Characters / Rabbit Hole (2023)

Weir and Allies

John Weir

Jonathan "John" Weir

Portrayed By: Kiefer Sutherland, Graham Harvey (childhood flashbacks)

Control is a delusion.

"For those of us who lie for a living, our only connection to reality are the people who really, really know us. And for me that was Valence, and only Valence."

The main protagonist of the series, a insanely-intelligent corporate spy framed for the both the murder of a US Treasury investigator, and his best friend in the aftermath of a seemingly-average job.

Raised from a young age by a CIA agent father who killed himself when John was ten, and shipped off to a boarding school by an alcoholic mom who couldn't cope, John adapted himself into a person who could, learning the art of psychological manipulation and subterfuge with the help of items stolen out of his father's safe alongside his best friend and adoptive brother Miles. Unfortunately, the trauma of his past and the life he's forced himself into have left him with a host of neuroses, including an inability to trust just about anyone, horrific paranoia, and frequent difficulty distinguishing his own delusions and fears from reality.

Tropes:

• Ambiguous Disorder: John Weir is many things, but healthy and stable really isn't one of them. He's incredibly paranoid, to the point that even the FBI agent hired to tail him thinks it's a bit unnecessary, suffers horrific nightmares on what is implied to be a regular basis, and if his frequent flashbacks to points in his past during stressful situations and what he says to the priest in the confessional booth at the start of the series is of any indication, has trouble differentiating what's in his head from reality without another person present to help verify. He also has a wide variety of stims and tics he uses to self-soothe when stressed, like finger-tapping or rocking, is utterly horrific at most non-practiced social situations, and has an almost photographic memory. Signs point to potential autism spectrum disorder and some form of PTSD, but the series doesn't confirm either way.
  • The terminology he uses to refer to his (not harmful) stims, "body-focused self soothing," is very close to the DSM-5 term "body-focused repetitive behavior," aka harmful self-grooming mechanisms such as skin picking or hair pulling done repetitively and involuntarily in order to soothe one's compulsions or anxiety, frequently demonstrated in people with anxiety, ADHD, ASD, and OCD.
  • In a flashback conversation with Miles he's mentioned to be on Paxil, a medication used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  • Upon learning that his father is actually still alive, having faked his death when John was a child, once he's away and around Miles, a person he trusts completely, he goes almost entirely non-verbal for a bit, holding himself and rocking back and forth to soothe himself until Miles forces him to have something to drink.
  • Ben even winds up telling him to his face whilst they're going through Miles' communications that he's been exhibiting signs of quote, "deeply-entrenched PTSD," saying that as a former CIA agent, he knows better than anyone else what that looks like.
  • He absolutely despises any deviation from his preset and excruciatingly-planned out ideas that he himself isn't responsible for, to the point that a plan going in any way wrong is one of the only things that can consistently get any sort of legitimate rise out of him. After Ben not only implies fault in his plans and his way of thinking after one of their safehouses is invaded, and presses his Berserk Button about Miles' potential betrayal, he looks like he's about five seconds away from physically attacking the man until Hailey gets involved.
    • Almost everyone that's been around him for longer than five seconds describes him as extremely detail-oriented, a major hard-ass when it comes to having everything go perfectly according to plan with absolutely no error, and almost always preferring to have complete control over the situation and plan so that it can be executed to his standards exactly.
    • Disruption of either one's routine or carefully-laid out plans is a major stressor for just about any autistic person due to the loss of control over the situation, especially considering the already insane levels of stress that John is already under, or if you lean towards interpreting him as having some sort of anxiety disorder, the anxiety often linked with not having everything perfectly planned out or not having something go according to plan can be extremely button-pressing.
• Berserk Button: Do not threaten anyone that he cares about in any way, shape, or form, or you will pay. And bringing up Miles Valence in any way that implies that he betrayed John and co. before his death is an almost surefire way to earn his ire.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: John is, at the best of times, extremely neurotic in his behavior, willing to execute plans and ideas that no person with even an ounce of dignity or common sense would touch with a ten-foot pole. He's also insanely good at his job, to the point that the FBI agent assigned to watch his every waking moment can't get a thing to stick when it comes to his, ahem, less legal maneuvers, and is capable of making the switch from corporate espionage to literal, democracy-determining spycraft with very little issue. It's telling that telling his team that they'll need to fake their deaths and start entire new identities is barely even met with any amount of surprise on their parts.
• The Chessmaster: As a corporate spy he seems to play this role as the head of his team, plotting out intricate details with perfect timing in order to get the outcome he desires. Even while scrambling when he's framed for murder, he still has a contingency or backup plan in place for just about anything the Omniscient Council of Vagueness can throw at him, which makes you wonder what he might be like if he hadn't decided to align himself with the lighter side of the morality scale.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Between an extremely traumatic and unstable childhood and an incredibly dangerous job that basically requires you become extremely paranoid and untrusting in order to survive, John's reactions to most circumstances that would send other people into a massive Freak Out is to shrug his shoulders and adapt his plan to fit the situation.
• Creepy Monotone: Has a rather unnerving tendency to slip into one of these whenever he isn't on the job or isn't actively attempting to engage with someone else socially in a "normal" way. It seems to be something of a self-defense mechanism, because if pushed past his limit in this state, the results tend to be either extremely loud or extremely violent.
• Despair Event Horizon: Hits this by the end of "Gilgamesh," nearly resulting in him murdering Ben out of a false belief that he's been manipulating John and Miles (which would also mean that he was responsible for Miles' death) the entire time. It takes uncovering Miles' hidden recording in the Gilgamesh tablet to snap him out of it, and it's all but stated that if it hadn't, that he would have wound up killing himself too.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Seems to have this in common with Miles, likely as a symptom of his distaste for what he considers "unnecessary killing". It's a sign of how bad his mental state's gotten when he steals a revolver out from under Ben's bedframe and proceeds to have a breakdown before nearly winding up killing him with it.
• The Insomniac: His flash-forward at the start of the series starts off by mentioning that he hasn't slept in at least a few days, and the times that we do see him sleep later on seem to wind up interrupted by nightmares before he gets anything decent.
• No Medication for Me: Is shown to have run out of his psychiatric medication midway through the first episode, and presumably has no way of getting more of it once he's framed for Homm's murder and sent on the run. He isn't going off of them on purpose, however, and given how his mental state declines as the season goes forward, he needs them to achieve at least some kind of regular function while under severe amounts of stress.
• Number Obsession: It's shown that he developed a love of ciphers and number puzzles at a young age while attempting to open his father's safe with Miles, and it's shown to have persisted long into the modern day, apparently as a sort of self-soothing mechanism. Miles apparently even learned how to develop number puzzles on the fly for John to solve, and does so to calm him down during a breakdown, and he even makes Hailey lift a book of them while teaching her how to do an op at the gas station.
• Parental Substitute: Despite the reveal at the end of the first season that Liv isn't his ex-wife and Sammy isn't his kid, it's clear that John still cares about them both deeply and still takes an active role in Sammy's life, to the point of attending his talent show when he performs to show his support.
• Photographic Memory: Has an insane mind for lists, categories, and all things numbers, and is still pretty good with almost everything else. It's telling how good it is that he's able to crack Miles' password when given the opportunity, given only five attempts and an extremely limited timeframe to do it in, just with the knowledge of a bunch of number sequences Miles liked and a good memory for the cipher puzzles they'd make up together as children.
• Professional Killer: Given Miles' statement that the job is "nothing that [John] hasn't done before" when asked how dirty the job is, and the later revelation that as part of it John was meant to kill the US Treasury investigator that he wound up saving and holding hostage instead raises some questions about just how many jobs of John's tend to involve more than just corporate sabotage...
• Sanity Slippage: Due to what is almost certainly a combination of being completely off of his psychiatric medication (he's shown to be almost completely out of it in Episode One and would have no real way to acquire more of it while on the run) and the extreme amount of stress he's under after Valence's death while working against Crowley, John's mental state seems to drastically decline over the course of the first season, culminating in him attempting to kill his father while in the midst of an active paranoid delusion.
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: The show actually manages to avert this trope somewhat, given that the Omniscient Council of Vagueness that's setting out to destroy democracy and run the world is very much real and a direct threat to John and his friends, but John is still a person struggling to cope with a severe mental illness, under a severe amount of stress and completely out of his medication, that makes him extremely paranoid as a baseline and impacts his ability to perceive reality. Unsurprisingly, the worse his situation gets and the more stress he undergoes, the worse his ability to cope with his mental illness gets in turn, and he winds up convinced that no one in his life can be trusted and that they're all trying to manipulate him by the time of "Gilgamesh."
• Smart People Play Chess: Flashbacks show John eagerly playing chess with his father at a young age, and he is very much intelligent.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Despite his best efforts to cope with everything he goes through during the first season, his regular methods of managing his mental illness just cannot measure up to the sheer amount of things stacked against it. After losing Miles (his only real friend for almost his entire life and the only person John felt ever really understood him), losing his team and being left unable to fully trust his father due to his involvement, and all of the plans he's been working at for years to go against Crowley completely going to hell, his anxiety and paranoia wind up off the charts, which in tandem with a lack of his regular medication manage to send him spiraling into a legitimate delusional breakdown once he hits his breaking point.
• The Tell: Taps his thumb against the nearest surface repeatedly as a self-soothing method whenever he's anxious or on-edge.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: John's primary rule above all else (which frequently puts him at odds with Ben, whose outlook on murder seems to be that the ends justify the means if it means getting rid of Crowley) is a fairly close variation of this trope: no unnecessary killing.

Hailey Winton

Hailey Winton

Portrayed By: Meta Golding

We are only as safe as our secrets.

"I'm not into any weird fantasy voyeur cosplay shit, or whatever the hell this whole thing is!"

Tropes:

• Naïve Newcomer: Being one of the only members of the team both completely unaware of Crowley's machinations or of how corporation espionage operates prior to her joining John's team, she is the person to whom most things that the audience might be otherwise unaware of are explained to.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Unfortunately for her, despite her intelligence and her ability to think on her feet, Hailey seems to practically specialize in this trope, especially under high-stress situations. (The fact that the entire series is practically one, unending high-stress situation does not go unmentioned by her, or John.) Case in point, her reaction to John's rescue of her from a group of people pretending to be police officers starts with her critiquing the fact that his method of rescue (manipulating the crowd and pretending to film the police while accusing them of deliberately attempting to use their power to harm a Black woman) could easily be considered racist if one really took the time to think it over, or for a more humorous example, her first breakfast with John and Ben involves her repeatedly managing to piss Ben off by failing completely to rein in any of her reactions to the things he says or learning about him and John's past.

Ben Wilson

Dr. Ben Wilson/ Ben Weir

Portrayed By: Charles Dance (present day), Phil Burke (flashbacks)

The algorithm is the enemy.

Tropes:

• Being Personal Isn't Professional: Seems to hold this POV when it comes to the vast majority of John's decisions, either simply unable to understand John's empathy for other people and desires for close relationships or having trained the impulse out of himself so thoroughly in his work that it may as well not exist for how well he's managed to bury it. This leads to the vast majority of him and John's nastiest conflicts throughout the series; with his consistent insistence that Valence betrayed John and their plan, his interference in the issue of the Intern managing to get all of John's original team killed, and his constant attempts to convince John that Hailey is untrustworthy and ought to be killed before she starts posing a security risk. One of these actually ends in Hailey literally having to drag John away from him before he snaps and beats the shit out of him for it.
• Deadpan Snarker: It's not hard to see where John got it from. Hardly a scene passes where Ben isn't saying something dry and caustic in a tone of withering disdain.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Over the course of his decades-long battle with Crowley, Ben has lost his family, his relationships with his wife and child, and even wound up forced to fake his own suicide in front of his son, John. It's not surprising that his attitude towards fighting against him has steadily morphed into "at least if we manage to end this plan that's steadily devastated all of our lives by killing him, we can probably manage to keep our democracy from crumbling for another decade."
• Lack of Empathy: Hooo boy. Although he does seem like a fairly kind father towards John if the flashbacks are of any indication, and he does have to get dragged away from the house kicking and screaming when it comes down to either faking his own suicide in front of John or having his work as a CIA agent outed and put at risk, his entrance back into John's life as an adult shows such a complete lack of understanding involving John's completely valid emotions about having his father, who as far as he knew, killed himself thirty-five years ago and changed his life irrevocably reenter his life with absolutely no warning and no consideration for the trauma said event left him with that it's hard to describe him as being anything other than massively self-centered at best, and a completely unfeeling asshole at worst. His introduction to Hailey during breakfast consists almost entirely of him ignoring her and telling John directly in front of her that he should've killed her already to avoid dealing with an unknown and a security risk.
• Must Have Nicotine: Smokes frequently, both in flashbacks to John's childhood and in the present day. The trait doesn't seem to have been passed onto his son, but a flashback of the two of them playing chess does show John getting a candy cigarette while Ben partakes in his own.
• Smart People Play Chess: Is shown playing chess with a young John in flashbacks to his childhood.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: A trait he shares with his son. It becomes steadily more apparent as the series goes on that a lot of Ben's more cruel or unkind behavior is done out of the knowledge that simply nothing else has worked over the last three decades of fighting against Crowley and his forces, and that at least being a snarky asshole who makes bad decisions for the greater good allows him to do something to keep the world safe, and allows him to keep John safe in turn.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Despite his good intentions, Ben's frequent attempts to hide things from John in order to keep him safe or to preserve their decent relationship only ever wind up making things worse once they're found out, especially because John is explicitly prone to intense paranoia and delusions, and Ben hiding things from him only makes that way of thinking feel justified. It nearly ends in tragedy for both of them as the series goes on, given that Crowley nearly manages to manipulate John into murdering Ben while in the midst of an active breakdown, telling John that after everything his father's continued to hide from him that there's no way he can ever be sure that what Ben's saying can really be trusted.

Edward Homm

Edward Homm

Portrayed By: Rob Yang

Read between the headlines.

Tropes:

• Butt-Monkey: Unfortunately for him, in the aftermath of his faked murder, his life only seems to be getting worse and worse by the hour. He's held hostage in a basement for three episodes straight, gets released and allowed to work with Weir and the rest of the gang only to discover via checking his security cameras that his wife's been having an affair with the neighbor and isn't even mourning his loss, accidentally kills a guy with a fire extinguisher in order to keep him from catching Weir and jeopardizing the mission, and winds up getting struck temporarily deaf by a flashbang grenade and shot in the arm when Crowley's forces invade the safehouse they're staying at, leaving him to whine pitifully that he's gonna bleed out and die until Ben shuts him up and stitches up the wound. Not to mention the fact that out of everyone in the group, Hailey's the only one that seems to treat him with any actual respect, given that his frequently naive and ramble-y demeanor seems to drive the more reserved John and Ben absolutely nuts.

Miles Valence

Miles Valence

Portrayed By: Jason Butler Harner, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong (childhood flashbacks)

"Safety in numbers."

"It's okay. We got through it before, I will be here to do it again if I have to, okay? Okay? It'll be okay."

Tropes:

• Doesn't Like Guns: Is this trope, according to John, who is utterly stunned when going through the evidence box containing items that were on him during his death to discover a small, handheld revolver among the possessions. It seems to only add fuel to the fire where his suspicions relating to Miles' death are concerned; one of his major arguments to Ben that something is wrong is that "Miles hated guns," when relaying the discovery of the evidence box.
• Driven to Suicide: Throws himself off the top of a building while John watches at the end of the first episode, seemingly at nothing more than the behest of an anonymous message saying "do it now." It's a major motivation on John's part to uncover the mystery behind his death and why he really killed himself, even more so than the circumstances behind the murder he was framed for.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: As revealed through flashbacks in Episode 3, he's been with this since John ever since they were kids, to the point that he's the person John goes to when he's having a breakdown over the revelation of his father's faked suicide over his ex-wife or anyone else in his life. They built their data business together, got an education together after working together as children to open John's father's safe and being inspired by what they found inside, and seem to be pretty much the only consistent form of support either's ever had for the vast majority of their lives. (John seems relatively private and friendless, and for a vast majority of his life had no family to rely on, while Miles mentions later on that he has no family or personal relationships he cares about besides John). When John decides to work with his father to take down a threat to freedom as they know it, the first person he goes to this with is Miles, who readily agrees to join him.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Although he doesn't seem to mind it all that much, given that there's multiple references to him being John's primary mental health support throughout the vast majority of their lives, he tends to veer into this territory at times for John in a way that just can't be described as particularly healthy. He's the only person that managed to get John out of a extremely bad depressive rut prior to the beginning of the series (that even John seems terrified at the thought of ever being in even as slightly as bad of a headspace as he was back then), he knows perfectly how to handle John's breakdowns and bad emotional states, and if the flashbacks and John's confessional to the priest at the start of the series are anything to go by, he was frequently one of the only things that allowed John to distinguish things in his head from reality under periods of high emotional stress.

Hafiz

Tropes:

• We Hardly Knew Ye: Winds up killed alongside the rest of John's original team when the Intern decides to clean house.

Manfred Larter

Tropes:

• We Hardly Knew Ye: Winds up killed alongside the rest of John's original team when the Intern decides to clean house.

Cara Spader

Tropes:

• Kill the Cutie: The sweetest and most endearing member of John's team, and her death seems to be the only one that actually leaves the Intern shaken in the aftermath.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Winds up killed alongside the rest of John's original team when the Intern decides to clean house.

FBI and Law Enforcement

Agent Jo Madi

Special Agent Josephine "Jo" Madi

Portrayed By: Enid Graham

The fake goes deeper.

Tropes:

Crowley and Associates

Crowley

• I Have Your Wife: Using people's loved ones against them is a favorite tactic of Crowley's. John knows this, hence using his supposed ex-wife against Crowley because he knows that he will kidnap her, only for him to reveal that the woman Crowley kidnapped is actually the "pro, a real bad-ass" that he hired to rescue his ex-wife when she was kidnapped previously, and who has been playing the role of his ex-wife ever since.

The Intern

The Intern/Kyle

Portrayed By: Walt Klink

Data is our downfall.

Tropes:

• Accent Relapse: Begins speaking in a thick, Eastern-European accent to further taunt his girlfriend Elena as he's killing her after she assassinates Senator Evans under his orders, and keeps it up for the rest of the series whenever talking to someone aware of his true nature as an agent for Crowley, with it implied that he's a Deep Cover Agent Crowley brought into his fold while doing his work in Europe.
• Affably Evil: A very strange example. He has no qualms about attempting to kill John in the street to get Valence's authenticator under Crowley's orders, notably trying very hard to make it hurt when he does, but he genuinely praises John as a boss on multiple occasions, stating that he enjoyed working for him and regrets that the pay wasn't good enough to make defecting from Crowley's side worth it. This culminates in him willingly and almost cheerily walking away from an attempt to kill Homm under Crowley's orders once he learns that Ben's eliminated him instead, apparently fully willing to refrain from going through with it now that Crowley's no longer around to pull the strings.
• Ax-Crazy: Although it seems as though the vast majority of his violence is done solely under Crowley's orders (and it is implied that his murder of Cara when he killed John's team in the first episode legitimately haunts him because he couldn't catch her off guard and she was aware enough of what was happening to plead for him not to do it), he still does quite a bit of it under what seems to be entirely his own volition, attacking and nearly killing Ben when he catches him following him around town, and throwing Xander, the iterim CEO of Arda off of a roof just to send a message, which Crowley even scolds him for doing without permission because it draws too much attention. Eventually, he even winds up murdering his girlfriend Elena in cold blood once she's assassinated Senator Evans under his command, strangling her to death as he coldly explains that he only picked her because she was unstable and easy to manipulate into something like this, making her perfect to date and to turn into a scapegoat. It gives the impression less that he does these things because of and for Crowley out of loyalty and more because working for Crowley gives him the opportunity to indulge his own violent desires with no repercussions.
• Deep Cover Agent: Given his Accent Relapse and his monologue during his murder of his girlfriend Elena, it can easily be inferred that he's a spy Crowley recruited to his cause while doing work over in Eastern Europe.

Elliot Gao