Characters / The Fly (1986)

aka: The Fly 1986 Seth Brundle

Characters in The Fly (1986).

WARNING: Spoilers for this film and The Fly II are unmarked.

Seth Brundle / Brundlefly

Dr. Seth Brundle/"Brundlefly"

"Computers are dumb, they only know what you tell them. I must not know enough about the flesh myself. I'm gonna have to learn."

^{Click here to see Brundlefly}

Played By: Jeff Goldblum

"The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore. I know what the disease wants. It wants to turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else. Whaddaya think? A fly? Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?"

A brilliant, fast-talking thirty-something quantum physicist, Seth has spent at least six solitary years working on teleportation technology. Out of loneliness and lust, he impulsively, awkwardly offers to show beautiful magazine reporter Veronica Quaife his project — and she is impressed enough that, after a false start, she agrees to follow his work for a book. When their professional relationship turns deeply personal, it gives him the "Eureka!" Moment he needs to perfect the telepods. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding involving Veronica's editor/ex-lover results in Seth thinking he's being cuckolded, and one too many glasses of champagne later he decides to go ahead with the finale of his project — teleporting himself as the device's first human subject. But he doesn't notice that a housefly is in the telepod with him when the fateful moment comes. The computer that controls the pods fuses the two beings on the molecular-genetic level, and in the days that follow Seth begins to transform into something else from the inside out...

Seth's Slow Transformation unfolds over distinct physical stages numbered by the filmmakers and referenced below.

• Stage 0: Pre-teleportation, when he is fully human.
• Stage 1: The days that follow, marked by odd hairs growing from scratches on his back and, later, facial lesions.
• Stage 2: After the night with Tawny the lesions are worse and his fingernails begin to peel away.
• Stage 3: Four weeks later; skin is completely disfigured and Primal Stance is beginning to develop.
• Stage 4: At most a few days later; Primal Stance is complete, hair is thinner, and teeth are corroded. Certain small appendages begin to molt^note to become the collection of "The Brundle Museum of Natural History" in his medicine cabinet.
• Stage 4B: The "monkey-cat" deleted reel (see certain non-Vanilla Edition releases); body is noticeably lumpier.
• Stage 5: Final humanoid form, resembling a mass of cancerous growths and/or a chrysalis.
• Stage 6: Brundlefly proper, completely insectoid and literally emerging from Stage 5.
• Stage 7: "Brundlebooth" a.k.a. "Brundlepod" — the result of accidental merger with broken pieces of a telepod.

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• '80s Hair: As Carly Lane wrote in a Syfy Wire article, Seth's brown hair is "not yet a mullet, not yet an '80s rocker 'do. But it looks soft. So very soft." (According to cinematographer Mark Irwin, David Cronenberg thought Jeff Goldblum had a "too narrow" face, so a hairpiece known as a fall was added to his natural locks to enhance it. The upshot is that Seth has a similar profile to Veronica and his Ominous Hair Loss from Stage 4 on is more dramatic.
• Adaptation Name Change: His counterpart in the 1958 film and the short story it was adapted from was named Andre Delambre.
• Adaptational Villainy: The original short story and 1958 film has No Antagonist; the titular Doomed Protagonist Tragic Monster is also a Non-Malicious Monster who manages to put himself out of his misery before his Split-Personality Takeover. In this version, Seth does undergo a Split-Personality Takeover and becomes a Villain Protagonist in the third act.
• Alas, Poor Villain: The completely transformed Seth ends up in a much more pitiful state after being painfully spliced with the remains of the telepod thanks to his Villainous Breakdown.
• All There in the Manual: That he has a doctorate is mentioned in a deleted scene in which Veronica videotapes an interview with him the morning after his fateful teleportation (and, oddly, in one of the television ads for the film).
• And I Must Scream: The "Brundlepod" form is in indescribable agony just from existing. It has just enough intellect left to nonverbally beg for death.
• Bad Liar: When Tawny asks him who Veronica is upon the latter's just-in-time arrival at the loft, he is so surprised, flustered, and embarrassed that he all he can think of to say is "Oh, I forgot to tell you — I live with my mother too. Mom, meet Tawny." Tawny doesn't buy it and takes the opportunity to leave.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Author William Beard's commentary track on the 2019 Blu-Ray discusses Seth as a case of this: He starts out introverted, controlled, and gentle, but post-teleportation becomes extremely extroverted, indulgent, and cruelly selfish as his animalistic, primitive "true" self is awakened and takes control of him.
• Big "NO!": Twice, after a fashion.
  • Short and intense version when Veronica suggests they could consult other doctors or scientists for help.
  • Although Brundlefly is The Speechless, when the teleportation sequence activates before he is fully out of the pod there's no doubting his anguished howl "translates" as this.
• Break the Cutie: He is shy and awkward around Veronica, but his enthusiasm for his work and desire to share it helps him connect with her, and their blossoming love indirectly helps him figure out how to program the telepods to transport animate objects. But his insecurity over the nature of her relationship with Stathis (which she doesn't go into much detail on because she'd rather not get him involved in that drama) leads him to misunderstand why she leaves on the night of his triumph, resulting in him getting drunk and teleporting himself. He becomes Drunk with Power for a while, but when he realizes what's actually happening to him — that he is mutating and effectively dying — he is brought back to his senses. He tries to see the bright side of his situation ("Don't you think [becoming Brundlefly] is worth a Nobel Prize or two?"), but as he comes to understand that he will not die as himself but an insectoid monstrosity who would harm the woman he loves — the only person he has in the world — he is thoroughly broken, and learning that she is pregnant but doesn't intend to keep the child pushes what remains of his sanity and morals off of a cliff.
• Bungling Inventor: A dark version, in that Seth's telepods accidentally double as a gene splicer when more than one living being is sent through at a time.
• Character Tics: He bites his fingernails when he's nervous, most prominently during the successful baboon teleportation, and this eventually helps him realize that something went wrong when he teleported when one of them comes off in his mouth. Post-teleportation, he develops a lot of tics foreshadowing his final form:
  • Stage 1: The first noticeable change — just before the audience sees the strange hairs growing from the cuts on his back — is that his kisses are lustier than in Stage 0. From there, whenever he's in heat his breathing and voice tend to be lower and raspier. The rasp becomes permanent come Stage 3. Come Stage 5 it's clearly difficult and even painful for him to talk and breathe in a human manner and his computer no longer recognizes his voice.
  • Stage 2: He begins clutching the left side of his abdomen. Come Stage 4 he reveals to Veronica that there's a growth there, but he doesn't know what it is. Stage 4B had a payoff in which an insect leg emerged from it, whereupon he bit it off; in the finished film its right-side counterpart emerges during his One-Winged Angel transformation. Back to Stage 2, when he broaches the idea of Tawny being teleported, he's also rubbing his forehead (just above his left eyebrow); this turns out to be a sign of the transforming body beneath his skull. He also is more physically sensitive — he brushed off the circuit board getting stuck to his back and pulled out by Veronica in Stage 0, but a few drops of alcohol rubbed into his skin hurts him enough to knock a glass out of Tawny's hand (alcohol is deadly to flies). Also, when Veronica talks to him he takes a bite out of a candy bar and makes a face as if it tastes bad, indicating that his taste buds and digestive tract are starting to change as well.
  • Stage 4: He has fully developed a fly-like twitch^note hinted at in Stage 1 during the arm wrestling match.
  • Also, it's subtle but in Stage 0 his hands tend to stroke or fidget with his tie when he's anxious or thoughtful. The latter is the case when he's lying on his bed after the disastrous baboon teleportation. As Veronica joins him there and tells him he's cute, she gently takes his tie in her hand...
• Clipped-Wing Angel: Thanks to a Villainous Breakdown he ends up getting fused with part of a telepod, left helpless and in terrible, dying pain — although it's clear that he was already physically and mentally unstable.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Downplayed. During the month Seth spends alone he is fearful and repulsed by what he's becoming, but adjusts to it because he has no choice. This results in embarrassment when Veronica returns and he doesn't think to warn her about how he now eats before helping himself to a doughnut. In Stage 5 his reaction to several teeth tumbling out of his mouth and onto the keyboard is not horror, as he displayed when his fingernails started coming off, but mild annoyance and resignation.
• Conspicuous Gloves: After his fingernails start coming loose, Seth puts on a pair of gardening gloves so he can use the computer's keyboard without leaving sticky pus on the keys. He is still wearing them in Stage 3 (when he's using canes to walk), and discards them come Stage 4, having figured out that the changes to his hands allow him to Wall Crawl.
• Cursed with Awesome: Even though the transformation makes Seth a diseased mutant, he gains wall-crawling skills, corrosive vomit, and superhuman strength and stamina as well. In fact, because the strength and stamina begin to manifest before the Power-Upgrading Deformation needed for the other abilities does, he initially doesn't realize he's cursed. It's unclear what the absolute end result of Seth's changes would be; the state he ultimately reaches (where he wordlessly begs for death by placing the muzzle of a shotgun to his own head) has at least as much to do with being caught partially outside the telepod when it activates as with having genetic problems.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: His short story/1958 counterpart decides to kill himself before he can hurt anyone, via being crushed by a metal press, requiring the aid of his wife to do so. Seth — in part because his insect side is determined to live at any cost — doesn't become suicidal until he is rendered a helpless Clipped-Wing Angel, whereupon he silently asks Veronica to slay him with Stathis's shotgun; she obliges by blowing his head off.
• Dying as Yourself: Tragically, Seth realizes that he cannot do this; by the time he dies as Brundlefly there will be nothing left of his original mind and morals. Or so he thinks. The broken Brundlefly managing to silently request that Veronica end his life with the shotgun means Seth Brundle died more man than fly.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Although he briefly falls out of love with Veronica in Stages 1 and 2 as his Split-Personality Takeover and Drunk with Power feelings blind him to her concerns over all the changes he's exhibiting, his learning what's actually happening to him brings him back to his better self and the only reason he doesn't reconcile with her right away is because he's scared that, among other things, he might be contagious. His love for her is such that he decides to send her away in Stage 5 for fear he'll eventually hurt her without meaning to. Although his mind completely snaps with the realization that she's pregnant and doesn't want to keep the child and he subsequently decides they will be the "pure" human beings who will unwillingly help him with his Evil Plan to save himself, even in this deranged state the only reason he doesn't kill Stathis with vomit drop is because she begs him not to, and he clearly sees the prospect of Romantic Fusion as a wonderful culmination of their relationship as well as his last hope of retaining humanity.
• Evilutionary Biologist: In Stages 1-2, Seth believes that his enhanced strength, stamina, etc. are the direct result of teleporting himself so he starts pressuring Veronica to "go through" — "And I won't be able to wear you out; we'll be the perfect couple! The Dynamic Duo!" When she objects he declares her a coward and sets out to find "someone who'll keep up with me", leading to his tryst with Tawny. Only Veronica's timely arrival stops him from forcibly teleporting her; shortly after this he realizes what's actually happening to him, which smashes this trope to pieces.
• Evil Plan: He plans to genetically splice himself with a healthy human being, since that would make him more human than fly again. Not evil enough? Well, the human subject he chooses is Veronica — and it's implied it's partially because she doesn't want to keep his child, but he does.
• Face–Heel Turn: By the end, his desperation to retain his humanity combining with his mind becoming more selfish and instinctual like that of a fly leads him to forcefully trying to merge Veronica and their unborn child with him. He is fully aware that this is in effect, and urges Veronica to leave him before he hurts her, but that's before he learns she's pregnant.
• Fatal Flaw: Lust. He must follow things that fascinate and matter to him — his work and his relationship with Veronica, who understands and is attracted to his passion for that work — to their ultimate conclusions. His fateful teleportation arises from his response to Veronica leaving to confront Stathis just as they were celebrating his successfully teleporting a baboon. The careful, patient scientist gets drunk — loosening his self-control, whereupon he throws caution to the wind for his ultimate professional goal ("What are we waiting for? Let's do it!") and ends up fused with a creature that operates purely on instinctual urges. He's initially euphoric and desperate to teleport Veronica or any other woman because he needs "someone who'll keep up with me" — that is to say, is capable of sating his lust — and only realizing what's actually happening to him breaks the spell. Faced with the prospect of a painful, awful metamorphosis and death, he still takes comfort in becoming something that never existed before — and that he accidentally invented a "very good" gene splicer. He's fascinated and even delighted by the process (as when he shows off his Wall Crawl skills to Veronica), but still seeks a way to retain his humanity. In the climax, with his mind almost completely ruled by insect instinct, he decides using the pods to fuse himself with her and their unborn child — creating "the ultimate family" and making her part of him forever by way of his work — will do that. Instead, he ends up only wanting death and accepts it, having seen an incredible experience through to a logical end, a triumph of sorts as Cronenberg points out in his DVD commentary for the film.
• Genius Cripple: Played with. When he allows Veronica to see him again (Stage 3), he is using two canes to slowly walk because he's now hunched over and cannot maintain his balance otherwise. At this point he believes he is dying. By her next visit (Stage 4), he has not only adjusted to the Primal Stance but is downright jumpy and spry — having discovered an ability to Wall Crawl and realized that he isn't dying but becoming something else.
• Gentleman and a Scholar: He's a "socially-awkward but nice and polite" example of the trope prior to his transformation; his losing his gentlemanly nature is an early sign of it.
• Gibbering Genius: The Trope Codifier, bar none, as Jeff Goldblum's subsequent career bears out. Seth is a cheerful chatterbox from the start, admitting early on that after years of working alone he feels a need to talk to someone about what he's doing. Post-teleportation, he becomes even more talkative because his metabolism is working a lot faster and the resultant exponentially surging energy is affecting his brain. In Stage 5 his speech is slower and halting, likely because his vocal cords are decaying, but he still clearly wants to speak as long as he's able to.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: He, or at least the good in him prior his Split-Personality Takeover Face–Heel Turn, becomes this in the sequel. His son Martin ends up carrying on and redeeming his legacy by not only figuring out how to make the telepods work again, but also finding a cure for the mutation he inherited from his father.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Upon realizing that the smug, confident Stathis is an ex-lover of Veronica's as well as her editor, Seth jumps to the conclusion that she's cuckolding him and bitterly drowns his sorrows even though she's promised to return to the loft in a few hours (which she does). The resultant loosening of his self-control is what sets him on the path to becoming a literal monster. When Stathis comes to rescue her from his clutches in the climax, Seth cruelly maims him before attempting to Murder the Hypotenuse, only stopped by Veronica's desperate pleas.
• The Grotesque: Once his Drunk with Power "high" has ended and he realizes what's actually happening to him, his sweet self re-emerges in Stage 3 but is now laced with Gallows Humor, fear, and shame as he continues to deteriorate. Upon re-establishing contact with Veronica, he initially tries to avoid physical contact with her (concerned he might be Patient Zero), sadly saying in passing "You look so pretty..." at one point. When he finally reaches out to her for an embrace — after he has vomited upon a doughnut and his right ear has tumbled off — she returns it without hesitation. Even though it's upsetting and exhausting for her to be witness to his unfolding tragedy, she loves him too much to abandon him altogether. Ultimately he decides to send her away upon realizing that, due to his mind and morals fading away, he will hurt her if he doesn't.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Brundlefly is this, and in his final "natural" form he does not bear an obvious physical resemblance to either a human or a fly as a result.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: He's not seen wearing the brown leather jacket Veronica purchases for him until after his trip through the telepods, and then it's specific to his Drunk with Power stretch — especially his setting out to find another partner after she refuses to be teleported. For bonus points, that she bought him a leather jacket ties into Seth's growing understanding of and fascination with flesh.^note For even more points Seth buys her a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant later, which she wears for almost all of her subsequent scenes. His world, after all, is that of the machine/metal.
• Hidden Depths: Gibbering Genius though he may be, he's eloquent when it comes to explaining his work. He's socially awkward but he's also capable of deep love and devotion, though this is tragically perverted by his transformation. He retains his eloquence even as the rest of his humanity fades away, and losing his ability to speak (when Veronica accidentally rips his decayed human jaw off) is tellingly the moment he moves from Stage 5 to 6. These depths are foreshadowed by his sole hobby — playing piano.
• Hollywood Homely: He's quite muscular for a scientist who doesn't get out much. (Not that any of the female viewers are complaining, or anything!) The shooting script did have him as out-of-shape prior to the teleportation, a detail that may have been dropped because the film was made in a compressed timeframe (shooting began in December 1985 for a locked-in August '86 release date). William Beard's commentary on the 2019 Blu-Ray points out, however, that the audience doesn't notice how shapely Seth is until he teleports himself because his concealing Limited Wardrobe, expressive face, and awkward-but-sweet personality are holding their attention.
• Howl of Sorrow: To say nothing of pain — having been merged with broken telepod parts, his Stage 7 self howls in agony as he tumbles out of the prototype pod.
• Humble Hero: While the plot gets rolling by way of his wanting to impress Veronica with his marvelous telepods, after his demonstration he freely admits that he didn't create them from scratch, saying "I'm really a systems management man" in that their individual components (lasers, molecular analyzers, etc.) were commissioned from people "much more brilliant than I am [...] and I just stick them together." Moreover, Veronica apparently only learns of his noteworthy past (he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in physics at the age of 20) from Stathis. Seth loses this humility in the Drunk with Power stage of his metamorphosis, becoming a braggart in the wake of his belief that his invention has made him a superman.
• I Am a Monster: He basically warns Veronica of this in his "insect politics" speech.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: In the end, seeing the pathetic creature that was once Seth Brundle crawl out of the third telepod, fused with pieces of machinery and in horrifying agony, is probably sadder than watching the end of Old Yeller. This can obviously end only one way, and in one final display of humanity Brundlefly silently begs a shotgun-armed Veronica to end its life, and after some painful hesitation, she does.
• In-Series Nickname: He dubs himself "Brundlefly" upon realizing he's becoming a new lifeform.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Trying to convince Veronica to chronicle his work for a book, he notes "I don't have a life, so there's nothing for you to interfere with." Stathis learns that Seth's been working on the telepods for six years, which implies he's been alone at least that long, though earlier in his career he successfully worked with others. However long it's been, by Seth's own admission it's been "too long."
• Ironic Name: Crossing over with Shout-Out, his surname is that of a famous British racecar driver (Martin Brundle), which is completely unsuited to someone who has suffered from motion sickness his entire life. (The sequel carries on the reference by simply naming his son Martin.)
• Irony: A situational case: Seth's devoted his life to teleportation technology due to his chronic motion sickness and resultant hatred of vehicles. His Teleporter Accident results in him having to constantly vomit just to survive, as he cannot digest solid food and must use vomit drop to dissolve whatever he eats.
• Kubrick Stare: As Veronica adjusts her videocamera in preparation for interviewing him about what exactly happened to the first, ill-fated baboon, Seth — struggling to contain his anger, frustration, and guilt over the accident — glares in this manner.
• LEGO Genetics: Averted, as the change in DNA affects Seth slowly as his cells replicate, and his Stage 7 form isn't anything resembling a properly functioning body — though being fused with a telepod isn't exactly natural. Stage 6, his final "natural" form, is noticeably asymmetrical; his transformed human legs and arms don't remotely match each other. He also has a fifth, fly leg-like appendage on the right side of his body — the reason he doesn't have a corresponding one on the left is because that emerged back in the deleted Stage 4B sequence, and he desperately bit it off.
• Limited Wardrobe: Lampshaded! After Veronica mentions he apparently wears the same outfit every day — charcoal grey suit jacket, white dress shirt, red necktie, black trousers, and brown Oxford shoes — she learns that it's actually one of five identical sets of clothing. He explains to her that he got the idea from Einstein, who supposedly had five sets of clothes to avoid wasting mental energy on deciding what to wear. Of course, Einstein likely didn't have five jackets and five pairs of shoes!
• Little "No": After his fingernails start coming off, he tremulously whispers "Oh no...what's happening to me? Am I dying? Is this how it starts — am I dying?"
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Becoming a Body Horror via botched teleportation means Seth develops amazing strength and the abilities to Wall Crawl and vomit corrosive enzymes on food and enemies.
• Mad Scientist: Initially subverted, later played straight. Prior to his teleportation, he is a driven scientist, and doesn't have great social skills, and is, well, working on teleportation, but he is a sane man working for the greater good with a clear ethical code. Even his choice to become Professor Guinea Pig as soon as possible is one he makes while he's drunk. Post-teleportation, the gradual Split-Personality Takeover (plus, at least before he learns what's happening to him, a Drunk with Power feeling) turns him into a straight version of the trope, albeit a sympathetic one with a Tragic Dream end goal. In an interview John Landis did with Cronenberg for the book Monsters in the Movies, they argue over whether Seth can be called this trope or not: Landis says yes, Cronenberg no.
• Milking the Giant Cow: He has lively hand/arm gestures in Stage 0, but in Stage 1, as he rants to the increasingly distressed Veronica about the wonders of diving "into the plasma pool" via teleportation, his gestures are extravagant — particularly when he points. This trope disappears post-Stage 2 due to his transformation affecting the speed and range of motion of his limbs.
• Monster Progenitor: Due to the events of the sequel. His son by Veronica, Martin, was conceived after Seth became a mutant and is an Uneven Hybrid of man and insect; unusually for this trope, he is stronger than his father was because he was born part-insect and is also able to retain his human intelligence and morals because he's 75% human. The villains' Evil Plan is to use Martin's monstrous form and Seth's telepods to create an entire race of monster soldiers, but Martin fights back and ends up becoming completely human while the Big Bad ends up a helpless mutant, ending the line.
• Motifs: Critic/filmmaker Steven Benedict points out in his podcast episode on this film that Seth Brundle is marked by evolution/transformation even before his Tragic Mistake.
  • He lives and works in a converted floor of an Abandoned Warehouse.
  • He has a Significant Wardrobe Shift in the wake of Veronica becoming his lover and expanding his wardrobe.
  • Once he starts mutating, slowly but surely his loft "decays" along with him, and he becomes associated with shadow rather than light (see Orange/Blue Contrast on the main page for more).
  • What is Seth? The answer to this question is brought up and changed by him and others to the point that I am / You are / Are you / He is verge on Arc Words:
    • Veronica notes "You're not a very accomplished drunk" during the drive to the loft. While he's actually nauseous due to motion sickness, her observation turns out to be true.
    • "I'm really a systems management man."
    • The skeptical Stathis dismisses him as "Your magician" to Veronica when Seth arrives at the Particle offices. Veronica notes to Seth "He thinks you're a con man." Later Stathis refers to him as "Your new playmate" and "The nightclub act" to her, but goes on to note that "He's actually quite brilliant."
    • The lines leading into Veronica and Seth's first night together are, respectively, "You're very cute. You know that?" "Am I?"
    • Tawny wonders in turn if Seth is a bodybuilder or magician of some kind. He responds that he is both times, specifying in the former case that "Yeah, I build bodies. I take them apart and put them back together again."
    • Veronica warns him shortly thereafter "You're changing, Seth".
    • Explaining what went wrong with his teleportation, he notes "Now I'm not Seth Brundle anymore. I'm the offspring of Brundle and housefly."
    • Later: "Am I becoming a 185-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming Brundlefly."
    • Seth Brundle and the film's final assessment, of course, is that he's "an insect who dreamt he was a man, and loved it."
• Mr. Exposition: In the first scene at the loft, he demonstrates and explains the telepods to Veronica and goes on to explain how he's realized them and why no one else, not even his financiers, knows about them as yet. Later on, after he's learned exactly what the nature of his transformation is and why it's happening from his computer, he explains it to Veronica in layman's terms. Not only is this justified because he's the only person who can explain these things and events to her, he admits that "I have a strong urge to talk about what I'm doing" to somebody after years of working alone.
• Must Have Caffeine: Implied if one knows from coffee culture. As Emma Westwood's book on the film notes, "no one had a cafe-style coffee machine in their home in the late 1980s", but Seth does. (He specifically identifies it as a Faema, which is espresso-specific; he also knows how to prepare cappuccino.) This trope also applies, albeit downplayed, on a meta level: Jeff Goldblum used coffee as an aid in playing Seth's post-fusion, hyper and unstable scenes.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Seth's eyes widening in horror as he learns from the computer that he was genetically fused with the fly is this trope expressed without words. (The fade to black that follows, helping to establish a four-week time jump between this and the next scene, is one of only two such fades in the film — the other being at the very end.)
• Nerds Are Sexy: He is presented as attractive, though he doesn't realize it. As socially awkward as he is, it's in a sweet way, but it's really his passion for his work that serves as the Commonality Connection between him and Veronica. After his initial teleportation, he at first becomes noticeably more alluring — but also dangerous.
• Nerds Are Virgins: It's not stated in-universe but according to David Cronenberg Seth is a virgin before he meets Veronica. Thus his relationship with her marks a crossing of a metaphorical threshold into maturity...and with that, the sorrows of aging, disease, and death when it inadvertently leads to his Teleporter Accident.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Justified: He becomes this as a way of coping come Stage 4, having realized that he's not dying (at least not in a conventional sense) but becoming a new lifeform. He is a scientist, after all; he needs to thoroughly understand and even embrace what he's becoming, no matter how disgusting it is by human standards. He insists that his eating habits be recorded for posterity in this stage, but the trope reaches its apex in Stage 5 with the reveal that he's preserving all of the human body parts he molts, which are "of historical interest only", in his medicine cabinet — aka "The Brundle Museum of Natural History".
• Non-Malicious Monster: Once he becomes The Grotesque with Stage 3, he also becomes this...for a while. Because he is also undergoing a Split-Personality Takeover, he cannot hold himself to this trope forever and come Stage 5 tells Veronica I Am a Monster in hopes of keeping her safe. It doesn't work since he learns about her pregnancy (and her intent to abort it) as he watches her leave with Stathis, and this pushes him over the edge. It's worth noting that in the shooting script he stopped being this trope sooner: A storyboarded but unfilmed scene had him vomiting on a homeless woman and preparing to eat her before he realized what he was doing.
• No Social Skills: Downplayed and justified. He's spent his entire adult life — and probably much of his adolescence, given he was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize at 20 — consumed by his work in physics, and has worked alone for at least six years as the film begins, so while he is polite, pleasant, and okay with social cues, he's initially at sea dealing with others on a personal level. He regrets this, and post-teleportation is excited that he can finally work on personal growth now that he's achieved his professional ambition. But that's before he realizes the real reason he feels so great...
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Defied. He explicitly explains that most of the technical apparatus is stuff he himself doesn't understand, designed by colleagues he says are far more brilliant than himself and only assembled by him. He also explains his initial difficulty with transporting organic matter as being a result of his inexperience in biology. His own fields seem to be mathematics and programming.
• Ominous Hair Loss: As Seth's mutation progresses he begins shedding hair. By the time Veronica arrives at the lab to say goodbye, Seth's hair has been reduced to a few stray lengths of hair across his misshapen skull.
• Permafusion: What ends up setting up the movie's events is him accidentally merging with a housefly as a result of a transporter accident. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there: as the movie progresses, so does Seth's transformation ito a horrific human-fly hybrid, until a second transporter mishap causes him to merge with shrapnel, forcing Veronica to kill him in order to end his misery.
• Phlegmings: By the time he reaches Stage 3, poor Seth can no longer digest solid food and must eat the way a fly does — via "a corrosive enzyme, playfully called 'vomit drop'" as he puts it, resulting in this trope whenever he has to consume anything. The vomit drop stains his face and clothes too, and is a key reason he ends up with Scary Teeth.
• Posthumous Character: In The Fly II, he casts a long shadow over the story. While Bartok Industries has no problem restoring the telepods, no one can figure out how to get them to teleport living matter properly, with Anton Bartok explaining to Seth's son Martin that it's one of the "secrets [that] died with him." Martin, who knows that his father was brilliant but not how he died (rather he is told that he succumbed to a Rapid Aging disorder that Martin has inherited), is convinced by Anton to try and finish his father's work. The tipping point for Martin's decision is watching (some of) the tapes Veronica made chronicling Seth's work, incorporating a deleted scene from the first film in which, the morning after his fateful teleportation, Seth describes how the experience felt.
• The Power of Love: The original HBO plot rundown of this film called him a man "transformed by love", and indeed he is in a myriad of ways. Love Hurts, indeed:
  • His succumbing to The Power of Lust and approaching Veronica at the Bartok press event starts the story.
  • In an inversion of Love Makes You Uncreative, the "Eureka!" Moment that points him towards solving the riddle of teleporting living matter via the telepods comes via Veronica's playful pillow talk.
  • His mistaken belief that Veronica is cheating on him with Stathis leads to him getting drunk out of jealousy. In his compromised mental state he decides to jump ahead to the climax of his experiments and teleport himself, which ends up being his Tragic Mistake.
  • Upon realizing he is succumbing to a Split-Personality Takeover that is eradicating his human morals and reason, he sends Veronica away — despite her being the only person he has — so he won't hurt her.
  • Immediately afterward, however, he learns that she is pregnant with his child and intends to have an abortion. His heart and mind break together, rendering him crazed and wicked: he kidnaps her and upon realizing he cannot convince her to bear the child decides he will create "the ultimate family" and retain what remains of his human self by forcing her to undergo Romantic Fusion with him.
  • On top of this, when Stathis arrives at the loft to rescue her Seth attempts to Murder the Hypotenuse — piece by piece, by using his vomit drop to dissolve first Stathis's hand, and then an ankle. He only stops short of dissolving his face because Veronica begs him not to.
  • When Laser-Guided Karma renders him a Clipped-Wing Angel, he uses this trope to end his suffering (and, perhaps, atone for his crimes) by silently communicating to Veronica that he wants to die by her hand.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: Seth's strength and stamina only grow as his transformation into Brundlefly progresses, but at the cost of his beauty. His fingernails coming off reveals that the fingers themselves are now secreting a pus that is extremely sticky, which turns out to tie in to his ability to Wall Crawl (and while it's hard to see watching the film on a small screen, the palms of his hands and soles of his feet end up with little gripping "pads" for this). Losing the ability to digest solid food and having to use vomit drop upon it results in Scary Teeth.
• Primal Stance: He starts developing this by Stage 3, and come Stage 4 has fully adjusted to it.
• Professor Guinea Pig: A rationalized version of this trope. Seth admits early on that he intends to teleport himself as the Grand Finale of his experiments, but shortly after the first time he successfully teleports any living organism he gets drunk and decides he doesn't need to wait on making sure the process doesn't have any aftereffects or anything like that. In fact, he's having a "conversation" with that baboon and tells it "I'm sorry I killed your brother...but he didn't die in vain, if that's of any comfort. And as the general said, 'There's nothing I'd ask you to do that I wouldn't do myself, boys.'"
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: His character arc, and his attempts to resist it only end up furthering it. He spends most of Act One as the sweetest of nerds...then comes the Teleporter Accident. Most of Act Two sees him as a would-be Übermensch who rages at the woman he loves, gruesomely maims a man in arm wrestling just to win an evening with another woman, and tries to put each woman through the teleporter in turn. The Internal Reveal deals a much-needed blow to his ego, but in Act Three he realizes his mind is still losing its human reason and compassion; the selfish ruthlessness that began to show in Act Two will eventually consume him. Come the climax, it does and he becomes a monster in every possible sense of the word.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Albeit the most grotesque version of this trope ever. Brundlefly proper doesn't have insectoid eyes, but gigantic opalescent ones that blink, stare, and twitch (Cronenberg and the effects team effectively caricaturing Jeff Goldblum's eyes). When Veronica objects to Brundlefly's silent request to Mercy Kill him, he sadly stares up at her in this manner and moans softly...and this last expression of humanity convinces her to pull the trigger.
• Real Award, Fictional Character: He was, according to Stathis, "an inch away from the Nobel Prize in Physics" when he was just 20. Later, Seth figures he might have a shot at the Nobel just for becoming Brundlefly.
• Revenge Before Reason: He has a Villainous Breakdown upon seeing Veronica's telepod severed from the other two and smashes the door of his open so he can finish Stathis off. With so little time left in the countdown and Stathis already maimed and near-helpless, the safe option would be to let himself be sent to the prototype pod alone and then come after him. Sadly justified in that at this point, instinct and rage have overpowered what remains of his human reason.
• Sanity Slippage: Brundle's gradual transformation and his futile attempts to reverse it eventually drive him insane, to the point where he decides that the best way to reclaim his humanity is to fuse himself, Veronica, and their unborn baby into "the ultimate family." He lampshades this earlier in his "insect politics" speech, describing himself as "an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake."
• Saying Too Much: In the opening scenes, due to The Power of Lust clouding his mind he either misses or forgets the rather important fact that Veronica is a journalist when he offers to show her what he's working on in his lab. He doesn't realize his mistake until he realizes she's recording part of their conversation after his demonstration, and she correctly points out that everything he said was on the record and refuses to give him the resulting tape. After she leaves, he decides to make the best of it with a deal: If she'll hold off on writing an article on his work, she can be the sole chronicler of the creation, development, and refinement of the telepods, the stuff of an entire book.
• Scary Teeth: His teeth in Stages 4 and 5, the result of being corroded by vomit drop and sugar. Several of his front teeth gruesomely tumble out when he pulls a pencil he's been idly chewing on from his mouth.
• Second Love: As far as the audience knows he is this to Veronica, whose first love was Stathis. Seth is her true love as well, to the point that no one working on the film was satisfied with the two epilogues shot in which Veronica and Stathis ended up a couple again.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: He initially has a nice but very Limited Wardrobe because he doesn't like expending mental energy on choosing what to wear; never mind he's a recluse and it wouldn't matter what he wore most of the time. Veronica decides to change that after learning this and buys him some new wardrobe pieces — a plaid shirt, a brown leather jacket, etc. The next time he's seen he's wearing said shirt and coordinating pants, suggesting he adopted the new look immediately; the suits are never seen again. It's a sign of how his relationship is transforming his entire life; in fact in the same scene he finally successfully transports a living being through his telepods, which he couldn't have done had his relationship with her not led to a "Eureka!" Moment. But later that night he teleports himself...and the early stages of the Slow Transformation that results have him become more virile, sensual, and aggressive. That's when the audience starts seeing him in that leather jacket — first with a shirt, but later without.
• Sinister Sweet Tooth: One of the earliest signs that Seth's teleportation experiment is turning him into a monstrous, amoral fly hybrid is his growing taste for sugar: at first, he's merely ladling the stuff into his coffee and calling loudly for a cannoli to go with it, seemingly uncaring of how weird it looks (or perhaps he thinks an alternative trope is in play); then, as he grows more violent and obsessive, he begins munching on chocolate bars while wandering the town in a rage, leading to a scene in which he gives a man a potentially lethal compound fracture without feeling a flicker of concern. By the time his degeneration becomes plainly obvious, his once-relatively tidy lab is littered with boxes of donuts and other sweet foods — a sign that his humanity is undergoing a very steep decline.
• The Sleepless: Post-fusion. Before he realizes what's actually happening to him he's happy about it: "I hardly need to sleep anymore, I feel wonderful!"
• The Speechless: Come Stage 6, he is this. As Cronenberg points out in the DVD commentary, Seth's final metamorphosis into Brundlefly only comes after Veronica accidentally rips his decaying human jaw off. Since he's no longer able to communicate with others, there's a tragic sense in the rest of his body giving itself up to the insect form.
• Stages of Monster Grief: He goes through all of them in his one-month-plus transformation.
  • Denial: Upon realizing that going through the teleporter somehow changed him, he never denies the actual changes, but rather that they're anything but good. He doesn't mind that his skin is developing lesions and his temper is shorter and more explosive. He even likes the prospect of gaining a Carpet of Virility! Once the fingernails start coming off, though...
  • Acceptance: He realizes the true nature of his condition, resigns himself to his eventual fate of disintegration and death, and comforts himself with Gallows Humor and by exploring what he's becoming in the meantime, seeing the upsides of it where no one else can. Veronica's love and presence helps here. However, he does long to be human again upon realizing he's also losing his mind and morals, resulting in...
  • Defiance: He starts formulating a plan "to reduce the percentage of fly in Brundlefly" at the very least. But it requires him to fuse himself with another human, and with his insect survival instincts starting to kick in he moves to...
  • Betrayal: With his sanity cracking upon learning Veronica is pregnant and intends to have an abortion, he decides to fuse her and the fetus with him. He also maims Stathis — who indirectly set Seth on the path to his Tragic Mistake — when he tries to rescue her, only for Stathis to get a second wind. The result is that Seth, now completely Brundlefly, gets merged with parts of a telepod. Now in horrible pain, he is...
  • Driven to Suicide: Except he's unable to kill himself, so he manages to convince Veronica to finish him off with Stathis's shotgun.
• Super-Strength: Merging with the fly gives him a mild form of this — enough to perform impressive gymnastic feats, rip open a strongman's arm in an arm-wrestling contest, and Bridal Carry objects of his affection/lust over long/steep distances. It's implied he's also capable of Roofhopping, and the script outright showed him doing so.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Played with. Initially, his awkward nature downplays his attractiveness, as does the fact that Veronica is also tall. When she tells him he's cute, his response is "Am I?" In the first days after he's merged with the fly, the trope is played straight as he explores his new strength and virility and Veronica is more attracted to him than ever...only for his personality to become uglier as the transformation slowly works its dark magic on him. Once it kicks into high gear, Seth's beauty is decimated piece by piece — he succumbs to a Primal Stance, his dark hair gradually falls out, and his face becomes a ruin.
• Teen Genius: He's implied to have been one. Stathis tells Veronica that Seth was "An inch away from the Nobel Prize in Physics...he was only 20 at the time" he led a team of physicists.
• That Man Is Dead: When he explains his Teleporter Accident to Veronica he tells her "Now I'm not Seth Brundle anymore...I'm the offspring of Brundle and housefly." Later, having realized he's becoming a new lifeform rather than merely dying, he starts referring to himself as "Brundlefly".
• Tragic Monster: Alas, poor Seth! Probably one of the most profound examples of this trope ever.
• Tragic Villain: He becomes a Tragic Monster who desperately tries to regain his humanity — even if it means harming his love.
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: He's tidy in his appearance and the upkeep of his apartment/lab, going so far as to wear a clean set of clothes (one of five identical sets, down to the shoes) every day. As his mutation progresses apace and his mind declines as he tries to find some way to hold the inevitable back, he gives up on taking care of himself, the apartment becoming a wreck of discarded garbage (especially empty food and soda containers) — fitting in a sad way, flies being commonly associated with garbage and rot. He even turns his medicine cabinet into a museum for his falling-off appendages. As early as Stage 2 Veronica notes that he looks and smells bad compared to how he was before, but he brushes off her concerns with "I've never been much of a bather."
• Vampire Refugee: Seth becomes desperate to retain if not regain some of his humanity, but his plan to do so fails spectacularly, in part because it makes him a...
• Villain Protagonist: Becomes this upon deciding to forcibly merge himself with Veronica (and her unborn child) into a single entity, since that would be "More human than I am alone!" On top of that when Stathis comes to rescue her he maims him with vomit drop, clearly getting some enjoyment out of the process as he does so, and only Veronica's plea stops him from finishing him off.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the climax, Seth/Brundlefly's reaction to seeing Veronica's telepod disconnected from the other two is to smash the glass door of his open so he can at least have vengeance on Stathis. But just as he's partially outside it the countdown ends and the result is not pretty.
• Was Once a Man: His loss of humanity is such that he describes himself to Veronica as "an insect who dreamt he was a man" when he turns her away for the final time. He currently provides the trope's page quote. He's also an atypical example of the trope in that the audience fully gets to know him as a human before his Tragic Mistake transforms him.
• Workaholic: By his own admission, he has no life beyond his work on the telepods before he meets Veronica. In hindsight this points to his Fatal Flaw being desire. Whatever or whoever it is that matters to him, he must pursue it with all of his heart to the exclusion of all else — and what self-control he has ends up first compromised, then destroyed, over the course of the story.

Veronica Quaife

Veronica "Ronnie" Quaife

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

Played By: Geena Davis (original), Saffron Henderson (The Fly II)

A reporter for Particle Magazine, Veronica's initial skepticism of Seth's claims of an invention "that will change the world and human life as we know it" is quickly dispelled when she sees them in action. Beyond the lure of a career-making story, she becomes drawn to Seth's passion for his work and his sweet charm, and elevates their relationship to a romantic one. At first merely puzzled by (and to an extent attracted to) Seth's changing nature post-teleportation, she comes to realize something is wrong with him but ends up being turned out of his loft/lab for her trouble. Four weeks later her worst fears for him are exceeded when he contacts her again and reveals the truth about his condition. Her love for him is so strong that she is not willing to abandon him, even as her own mind threatens to crack under the stress...but what will she do when she learns she is pregnant with his child?

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• '80s Hair: She has a voluminously curly brunette perm.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: In both the short story and 1958 film, the equivalent character Helene was nearly Driven to Madness in trying to find a way to undo the transformation of her husband and failing that, giving him a Mercy Kill, but Veronica — while able to hold on to her sanity — has things much, much worse due in part to the nature of Seth's transformation. She figures out early on that he's not himself and what must be behind it but her concerns are treated as a Cassandra Truth by Seth, who ultimately turns her out of his loft, leaving her to worry for four weeks about him since he's cut off all communication with her. When she finds out what's becoming of him and why, she is broken-hearted yet knows she has to be there for him because he has no one else in his life and there's nowhere to turn for help. Then she finds out she's pregnant with his child and has to decide what to do about it, as it more likely than not will be a mutant. After she sees Seth's Stage 5 appearance and he warns her that he is too dangerous to be around, she decides not to tell him of her dilemma and makes her decision to have an abortion...but when Seth overhears her pleading with Stathis to arrange for it right away, the stage is set for a tragic finale for everyone.
• Audience Surrogate: She is the film's principal audience viewpoint character.
• Brainy Brunette: She writes for a science magazine, after all. In passing she notes that in college she was a science major, and it was Stathis who got her into journalism. Her intelligence and intuition help her realize something is dangerously wrong with Seth even before she gets confirmation from a lab that the odd hairs growing out of the scratches on his back are not human.
• Commonality Connection: Passion for one's work. Veronica is passionate about her work as a science journalist, and knowing that Seth's work is the ultimate scoop she's determined to be the one who documents it. She becomes interested in Seth as a person in part because he is so clearly devoted to his work and wants to share that passion with someone. Their shared tragedy is that Seth's passion is his Fatal Flaw and becomes all-consuming as his human capacity for compassion and compromise slowly dies, culminating in his attempt to fuse himself with her and their unborn child.
• Damsel in Distress: Ends up one in the climax when Seth not only kidnaps her but, it turns out, intends to force her into Romantic Fusion. When he reveals his intentions to her, she tries to escape his grip but ends up only triggering his One-Winged Angel transformation; this is justified as his Super-Strength has become enough to overpower her and ultimately toss her into the telepod. Stathis saves her by disconnecting her pod from the other two before the countdown reaches zero.
• Deadpan Snarker: She is this from the get-go, with her response to Seth's opening claim of working on something that will change the world being "Change it a lot or just a bit? You'll have to be more specific." This trait is a stark contrast to Seth's awkward nature, speaking to her being far more worldly than him. However, as she realizes what's happening to him she drops the snark entirely while he indulges in Gallows Humor about his situation.
• Deuteragonist: Seth may be the Doomed Protagonist, but Veronica's role and perspective on events is so important that she edges him out in total screentime. This is especially clear in the third act as she struggles with both Seth's transformation and the realization that she's pregnant with his child. As his Protagonist Journey to Villain becomes complete she brings the tragedy and film to an end by killing him at his request. Given how much of the plot she instigates/furthers, Seth could even be seen as a Decoy Protagonist with her as the true one.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: Because she knows what's happening to him is a terrible, uncontrollable sickness her love for Seth is steadfast even as his transformation into Brundlefly reaches its climax. Even after he's kidnapped her and attempted to murder Stathis, when he asks her to "Help me be human" her response is a tearful "How?" She doesn't try to escape until she learns exactly what his Evil Plan is. After Stathis rescues her and Brundlefly is Hoist by His Own Petard, her initial response to the creature wordlessly begging her to end his suffering is to cry out that she can't! But both know that there is no choice left, and she does, whereupon she sinks to her knees in tears.
• Fatal Flaw: Secretiveness. On the upside, she's a woman who values her privacy and right to make her own choices, and initially tries to hide her decision to follow Seth's work from Stathis, in part because she knows Seth doesn't want the world to know about it just yet. On the downside, she avoids disclosing her romantic past with Stathis to Seth, even when the former starts stalking her, for an admittedly decent reason — she can handle Stathis on her own and doesn't see the point of getting Seth involved in such drama. But when she leaves to confront Stathis over the planned Particle cover story Seth puts what he does know about their relationship together and jumps to the wrong conclusion, and his reaction to this results in his Tragic Mistake. Later, she keeps two further secrets from Seth: 1) that Stathis knows what is happening to him, 2) that she is pregnant with Seth's child. She actually intends to reveal the latter to Seth when she visits him in Stage 5, but Cannot Spit It Out once he tells her I Am a Monster; she decides to seek out an abortion as she leaves. Alas, Seth (observing her desperate argument with Stathis outside) learns what she's hiding from him, and the climactic tragedy ensues.
• Foil: Seth has one in Stathis, and Veronica has one in Tawny. After Veronica refuses to undergo teleportation, the Drunk with Power Seth picks up a looser, flightier, grungier woman at a bar; she doesn't take their tryst seriously and takes his strange behavior mostly in stride, although she refuses to be teleported. Tawny's also blonde, tanned, and significantly shorter than Veronica, reflecting an unbalanced power dynamic. It's Veronica's arrival and warning to Tawny ("No. Be afraid. Be very afraid.") that effectively saves the latter from Seth forcibly sending her through, allowing her to leave. The entire interlude is a grotesque foil to how his relationship with Veronica began: Where he used the prospect of a wonderful invention — reflecting his intelligence — to convince her to go back to his loft, and she was the one who made the first move in the escalation of their relationship, he is much more forthright in his flirting with Tawny and gruesomely defeats a rival in One-Sided Arm-Wrestling to claim her. (He is also drinking Scotch during both initial encounters.) And where he freely, humbly admitted to Veronica he couldn't take all the credit for his breakthroughs, when the awed Tawny asks him "Are you some sort of magician?" after he demonstrates the telepods to her he declares in a harsh whisper "Yes." as he makes the first move in the resulting tryst.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: The first of her many outfits includes a black leather suit jacket, which contributes to how modern (by 1980s standards) and worldly she looks compared to Seth in his Limited Wardrobe suit. Once they're in a romantic relationship, she initiates him into this trope by buying him a brown leather jacket (see above).
• Hidden Depths: She's a snarky, fiercely independent Watson, but at the same time she is capable of not merely deep romantic love for Seth but, as his transformation progresses, extraordinary compassion for and devotion to him.
• Hysterical Woman: Subverted. When she, having seen Seth in his Stage 5 form, tearfully, desperately tells Stathis that she needs to have an abortion right away — never mind it's well after nightfall — he initially refuses and says they should wait, subtly suggesting that she's this. But while her emotions are heightened, she is thinking very rationally; she wants to get this over with as soon as she can. By the time they're in the abortionist's office, she is calm but remains intense and insistent that she have the abortion, dismissing an offer to have a ultrasound or any other tests performed first because "Tests can't prove anything."
• In-Series Nickname: Both of her lovers refer to her as "Ronnie"; tellingly Seth only starts doing so after their relationship becomes personal. That it's a masculine name and apparently the one she prefers speaks to her agency and strength in both relationships; that Stathis ends up being the only corner of the love triangle without a nickname speaks to the many similarities and powerful bond between Veronica and Seth/Ronnie and Brundlefly.
• Intrepid Reporter: She goes to the Bartok press event looking for a good story, and she soon finds one. Seth is so blinded by attraction to her that he forgets she's this until after his initial demonstration of the telepods, and asks for the interview audiotape she's recording. She stands her ground — after all, everything he did and said was on the record — and storms out. He visits the Particle offices the next day and, upon learning that her editor thinks the telepods are "an old nightclub routine", is happy that she can't yet find a taker for the story. Over lunch he explains to her the reason he doesn't want the story to get out right away (he hasn't figured out how to safely teleport living things), and tells her that she should cover his work for a book instead. She agrees to this — after all, being the sole chronicler of a world-changing technology is the ultimate scoop. While she also finds him endearing as a person, she doesn't fully realize how much she cares about him until after the accident with the baboon, when she insists on interviewing him only to realize too late that the failure affected him personally (in that he doesn't want to talk about it yet).
• I Want My Beloved to Be Fashionable: An unusual take on this trope in that, after their relationship has become a personal one, she expands Seth's very Limited Wardrobe by purchasing clothes that are more casual rather than less, though they are still nice.
• Little "No": Her reaction to Seth explaining his Romantic Fusion intentions — and activating the countdown to it — is Type 3 (tiny, pathetic expression of dawning horror). She can't bring herself even to cry out and struggle until after he's said his Last Words and begins to lead/drag her to the telepod.
• Living Emotional Crutch: She becomes this to Seth in Stage 3. He sends her away in Stage 5 upon realizing that she won't be able to hold him back, much less help him, much longer due to his Split-Personality Takeover. When he realizes she's kept the secret of her pregnancy from him, though, he snaps and decides to literally make her part of him.
• Love Martyr: A justified example. When Seth starts treating her badly in Stage 1 on top of the physical changes she's already noticed in him, she realizes that it's all due to a Teleporter Accident, meaning he's sick and needs help. When he turns her out of the loft in Stage 2 in spite of her pleas, she leaves in tears, knowing that he's too angry and aggressive to reason with. She tries to contact him by phone over the next four weeks, but never returns to the loft. When they finally meet again, he is no longer dangerous (although he and Stathis initially fear he might be Patient Zero) in the wake of realizing what's actually happening to him. She knows he needs her support, since he has no one else and her love for him has never flagged, but it is draining for her emotionally. Come Stage 5, he tells her that she must never see him again (and thus stop being this trope) because his mind is going and Love Cannot Overcome.
• Poor Communication Kills: She makes two mistakes of this type, with tragic consequences:
  • When she learns Stathis is trying to sabotage her work and relationship with Seth by rushing a magazine article on the telepods to press, she decides to confront him right away. Seth, who does not know that Stathis is her ex, is in the middle of ordering Chinese takeout for him and Veronica to celebrate his perfecting the telepods and thus puzzled and upset by her suddenly leaving, and she only explains to him that she has to take care of "the residue of another life". Unfortunately Seth puts two and two together once she leaves and assumes he's being cuckolded, which drives him to getting drunk and from there deciding to teleport himself.
  • Unsure what to do about her pregnancy, she goes to visit Seth and tell him about it only to be so upset by both his Stage 5 appearance and his warning that I Am a Monster that she Cannot Spit It Out and leaves in tears. He ends up overhearing her subsequent anguished conversation with Stathis and learns that she does not want to keep the child, and decides to trail them as they seek someone who can perform an abortion...
• The Power of Love: Once she learns the awful truth about what's happening to Seth, she is determined to be there for him even though it's taking a huge toll on her emotionally and may well bring her to harm as well.
• Put Off Their Food: Subverted early on when Seth takes her to a fast food restaurant. Owing to the cuisine, his intimations of gruesome horror don't affect her appetite!
  Seth: I can only teleport inanimate objects.
  Veronica: So, what happens when you try to teleport living things?
  (His eyes flick to the burger in her hands, and he grimaces)
  Seth: Not while we're eating.
  Veronica: It can't be worse than this!
• Sadistic Choice: Upon learning she's pregnant with Seth's baby, she finds herself facing a deeply personal version of this. Her behavior in her nightmare, in which she initially seems to be suffering a miscarriage and tells Stathis "I don't think I want to lose it....Why am I losing it?", suggests that she does not want to give up the child of her union with her true love. However, if she keeps it, she'll most likely bring a mutant into the world. After seeing Seth's hideous Stage 5 state, with him telling her I Am a Monster on top of that, she decides she must have an abortion, painful as it may be for her emotionally.
• Science Hero's Babe Assistant: Subverted! She's a journalist, so naturally she'd be asking questions — especially about completely unprecedented technology being developed in secret — as she hangs around Seth, who wants to be asked about his life's work. She's also sharp enough to realize that Seth's Slow Transformation is a bad thing before he does, even going to a lab to have the strange hairs on his back analyzed so she can better back up her assertions, and points out that they could ask others for help as his condition worsens, though he shoots this suggestion down. She also knows that her baby could be born human but mutate later, meaning that the abortionist's offer to run tests on her fetus before moving forward on the procedure would be useless. She only becomes a Damsel in Distress in the climax, when she learns what the final cost of Supporting the Monster Loved One is to be, and is faced with a creature much more powerful than she is.
• Screaming Woman: She spectacularly screams three entirely justified times in the third act: first during her Nightmare Sequence as she sees she's giving birth to a giant maggot, second when Seth jumps through the window of the operating room to kidnap her, and third when she accidentally rips his decayed jaw off and triggers his One-Winged Angel transformation. (In the original electronic press kit Geena Davis mentions Cronenberg, during shooting, playfully referring to her as "The Girl" with scenes like this in mind.)
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She is initially interested in Seth for professional reasons but his gentle, sweet personality and passion for his work is genuinely attractive to her. When she acts on this he — isolated and lonely for so long — eagerly and tenderly responds in kind, having desired her from the moment he met her. He's a sharp contrast to her ex-lover and current editor Stathis, a seemingly confident but Clingy Jealous Guy who is constantly heedless of her wishes and feelings, and even stalks her to figure out the true nature of her relationship with Seth. When he does, his attempts to sabotage it inadvertently lead to the Tragic Mistake that slowly undoes Seth.
• Stocking Filler: When Seth is ready to show her how the telepods work, he asks for a personal item of hers to send through. She peels off one of her garter stockings, much to his awkward interest. ("I don't wear jewelry.") After their argument over his belated realization that he should not have shown the pods to a journalist, she leaves without putting it back on, brushing off Seth's concern with "Keep it for good luck."
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: The opening sequence of The Fly II has her suffer Death by Childbirth. Unfortunately, shooting another childbirth scene was the last thing Geena Davis wanted to do as shooting this film's Dream Sequence had been stressful enough (her career was also taking off in the interim) so another actress was employed. Earlier concepts for the sequel gave Veronica a much larger role.
• Trauma Conga Line: She's not the one turning into a monster but she suffers at least as much as Seth does, arguably more, over the course of the story.
  • Working with the Ex would be difficult enough for anyone, but Stathis begins stalking her upon realizing Seth is interested in her. When his suspicions about their relationship are confirmed, Stathis threatens to have a magazine article about the telepods published, which will undercut the book deal she has with Seth. She handles this crisis with aplomb, but not before she accidentally sets the stage for Seth's fateful teleportation.
  • In the days immediately following, she comes to realize that something is wrong with Seth but not only does he not believe her, he calls her jealous of his new abilities and a coward for not wanting to be teleported herself. Coming back from getting the hairs on his back analyzed, she's heartbroken to find that he had a one-night stand with another woman in the interim. Then the enraged Seth turns her out of the loft altogether when she reiterates that he is sick.
  • After four weeks of fruitlessly trying to communicate with Seth, she learns that what's happening to him is far, far worse than she could have imagined — he's hideous, apparently dying, and there's no real help to seek. She must become his Living Emotional Crutch — and on top of that, her only confidant is Stathis, who cannot understand why she is willing to do this.
  • Upon learning she's pregnant with Seth's child, her fears over what it could turn out to be result in horrific nightmares. When she visits him, hoping to explain the situation and figure out what to do, she instead leaves in desperate tears upon his telling her that she must never see him again because "I'll hurt you if you stay."
  • She decides to have an abortion but is kidnapped by the desperate, deranged Seth before that can take place. She watches helplessly as Stathis arrives at the loft to rescue her only to be maimed by Seth — and then she learns what Seth wants her to do, what he's going to make her do, in order to save what remains of his humanity. She becomes a Damsel in Distress as his Metamorphosis becomes complete and he tosses her into the telepod, which she has no means of escaping. She's facing a Fate Worse than Death. Stathis manages to rescue her, but...
  • She has to witness the final ruin of the man she loved, who looks nothing like a man anymore, and put him out of his misery.
  • Finally, at the top of The Fly II, having been convinced and/or pressured by Anton Bartok into doing so she brings the child she didn't want to term...and suffers Death by Childbirth. Her last words are "You said it wouldn't be like this! You PROMISED!"
• Tsundere: Her tsun side initially dominates, and with good reason. With Seth she is initially skeptical of his claims about the telepods, and then frustrated that he doesn't realize she agreed to visit his lab because she was interested in getting a story (he was trying to woo her, not become a subject for an article). Moreover she answers to an editor who is also a pushy ex-lover and lords his higher position over her by planning to jump her on the story — she has to stand up for herself. Love for Seth brings out her dere side, but as she realizes before he does that something terrible is happening to him the tsun side becomes a sort of protection for her, though by the end it can only go so far when put up against what Seth becomes and what's happening to her as a result.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: In sharp contrast to Seth's initially Limited Wardrobe, by the end of the movie Veronica's outfits number in the double digits. One sign of how drained she is after she revisits Seth at Stage 3 of his transformation is that she's seen wearing the same outfit and hairstyle through that visit, her subsequent consultation with Stathis, and her next visit to Seth, by which point he's already reached Stage 4 (which would have unfolded over, at most, a few days).
• The Watson: Being a reporter seeking a good story she is naturally inquisitive about what Seth is working on, and since it turns out to be completely groundbreaking technology more questions naturally follow about how it works, how he was able to accomplish it in secrecy, etc. When she reestablishes contact with him in Stage 3, her questions set up his explanations of exactly what's happened and is happening to him. In between, there are some twists on this trope: First, her and Seth's roles are temporarily reversed when he asks her about the true nature of her relationship with Stathis, and she explains their backstory. Second, in Stages 1 and 2 she notices and asks about the strange changes she's seeing in him but he brushes her questions and concerns off because he's too distracted by his own thoughts and feelings, and when she realizes something must have gone wrong when he teleported himself decides to have the hairs that were growing from the wound on his back analyzed at a lab (offscreen, while Seth is busy with Tawny).

Stathis Borans

Stathis Borans

"I'm sure Typhoid Mary was a very nice person too when you saw her socially."

Played By: John Getz

Veronica's editor at Particle Magazine was also, prior to the events of the film, her live-in lover. Smug and confident to a fault, he did not take her choice to leave him well and is desperate to use their working relationship to maintain some kind of personal one. Upon learning (via stalking) that Veronica and Seth are lovers, he decides to use his connections to scoop Veronica on the telepod story — unwittingly setting the stage for Seth's fateful teleportation in the process.

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• Adaptational Jerkass: He's more of a Crazy Jealous Guy and later a reclusive Jerkass Woobieinvoked in the 1989 sequel than his 1950s counterpart François played by Vincent Price.
• All There in the Manual: The shooting script reveals Stathis goes skeet shooting, which is why he has a shotgun on hand for the film's climax, and that he was Veronica's live-in lover for two years but didn't seem to take that relationship too seriously until it was nearing its end.
• An Arm and a Leg: Gets his hand and foot dissolved with fly vomit. He lampshades this in the sequel.
• Artificial Limbs: In the sequel, he's acquired prothetic limbs to replace the hand and foot he lost.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He tells Veronica "I don't want you to disappear from my life" during their confrontation over who has the rights to the telepod story; he wants to at least be her confidante, and she is willing to grant him this. However, it means that he ends up privy to the horrors of Seth's transformation and the crisis of her pregnancy — and is the only person who can save her when the climax looms.
• Benevolent Boss: Though not initially (see Mean Boss below). He edits the magazine his ex Veronica writes for, which technically makes him her boss. Although he tries to use his position to scoop her on publishing a story about the telepods, he turns out to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who shows sincere concern for her well-being and even comes to her rescue when she gets kidnapped by Brundlefly.
• Career-Ending Injury: The sequel implies Stathis lost his job as an editor at Particle Magazine in that he's forced to receive a disability retirement due to losing his hand and foot at the end of the first film.
• Character Tics: Starting with his first lines he often puts/has his fingers to one of his temples as if he has a headache whenever he's annoyed and/or stressed. (John Getz had a headache when he auditioned, and Cronenberg liked the resultant reading so much he asked him to recreate that attitude once they were shooting.)
• Clingy Jealous Guy: Stathis does not take Veronica moving on from their breakup well. In addition to attempting to sabotage her and Seth's relationship, early on he invites himself into her apartment to use her shower when she's away and repeatedly makes lascivious comments towards her. When Seth abducts Veronica from the abortion clinic, rather than calling the police, Stathis shows up to Seth's lab with a shotgun! However, the last note is justified as Seth has become a dangerous monstrosity by that point and time is of the essence. In the sequel, he even tells Martin and Beth that Seth stole his girl! (Not only did Veronica break up with Stathis well before she met Seth, she was the one who initiated the resultant romantic relationship.)
• Composite Character: Of two characters specific to Charles Edward Pogue's original script draft: Harry, the protagonist's best friend and colleague nursing a crush on their love interest (see also Expy below), and DeWitt, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who wanted control of the protagonist's project for himself.
• The Confidant: He's willing to settle for being this to Veronica on a professional level so long as he's still a part of her life. This becomes a case of Be Careful What You Wish For when she turns to him for help in handling Seth's transformation, and from there her pregnancy as well, as she can't bring herself to reveal the latter to Seth. When Seth finds out she's been confiding in Stathis and exactly what she's been confiding to him, the stage is set for the tragic climax of the story.
• Deadpan Snarker: Shares this trait with Veronica; his response to her trying to explain Seth's suffering is "I'm sure Typhoid Mary was a very nice person too when you saw her socially." Just like it does for her, this trait evaporates upon seeing (via the video she records of Seth's eating habits) just how horrible the situation is. It returns in the sequel, albeit in a much more bitter manner.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Following the events of the first film and the opening sequence of the second, he's turned to drinking heavily.
• Entitled Bastard: "Ronnie! You've got to talk to me!" Which is immediately shut down by Ronnie's Shut Up, Hannibal! speech a second later.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first lines have him dismiss Veronica's scoop about Seth's work — and both sets up his smug nature and foreshadows the reveal that he is Veronica's ex as well as boss — in this manner: "It's a joke!...It's an old nightclub routine — two cabinets. And you fell for it." As she tries to assert that she's the one who saw this as he gets up to answer his office phone, he briefly pauses (looming over her!) to ask her "Are we having lunch?"
• Expy: Vincent Price's character François from the original 1958 film, for being a male character who also has feelings for the female protagonist, who in turn confides to him about what is happening to the Doomed Protagonist. Also, both characters have facial hair in contrast to the male protagonist's clean-shaven face — and are the only characters to return for the sequel and be reprised by their original actors! In Charles Edward Pogue's original script, his equivalent character (Harry) was even more this trope, serving as the protagonist's supportive best friend and colleague rather than a Crazy Jealous Guy actively trying to meddle in romantic affairs, only openly trying to act on his desires once it was clear the protagonist was too far gone to be a legitimate option anymore. (The upshot of this was that his being maimed by vomit drop didn't seem as fitting as it does for Stathis, for whom it's a sort of karmic Disproportionate Retribution for his jealousy accidentally setting the stage for Seth's transformation.)
• Fatal Flaw: Jealousy. He's confident he can rekindle his romantic relationship with Veronica until the moment he learns that Seth has come to the Particle offices to talk to her. From that point on he's determined to learn whatever he can about Seth and figure out what the nature of his and Veronica's relationship is/is becoming (this is made even clearer in a deleted scene that appears in the making-of documentary Fear of the Flesh), and when he finds out via stalking they are lovers he tries to blackmail her into leaving Seth with a Career Versus Man decision, desperate to keep her in his life somehow. This fatal flaw ends up bringing out the fatal flaws of Veronica and Seth in turn, with horrific consequences for all three.
• Foil: His smug, bullying, confident, and selfish nature makes him this to the awkward, shy, gentle, insecure Seth. By the end of the film their roles have reversed, with Seth a Villain Protagonist and Stathis a Hero Antagonist, each demonstrating crueler or kinder sides as a result of the former's transformation.
• Handicapped Badass: Despite just getting his hand and foot dissolved, causing him to go into horrified, painful shock to the point of rolling up his eyes, powered by love for Veronica, he manages to keep himself from completely fainting and saves her from being forcibly fused with Brundlefly. Bonus points for resting his shotgun on top of his bloody stump on his left wrist where his hand used to be as he fires the shotgun to disconnect Veronica's pod — and after that manages to crawl to her pod to unlock the door and let her out.
• Hero Antagonist: Initially a typical Crazy Jealous Guy antagonist but gradually begins to play this role straight, especially when he comes to Veronica's rescue after she gets kidnapped by Brundlefly.
• It's All My Fault: In the sequel, Stathis being reduced to self-pityingly Drowning My Sorrows following Veronica's death on top of the first film's events may be layered with this, since he was the Unwitting Instigator of Doom for it all (see below).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He appears to be just a total jerk who's still bitter about Veronica leaving him, but he doesn't hesitate in helping her get to an abortionist when she decides to get rid of Seth's baby, and he comes to the rescue when she's kidnapped. Also, in the sequel's prologue he begs Bartok's cohorts to put more effort to save Veronica as she gives birth to Martin. Even though he transitions to being a straight Jerkass (though understandably a pitifulinvoked one) in the sequel, Stathis still carry a degree of sympathy for others as gives his last words of encouragement towards Martin and Beth to find a cure after he makes it clear the Telepods are his only chance for one and offering his jeep to them to prevent them being easily tracked down by Bartok as he tells them to Get Out!.
• Laser-Guided Karma: His meddling with Seth and Veronica's relationship is indirectly responsible for Seth's transformation into Brundlefly. Brundlefly repays him by melting his hand and foot off in the film's climax.
• Mean Boss: He uses his position as Veronica's editor to try and interfere with her and Seth's relationship, with unintentionally disastrous consequences. However, he goes on to be a supportive confidant/Benevolent Boss when he learns what's happening to Veronica as a result of Seth's transformation.
• Mr. Exposition: He reveals to Veronica pertinent details about Seth's past that Seth himself doesn't mention to her (that he was brilliant enough to be shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Physics at 20, etc.). Interestingly, he has an ulterior motive in collecting and sharing the knowledge. From the moment Seth comes to the Particle offices to see Veronica, Stathis suspects the "magician" has more than a professional interest in her — a deleted scene that appears in the documentary Fear of the Flesh shows Stathis telling a subordinate to dig up any information she can about Seth just after he sees him and Veronica leaving together — and sharing the information with her at her apartment is a way of seeing whether she is interested in him professionally and/or personally. She attempts to brush this off by saying she's not yet committed to writing about him, but Stathis notes "That's not like you" and when she responds by angrily demanding he leave, he knows something is up and subsequently stalks her to find out what it is.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The only time something very bad happens to Stathis is when he nobly comes to Veronica's rescue after she gets kidnapped and get his hand and foot dissolved with Seth's vomit drop. This gets worse for him in the sequel with Veronica's Death by Childbirth after saving her in the first film's climax. That said, the former situation can also be read as Laser-Guided Karma for Stathis being an Unwitting Instigator of Doom, all because he was bitter about Veronica choosing Seth over him.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Seriously played with. He tries to sabotage Veronica and Seth's relationship over the course of the first act, and drops out of the narrative shortly after she stands up to him. But because Veronica sees Stathis as a personal nuisance, Seth doesn't know exactly what's going on when she leaves to confront him, and his incorrect assumptions set up his Tragic Mistake and transformation into not just a villain, but a monster! With this in mind, when Stathis returns in the third act, it's as the despondent Veronica's confidant, and he slowly becomes a Hero Antagonist whose actions are as important to the climax as anyone else's.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Downplayed; as William Beard points out in the 2019 Blu-Ray commentary Stathis's outfits reflect his gradual development into a Hero Antagonist. As early as the scene in the clothing store, he's wearing a gray overcoat and a partially-burgundy tie that resemble pieces of Seth's Limited Wardrobe — just as Seth is about to move away from that look. It also foreshadows Seth's capacity for jealousy. (This is also the outfit Stathis wears in Veronica's Nightmare Sequence, in which he is wholly supportive and effectively substituting for her true love Seth.) From his viewing the video of Seth onward, he dresses more casually — in that scene he's wearing a plaid shirt and neutral slacks just like Seth did after Veronica shopped for him, and in the closing stretch he has a brown suede jacket and blue sweater — the former a softer version of the leather jacket Seth wore in the second act.
• Sole Survivor: The only one of the three principal characters who lives to the end of the sequel.
• Stalker with a Crush: He spends the first act as this: He stops off at her apartment just to take a shower — he still has a key and she hasn't changed the locks — and secretly waits outside the warehouse where Seth lives and works to monitor her comings and goings. When she stays there an entire night, he realizes they are lovers and proceeds to follow her to a men's clothing store (where she's looking to expand Seth's Limited Wardrobe) to confront her. After a further confrontation with Veronica over his intent to scoop her on the telepod story, during which she agrees to at least treat him as a confidante, he drops this behavior and indeed isn't seen again until the third act.
• Survivor's Guilt: In the sequel, he is reduced to Drowning My Sorrows following the deaths of Seth and especially Veronica.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Despite later stating to Martin and Beth that he had no love for Seth and that he "bugged" him in the sequel, he can only watch in stunned silence and remorse at both the pitiful end to his romantic rival and Veronica's grief.
• Tritagonist: Downplayed — he is the third important character but most of his scenes involve his interactions with the other two. The only stretch in which he's absolutely alone is when he arrives at the loft to rescue Veronica.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Just after Seth successfully teleports the second baboon and they're beginning to celebrate with champagne, Ronnie finds a package Stathis left at the loft that's addressed to her. In it is a mock-up of a Particle cover about Seth and the telepods. This sends the message "Break up with Seth or I break the story." Ronnie abruptly leaves to confront Stathis without telling Seth why...and Seth, who knows Stathis is her editor, realizes from what little she said as she left that he was also her lover. Believing he's being cuckolded, Seth gets drunk and, with his self-control loosened, decides that there's no reason not to become Professor Guinea Pig right away...

Martin Brundle

Martin Brundle

Played By: Eric Stoltz

The child of Seth Brundle and Veronica Quaife, Martin was unfortunately conceived after his father's fatal telepod accident, resulting in him being born with some of his father's insect genes. As intellectually brilliant as his father but suffering from accelerated aging, Martin looks like he's in his early twenties when he's chronologically only five years old, and attempts to devise a way to cure his condition using the telepods as his condition accelerates.

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• Body Horror: Like his father, Martin undergoes a mutation from humanoid to insectoid, but in his case this was a “natural” part of his body’s evolution, so the process progresses more smoothly and is fundamentally less twisted, to the extent that Martin spins a cocoon for himself at a key point where Seth’s transformation just saw parts of himself falling off or breaking apart.
• Child Prodigy: By the time he's mentally and physically become a preteen (chronologically he’s not even three years old yet), Martin is bored by all the intellectual testing he's being put through by his overseers because it's all too easy for him and prefers to work on his own projects. He is able to hack into computers and create his own security badge to explore Zone 4.
• Cursed with Awesome: Doubly so for Martin compared to his father, since his Martinfly form, while inhuman, turns out to be a coherent, seemingly healthy lifeform instead of a diseased, deformed mishmash of genetic goo (possibly due to being born with the fly genes instead of having them abruptly inserted into him as an adult). He's much more of a werefly / alien lifeform than the diseased corpse-like wreck Seth ended up turning into in the first film.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Where his father was mutated into a monster and was ultimately forced to request a Mercy Kill, Martin is able to find a cure for his condition by transferring the “infected” gene sequences into Anton Bartok while leaving him basically human.
• Generation Xerox: Doomed from birth to undergo a Slow Transformation into a monster due to the insect genes inherited from his father, Martin also inherited Seth’s intellectual brilliance and social awkwardness, with others concluding that Martin alone can complete his father’s work. He even falls for a beautiful brunette who helps him with the project, likes how Endearingly Dorky he is, and doesn’t reject him as he mutates. Ultimately Martin’s more stable transformation allows him to retain enough of his human mind that he finds a cure for his condition.
• Honor Before Reason: Martin discovers he can cure himself, but only if he uses a healthy human donor. He initially refuses to subject another person to what he's going through, but learning the truth about Bartok’s manipulations and his subsequent full mutation make it easier for Martin to reconsider that stance.
• Horrifying Hero: Martin's final form might be a horrifying mash up of fly and human, but he's in complete control of himself and still a good guy.
• Lightning Bruiser: Unlike his father, who had his genes mashed together and became a strong but sickly and misshapen monstrosity, Martin Brundle is a naturally formed Half-Human Hybrid, leaving his mind more lucid and his body healthier and more viable. He is remarkably fast and able to leap great distances, strong enough to fold a man in half (backwards), and a gunshot wound to the torso hardly slows him down, if he wasn't outright feigning injury.
• No Social Skills: Martin is intellectually brilliant but socially awkward by the time he's physically and mentally matured into a young adult. Since he's spent all of his life under observation by Anton Bartok and his heartless underlings, and Rapid Aging meant having peers around was out of the question, he never had an opportunity to form emotional and social attachments to anyone besides Anton (who is faking it) and the ill-fated dog. Beth quickly comes to like him once they meet, though, finding his curious and polite nature appealing.
• Raised in a Lab: Martin was raised in a laboratory at Bartok Industries, as Anton Bartok wanted to observe how Martin's dormant fly genes would manifest themselves as he grew up.
• Rapid Aging: Martin ages at four times the normal human rate. He knows that this is abnormal; he just isn't aware of the actual cause. Bartok and his underlings tell him that he inherited a rapid aging disorder ("Brundle's Accelerated Growth Syndrome") from his father, who ultimately succumbed to it. It is "controlled" by their (phony) injections, while Martin eventually uses the restored telepods to work on finding a cure for it. Only later does Martin learn the awful truth.
• Younger Than They Look: As a result of rapid aging caused by his unconventional genetics, Martin looks to be in his early twenties when he’s chronologically five years old.

Beth Logan

Beth Logan

Played By: Daphne Zuniga

An employee of Bartok Industries, Beth meets and falls for Martin Brundle once he begins officially working at the company, becoming his only confidant and ally as he begins to suffer his father's fate of mutating into a giant fly-monster.

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• Despair Event Horizon: Witnessing Martin weave a cocoon and talk about how he’s becoming “better” proves too much for Beth, and she’s forced to basically return Martin to Bartok Industries despite knowing that they only want to use him.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: Beth bears a rather striking resemblance to Martin’s late mother Veronica, even though Martin only “met” his mother briefly before her Death by Childbirth.
• Living Emotional Crutch: During the final clash, Beth is basically the only person in Bartok Industries Martinfly still cares for, his mutated self showing no intention of harming her even as he tears through security guards.
• Science Hero's Babe Assistant: Beth doesn't do much as Martin's assistant aside from Supporting the Monster Loved One in the second half (the road trip to flee Bartok's goons, in particular, ends up doing little). Her big contribution to the climax is pressing a button, and only because (unlike his dad) Martin hasn't programmed an automatic teleportation sequence for the telepods.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Beth explicitly calls Stathis out on his dismissive response to Martin’s pleas for help as the older man recalls the circumstances of Seth Brundle’s death, asking him to show some compassion.

Anton Bartok

Anton Bartok

Played By: Lee Richardson

The head of Bartok Industries, Anton Bartok funded Seth Brundle's original telepod experiments, and subsequently convinced Veronica Quaife to give birth to her and Brundle's child. When Veronica died from the shock of seeing the larval sack she had given birth to, Bartok set himself up as the father figure to Martin Brundle, but truly intended for Martin to use his brilliance to solve the problems of the telepods and make them available for mass production.

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• And I Must Scream: Bartok's karmic end has him reduced to a hideously deformed mutant crawling around in that same pit, pitifully squirming around, and barely able to even feed himself.
• Bad Boss: The news that Martinfly has killed some of his employees is dismissed by Bartok given his focus on taking Martin alive.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Anton Bartok acts like a kind father figure to Martin and is very much the only person there who treats him kindly. But it's all a lie; he only sees Martin as a useful tool for his corporate interests.
• Underestimating Badassery: Bartok and his staff assumed that Martinfly would be like his father, who wasn't actually that much of a threat against anything more than a untrained man with a shotgun, and needed the element of surprise. Although they have a fully-armed security team ready for when Martinfly emerges, the resulting pure hybrid is a powerful monster with full awareness and no obvious weaknesses, allowing him to tear through the security staff and use Bartok as an unwilling ‘donor’ to provide the healthy gene sequences necessary to cure Martin’s own mutation.

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