Dr. Mohinder Suresh (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
strongnarrativevoice) wrote2023-01-27 07:33 am
strongnarrativevoice) wrote2023-01-27 07:33 am
Duplicity App
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Name: Anna Age: 36 Contact: annalizabeth on Discord, Timezone: EST Other Character(s): None |
Name: Mohinder Suresh Door: Previous Acceptance Canon: Heroes Canon Point: Shortly before episode 3x17, "Cold Wars" Age: 33 Appearance: Here History: Wiki Link Re-App: While it has been about eight months since he was last in Duplicity, only three months have passed in Mohinder's world. Personality: • Determined Mohinder's father used to refer to him as "fragile," and to rebuff Mohinder's attempts to join in on his research by quoting Darwin at him -- "A scientific man should have no wishes, no affections, a heart of stone. That's me, Mohinder. It's not you." The very last thing Chandra Suresh would have wanted, before he was murdered, was for his son to fly to America and take over both his life's work and the investigation into his death, but that's exactly what Mohinder did anyway. Even as early as episode 1x02, when Mohinder was still just a professor with no combat training or experience, he was willing to physically tackle a man who had seconds earlier been holding him at gunpoint rather than let the man escape without giving him any answers. When he actually finds his father's murderer, a man with an entire arsenal of superpowers at his disposal, he manages to keep his heart rate level enough to avoid letting the killer's superhuman hearing detect anything unusual--then drugs him with sedative tea, tortures a confession out of him, and shoots him. Later, he finds himself agreeing to fight, by turns, first a massive shadowy organization that's been pulling strings behind the scenes, and then the company's most dangerous ex-agent, because he's firmly convinced that it's the only way to stop a dangerous virus from becoming a pandemic. He ignores any and all attempts to dissuade him, because in his mind, if nobody else cares enough to stop the threat posed by the virus, he has to be the one to do it. He figures out how to give himself superpowers, and even when the experimentation goes horribly awry, he refuses to give up and let someone take away the powers and the side effects and return him to normal. His insistence on pushing through and perfecting the formula crosses the line into villainy, but in the aftermath of it, his commitment to atoning for what he's done is even more wholehearted and obsessive. No matter how many times over the course of the series Mohinder finds himself in over his head, his consistent response--save for once, at the end--is to swim deeper. It takes actual death, from which he has to be saved by a time traveler, for him to finally hang it all up and go back home to India like his father would have wanted. • Suggestible/Easily Manipulated Mohinder doesn't think of himself as someone who trusts easily, or exposes his vulnerabilities to people with bad intentions. He is deeply wrong about this. As his telepathic friend once told him, "I don't need to read your mind. You're an open book." And like an open book, Mohinder's ethics are susceptible to overwriting by those who can find the right rhetoric to convince him that their agendas are for the greater good. There is very little that Mohinder can't be talked into if he's persuaded that it's necessary in order to Save The World. Throughout the series, he becomes something of a magnet for unscrupulous people who know that they can use his scientific talent to whatever end they desire, as long as they dangle the threat of something he fears in front of him to make him believe he's doing something to avert it. He begins Season Two in cahoots with Noah Bennet, a former agent of the shady company Primatech, to advance their mutual goal of taking the organization down. (This in and of itself is an example of Mohinder being used for someone else's purposes, as Noah knows perfectly well how inexperienced Mohinder is with undercover work and how dangerous the work actually is, but doesn't particularly care what happens to him as long as Noah's own family remains safe.) Before long, the Company's recruiters have begun to wear him down, telling him that the threat posed by the virus they're trying to cure (a virus they weaponized and unleashed in the first place, unbeknownst to Mohinder) far outweighs the harm done by their ethical violations. Mohinder quickly comes to believe that they're the only people who can help his adopted daughter when she becomes ill, and they're all too happy to let him keep believing it. He comes clean about his spying, switches sides, and shoots his former partner for the Company's benefit. "You have nobody to blame but yourself," he tells Noah, after the fact. "What this company does--we save lives." Later, under the influence of an unstable power-granting serum he tested on himself before it was ready, he finds himself working for yet another evil corporation called Pinehearst. Forced to use their resources to find a cure for the terrible side effects he's inflicted on himself--a cure which will advance their goal of mass-producing the serum--and convinced that he can only save himself by experimenting on the unwilling human subjects they bring him, Mohinder still deflects accusations of helping the villain with "I'd like to think he's the one helping me." (Two episodes later, they're holding him captive in his lab under threat of torture.) While his judgment of character is terrible, and every new organization he falls in with pushes him further and further over lines he never intended to cross, Mohinder can always be trusted to recognize the error of his ways eventually. Once he does, he blames himself completely, marinates in terrible guilt and shame, and does everything he can to make amends for what he's done--but the damage always remains, and there's always a next time. Re-App: Mohinder's previous time in Duplicity has not made him less easy to manipulate, but it did help him work through a lot of his crippling guilt issues for the things he'd been talked into doing back home, and he's a healthier person for having been helped to let that go. • Reckless The flip side of Mohinder's determination, or perhaps a necessary component of it, is his tendency to jump headlong into danger without asking questions or thinking of the consequences until it's too late. It's extremely fortunate for him that he has a real talent for thinking quickly in crisis situations, because his lack of talent for planning or forethought is what gets him into said crises to begin with. The closest he really comes to formulating an advance plan is when he lays a trap for his father's killer by knocking him out and connecting him to an IV of curare to paralyze the part of his brain that controls his powers--but having done that, he pushes his luck too far by leaving Sylar there and running experiments on him that take long enough for the drugs to wear off. Only thanks to Peter Petrelli's timely intervention does Mohinder escape the situation alive. The entirety of the aforementioned plot arc where he finds himself at Pinehearst's mercy could easily have been avoided, had Mohinder not thought it a good idea to inject himself with the superpower-granting prototype serum he'd only invented earlier that day--but for reasons even he can't adequately explain later, he hadn't been willing to take any further time to work out the kinks. The only thing that gets through to him, eventually, at the end of the series, is his own murder at the hands of an unstable villain from whom he's been withholding information. Having thrown away his relationship and traveled around the world on a whim to investigate said villain, he winds up dead on the floor of a filthy motel room in the middle of nowhere, until a time-traveling acquaintance is considerate enough to rewind the clock and slap a Kevlar vest on him to save his life. Even then, his mouthing off to his savior is enough to convince the other heroes that he needs to be gotten out of the way to stop him from throwing a wrench into their plans, and Mohinder spends the next two months sedated in a psych ward under a false name. Chastened by the whole experience, he returns to India and puts all of it behind him. Re-App: Mohinder's previous time in Duplicity has tempered some of his recklessness, as he faced more consistent and immediate consequences there than he did in his own world--though he is still hotheaded enough to get himself into trouble. • Rude/Unkind A fair amount of Mohinder's motivation as a character comes from his desire (successful or not) to be a good person who helps others. But being a good person and being a nice person are not the same thing, and Mohinder is not often particularly nice. Even when he tries to be polite and friendly, he finds it difficult to sustain--many of his conversations will degenerate before long into prickly cynicism. It's a pattern he learned from the way his father treated him, and it rears up especially when he feels insecure or threatened. When dealing with frustration about his lack of research progress and doubts about his own worthiness to continue, he meets Peter Petrelli, and answers Peter's excitement and enthusiasm for the project with rudeness that borders on cruelty. His initial, relatively innocuous (but still uncalled-for) sarcasm gives way to talking down to Peter in the tone of a kindergarten teacher when he talks about being special. Several episodes later, having been convinced to hear Peter out about his powers, his skepticism takes the form of smirking and derisive laughter when Peter can't access them on command. "Of course he is," he sneers, when Peter says that his brother is in another city and can't give him the proof he needs. Seemingly trying to make Peter uncomfortable enough to leave--a pattern that repeats itself more passive-aggressively two seasons later, when he expresses detailed support for hero internment camps in what can be interpreted as an effort to anger Peter into getting out of his cab--Mohinder says that Peter ought to be talking to his father instead. When Peter asks how to get hold of Chandra, Mohinder's smirk only widens as he cheerfully directs Peter toward the urn on the table. As with most of Mohinder's negative traits, he's perfectly well aware of his tendency to lash out like this at others and he really dislikes it about himself, but it's much deeper-ingrained in him, and it doesn't change or improve noticeably over the course of the series. Re-App: Mohinder's previous time in Duplicity has made him slightly more confident and therefore less touchy about things, but not by much. Powers and Abilities: Super strength, and slightly-less-super-but-still-superhuman agility. He can easily do things like rip the door off a car, crumple a handgun in one fist, fling a large person in riot gear a distance of several yards, or get around obstacles by ricocheting between buildings. He also demonstrates increased resistance to tasing, though he can still be incapacitated by it after withstanding six or seven shots. (The resistance does not extend to chemical sedation; it appears that he can still be drugged with doses appropriate for ordinary humans.) Inventory: -- Silver thumb ring, intricately tooled -- Leather satchel, empty Samples: Thinking Communicating |
