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Caleb Campbell
Played by: Graham McTavish
The captain of the USG O’Bannon.
- Alliterative Name: Caleb Campbell.
- Drowning My Sorrows: After the Aegis VII incident involving many deaths of his crew mates and Kuttner’s insanity, he was seen in Stross’ flashback drinking a bottle or two.
- Expy: To Benjamin Mathius of the USG Ishimura, where aside from the scar on Campbell’s left side of his face, they shared a similar appearance and status as captain. However, he could also be considered a Good Counterpart because Campbell clearly wants nothing to do with the shard, knowing that it’s affecting his psyche and was more concerned about his crew, while Mathius goes further insane, determined to get the shard back home, not caring what happens to the people onboard.
- Properly Paranoid: It's obvious from the start that he thinks the Marker shard is bad news, wants as little to do with it as possible, and is clearly tolerating its presence onboard his vessel only because of the payout its delivery would bring. Considering what it would do later, his suspicions are completely justified.
- Retirony: Before he sacrificed himself to save the remaining crew, Campbell wanted someone to tell his now-widowed wife she was right about retiring before his final mission.
- Theme Naming: Shares a surname with sci-fi author: John W. Campbell
Nolan Stross
Stross in the present
In the flashbacks
Played by: Curt Cornelius
A scientist that experimented on a Marker in Dead Space: Aftermath. Stross went insane and was locked up on the Sprawl after he killed his wife and son while hallucinating that they had turned into Necromorphs. In Dead Space 2, Stross knows Isaac since they both had information about the Marker, and insists that he knows how to destroy it, but his incoherent ramblings make him hard to understand.
- Asshole Victim: His hubris is directly responsible for everything that happens on the O'Bannon in Aftermath. Even before he came under the Marker Shard's influence and brutally murdered his wife and infant child, he was still an arrogant dick. Supplemental material shows that he was cheating on his wife, planned on leaving her, and thought too highly of himself to consider that he shouldn't be playing with the Red Marker fragment. When all hell broke loose, he panicked, leading directly to a lot of people's deaths.
- The Atoner: Say what you will about him, if it wasn't for him, Isaac would have given up hope altogether and never would have known to chase down the Marker, let alone where to find it. His actions of seeking out Isaac spared Earth space for at least three more years anyways, but, unfortunately, he didn't have nearly enough willpower to end it himself.
- Ax-Crazy: After the Marker is done with him, he goes completely insane with a penchant of sticking screwdrivers into people's eyes
- Bullying a Dragon: Granted, he was completely bonkers by that time but seriously, attacking an armored Isaac Clarke in close-combat with a screwdriver is not a good idea. Same thing could be said about gouging out one of Ellie's eyes, since all it achieved was pissing her off enough to beat him up.
- Buried Alive: Stross' greatest fear, as manifested by the interrogation chair, is being buried alive and left to die.
- Canon Immigrant: He appeared in Dead Space: Aftermath before Dead Space 2.
- Dirty Coward: Not that he can really be blamed, but he knows that he has to enter the machine to fight back against the Marker. The problem is that he's too afraid to face his dead wife once he completes the session. He decides that Ellie should enter the machine in his place and, in his insanity, tries to give her a "session" with a screwdriver. To be fair to him, he's gone untreated from his PTSD, survivor's guilt, and his psychosis over the last three years and was forced to create the very marker that's driving him insane and killed everyone around him. In addition, him actually remembering the details of what EarthGov did to him and the other patients actually is detrimental to his willpower. Isaac doesn't remember the horrors or the sessions, making him more likely to want to attempt a session. On top of that, the Marker is specifically designed to use every psychological trick in the book to break its victims. Isaac has a host of psychological crutches that Nolan simply doesn't have such as his status as an engineer which gives access to tools and armor. While Isaac has the engineering know how to juryrig weapons, Nolan can only survive by hiding which drives his desparation and hopelessness.
- Due to the Dead: Regardless of what Isaac does with his corpse, he took no pleasure in killing Stross. Isaac sees himself in Stross and is understanding of his insanity while Ellie dismisses it. Isaac never blames Nolan for what he did, but lays all of the blame on the Marker. He is understandably pissed when hallucination!Nicole mocks Isaac over Nolan's death.
- Foreshadowing: Stross' purpose in the game is to provide clues to what Isaac needs to do in order to complete his mission to kill the Marker. Isaac actually goes out of his way to save Stross because he believes Stross holds the key to understanding how Isaac can stop the outbreak.
- Face–Heel Turn: The further down his sanity spirals, the less helpful he becomes. In Dead Space 2, he's actively hindering your progress after his Sanity Slippage gets bad enough. It's born of a desire to not accept responsibility for what he's done.
- Heroic BSoD: He killed his wife and kid while hallucinating. The guilt eventually leads to his death.
- Madness Mantra: As he grows increasingly insane, Stross starts babbling constantly about the "three steps", with no greater context for what those mean.
- The Millstone:
- Stross is a completely useless liability. While he tells Isaac where the Marker is, and claims to knows how to destroy it, Stross degenerates rapidly into a Madness Mantra and has nothing to contribute after that. Once he becomes violent, Isaac struggles with him and kills him. Turns out, his help was unnecessary, anyway. To the point that the developers put an audio log on his body, in the extremely likely event that the player would want to abuse his corpse.
- He was also this in Aftermath, culminating with him hesitating to throw the Marker Shard inside the ship's engines to destroy it, while the other survivors were fighting for their lives against the Necromorphs.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The man was an arrogant prick who didn't think about what his cheating would have on his family. However, dialogue in the second game imply that he actually did love his son. It was only long after he killed them that he realized how much he cared about them which drives his guilt. The Marker tortures him with their faces and, in the end, he was too afraid to confront them. He tries to force Ellie and Isaac to take his place by giving them a "session" with a screwdriver.
- Never My Fault: His Fatal Flaw. As Dead Space: Aftermath showed, he was responsible for the death of several people after breaking a seal on a door, which let a necromorph slaughter a crew of workers. Driven insane by it, he brutally murders his wife, Alexis, and their son, by his own hands. By refusing to accept responsibility for his actions, the Marker slowly drives him crazy in 2, to the point he starts attacking Isaac and Ellie, forcing Isaac to kill him in self-defense.
- Shadow Archetype: To Isaac. Isaac and Stross were both brought to the same colony and suffer from similar delusions under the Marker's influence. However, Isaac accepts his girlfriend's death and stays sane, while Stross let's his guilt consume him.
- Sanity Slippage: Starts out fairly coherent and helpful, and gradually degenerates through the course of the game as the Marker eats away at his mind, until he's a violent maniac.
- Theme Naming: Named after a science-fiction writer, although he's unique in that his namesake is still alive: Charles Stross.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: He kills his wife and kid because he saw them as a slasher and lurker, respectively.
Dr. Isabel Cho
Cho in the present
In the flashbacks
- Played by: Gwendoline Yeo
- A Fate Worse Than Death: Being lobotomized into a drooling vegetable and framed as the one responsible for all the deaths that happened on Aegis VII, the Ishimura, and the O'Bannon. What else could you call what Earth-Gov did to her?
- Lobotomy: Her unfortunate fate at the end of the movie when she refuses to go along with the conspiracy, both to keep her quiet and to provide a convenient scapegoat for the disaster on the Ishimura and the destruction of the O'Bannon.
- Ms. Fanservice: In some of the flashbacks, but particularly so in Nolan's, where she's shown wearing make up and acting flirtatious with him, while other flashbacks portray her without such cosmetics. It is however notable that she's the only Dead Space human female shown having sex and being partially nude.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Destroys the Marker shard which had wiped out the O'Bannon's crew, after managing to stay sane through the carnage, but because she refused to be complicit with Earth-Gov's plot, she was lobotomised and made out to be a terrorist as part of their cover-up.
- Heroic Willpower: Said to have a notably strong will that kept her resistant to both the Marker and the Earth-Gov conspiracy's temptations. Sadly her resistance to the latter leads to her downfall when Earth-Gov decides she's a liability.
- The Scapegoat: Cho is turned into this by Earth-Gov in order to cover up the events that transpired at Aegis VII as punishment for refusing their job offer in studying the Markers. She's lobotomized to keep her quiet and framed to the public as a terrorist that massacred the crew on Aegis VII, the Ishimura, the Valor and the O'Bannon before being held at the Sprawl to be tried for her "crimes".
- Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: Despite Cho’s fate and only being mentioned in a log, what happened to her during Dead Space 2 hasn’t been brought up.
Nickolas Kuttner
Kuttner in the present
In the flashbacks
Played by: Christopher Judge
- The Big Guy: As a buff and big ex-marine, he's the strongest of the survivors and the one known for taking out the biggest Necromorphs. He even managed to fight his way out from the Earth-Gov interrogators before unintentionally killing himself.
- Crazy Sane: After accidentally killing Noah and being restrained as a result, he somehow manages to mentally stabilise in time to combat the outbreak on board, albeit while still being hounded by visions of his dead daughter. However, in spite of his ongoing Marker Sickness, he would prove himself a reliable ally to the surviving crew and ultimately help them end the Marker shard's reign of terror.
- Outliving One's Offspring: His daughter Vivian died prior to the movie, which was the source of angst that the Marker Fragment takes advantage of.
- Theme Naming: Named after Henry Kuttner, who was also one half of pseudonym Lewis Padgett.
Alejandro Borges
Borges in the present
In the flashbacks
- Played by: Ricardo Antonio Chavira
- Artificial Limbs: A rarity seeing as most people just get cloned ones in Dead Space's future.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Swears like a sailor in response to all the horror he's seen.
- Handicapped Badass: He’s missing an arm, but he makes up for it with a cybernetic replacement. He survives the Necromorph outbreak on the USG O’Bannon, and is able to keep himself sane while a majority who encounter the Marker go crazy. He’s only killed because someone shoots him in the back when his guard is down.
- Hope Spot: Led to believe he was getting away unharmed before he got shot in the head.
- It's All My Fault: Said this word to word after his cousin died in Aegis VII.
- Jerkass Has a Point: He's both Hot-Blooded and the Only Sane Man of the crew.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He genuinely cares for his cousin, even falls into a grief-stricken rage against Kuttner for killing him under the Marker's influence.
- Only Sane Man: Remained resistant to the Marker's influence like Cho, and the only male to show no change in attitude in response to the events on the O'Bannon. Lampshaded by Borges himself.Alejandro Borges: Seriously, am I the only one who didn't go batshit crazy back on that damn planet?!
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Was seen surrounded by Necromorphs before being cutoff from Captain Campbell in Stross’s flashback and later revealed to survive in one piece in Cho’s flashback, clearly fighting them off while creating weapons to fight against them.
- Theme Naming: Named after Jorge Luis Borges- whether or not you'd class his works as science fiction is a matter of debate, of course.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Gets his head blasted when the Earth-Gov interrogators decided he wasn't useful since he hadn't made direct contact with the Marker fragment.
- You Killed My Father: Holds a grudge against Kuttner for killing his cousin in Aegis VII, not caring if the latter was under Marker influence when doing so.
