis, he seems to enjoy a good steak.
• Secret-Keeper: Both of them were personally picked out by Dr. Darling himself to be a part of Dimensional Research, which some researchers can be heard mentioning they weren't sure existed.
  • Carla was also an important member of the Prime Candidate Program, and more importantly Dylan's existence, which was kept a secret from staff not involved with the project.
• The Quiet One: While they can be seen speaking in some cases, they are usually narrated over by Darling, and even when they aren't, like the Spare Footage tape, most of what they are saying is impossible to hear.
• Take a Third Option: Rather than defending Dr. Darling's videos or agreeing with Tan when he says they're bizarre, she merely says that the video shoots are interesting.
• The Un-Smile: In the middle of Spare Footage, they both give awkward, short-lived smiles into the camera.

Dr. Campbell

Dr. Eugene Campbell

Portrayed by: N/A

Appearances: Alan Wake II

"The trick, I believe, is in the manifestation of the nursery rhymes. Art becoming reality. The doorway being revealed, and perhaps even... someone entering it."

The lead scientist of the FBC's Department of Parafictional Research, studying the reality altering powers of Cauldron Lake by using several nursery rhymes.

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• Asshole Victim: He plans to have Saga transported into the Dark Place via his experiments only for a mysterious force (presumed to be Mr. Door) send him there instead.
• Bad Boss: Two of his field operatives are forced to go into Bright Falls and risk the FBC's secrecy because he doesn't provide them with enough resources at their outpost... by which we mean "one of them was attacked by a wild animal and they needed medical help." His only response to this is to have them both reprimanded for disobeying orders and reassigned to even more remote locations in the woods outside Watery instead.
• The Ghost: Campbell is never encountered in person and only communicates with Saga via radio at the end of the quests.
• History Repeats: Like Dr. Hartman before him, he’s a scientist who conducts experiments on Cauldron Lake in an attempt to exploit its powers, which ends poorly for him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The ritual that sent him into the Dark Place was fully masterminded and initiated by him. Thanks to Door's influence, the final rhyme redirects and takes him instead.
• Laser-Guided Karma: He was rude and condescending to Saga, chastised her for "interfering" with his experiment even though she made it work, and hoped it would send her to The Dark Place. In the end, he got sent to The Dark Place. Saga even calls it out as karma.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The E-mails you can find from him show him as thinking incredibly highly of himself and his scientific expertise while in charge of the Nursery Rhyme project. It quickly becomes apparent he is arrogantly messing with things beyond his understanding, and he ends up in the Dark Place for his trouble.

Operations and Security

Helen Marshall

Helen Marshall

Appearances: ''Control'

Voiced By: Jade Anouka Likeness: Brig Bennett

"You can't save everybody."

Head of the FBC Operations division, and a member of Trench's inner circle. She's universally recognized as one of the biggest badasses in the Bureau, and is responsible for overseeing the teams that deal with paranatural events. Before becoming part of the FBC, Marshall worked as a CIA agent.

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• BFG: She carries around a Lewis machine gun, a WW1-era piece which is very much not designed to be used handheld.
• Cool Old Lady: Pope gushes about her badassery, and she's an older lady still actively shooting folks with the rest of the FBC Operations division.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Her name can be found on a desk in Executive Affairs, long before she's actually mentioned or met. Strangely enough, the nameplate lists her as a secretary, and there's also another nameplate in the same location with a different name.
• Final Boss: The last major enemy in the storyline of the Foundation DLC.
• First-Name Basis: Averted. Jesse actively tries to get Marshall to stop calling her Director and instead call her Jesse, but Marshall (in contrast to the other supervisors) pointedly ignores the request. It's not done out of any kind of malice, but seemingly to hammer home to Jesse that she cannot shake her responsibilities as director.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In the opening CGI when Jesse enters the elevator to reach the Bureau proper, Marshall's face can be seen (mostly blurred and distorted) on an after-action report file. What the file contains is actually legible, but it's pretty much Unreadably Fast Text.
• Good Is Not Nice: She's morally upstanding but, fitting with her tough as nails personality, is not one for politeness or nicety, and expects others to pull their weight. See First-Name Basis above.
• Heroic Sacrifice: She heads into the Foundation with every expectation she won't make it out alive. She survives the bomb she uses to crack the Nail, but then she finds herself being hunted by an Astral Spike most likely sent by the Board. Even then, it's not the Spike that gets her, but the Hiss, who end using her in their continued attempt to corrupt the Nail.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Subverted. Marshall is voiced by a different actress than her model and live-action actor, not unlike Alan Wake.
• Improperly Paranoid: She may or may not be right to be suspicious of the Board but they are against the Hiss destroying the world and their help is necessary to keep the Bureau (as well as the world) from being destroyed. Her destroying the Nail almost does as much damage as Trench letting the Hiss in.
• Killed Off for Real: In Foundation, Jesse sees visions of her much like Director Trench, indicating she's dead. The visions imply she was assassinated by the Board for following Trench's last orders. The last thing she says in her final Hotline vision is a direct address to Jesse, saying "here's your final lesson: you can't save everybody." She's corrupted by the Hiss, but for anyone but potentially Dylan, that's as good as dead, and Jesse has to kill her.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Conceptually, an inversion: this boss is corrupting the load-bearing object keeping two dimensions stable so defeating it is the only way to save the world.
• Mouth of Sauron: She's the only other Hiss corrupted to be able to speak more than just the Hiss incantation (before transitioning into it), implying after being exorcised from Dylan, they've made her their primary host until Jesse kills her.
  Marshall: [corrupted by the Hiss] Soon, you will no longer recognize us or yourself or him or her or them. Family is dead and walls are broken but yellow and red in the eye.
• Nerves of Steel: The first thing Jesse notes about her is how utterly unfazed she is by what's been going on around her.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Tried and ultimately failed. She sets out to blow up the Nail before the Hiss can corrupt it, and with it the Oldest House — and, at the same time, damaging the Board's power base in the FBC. While Marshall does damage the Nail enough to prevent the Hiss from taking it immediately, the Board are onto her, and she ends up being hunted by an Astral Spike which damages her HRA, causing her to be taken by the Hiss herself.
  Marshall: Nothing a little C4 can't fix. Two birds, one bomb.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Marshall thinks blowing up the Nail will prevent the Hiss from getting it and weaken the Board, who she considers to be evil. However, destroying the Nail results in the dimensions starting to merge and will probably destroy the Earth, though she presumably wasn't aware of that at the time.
• Only Sane Woman: She seems to be alone in her suspicions of the Board... and it's implied through her own suspicions that the Astral Spike that "killed" her (leaving her open to corruption by the Hiss) was sent by the Board to hush her up. Subverted with the fact that her suspicions of the Board almost destroy the world.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Marshall dies thinking she'd managed to not only stop the Hiss from taking the Nail, she'd undermined the Board's foothold in the FBC. It turns out while she had slowed the Hiss down, they corrupt her and attempt to use her to corrupt the Nail anyway... and the damage to the Nail seems to give the Board an excuse to have Jesse fix it for them.
  Marshall: Trench made it sound like it'd be the end of the world. He was never one to exaggerate. Well, orders are orders, even if they come from a dead man.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Her mission was to apparently blow up the Nail in the Foundation, to keep the Hiss from corrupting it. Unfortunately that caused the Foundation to start crumbling, breaking the walls between realities, which the Board considered a no-no. An Astral Spike (which she suspects was sent from the Board) attacked her and damaged her HRA, likely as retaliation (and leading to her becoming a Hiss). Jesse repairs the Nail but that lets the Hiss get at it through the now Hiss-ified Marshall, and they nearly vibrate the two dimensions into annihilation. Marshall's entire mission is a kerfuffle of conflicting priorities that accidentally make things worse.
• Sequel Hook: She's mentioned to disappear for days on end, once to the Black Rock Quarry, and disappears two thirds into the game. Her whereabouts are uncovered in the Foundation DLC.
• Shoot the Dog: Jesse is forced to kill her after she's corrupted by the Hiss.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Jesse catches glimpses of her in the Foundation alive, even though the Hotline visions imply she should be dead by now. How much of this is the wonky nature of time in the Foundation versus the present version of Marshall, now corrupted by the Hiss, is left as a mystery.
• Walking Spoiler: Her status as the final boss of the Foundation DLC.
• We Used to Be Friends: She and Trench trusted each other above all others back when they were coming up in the Bureau as field agents. Trench seems to have trusted her as much as anyone in the end — the Hiss corruption seemed to confuse him to the point where he wasn't even speaking with the Board in his final days — but Marshall hadn't liked what Trench was becoming for some years.
  Marshall: In the end, he valued order over people, the advice of invisible voices over that of old friends. He lost sight of who he was. The Board made sure of that.

Lin Salvador

Lin Salvador

Appearances: Control

"It should never have been accessible to low-clearance staff in the first place."

The Head of Security in the FBC and one of the members of Trench's Management Team. While he survived the initial attack by the Hiss, he disappeared when he took a team of rangers to try and contain the rogue Altered Items in the Panopticon.

---

• Benevolent Boss: Arish, his direct subordinate, has nothing but positive things to say about Salvador, and the two would regularly get drinks together after work.
• Changing of the Guard: After his disappearance and death, Arish is given his role in the FBC hierarchy.
• Flunky Boss: Has several Hiss Rangers backing him up.
• King Mook: Corrupted into a powerful Hiss Warped by the time Jesse finds him.
• Manly Facial Hair: He has a thick, white 'stache, and is one of the few people to try to take the fight to the Hiss after the initial invasion.
• Mind over Matter: Like the other Hiss Warped, he can easily pick up and throw large objects at Jesse without physically touching them.
• Orbiting Particle Shield: Creates a powerful shield out of nearby debris which completely protects him from all of Jesse's attacks until broken.
• Only Sane Man: His quote is referencing an incident with the Jukebox Altered Item, when two newer recruits decided to engage in... inappropriate workplace behavior which got them killed. He decided to have it locked up afterwards.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Receives the least screen time of those in Trench's inner circle, with only brief mentions, a mandatory boss fight, and a very slim amount of collectibles referring to him, both before and after death.

Simon Arish

Simon Arish

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: Ronan Summers

"So, to recap: death, disaster, and imminent destruction. Another day at the FBC."

Chief of security for the Maintenance Sector and a former FBC Ranger. He and his crew are found in the NSC Power Plant holding off the Hiss, and once Jesse deals with them, he quickly reasserts control.

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• Badass Adorable: Downplayed compared to Jesse, both in the badass and the adorable, but he's competent enough to manage the defense of the Power Plant, and is a friendly, nice guy with an adorable smile.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: According to a document by Salvador, staying out of the way of and not trying to find a solution for problems, even ones that don't involve him, is difficult for Arish.
  Security Matters: In case you hadn't noticed, something is up between Trench and Darling. I know this isn't your strong suit, but try your best to stay out of it.
• Deadpan Snarker: Arish is never short of a dry remark for any occasion. For example, upon hearing the Name To Run Away From Really Fast Jesse gave the extradimensional virus:
  Arish: The Hiss? That's what we're calling them? That's catchy.
• Drink-Based Characterization: His go-to choice of drink when work gets out is a cold beer. He even laments the Oldest House not having any during the Hiss invasion.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: As he can bring up in a post-game conversation with Jesse, he is a firm believer in this, and finds Research's continuous prodding into the unknown to be Tempting Fate.
  Arish: Look, these things are not toys, and acting like they are is only ever going to end one way.
• A Father to His Men: Unlike most FBC personnel, while he is willing to accept losses, he doesn't brush off any of his agents' deaths and does everything in his power to keep survivors under his care alive.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Seemingly his go-to way of making friends. Him and his old squaddies became friends after a dangerous mission that was initially believed to be a werewolf, and he becomes a friend of Jesse's as a result of them working together to fight off the Hiss.
• Good Is Not Soft: Despite fighting to protect the Bureau, being a firm ally of Jesse's, and being an all-round Nice Guy, he will still gun down former allies who have been corrupted by the Hiss, and barely hesitates in telling Jesse to kill his friends if she sees them.
• Hidden Depths: He's not just a security guard, but was at one point a provisional FBC Ranger who still plays cards with his old unit — or did, before the Hiss got them.
• In Harm's Way: Despite the constant dangers of the Oldest House, he admits that he would simply get too bored with the (relatively) safer option of a desk job.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Arish is modelled after his actor, Ronan Summers.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Arish would regularly share beers after work with his middle-aged boss Salvador, and spends his coffee breaks with Ahti, who at least looks like an older man.
• Last of His Kind: He used to be a Ranger, but transitioned to Security. He's now the last of his old Ranger squad, all others dying to the Hiss during the game.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Based on a comment he can make on Northmoor's file, he doesn't know that the NSC is powered by him, or that he is even still alive.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: In Central Executive, you can overhear him wishing that the Oldest House's emergency rations came with beer, as he's, "Fuckin' thirsty!".
• Nerves of Steel: He's impressively unrattled despite the craziness going on around him, instead keeping a laid-back attitude.
• Nice Guy: Congenial, friendly, respectful (aside from frequent profanity), and tries to help put Jesse at ease.
• Nice to the Waiter: One of his many endearing qualities: he treats the Maintenance teams he's protecting with respect. Even Ahti likes him (respects his elders — makes good coffee).
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Not really remarked upon, but despite Arish being a thoroughly competent security agent and FBC leader, Marshall is considered to be the badass of the upper circle. Later, he's overshadowed by Jesse as well, as she saves the Power Plant and pushes back the Hiss. He resents neither of these.
• Seen It All: Part of the reason he takes the Hiss invasion in stride — his opening mission was thought to be against a werewolf, and he's spent years at the FBC since.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Says "fuck" about once every three sentences or so.
• Stepford Smiler: After Jesse confirms that all of the members of his old squad were infected, he sounds like he’s Trying Not to Cry but still manages to keep up his same light-hearted demeanor until he recovers.
• Story Breadcrumbs: While his story about the werewolf originally seems like a Noodle Incident, the Albany Summary and Albany Supplement documents reveal an after the fact look at the AWE, revealing additional details like the Human Hand Chair being the Altered Item.
• Tragic Keepsake: His silver bullet becomes one over the course of the game, as his ex-squadmates who also carried them all die.
• Working-Class Hero: The hardworking chief of security for Maintenance Sector, who speaks his mind and likes to finish off the day with a cold beer and a plate of wings.
  Arish: You know, everyone thinks that Maintenance is the lowest rung on the ladder just 'cause we fix pipes instead of writing memos, but I gotta be honest, these are the bravest people in the goddamn building.
• You Are in Command Now: With the disappearance and death of his boss, Salvador, he pretty much runs Security, including the Ranger teams while Marshall is elsewhere.

Rupert Wells

Rupert Wells

Appearances: Control

Voiced by: Alex Lanipekun

"I stayed back to help the others. Did a shit job of it, clearly."

An FBC Ranger and medic found trapped within the sealed Threshold of the Containment Sector during the side quest, “A Matter of Time”.

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• Affectionate Nickname: While starting "A Matter of Time", Horowitz refers to him as "Rupe" when assuring Jesse that Wells could "patch [Horowitz] up."
• Badass Normal: A normal FBC ranger who manages to survive both the Anchor and hordes of Hiss with nothing but a gun and his wits and walks away without a scratch.
• Determinator: After witnessing his team get slaughtered by the Anchor and himself only barely escaping with his injured friend, what does he do? Run back in to try and save the others.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A recording featuring him and Horowitz appears in Maintenance, a location you will most likely have visited long before you encounter him in the Containment Sector.
• Escort Mission: The journey to get him back to Horowitz is one of these, though less grating than most examples, as he is invincible and can draw the Hiss away from you.
• Heroic Resolve: Tries his hardest to save his team from a mission gone disastrously wrong, and even when that fails, he moves onto Central Executive to help the injured there.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: He is this with Horowitz, being very close friends who do all their missions together.
• The Medic: His main priority is doing what he can to help his squadmates when their mission goes awry, and despite not saving anyone, still seems to be competent in the role.
• Nice Guy: A (mostly) polite man dedicated to doing his job to the best of his ability.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: He manages to seal away the Anchor, one of the most dangerous Altered Items to escape containment, and survive when the rest of his team dies in the process.
• Overranked Soldier: Downplayed, as how FBC clearance works is not fully revealed, but Wells, a field medic, apparently has Level 9 Clearance. (To compare, most locked doors in the FBC have a clearance level of 1 to 6.)
• Sole Survivor: The rest of his team end up killed by the Anchor or, in Horowitz’s case, infected by the Hiss.
• Troll: He and Horowitz make up a story about a Mermaid with an alluring song in the Quarry after exploring it, seemingly only to get a reaction out of the person asking them.

Kevin Horowitz

Kevin Horowitz

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: Nathan Wiley

"We followed the Altered Item inside, but the way it was acting... we weren’t ready."

A Ranger found injured in the Containment Sector after the Anchor slaughtered his team. He gives Jesse the quest, "A Matter Of Time", to find and save the medic Wells within the Sealed Threshold.

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• Almost Dead Guy: Jesse finds him this way, but goes to find the medic Wells to defy this trope and save him. Unfortunately, this is played straight, and he is infected by the Hiss.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: When you return to him, you find him corrupted into a Hiss soldier because of a damaged HRA.
• Early-Bird Cameo: You find a recording of him and Wells in Maintenance, which you will have most likely visited long before you ever enter Containment.
• Elite Mooks: He has much more health than the standard Hiss Ranger, but otherwise is just like any other Hiss Mook.
• Flunky Boss: A horde of Hiss show up to assist him against Jesse and Wells.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: He is this with Wells, being close friends who do all their missions together.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Sitting on the ground, barely keeping himself supported with his gun, the floor beneath him covered with his own blood, he is asked what happened to him by Jesse. His answer?
  Horowitz: Got into a little scrap.
• Insistent Terminology: Insists a (made-up) mermaid he and Wells found in the Quarry was enchanting in beauty, instead of alluring.
• Last-Name Basis: Other than the Expedition Debrief recording, where he is asked to state his full name, he is only known as, up to only introducing himself as, Horowitz.
• Mercy Kill: Once he is infected by the Hiss, Wells and Jesse understand there is nothing more to be done and finish him off.
• Obviously Not Fine: As Jesse worries about whether or not he'll survive his wounds, he tells her this, while lying in a pool of his own blood and groaning:
  Horowitz: Don't look at me like that. I'm fine.
• Overcome with Desire: During Wells' story about the mermaid in the Expedition Debrief recording, he describes Horowitz as this trope word for word when he saw the mermaid singing.
  Wells: Yeah, the mermaid. Horowitz here found this mermaid in the Quarry, just sitting on some Black Rock. She was singing this beautiful song and he was overcome with desire.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Wells and Horowitz barely manage to escape with their lives when the anchor attacks, but Wells goes back to try and save the others, leaving the wounded Horowitz alone. Not only does Wells not save anyone else, Horowitz is corrupted by the Hiss, leaving Wells the Sole Survivor.

Lopez

Captain Lopez

Appearances: Control

"Squad Captain Lopez, reporting on expedition 17-B. At the Formation now. Visually, no distinction from the previous visit."

A Ranger squad captain sent with her team to scout out the unmapped Quarry Site Beta within the Jukebox Object of Power, which they have not returned from. Discovering her fate is the subject of the "Put a Record On" side-quest.

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• Apocalyptic Log: Her second recording is a textbook example of this trope, recounting breathlessly how "they" (the Hiss) killed her team, before warning anyone else to stay away as the recording cuts out just as she is implied to be killed.
• Badass Bookworm: Lopez joins a book club within the FBC, and seems relatively well-versed in literature, even pointing out some common tropes of the Young Adult Literature genre.
• Defiant to the End: Lopez, alone against an overwhelming horde of Hiss soldiers, goes down firing as she gives a final warning to anyone who goes looking for her.
• Foreshadowing: An In-Universe example: The book she reads for her book club, Unless You has the main character dying "out in the unknown, alone and surrounded by danger, but never loses sight of her goal". She refers to this "soldier's" death as a highlight of the book and would end up dying identically: out in the unknown of the unmapped Quarry site, the rest of her team dead and transformed into Hiss, but still gives a final warning for anyone who finds her message, her final goal before dying.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Hiss become this to her uninformed and unprepared team, appearing out of thin air and quickly infecting and massacring her and her squad.
• Profane Last Words:
  Lopez: No! Stay the fuck away!
• Recycled Script: invoked Lopez's logs were originally found in place of Ramsay's logs in the Pit, but were taken out and inserted into Quarry Site Beta in the Expeditions DLC.
• Young Adult Literature: The book Unless You appears to her as one of these novels, with her noting the clichés of being in a Dystopia and the protagonists falling in love over the course of their journey together. She gives it an average review, saying she doesn't get the "teenage angst", but says her niece would like it.

Ramsay

Captain Ramsay

Appearances: Control

"Underhill sent us down this weird-ass Threshold, looking for whatever's making all these vegetables sprout. I will say this, um... it smells delicious."

A Ranger captain whose team was deployed by Dr. Underhill to examine the Pit, an area located within the depths of the Research Sector infested with the Mold.

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• Amazing Technicolor Population: Casually mentions in his second audio log that consuming the Mold has turned a fellow Ranger's skin a shade of green.
• Apocalyptic Log: Ramsay's logs begin with him and his team entering the depths of the Pit, unsure of what to expect, and the final log ends with them all completely enthralled by the Mold.
• Body Horror: Ramsay's consumption of the Mold first turns his skin green, then causes fungal growths to emerge from his body, distorting him and the rest of his team into only vaguely human husks.◊
• Death by Gluttony: A sympathetic example in his final recording, where he can be heard vigorously devouring Mold, all the while rambling about needing to eat more. What makes it sympathetic is how he literally cannot stop eating it, and what a horrible fate will soon await him.
• Dissonant Serenity: As he becomes more and more infected, his inflection becomes gradually cheerier and begins laughing much more, even as the Mold begins to very obviously affect his squadmates.
• Delicious Distraction: Even before the Mold begins to infect him, he notes how delicious the Mold smells, and takes it in stride when one of his teammates, Ollie, eventually eats some of it.
• Midseason Replacement: A video game example. In the free Expeditions DLC, the second of four, his logs are added to replace those of captain Lopez, whose audio was reused in Quarry Site Beta.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Ramsay's death reinforces just how dangerous the Mold can be, quickly infecting, killing, and bringing an entire squad of unprepared Rangers under its thrall.
• Too Dumb to Live: Ramsay is sent to examine an extraterrestrial fungus infesting the lowest depths of the Research Sector, but quickly succumbs to the Mold when first either Ramsay himself, Ollie, or another Ranger eats it, because it smells delicious.

Kiran Estevez (Unmarked spoilers for Alan Wake II)

Agent Kiran Estevez

"Eavesdropping is a big part of the job."

Appearances: Control ^note Mentioned only | Alan Wake II

Portrayed by: Janina Gavankar

"A whole lot of paranatural crimes happening right now. But it's fucking awesome!"

A field agent of the FBC's Investigations Department, stationed in Bright Falls, who leads the backup that Casey calls to Bright Falls in Alan Wake II.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Per Alan Wake's writings in Alan Wake II, Estevez has been taking on the hard role of leading her division without any guidance from HQ, meaning no reinforcements and no logistics. The Hiss have presumably been purged from the Oldest House four years after the events of Control, but Estevez was established to have been outside of the Oldest House in Control, meaning it's not clear if she's been appraised on the situation there. All we know as of Alan Wake 2 is that "the Oldest House has gone dark," left unspecified if this is still the Hiss threat... or something else.
• Badass Longcoat: Wears a sleek black coat over her field uniform that reaches down to her thighs, and is a federal agent experienced in dealing with paranatural happenings and AWEs at ground zero.
• Badass Normal: An entirely normal human, who is also a competent and long-serving FBC agent who survived run-ins with the Taken.
• Big Damn Heroes: She and a squad of FBC agents rappel down from a helicopter to save Alan from the Cult of the Tree... right before taking him into custody.
• Call-Back: Her official render for Alan Wake II has her lit in a red hue similar to the Hiss's light, but she's not actually affected by it.
• Commonality Connection: She and Casey are divorced with their respective ex-wives, something they both bonded over.
• Cowboy Cop: The FBC equivalent. She notes several times the way she is handling the situation at Bright Falls is far from official protocol and highly risky. However, she is reasonable enough to recognize saving the world from "the worst AWE since Eagle River" is more important than mindlessly following training.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Prior to her proper introduction in Alan Wake II, she is mentioned by Langston in the ending of the AWE DLC, and features in several documents throughout the Investigations Department.
• Fire-Forged Friends: She and Casey put their differences as members of different government agencies aside and become fast friends after fighting off Taken at the Sheriff Station together. She also develops a similar rapport with Saga after just a short while.
• First-Name Basis: Might be the only person to address Casey by his first name.
• Ink-Suit Actor: And yet oddly for a Remedy game, she doesn't make a live action appearance.
• Insistent Terminology: Never deviates from exclusively using approved Bureau terminology in conversation, no matter how odd it makes it sound her to those not associated with the FBC.
• The Leader: She's the head agent of the Lake House, and is currently the head authority of the agents stationed in Bright Falls, as the Oldest House is still under a lockdown from the Hiss.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Due to the Oldest House's lockdown severing connection between the FBC agents within and the various field agents, she is unaware of the cause of the crisis and the threat of extinction the Bureau faced.
• Meaningful Name: "Kiran" translates to "Beam of light", and during the climatic ritual at Cauldron Lake, she supports Saga by shooting the approaching Taken horde, and later Scratch himself, with a spotlight from a distance.
• Not So Above It All: She quickly becomes interested with the Old Gods of Asgard during their performance and requests for a t-shirt of them.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Zig-Zagged. At first, she comes in and swipes the case from under Saga's nose, and Saga doesn't trust her as far as she can throw her. However, in the Endgame, she agrees to help Saga, participating in the Old Gods of Asgard concert/ritual by training beams of light on the Taken coming out of Cauldron Lake and coordinating supply drops to help Saga. She also lets the fact that Saga is committing "a whole lot of paranatural crimes" slide.
• Sole Survivor: By the events of the game, only a small team of FBC operatives are left in Bright Falls and their main research station has been overrun. Another Taken assault as they try to regroup in the Sheriff Station results in the death of almost everyone else left but her (though, evidently they still have a few off-screen personnel, such as the helicopter pilot who transported Estevez to the Cauldron Lake summoning).
• Straight Gay: Shows no obvious stereotypes but mentions an ex-wife in conversation with Saga and Casey.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: As a Reasonable Authority Figure who steadily learns to trust the hero more from their first suspicions and becomes a companion in the endgame, she takes a very similar role to the absent Sarah Breaker from the Alan Wake.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: She openly tells Alan she doesn't have a lot of faith in his ability to fix the AWE, but acknowledges him as the best chance they left to save the town, and assists by giving him weaponry and directions.
• Twofer Token Minority: A woman of color (suggested to be half-Indian, half-Spanish by her name^note As well, her actress, who she is directly modeled off, is of Indian-Dutch descent) who is also a lesbian.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: While no fault of her own, she led the capture and imprisonment of the Taken Hartman. This would spiral into Hartman escaping, destroying the Investigations Sector, and eventually becoming a threat to the entire FBC by the time the Hiss invaded.
• Walking Spoiler: Her existence spoils the fact that the FBC crashes the plot of Alan Wake II.
• Workaholic: Unlike Casey, who's dialogue suggests he and his wife simply grew to hate each other, she notes her dedication to FBC, and the constant travel and life-threatening situations this led to, developed a rift between them they couldn't work around.

Other Divisions

Alberto Tommasi

Alberto Tommasi

Appearances: Control

"Well done, everyone. It was a strong campaign and perfectly executed."

Head of FBC Communications, and a member of Trench's inner circle. His keycard is needed for Jesse to access the Hotline, which makes it rather unfortunate that he's become a rather powerful infectee of the Hiss.

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• Flight: After being corrupted by the Hiss, he constantly flies around while throwing things at Jesse.
• Jerkass: Downplayed, but he was certainly callous back when he was alive. The recording of him you find after his first boss fight has him chuckling about how much easier on them it was that an Altered Item turned up in a US embassy (an Altered Item, mind you, which created a sonic wave that severely injured multiple staffers), before snapping at whoever was recording.
• Large-Ham Announcer: Is unique amongst the Hiss-corrupted for taking to the FBC's internal broadcast system to loudly, and fervently, shout the Hiss incantation. This can be heard all throughout the Executive Sector before Tommasi gets kicked out of the Mail Room.
• Mood-Swinger: Correspondence in his division shows he was as generous and genuine in praising his employees as he was quick to anger when they screwed up.
• Optional Boss: Ends up as one that you can re-fight later on, following his mandatory boss fight.
• Posthumous Character: One of the first named Hiss Jesse encounters, he is effectively dead before Jesse arrives at the Bureau, and as such your only experience of the person he used to be is through memoranda and the tape recording in the mail room.
• Too Dumb to Live: Made a point not to put on an HRA, mostly because he disliked Darling. Unsurprisingly, he succumbs to the Hiss.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: His mandatory boss fight is a mixture of this and Early-Bird Boss; although the arena where you fight him has many cover spots where you can easily shoot him, his telekinetic attack can two-shot you and has two recharges, effectively meaning that it can near-instantly kill you if you go out in the open to attack him. Couple that with the fact it gets helped by Hiss Barriers every now and again, and the fact that it's immune to your own telekinetic ability by virtue of being a Hiss Elevated, and you have one hell of a boss battle early on. Luckily for you, you don't need to fully deplete his health bar to defeat him.

Frederick Langston

Frederick Langston

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: Derek Hagen

"It's not superstition if it works."

Supervisor of the Panopticon, the prison housing the FBC collection of Altered Items and Objects of Power. He'd much rather be at home than locked down in the Bureau, but he's got a job to do.

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• All Therapists Are Muggles: Zig-Zagged. He gave up his standard therapist both because he was unable to tell her the root of his issues, and because he realized that not All Psychology Is Freudian. The FBC also offered their own trained psychologist, but he turned that one down because he figured what he said would be kept documented against his will.
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat: He comes across as this. He is well aware of the dangers of the Altered Items but does not have the time to secure them all. After some escape, he has to rely on Jesse to round them up. In his defense, they were currently under a lockdown and Langston had already lost many personnel to the Hiss. He simply didn't have personnel to spare.
• Butt-Monkey: The two Rangers with him treat him as one, constantly speaking in a Machine Monotone to annoy him. Somehow, they have a higher clearance than him, and they love reminding him of that fact.
• Classical Music Is Cool: He has been a big fan of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" since he was young, as it was his starring moment playing the tuba in the school band. Even the first thing you hear from him in the Panopticon is Langston humming operatic music to himself.
• Companion Cube: Views most of the Altered Items as this, arguing for more humane treatment of them, and occasionally talking to the "behaving" items with Baby Talk.
• Declining Promotion: Jesse offers him to run the Investigations Sector after she got rid of Hartman. Langston, being Genre Savvy about what happens to Supervisors within the FBC, turns it down.
• Dodgy Toupee: Langston has a comb over that does nothing to hide his baldness.
• Fanboy: Of the Alex Casey novels. He's quite upset that the Hiss invasion made him miss the opening of the latest film adaptation, The Sudden Stop.
• First-Name Basis: Subverted. When Jesse finishes talking to him for the first time, he insists he be called Fred instead of Langston. Jesse then proceeds to immediately ignore him and never refer to him as this.
  Langston: Here, I'll get the door for you. And please, ma'am, call me Fred.
  Jesse: Thanks, Langston.
• Get Out!: In the Langston Interrogation tape, Langston's interrogator says this ad verbatim when he asks for his confiscated book back after being let off with a warning and an Implied Death Threat.
• Giftedly Bad: You can find two tapes of freestyle poetry by Langston in the Investigations Sector in AWE, left there by accident when the sector was blocked off. Both are completely nonsensical and vaguely disturbing, but are said with conviction and looked upon fondly by Langston, who simply calls them "ahead of [their] time" and indicates he's still making more.
  Langston: Think My Bleeding Clock meets Sylvia Plath.
  Jesse: I am so curious, yet so concerned.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Averted. He has a nasty-looking scar on his upper lip which would normally imply either badassery or the possibility of turning traitor, but he's just an overseer for the Panopticon and his loyalties are never in question.
  • Given that his voice actor had a cleft palate repair his upper lip scar presumably has a similar origin.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Langston explicitly reveals that he is a fan of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in AWE, and even named a cat after him. Combine this with his expressed beliefs about how Altered Items should be treated, and the Tennyson report about reforming the FBC and returning to esoteric times — complete with quotation of Tennyson's poetry — suddenly doesn't seem so mysterious anymore.
  • For such an anti-social person, he shows an interest in hosting an Educational Short centered around the Panopticon now that Darling won't be making any more.
• Hypocrite: During his long-winded ramble in Investigations, he assures Jesse he, "keeps his nose to the grind," while others spread rumours, but in an interrogation log, he quickly brings up how "Dave Gleeson and his crew" were talking to Fra for their own amusement.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: At the end of his rant in AWE, he gives one of these excuses after he gets uncomfortable from calling his cat before Alfred, Sylvia, an asshole.
  Langston: Hey! There's a light flashing on the console here. I gotta, uh, check this out. I'll get back to you later.
  Jesse: Real smooth, Langston.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Downplayed. He looks vaguely like a less attractive version of Derek Hagen, but he has a distinctive scar across his upper lip to match Hagen's.
• Internal Reformist: Implied to be the writer of the Tennyson report, in which he calls for reform in the FBC and a return to more traditional, less scientific times, and even calls out Trench and Darling directly. He seems to have wisely kept himself anonymous given Trench's manhunt for the writer afterwards.
• LOL, 69: Inappropriately amused by an altered item going missing from cell 69.
• Metaphorgotten: When asked to differentiate between Objects of Power and Altered Items, he does manage to make a decent one comparing the O.o.P.s to hurricanes. He immediately ruins it by comparing Altered Items to "weird thunderstorms" that are now raining knives due to the Hiss' influence. Jesse quickly lampshades this.
  Jesse: [Internal Monologue] Nice metaphor.
• Motor Mouth: He has a tendency to ramble. Not as noticeable in the main game (though Jesse does frequently cut him off), but while acting as Mission Control over the one-way PA in AWE, he starts chatting about his personal life at length. His musings suggest he's slightly lonely, with his closest friends seeming to be his pampered cat and an elderly neighbor.
  Langston: Ever since I got put in charge of the Panopticon, people treat me different. Like I'm 'crazy' for wanting to work with Altered Items. People just don't understand the Altered Items like I do, you know? I don't want to brag, but it does take a very empathetic mind to connect with the Items.
• Moving the Goalposts: After Jesse recaptures the escaped Altered Items from the Langston's Runaways quest, she returns, content to have found them all. Langston then sheepishly brings out a second list for her.
• Named After Someone Famous: A habit of his is to name his cats after poets. He talks about being a fan of both Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Sylvia Plath, and his two cats happen to be named Alfred and Sylvia.
• Nepotism: Downplayed example. He learned about the FBC at all (and therefore was able to get his job) thanks to his uncle. But he started at an explicitly entry-level position and through sheer luck (surviving breaches) and over ten years of steady work "climbed" his way to supervisor, where he's okay at the job and has picked up a knack for calming down the various supernatural objects.
• No-Respect Guy: How he views himself. He comments that he is The Un-Favourite and that while the Director meets with other supervisors, Langston is passed over. Of course, the previous Director did tell him to keep up the good work with what Langston was currently overseeing. It is more so Langston wants to be involved with the higher security details and not Locked Out of the Loop.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction when he's told he forgot to send a replacement for Agent Phillip Philson, who has been staring at the Arctic Queen for more than 24 hours straight since the Hiss invaded. He defends himself by noting he's been rather busy with all the other emergencies under his purview.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: In the habit of saying awkward things. Occasionally he even catches himself.
  Langston: [as Jesse goes after the Third Thing] Okay, well, uh...break a leg!...Oh, why did I say that?
• Serendipitous Survival: According to his second rant in AWE, Langston used to work in Investigations and was saved from the massacre caused by Shaded Hartman by the simple fact that he didn't like the potato chips from the vending machines in Investigations, so he habitually visited the ones in Executive instead and was conveniently doing so when Hartman broke containment.
• Signed Up for the Dental: The better healthcare hooked him on the job. Otherwise, he'd be working for the Post Office. He checked.
• Sympathy for the Devil: One of the memos Jesse finds is a proposal from Langston to stop treating the Altered Items as prisoners, despite some of them being fairly murderous. He instead argues that a degree of ritual worship, like making art featuring them, would placate them so they do not feel mistreated and stop acting out.
  • Brought up again in AWE, where Langston claims (in part of a much longer ramble) that his skill at handling Altered Items comes from being able to empathize with them and understand how they think.
• Trademark Favourite Food: He loves potato chips, but only the "thick, ruffled" kind. He certainly isn't a fan of the thin chips the Oldest House sells, as they have no texture.
  Langston: I may as well eat cardboard.
• Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization: Langston, who is awkward, introverted, and slightly messy, has a rumpled collar and a tie that is noticeably askew, which despite the HRA attached to his chest, can be neat and straight, as Arish shows.

"Ahti"

Ahti

Appearances: Control | Alan Wake II

Portrayed by: Martti Suosalo

"Jahaa, jaa-a, you think there's a dog buried in this? I can tell you are not yesterday's grouse's son. That's why you'll make a great assistant."

The Bureau's janitor, and the first person Jesse meets in the FBC. While initially he seems like nothing more than an oddball Finn, it quickly becomes clear that there's a lot more to Ahti than he lets on.

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• Almighty Janitor: Ahti is freely walking around during lockdown, unarmed and not wearing an HRA in the middle of the Hiss incursion. He also seems to summon the elevator that gets Jesse into the Executive Sector, which then disappears. It's clear to Jesse that there's more to him than meets the eye right from the start. He knows secrets about the Bureau that not even the higher ups are aware of, suggests to Jesse that she works for him as his assistant even after he knows full well she's the new Director, and even has access to some of the more top-secret areas... like the rune-inscribed Foundation, where the game implies but never confirms he might be some manner of Finnish hero/deity. He says himself that he's friends with Tor and Odin Anderson of the Old Gods of Asgard from Alan Wake (something confirmed in Alan Wake II, where he evidently stays at the same nursing home as the two), who are likewise never quite confirmed to be the actual Norse gods Odin and Thor. It is worth noting that the Finnish word for "janitor", talonmies, translates literally to "man of the house".
• Ambiguously Human: It's left very unclear whether Ahti is a resonance entity like the Hiss or the Board that's far better at passing as human or a very powerful, very old, very eccentric Parautilitarian.
• Arch-Enemy: The Clog is Ahti’s, being one of the few threats to the Oldest House he takes seriously, up to calling it his "old enemy" when Jesse discovers it infesting the pipes in Maintenance.
• Beautiful Singing Voice: Both Theodore Ash, Jr. and Parakinesiology Chief Lewis note that Ahti’s singing voice is very nice. The player can hear for themselves in Alan Wake II.
• Benevolent Abomination: Ahti might look human, but it's pretty clear that there is something off about him. With that said, he's an otherwise benevolent figure who is nothing but helpful (in his own cryptic way) to Jesse.
• Benevolent Boss: Greets Jesse by claiming that she'll work for him, which turns out to not be far from the truth. He's also respectful, encouraging, and praises Jesse for seeing through his own little fibs, like when he tells her that her task to keep the NSC from exploding will be a simple job.
• Berserk Button: The Clog! According to staff notes, the normally calm and unflappable Ahti is reduced to ranting and swearing at it whenever he sees it. His side quest to push it back a second time is noticely more enthusiastic than his other requests.
• Big Good: He's one of the Greater Scope Paragons of the game, providing Jessie with the necessary tools to succeed in her fight against the Hiss while also offering sage advice on how she can succeed as the new Director.
  • Serves this role again during the events of Alan Wake II — all the other paranatural forces that Alan and Saga encounter are some combination of sketchy or incompetent, the FBC included, but all of Ahti's appearances end up benefiting them in some way.
• Bilingual Bonus: He frequently switches from English to Finnish mid-sentence.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Much of his dialogue is Finnish idioms translated literally into English, with bizarre results.
  Ahti: You better go now, or you won't have to run with your head as your third leg.
• Brown Note Being: An attempt by the FBC to record Ahti's daily routine resulted in the creation of an Altered Item. The footage, which simply shows him dancing around, compels everyone who sees it to mindlessly watch and can not be turned off. The higher-ups eventually decided to throw the TV into the deepest hole they could find, which results in it being lost in the depths of the Foundation until Jesse finds it in the eponymous expansion.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Nearly all of Ahti's dialogue can sound like complete gibberish. This is lampshaded by many documents found in the Bureau.
  "Clog Complaint" Memo: And why the hell does Ahti keep yelling nonsense at [The Clog]? He acts like it can understand him. Of course, he acts like we can understand him, too. Guess that's just his brand of crazy.
• Commonality Connection: Jesse bonds with Ahti pretty much immediately over having held the same underappreciated job.
  Jesse: [narrating] I've done enough nightshift loner jobs to know it makes us come off weird. Ahti the janitor is a friendly face in my book.
• Creepy Good: While Jesse rationalizes that coming off as creepy is inherent in odd-jobs like clean-up, there's something definitely off about Ahti even as you familiarize yourself with the various oddities and hostile obstacles of the Oldest House. This doesn't stop him from being an overall benevolent figure in Jesse's journey.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ahti is often salty and barely emotes when he speaks. His reaction to learning Jesse passed her "interview" is a dry "jippii, saatana," which roughly translates to "congratu-fucking-lations."
• Elemental Motifs: With water, representing cleaniness, purity and mystery. He shares the same name (and implied to be) with a Finnish god of water, he is usually seen mopping the floor and near a body of water. In Alan Wake II, he is first seen in the town of Watery, and at the climax before he lets Alan back into the Dark Place, he acknowledges how he shares this water-symbolism with the Dark Place. This establishes Ahti as the Good Counterpart of the Dark Presence, which uses the negative aspects of water.
  Ahti: I'll come to wash the floor of [Alan's] room next. All you need is water and Vileda. Water is the oldest balm. Water finds its way. What water brings, it takes away. It can be clean or dirty, it can give life or drown it.
• Establishing Character Moment: Ahti is introduced mopping in the empty entrance level of the Oldest House. He claims that Jesse is there for the job of "janitor's assistant", points her to the elevator that wasn't there before (having originally been a portrait of him from the back) and responds to her inner monologue as though she said it out loud. This establishes him as blatantly supernatural and a little creepy, but an otherwise helpful individual with bigger pull in this setting than being a janitor would imply.
• Helpful Hallucination: In "Take Control", he's the only member of the imaginary bureau staff that's on Jesse's side, advising on her to break through the Hiss's illusions. It's not certain if this was just Jesse's subconscious, or if Ahti can literally project himself into human minds.
• Hidden Depths: He's an ethusiastic music lover. On top of having a fantastic singing voice, he gives Jesse a cassette containing "Take Control" to help her get through the Ash Tray Maze.
• Inexplicably Awesome: He starts out eccentric enough, but over time you learn "eccentric" doesn't cover half of it. He's unaffected by the Hiss despite lacking any kind of protection. He comes and goes as he pleases throughout the Oldest House, regardless of hazards or security protocols. He can hear Jesse's internal monologue and reply to it, though she's too thrown by his odd behavior to notice it initially. Oh, and he's implied to be friends with the Old Gods of Asgard, which has a number of confusing implications when you consider that he shares his name with a Finnish sea god. Nobody knows what his deal is, and by the end of the game, you still won't, as he seemingly disappears.
  • The Foundation DLC adds some more confusion to the mix. For some reason, him being recorded by the Bureau somehow created an Altered Item, something that the Bureau is unnerved by. In addition, he apparently just appeared in The Foundation one day, and knew how to make his way around the cave system before any of the Bureau members did.
    • Another layer to the detail of the Altered Item is how, despite being described as pausing movement through pausing thought, it can stop Astral Copies, creatures that have no sentience and if not following the will of supernatural entities, blindly attack anything in their way.
  • The AWE DLC shows that he is fully aware of the Dark Presence, and somehow manages to post some "janitor's assistant" missions for you in the completely sealed-off Investigations Sector, in a room you had already been in before where there were no missions posted the first time you were there, while he's on vacation. The "Burn the Dark" mission has him imply that he knows Cynthia Weaver as well, or at least knows of her.
    Ahti: Darkness everywhere. "New day, same old bloody shit," said the old lady.
  • Ahti appears in Alan Wake II, as one of the elderly the Valhalla nursing home takes care of (specifically, Saga first finds him singing at a bar in Watery during one of their outdoor trips), which should explain how he knows the Anderson brothers and Cynthia, and isn't too suspicious ...but then he shows up in Alan's sections, within the Dark Place, doing his janitorial duties in the talk show studio Alan finds himself in at the start of each Initiation chapter without so much as a bother and long before Saga comes across him. He appears behind Saga to give her a warning against opening a door marked with a certain spiral symbol in the nursing home with no warning. Then there's how swapping between Saga and Alan requires finding the Janitor's Break Room...
• Inconspicuous Immortal: He's some sort of immortal being, perhaps even a Finnish god; according to notes, he's been working at the Oldest House since it was discovered back in the 1960s, though nobody can remember actually hiring him, and nobody in the present has noticed that he doesn't appear to have aged in the last fifty-odd years. To most of the staff, he's just a jovial old geezer with a rather eccentric speech pattern, and he only uses his baffling array of powers to aid in his job of cleaning the building... up until he decides he wants a holiday, of course.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Ahti looks like an older version of his actor, Martti Suosalo.
• Meaningful Name: Shares his name with a Finnish sea god. Considering his unexplained powers and some dialogue by Darling and Trench at the end of the game, he may not be sharing anything and may actually be the god.
• Metaphorgotten: A lot of his dialogue are made up of old Finnish sayings that don't translate or make much sense when translated into English.
  Ahti: (Jumalauta), that held you close, Tom. (Ei muuta kun) onwards, said the granny in the snow. When the panic is biggest, the help is also near.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • One of the notes you collect is about how baffled some of the agents are with how Ahti is able to get into places that should have been impossible, such as through the Ashtray Maze. Jesse has a simpler explanation: "The janitor always has the keys."
  • The Valhalla Nursing Home has a door with the spiral pattern of the Writer's Room on it. If Saga attempts to open it, Ahti will suddenly be right behind her to warn her away.
• Odd Friendship: He seems to be much fonder of Jesse than any of the previous Directors. Implied to be because, the unlike the rest of the Bureau, she's willing to look past his quirks, isn't as domineering over the paranatural as with Northmoor and Trench, and she genuinely appreciates his help.
• Older Than He Looks: Not that he looks young, but he's noted to have not physically aged a day since he was first encountered by the FBC in the 60s, which was almost sixty years before the game takes place.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Normally, Ahti always is calm and collected and ready to offer a word of advice, even if his advice is generally given in butchered Finnish-to-English metaphor. Upon meeting the right conditions though in Alan Wake II, Saga can find Ahti in his room at the Valhalla Nursing Home in a state of agitation and fear, seeming confused and uncertain about where he is and scared about something that is coming.
• Phrase Catcher: Both Jesse and Alan comment on how he is "a friendly face" shortly after meeting him for the first time.
• Rule of Symbolism: Near the end of the game Jesse finds Ahti in an unmapped location of the Oldest House. Jesse sees visions of a forest and waves as if she is near an ocean shore line. Ahti appears to her as if he is coming out of the waves. This lends credence that Ahti is connected to (or is) the Finnish sea god. One document found in The Foundation says "Cleanliness is next to Godliness", and Ahti is a janitor...
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: He talks a lot about his upcoming vacation and how he's not going to delay it. Halfway through the game he disappears from his office in the basement, so he wasn't kidding around. Jesse finds him in the Foundation, surrounded by visions of forests and coasts of Finland.
• Serious Business: When Jesse has to find him while he's on "vacation," he says "Hey, girl. For a Finn, holiday is holy, perkele!"
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Most of his Finnish lines contain at least one "perkele"^note For non-Finnish speakers, it means "devil", and was originally the name of a Finnish pagan deity, but it's used in the same context as "fuck" or "shit" somewhere.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: He and the Clog have this dynamic, as despite everything going to absolute hell around them the Clog is still trying to sneak in and infuriating Ahti in the process as if it's just another day at the FBC.
• So Proud of You: After witnessing Jesse breaking free of the Hiss, he chuckles warmly and remarks that he knew he chose a good assistant.
• Telepathy: Implied to be one of his powers, as he can hear Jesse's internal monologue and respond to it.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Some higher-ups at the FBC know something is up with Ahti, but they don't want to poke this particular bear. The one time they tried surreptitiously taking some camera footage of him, the footage itself became an Altered Item. When the VHS tape was put into a TV, it became permanently stuck inside, and the TV started playing the footage continuously on a loop, even when not plugged in. It mesmerizes anyone who looks at it, and even keeping it locked in a box isn't safe since just being near it makes people have the uncontrollable urge to open up the box so they can look at it.
• Threshold Guardians: In Alan Wake II, he has his own room in the Valhalla Nursing Home in Watery, and it's implied that he's there strictly to keep people away from a locked door that leads to the Dark Place, something he unlocks for Alan at the climax to rewrite the ending to Scratch's horror story.
  Ahti: Getting in is forbidden, for your own safety. Time is long for those who wait. But in the end, stand the thanks.
  • In Alan Wake II, Saga's story in the "real" world and Alan's story in the Dark Place can be switched between using puddles of water next to Janitor's Buckets in the Break Rooms... and all Break Rooms with a Janitor's Bucket also have some additional features: an instrumental version of Ahti's song "Yötön Yö" playing on the radio, and a poster of "Ahti and the Janitors," the band with Ahti featured in "Zane's" film of the same name. The implication is that Ahti is able to set up doorways between our reality and the Dark Place.

William Kirklund

William Kirklund

Appearances: Night Springs | Control

The former Head of Investigations (the abandoned and sealed away Investigations Sector,) dedicated to uncovering and documenting the histories of FBC personnel and paranatural occurrences before resigning.

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• Determinator: After The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman escaped, slaughtered most of the security, and forced a lockdown on most of the Investigations Sector, he continued running the department with the survivors in what amounted to a single room for roughly two years.
• Dwindling Party: Suffers this trope with his entire department, starting when The-Thing-That-Had-Been-Hartman broke loose and killed most of his agents, continuing when Trench refused an expanded budget to compensate, and finally reached a boiling point when he himself resigned, which swiftly caused the entire department to become abandoned.
• Early-Bird Cameo: His first mention was in the Alan Wake tie-in comic "Night Springs," where he was the recipient of a phone call from Frank Breaker informing him of the Bright Falls AWE. Even then, all that was seen was his last name, and not even his side of the conversation was shown.
• Everyone Has Standards: Refused to let a Hot-Blooded interrogator continue trying to "break" an Altered Item-wielding terrorist, and reassigned him to desk duty.
• The Ghost: Though he's mentioned all over the place, he's already resigned and left the FBC by the time Jesse enters the Oldest House.
• Jurisdiction Friction: He caused lots of friction with Trench because of his personnel investigations, leading to Trench cutting budgets for Investigations and giving him No Sympathy for all the men Kirklund lost in retaliation.
• Last-Name Basis: Before being properly introduced in AWE, he was only known as "Kirklund" or "Mr. Kirklund."
• The Paranoiac: Led investigations into most of the significant members of the FBC after he became suspicious of Trench, and while some of his investigations did raise good points like the Prime Candidate Program taking in a child being unethical, his research into people like Dr. Darling paint him more as Improperly Paranoid. Admittedly, Darling did have his fingers in quite a few not-so-ethical pies.
• Sucksessor: His replacement, Remy Denis, held none of the respect Kirklund did. Coupled with the loss of Trench's favor and the quarantine of all but one room of the Investigations Sector, Denis was only just keeping the department afloat up until the Hiss threw an even bigger spanner in the works.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives a brief, but biting one at the expense of Trench through the letter he gives when he decides to Resign in Protest.

Resignation Letter: I blame this situation on our [REDACTED], who has routinely ignored my requests for assistance in reclaiming the parts of the Investigations Sector lost to the [REDACTED] loose inside. I will never forget the screams of brave agents begging for us to open that Firebreak. I will carry that shame for the rest of my days.

The [REDACTED] has failed his agents. I shall never forgive him for that.

• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: His agents regularly laughed at and belittled Fra, which he didn't care about enough to stop, and later even took Fra's head as a trophy in his office. Also, pondering if paranatural beings deserved "humane" treatment paused his investigation into Darling and his experimentation with Hedron.

Phillip Philson

Agent Phillip Philson

Appearances: Control

Portrayed by: David Menkin

"If I look away, I don’t know what this thing will do. You have to get me out of here."

A very unfortunate junior agent of the FBC, who plays a major part in the side-quest "Fridge Duty".

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• Alliterative Name: Phillip Philson. Also doubles as a Repetitive Name.
• Butt-Monkey: First, his fate, which he comments feels "clunky" is told to him by the book Unless You, then he is given a week's suspension for kicking a fridge in anger, then finally heavily implied to be killed by the Arctic Queen, moments away from being saved.
• Death by Irony: Langston notes after his death that he always hated fridge duty.
• Determinator: He stares at a murderous fridge for more than 24 hours without pause or rest when Langston accidentally forgets he’s stuck in the containment cell.
• First-Name Basis: His last name is only given in a collectible, all other sources merely refer to him as Phillip.
• Foreshadowing: This happens to him In-Universe, an almost one-to-one showcasing of the events that lead to his implied death is shown in a book he reads.
• Freak Out: Is having one whenever Jesse talks to him, frantically telling her he doesn't know how much longer he can keep watching the fridge. Ironically, he only sounds relaxed when Jesse tells him he's about to be rescued, moments away from his death.
• Heroic Sacrifice: While he is implied to be dead, his refusal to stop staring at the Arctic Queen ultimately saved a lot of lives from the fridge's "erratic behaviour".
• Something We Forgot: He is what Langston forgets in the midst of the Hiss crisis, leaving him trapped until Jesse finds him.
• Uncertain Doom: His death isn't actually confirmed, as he simply disappears, leaving behind a pool of blood. However, the implication isn't pretty, especially with the fates of his fellow book club members.

Jeanne Gibbs

Jeanne Gibbs

Appearances: Control

"If we get out of here, I'm hiring a lawyer. These are unsuitable working conditions."

A Containment Process Designer who worked in Processes and Protocols in the Containment Sector until a building shift landed the whole department in the Foundation, stranding them there.

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• Action Survivor: Despite being trapped in the Foundation for an impressive period of time, she still managed to survive until the Hiss showed up, eventually making it out of the Collapsed Department and into Dr. Ash's restricted lab on the other side of the Foundation. Had she not been corrupted by the Hiss, she might have survived until Jesse could get to her.
• Broken Pedestal: The Bureau as a whole becomes this to her, as spending weeks trapped in the Foundation after the largest building shift to ever occur in the Oldest House and feeling they abandoned her.
• King Mook: She's a superpowered Hiss Distorted with powers unique to her, such as a powerful energy beam that can melt Jesse's health if not avoided.
• Robinsonade: With a twist: rather than being stranded in the Wild Wilderness or on a Deserted Island, Gibbs and her fellow survivors, along with their whole office space, were transplanted to an uncharted, hostile section of the building where they worked.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Somehow managed to survive alone in the Foundation for a long period of time... only to be corrupted by the Hiss.
• Sole Survivor: Of the Dwindling Party of staff trapped in the Foundation.
• Superboss: She's fought in Dr. Ash's restricted lab at the end of an optional side quest.
• Unwitting Test Subject: At least, she thinks so. She comes to believe that the Bureau knowingly stranded her in the Foundation as part of some sort of experiment, and leaves a "screw you" in her final report directed towards whoever she believes is observing her.
  I hope these notes are a good read for whatever Ranger finds them. Fuck you. Put that in your report.

America Overnight

America Overnight

Appearances: Control

"You're listening to America Overnight: broadcasting the truth no matter the consequence for 29 years and counting."

A late-night radio show formed by the FBC to discreetly gain leads on paranatural occurrences across America, it centers around guests retelling their unnatural experiences to the host, or more rarely, a reading of a fan-submitted letter.

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• Affably Evil: While "Evil" is a stretch, the host, who openly deceives callers for the benefit of covering up the same extraordinary events they're hoping to shine a light on, is polite and always listens to the stories of said callers, no matter how ridiculous.
• Character Catchphrase: Every snippet you find recorded in the base game has the host beginning with "Thanks for staying up with us." This becomes a Subverted Trope in the Foundation DLC, where neither episodes start with this.
  • Also, the very first episode you can find only has, "Thanks for staying with us."
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Karen Harris, the show's producer, was turned to ash when she touched an Altered Item fondue set sent by the Blessed Organization.
• Covert Group with Mundane Front: The FBC, a secret group dedicated to upholding a Government Conspiracy, started a radio talk show for the purpose of finding potential paranatural phenomena.
• Deadpan Snarker: The host, on some occasions.
  Nervous Caller: This is something else. Something nobody talks about: Ordinary.
  Host: This certainly doesn't sound very "ordinary", caller.
• Dramatic Reading: Whenever the host gets letters from those claiming to be experiencing the other-worldly, he reads the contents out for the audience in this fashion.
• Expy: Of Coast to Coast AM.
• Finger in the Mail: A variant occurs when the host is given a letter with the ashes and bone shards of a victim of the fondue set Altered Item before he finds the producer has suffered the same fate.
• Long Runner: The host often reminds the audience that the show is currently in its twenty-ninth year on the air, and the episodes you find start at 349 and end at 382.
• Milestone Celebration: Every episode you find recorded mentions early on how they are celebrating their twenty-ninth year on the air.
• No Name Given: While the producer gets a full name, Karen Harris, the name of the host is never revealed, with the only mention of his last name being redacted.
• Paranormal Investigation: The show presents itself as an off-the-books spot to share supernatural stories most of the listeners would say the government would suppress, making it especially ironic that it is secretly a government-supported operation to do exactly that.
• Show Within a Show: America Overnight is a popular radio show in the Remedy-verse, and we hear snippets of it recorded by the FBC throughout the game.
• Trauma Conga Line: The host of America Overnight is first sent a letter by the Blessed Organization filled with cremated remains, then his producer is killed by an Altered Item also sent by them, and when the FBC finds out he was in a relationship with the producer, he is put on a leave of absence for breaking Bureau policy.
• Romance on the Set: In-Universe, the producer and host of the show entered a relationship sometime during their time on the set together, against Bureau policies, which would bite the host in the ass when the FBC found out and suspended him from work.

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