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| This villain was proposed but was rejected by the community for not being heinous enough or lacks what is necessary to be a Pure Evil villain. Therefore, this villain shall be added to our "Never Again List", where proposed villains rejected by the community shall be placed to prevent future proposals of the same evil-doer. They can be proposed again (with the permission of an administrator) if new elements appear in their series that can change their status as non-PE villains. Any act of adding this villain to the Pure Evil category without a proposal or creating a proposal for this villain without the permission of an administrator will result in a ban. | ||
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| “ | Six. Six people have been taken this week. This thing that took your son… We don’t really understand it. But its behavior is predictable. Like all animals, it eats. It will take more sons. More daughters. I want to save them. I want to save your son. But I can’t do that. Not without your help. | „ |
| ~ Dr. Brenner explaining the Demogorgon to Joyce Byers. |
| “ | Hello, Eleven. I know. You're frightened of me. Perhaps, in our time apart, you may have even grown to hate me. But all I've ever wanted to do is to help you. And right now, I think you very much need my help. | „ |
| ~ Brenner trying to convince Eleven to allow him to restore her powers. |
Dr. Martin Brenner is the overarching antagonist of the Stranger Things franchise.
He was a senior research scientist and director of Hawkins National Laboratory. Raising some child test subjects, most notably One, Two, Eight and Eleven, in his lab, testing and pushing them to the limits of their psychic abilities through various kinds of experiments. In an experiment to locate One after his disappearance, Brenner indirectly unleashed a monster from another dimension into Hawkins, allowing Eleven to escape the lab. In the following week, Brenner and his team searched for Eleven while investigating the newly opened gateway to the other dimension.
He was portrayed by Matthew Modine, who also played Gordon Rickett in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Anders Muller in Retribution. In the stage play, he is portrayed by Patrick Vaill.
Personality[]
In most situations, Brenner is calm, collected and remote, but his quiet and curious nature hides an utterly ruthless personality. He held on numerous children captive in a lab and forced them to participate in experiments, giving them little access to the outside world and treating them as lab rats. He would go as far as electrocuting them for stepping out of line, as seen with One and Two. After the death of most of his test subjects, he is shown to have developed little care for human life in his pursuit of scientific progress, willingly keeping Eleven in isolation in Hawkins Laboratory and repeatedly subjecting her to physically and emotionally draining experiments, remorselessly submitting her to cruel psychological torture when she fails or refuses to do so. He acts gently and kindly to Eleven though there is an unstated threat is present in every tender word he says.
Brenner still has some humanity to him as he attempted to get his people to save Shepard from death and was genuinely distraught when Shepard died. In the past, he did genuinely care about his test subjects, viewing himself as a father figure to them, especially Eleven. He had a good relationship with most of them, punished Number Two for hurting Eleven and cradled Number Ten's body in grief as he died. He was horrified by his subject's deaths. He even cares for the psychopathic One, referring to him by his real name, Henry, wishing to help him with his mental problems. During his last moments, Brenner reveals that he genuinely views Eleven as his own child and is desperate for her to acknowledge him as such as he dies protecting her from the military. He feels no guilt for holding her captive her entire life and reducing her mother to a vegetative state, however.
Biography[]
Hawkins National Laboratory[]
Violent beginnings[]
Most of Brenner's past remains a mystery, except that he was involved in a controversial project under the codename MKUltra, a CIA-sanctioned research program designed to develop mind-control techniques in which the subject suffered extreme conditions at the hands of the researchers, including use of psychedelic drugs, physical and mental abuse, sleep deprivation, and malnourishment. One of the test subjects was Terry Ives, a pregnant college student, who gave birth to a girl named Jane, who had developed dormant psychic and psychokinetic abilities due to the experimentation on Terry. Brenner and his staff abducted the child, claiming Terry had miscarried, but Terry knew otherwise. She tried to sue Brenner in order to get her daughter back, but failed due to lack of evidence.
Terry then attempted to take Jane back herself by breaking into the place her daughter was being kept. She managed to get into a playroom and saw Jane playing with another child for a brief moment, before being dragged away by Brenner's guards and submitted to forceful electroshock therapy under Brenner's orders, reducing her to a lethargic and catatonic state.
Over the next few years, Brenner raised Jane, now referred to only as "Eleven" (referencing her status as a test subject), in seclusion in Hawkins National Laboratory. Using her youth and lack of social contact to his advantage, he built himself up as a father figure, making her refer to him as "Papa", all the while training and developing her psychological abilities, such as forcing her to crush a Coke can with her mind. On one occasion, he demanded that she kill a cat using her psychokinetic powers, to which she refused. As punishment, Brenner had two members of staff drag the pleading girl to a cell in the lab, but she defeated them, throwing one bodily against the wall and snapping the other's neck. While Eleven sobbed, Brenner picked up tenderly, considering this new development to be "extraordinary".
Later, Brenner wished to test Eleven's abilities to eavesdrop over long distances. He placed her in a sensory deprivation tank, referred to as a "bath", and she entered a psychic void where she found a Russian agent. Using her powers, she sent the Russian's words back to the lab. However, though the experiment was successful, she also discovered a mysterious creature in the void and became panicked, forcing Brenner to abort the experiment.
Intrigued, Brenner had Eleven placed in the tank again, this time with the goal of making contact with the creature. Eleven succeeded, finding the creature, but in her fear she unintentionally opened an inter-dimensional rift between the laboratory and the monster's dimension. In the chaos, Eleven escaped the lab through a drainpipe.
Hunting down Eleven[]
Brenner in season one.
Shortly after the Gate's opening, Brenner and a team of scientists went down to the lab's underground subsystem, which had been overrun by otherworldly tendrils and toxic biological growth from the other dimension. He resolved to hunt down Eleven and the Monster, hoping to recover his asset and eliminate the inter-dimensional threat.
The Monster abducted a local boy named Will Byers and takes him into the other dimension. To ensure the secrecy of the lab's illegal experiments and the subsequent incursion, Brenner had the disappearance covered up by placing a fake body in the nearby quarry, employing some Indiana State Police Troopers and a replacement coroner to discover it and ensure that nobody gets too close to it. However, this ruse was found out when Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper infiltrated the morgue and performed an unofficial autopsy, discovering cotton stuffing inside the body.
Brenner discovered that Eleven was hiding with Will's friends (Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair and Dustin Henderson), and he and a team of agents left Hawkins Lab to recapture her. However, they were spotted by Lucas, who managed to alert Mike, Eleven and Dustin to their approach. A chase ensued, during which Eleven flipped a government van with her mind, allowing them to escape.
Later, when Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers tried to infiltrate the lab, they are apprehended and brought to Brenner. In exchange for access to the Gate and a chance to save Will, Hopper disclosed that Eleven was located at Hawkins Middle School. Brenner and his agents set off for the school to recapture her. Connie Frazier and a team of agents ambushed her and her friends in a corridor, but she used her biokinetic powers to crush their brains in their skulls, killing them. Brenner held Eleven, who was drained of strength, and attempted to persuade her to return to the lab, but she refused, able to see through his facade as she now understood what love and friendship truly is. The blood of the dead agents drew the Monster through from the Upside Down, and it began slaughtering the agents, allowing Eleven and the boys to escape in the carnage. A horrified Brenner was subsequently attacked and seemingly killed by the Monster.
The newspaper clipping that foreshadowed the fact Brenner survived being attacked by the 1983 Demogorgon
A newspaper clipping, which had been placed on Hawkin's Police Station's bulletin board by December 1983, revealed that Joyce alleged that Will was "the subject of a secret government program" run by Hawkins Lab, while a "massive investigation" into "the hidden organization" took place. The article goes on to say that "under legal advise, Brenner has issued no comment" on the allegations, foreshadowing the later reveal that he was not dead.
Interregnum[]
In the wake of Brenner's seeming death, it was revealed that Eleven survived her battle with the Monster. She tracked down her biological mother Terry, and communicated with her via telepathy, seeing a younger Brenner taking Eleven - or Jane, her birth name - from Terry immediately after childbirth, and the lies told by Brenner's agents regarding Terry's 'miscarriage'.
Later, Eleven left her mother's house in search of her lost 'sister', who had been a fellow test subject at the lab. She met up with subject 008, now named Kali, who had become a vigilante gang member who uses her power - the ability to induce mental hallucinations - to hunt down and take vengeance on the people responsible for her and her friends' pain and neglect. Eleven, having now retaken the name Jane, accompanied Kali to the home of Ray Carroll, a former orderly at Hawkins Lab, and hurt him using telekinesis. Pleading for his life, Ray claimed that Brenner was alive, and that he could tell her his whereabouts. Jane leaves, sparing Ray.
As a reminder of the torture the Lab inflicted on both her and Jane, Kali used her power to conjure a hallucination of Dr Brenner in Jane's mind. However, this was not enough to keep Jane at the gang's side, and after having a vision of Hopper and Mike in danger at the Lab, she leaves Kali and the gang to rescue them.
Return[]
Ultimately, Brenner reveals himself to have survived the Demogorgon's attack while being left with a scar on his face. He convinces Dr. Sam Owens to help to restore Eleven's powers in the possibility of Henry Creel's return, which they prepare with Project NINA. Eleven had lost her powers during her encounter with the Mind Flayer, and the doctors retrieved Eleven for NINA upon the recent attacks on Hawkins by Vecna. Upon seeing that he is alive, the horrified Eleven attempts to run but the guards get her. Brenner says the door is always open for her to leave and convinces her to return to the project. In order to ensure she regains her powers, Brenner has her remember the traumatic encounter she had on the lab massacre by One, a memory which she had forgotten, as after the encounter her memory up that point was lost. The project does end up working, and Eleven gains her powers back.
Brenner and Owens tell Eleven about how Henry is back, and Eleven decides to go after them. Owens believes it is her choice, but Brenner does not yet think she is ready, and threatens to kill Owens if Eleven is to escape. Eleven fights back after Brenner, but he manages to subdue her by drugging her unconscious, and puts a shock collar on her before she wakes up.
Death[]
Immediately after, the facility get stormed by U.S. troopers led by Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan in search of destroying Eleven, who he believes to be the cause of the deaths in Hawkins. Brenner attempts to escape them by running into the desert with Eleven. However, a helicopter flying overhead is armed with a trooper wielding a sniper rifle. As Brenner runs, he is shot in multiple times as he tries to continues trying to escape with Eleven. One shot pierces his heart, and Brenner drops to the ground. After Eleven telekinetically brings down the helicopter, he deactivates Eleven's collar and tells her that everything he did was for her and asks her to confirm that she understands. Eleven, after holding his hand in sadness, instead simply says "Goodbye, papa", and walks away. Brenner dies alone in the sand from his fatal injuries, turning on his back and looking up at the sky.
Legacy[]
In that same evening, in an effort to save her best friend Max Mayfield, Eleven informs Vecna about Dr. Brenner's death and insisting that the scientist was to blame for Vecna's hideous physical transformation and nihilistic philosophy. However, Vecna rejects her sympathy and offer of redemption, adding that Brenner was nothing more than an ordinary and mediocre man who foolishly believed that he could achieve a higher status in the world through the powers of Eleven, Vecna and their fellow test subjects.
Vecna's plan to break the seal between Earth and the Upside Down ultimately comes to fruition with the temporary death of Max before her subsequent revival by Eleven's hands, which forces the heroes to start preparing for the final battle that would decide the fate of Hawkins and the rest of the world.
Trivia[]
- Executive producer Shawn Levy confirmed in an interview that Martin Brenner survived the Demogorgon's attack in the first season finale. Also, after the first season was released, director Matt Duffer stated in an interview that Brenner most likely survived.
- However, Brenner was killed off in the penultimate episode of the fourth season, and given how his death happened onscreen, it's likely that Brenner has died for good.
- Despite this, Matthew Modine has expressed his hopes that Brenner hasn't died because of his interest in working with the Duffer Brothers and Millie Bobby Brown by somehow bringing Brenner back, hypothesizing that maybe Brenner isn't what he seems to be and actually possesses similar abilities to those of Vecna and Eleven. As of this writing, it's unknown whether Brenner will return or will stay dead in the fifth season.
- Although unlikely to appear in the show's current timeline, Brenner has been confirmed to return in season 5 flashbacks that will delve into Henry Creel backstory and how Brenner developed his government program to include more test subjects like Eleven and Kali..
- During the scene where Brenner gets fatally shot several times by an helicopter, the pilot tells the sniper to "lead him some more", which is a reference to a scene of the 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket, where Private Joker (who, like Brenner, was portrayed by Matthew Modine) asks an helicopter's gunner how he can kill woman and children, with the gunner answering "easy, don't lead them as much".
- He is also the fourth antagonist of the series to be redeemed as well as the first major antagonist to receive this feat.
- Brenner is a German-language surname. It originates from the Middle High German term "brennen", which means to burn.
External Links[]
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 Villains
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Upside Down Hawkins National Laboratory Hawkins High Tigers Hargrove Family Soviet Union Others | ||