Series / Rabbit Hole (2023)

We are only as safe as our secrets.

Rabbit Hole (stylized as RABBIT/HOLE) is a 2023 spy thriller series created by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra and starring actor Kiefer Sutherland, available via the streaming service Paramount+.

Corporate spy for hire John Weir specializes in all things deception and subterfuge, manipulating both people and companies with the aim of getting one over the rich billionaires that own them with the help of a team of hackers and grifters he's steadily cultivated.

Unfortunately for him, that all comes crashing down when, in the aftermath of a seemingly-perfectly normal job involving a US Treasury Investigator and a higher-up in a rival corporation, the investigator is found dead, shot and killed execution-style, and Weir, caught on camera via manipulated video getting into the same car as him before he was killed, is the police's prime suspect.

Scrambling for answers and desperate to uncover the situation behind his framing, Weir finds himself inadvertently teamed up with Hailey Winton, a lawyer he had a one-night-stand with whom he initially assumes is involved, but turns out to seemingly knows nothing about the larger situation or John's world... which she has now been irrevocably sucked into alongside him.

In October 2023, Paramount+ canceled the show after just one season.

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These tropes are a delusion:

• Arbitrary Skepticism: When John starts showing signs of thinking that Miles might be alive even though he apparently committed suicide, both Ben and Hailey just take this a sign that he is further losing his grip on reality. This is despite the fact that Ben faked his own suicide when John was a child, which Hailey knows about, and that it was originally the plan for John's team to do this as well, before they were all killed.
• Arc Words: "Safety in numbers," a phrase shared between Miles and John as both children and adults used to emphasize their understanding of and care for each other, both in the safety they feel when together and in their use of numbers and numeric ciphers as a shared communication method. It winds up being the key to John managing to get into Miles' communications; the password reminder hint is that exact phrase, and the password that finally allows him access is, quite literally the word "SAFETY" in a numeric cypher code they both knew, having learned how to write in it in order to open John's father's safe as children.
• Bathroom Search Excuse: Agent Madi pulls this one to try and get the opportunity to snoop around Weir's wife's house without a warrant, which her superiors refuse to give her. Surprisingly, it actually works. Though given that the finale reveals that this woman was never John's wife in the first place, it may all just have been a part of John's gambit.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: John is the master at these, and successfully uses one of these in order to make it impossible for a man and a woman impersonating police officers to kidnap Hailey by riling the crowd up about her supposed arrest.
• Because You Can Cope: Seems to be part of Ben's reasoning behind faking his death when John was a child, only to come back into his life 35 years later; that John as a person is strong enough to deal with both the revelation and the war that Ben is currently fighting. As The Heart of the group, Hailey is utterly horrified by this view, seeing Ben's actions as manipulative, selfish, and irreparably damaging to John himself.
• Brick Joke: The extremely rare and expensive bottle of whiskey present at Elliot Gao's auction in the fourth episode, so rare and expensive that it needs an entire security system of its own just to have it present there, brought up as a funny anecdote when Hailey arrives there in an attempt to get information from Gao, winds up getting downed by her at the end of the episode as John attempts to explain the next phase of their plan, having stolen it while the power was disabled and the security system was turned off.
  • Not to mention, in a rather darker spin on that same joke, that whiskey bottle winds up used to track the team throughout the course of the fifth episode, with Homm actually getting shot in the arm in one of the attempts.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Both John Weir and his original team qualify as this, even teasing each other amongst themselves about their quirks while they plot out extremely intricate forms of corporate espionage. It's to the point that the team even treats the act of being asked by John to fake their own deaths to ensure their safety for what is implied to have been at least the second time, as a minor yet comedic inconvenience on their part just because they're so used to that kind of behavior on John's part or because their own personality quirks make it seem perfectly normal.
• Burner Phones: In the "Pilot" episode, John tries to hail a cab, only for the FBI agent Jo Madi to approach him commenting "Uh, shift change. Maybe get an Uber instead." She then continues that he can't because he has no credit cards and only burner phones. "Not suspicious at all," she deadpans.
• Car Fu: Hailey pulls this off in order to save John from an attack by the Intern while he's attempting to get away from the police station with the contents of Miles Valence's evidence box, which contains an algorithm key he needs to determine the people behind his framing. Even more impressive is that she manages this while zip-tied to the steering wheel.
• Casting Gag: Kiefer Sutherland as a spy attempting to preserve the very fabric of democracy, often at great cost to both himself and his loved ones? Now where have we seen that before?
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Before the start of his career as a corporate spy, John studied psychology in college, and considering his skill at reading people and manipulating them, was quite good at it. Compare this to his own mental health and understanding of himself, which is... not great to say the least. (The irony is not lost on him, to be certain.) A more direct example of this trope may very well be John's father, who had an entire psychology doctorate and whose job for years relied on his ability to read people and to understand both their emotions and what those emotions might cause... and yet still seems completely unable to understand the ways in which he severely traumatized John and impacted his behavior by faking his suicide when John was ten and maintaining that lie for over thirty years. The only person willing to point out any of this is Hailey, who barely knows either of them and thus has no reason to be anything but blunt when it comes to their behavior.
• Code Name: The opening of the episode "Tom" has John thanking his team for their work on their latest assignment and telling them that "Tom is coming up." They all toast "Tom," but when asked about who Tom is, John replies simply "You're gonna love him." Later, when they get together again, Larter asks again who Tom is and John explains that "Well, Tom is not a who. Tom is a what. Tom is an op, a dropout."
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: If you're willing to take Ben completely at his word on this one (he's certainly not a reliable narrator, but the POV flashbacks do show him having to be dragged away from child!John kicking and screaming once he sees John's reaction to it) his faked suicide was exactly this; his work in the CIA was threatening his family, and as the work got more and more secretive and more and more dangerous, he decided that the only option was to pretend he was dead in order to remove any leverage that his enemies had over him in the form of his wife and son.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Even outside the content of any of his previous missions as a corporate spy, John seems to carry quite a bit of trauma relating to incidents in his past, with nightmares and flashbacks implying a shootout at his house that killed his father. Except, it didn't.
• Deadpan Snarker: John, in spades, which makes his interactions with the exceedingly-anxious Motor Mouth Hailey all the more hilarious.
• Driven to Suicide: Miles, either carrying out the command of an anonymous message or refusing to kill John at the behest of said message (the message itself, "DO IT. NOW" is rather ambiguous, as is the context of the phone call he's having before he does it), jumps off the balcony and falls to his death when John goes to confront him about his involvement in the plan to have him framed for murder.
  • John's father initially seems to have pulled this, only for it to turn out, much to John's shock and horror, that he faked it, and has been alive for thirty-five years.
• Dysfunction Junction: Hoooo boy. It would really be easier to list the characters that don't either have a tragic past, horrific mental illness, or an overall terrible life than it would be to list the ones that do. John has an absolute boatload of trauma relating to his father's faked suicide, struggles with PTSD and what seems to be quite a few other unlabeled mental illnesses, and loses the only person that he feels ever understood him at the end of the first episode to suicide. Hailey grew up poor in the foster care system, stole millions in cryptocurrency from her corrupt boss, leaving her with a target on her back, and winds up roped into an extremely dangerous worldwide conspiracy for reasons beyond her control. Ben has an almost completely lack of empathy for other people, and lost his entire family in his thirty-year fight to keep the US government from getting taken over by Crowley and his forces.
• Faith in the Foe: Surprisingly enough, John to Madi. Even though he doesn't particularly seem to like her, he still has faith in her honesty and her willingness to do whatever is right, no matter the cost. This proves itself to have some merit when Madi, faced with the evidence that a significant portion of her workplace is dirty and that people are in danger if she doesn't help, works with both John and Rasche, people she despises, in order to ensure that justice is brought forth and no one is harmed in the crossfire.
• Faking the Dead:
  • Turns out that John's father pulled this when John was still a child, ostensibly to protect him, only revealing the farce after almost thirty-five years.
  • In the fifth episode, it turns out that Weir's team apparently did this at the series' start, having planned to fake their deaths in an explosion under the "Tom" plan in order to avoid the risk of being caught by either the FBI or Crowley's forces. Except, they didn't. Ben's attempt to kill the Intern to eliminate the loose end of a mole in the organization without John's knowledge wound up provoking the Intern into cleaning house when the attempt went sideways, with John's team winding up dead and their bodies ditched in an elevator shaft before the "Tom" plan even had the opportunity to go into effect.
  • John increasingly begins to suspect that his best friend Miles Valence might have faked his suicide of jumping from the roof of Arda Analytics. This comes to a head in the penultimate episode when John starts receiving messages on a secret backchannel app that was used exclusively by him and Miles. Ultimately, at the end of the episode he receives a recording from Miles explaining that the suicide was, in fact, real. He did it to save John, as Crowley had ordered him to kill him and it was the only way of possibly keeping the op going. Crowley has control of Miles's company, Arda Analytics, which is how he was able to fake the messages in the backchannel app.
• Five-Man Band: The main group, consisting eventually of John, Hailey, Ben, Homm, and Miles is an interesting variant of this trope, given that one of the main members is dead by the first episode and two of the members are pretty much forced into it by circumstance and necessity, but they still fit fairly well into the "classic" FMB line-up.
• Framing Device: The show begins with John in a priest's confessional booth, desperately needing someone to talk to and having no other options to discuss the events he's just been through. As he begins to confess, we're sent back to when they occurred three weeks prior, presumably experiencing them as they're said to the priest.
• Frame-Up: Weir gets caught in one of these at the start of the series, having been framed for the murder of a US Treasury investigator he was hired to portray as colluding with a corporation under investigation. The complications involved seem to be primarily involved with who set him up, but the fact that said Treasury investigator turns up alive at the end of the episode in his basement and he was in fact hired to kill the investigator as part of the job he was hired for and wound up framing it to look like he killed him instead of actually doing so only serve to complicate things even further.
• Freudian Excuse: Discussed. In a shining moment of black comedy, Hailey (who at this point in time is still technically John's hostage), John, and John's father get distracted from their breakfast by attempting to determine whether or not John's father's faked suicide is the primary reason that John is arguably so messed up as a person. John's only remark on the matter is that, considering the circumstances, he thinks he turned out fairly decent.
• Hesitation Equals Dishonesty: Discussed between John and Hailey as he is training her in the art of deception to help him with an op. He asks her to tell him something about herself, either true or a lie. When she hesitates in starting to tell her story, he tells her that he knows that she's lying because she hesitated and that people are suckers for confidence. Later, when Hailey is actually doing the op and tells their target that she knows he's lying because he hesitated, John comms through her earpiece that now she's just showing off.
• Honey Trap: What John thinks Hailey must be after their one-night stand at the beginning of the first episode, having discovered a camera hidden in her hotel alarm clock, at first assuming that she's been sent by Agent Madi and then that she's been sent by the people trying to frame him for murder. It turns out that she is not, in fact, a honeypot agent sent to get blackmail on him, having seen a fake profile for him on a dating app before she saw him at the bar, though the circumstances behind the profile and the camera still make their meeting definitively seem as though someone was behind it for their own purposes.
• How We Got Here: The first episode begins with John in a priest's confessional box, trying desperately to unravel a series of previous, complicated events by using the priest as a sounding board, because he's unable to do it on his own without beginning to lose the ability to distinguish what's in his head from reality. We loop back around to this point in the seventh episode of Season One, where John, on the verge of a complete paranoid breakdown over both a lack of trust in his father and a series of messages supposedly sent by "Valence" over the course of the episode, tries and fails to work out his circumstances with the priest before he completely loses the ability to distinguish his delusions from reality.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Considering the Dysfunction Junction that is the main cast, this happens fairly frequently, but of note is Hailey's reaction when discussing the cryptocurrency she stole from her corrupt job a few years prior to the series' start, taking a swig of an extremely expensive whiskey from the auction she's currently at before giving the fine details.
  John: Okay, Hailey, how much more?
  Hailey: 26 million dollars as of Friday.
  John: What the fuck?
• Leave No Witnesses: This seems to be Crowley's preferred method of dealing with any potential vulnerabilities in his plan. It's what the Intern winds up doing to Weir's original team when Ben attempts to eliminate him, executing them all in rapid succession before they could fake their deaths in order to avoid any possibility of their interference in Crowley's business.
• Madness Mantra: "You there?"
• The Man Behind the Man: When Crowley is finally eliminated by Liv and Ben at the end of Season One, the two of them discover an earpiece in his ear while examining his corpse, implying that Crowley was really nothing more than a pawn in a more powerful person's plan. Given the show's cancellation, this likely never be followed up.
• Motor Mouth: Hailey has the tendency to be one of these, often blurting out whatever comes to mind before she can consider whether or not it really needs to be said, much to the rather more terse and quiet John and Ben's consternation.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: As an extremely paranoid former member of the CIA, this seems to be Ben's usual idea of a solution to most problems that he views as a potential threat to his mission to take down Crowley. This is usually played for laughs, like when he suggests killing Hailey to her face during their first breakfast together and John exasperatedly dismisses him, but by the fifth episode it's not nearly as funny as it was at the start, considering that Ben's willingness to kill in order to eliminate the risk that the Intern posed as a mole in their organization without John's permission wound up only managing to provoke the Intern into slaughtering John's entire team once Ben failed to kill him and he realized he was caught. This, of course, pretty much manages to destroy any level of trust the other members of the team had in Ben, and only serves to pretty much make an already stressful and difficult situation even worse.
• The Needs of the Many: A question that the series seems to ask, and that seems to be the root of Hailey's dislike and conflict with Ben in turn: is the possibility of saving the world worth the harm caused to the people forced to do it and the people that they love in turn? Ben's work with the CIA ends in his faked suicide, an act that in combination with an already unstable childhood left John with a whole host of neuroses and issues as both a growing child and as an adult, and his reappearance in John's life as an adult thirty-five years later certainly hasn't done John's mental state or life as a whole any favors. He's incredibly lonely, has difficulties forging meaningful relationships with other people, suffers from horrific paranoia and PTSD, and at the start of the series loses both his closest friend (self-admitted by John to be the only person who ever really understood him), his entire team, who winds up killed by Crowley's forces because of Ben's actions, and his entire life once he's framed for Edward Homm's murder, all to fight for a cause that is all but impossible for him or anyone else to truly win.
• Nice to the Waiter: Our first glimpse of John away from the confessional booth he starts the series off having a breakdown in is him in a upscale restaurant, being perfectly cordial to the young waiter serving him, remembering his name and tipping him extra to change the channel when an ad for an affair website comes on... and then it's revealed ten minutes later that he was blackmailing the waiter into playing along with one of his heists with video of him stealing from the cash register.
• Not What It Looks Like: John's irritated insistence to Hailey that he's not secretly a psychopathic murderer is rather undercut by the man ( the Treasury investigator whose death he was just framed for) he's been holding hostage in his basement attempting to make a break for it and promptly running directly into a wall.
• Once More, with Clarity: As more and more of the circumstances behind John's framing are revealed, many of the scenes related to the initial Vallence job that led up to it change their meaning and tone almost entirely. The client's refusal to get involved, the man shadowing Miles and John during the proposal, Jo's warning, and the extremely high payday aren't for the normal frame-up of the rival CEO and the Treasury investigator; they're for a contract killing. The "money shot" in the series of photos John gives Miles in the aftermath of the job that the camera initially doesn't show? It's a photo of John's faked murder of the investigator, which the group stalking him released to the public and used to frame him.
• Phone-Trace Race: In "The Algorithms of Control," John has obtained a keyfob allowing him to access Miles' comms data. Thing is, he's not sure of the password and after five failed attempts, the system will lock him out for good. His remote access to the server is also immediately detected, but the guy currently running the show, Xander Arnaz, orders the staff to let him keep trying and not to do anything until they have his exact location. They manage to triangulate his location within a few miles before he succeeds on the final attempt and starts downloading the comms data, as Xander has disappeared from the room. When Xander gets back, he is furious that they are letting John do this, as he didn't mean for them to let him keep going if he actually got in. At this point, they cut him off, but it's already too late: John got what he wanted and they didn't manage to get a good enough trace to catch him.
• Photographic Memory: John seems to have one of these, or at least something very close to it, demonstrated both in his extremely-detailed plans and in a flashback to his childhood with his father quizzing him on the cities and states specific highway routes run through, with him getting them all completely correct. It's implied that this is at least part of the reason (aside from any potential and well-justified PTSD) that he's so prone to flashbacks during stressful situations, and why he has trouble distinguishing between things in his head from things happening for real.
• 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...
• The Paranoiac: John is exceedingly paranoid when it comes to just about everything, to the point that even Agent Madi (who as an FBI agent basically stalks him for a living) thinks it's a bit much. The only problem is that most times, he's completely right, given that the series starts off with him being framed for a murder he didn't commit.
  Hailey: You still don't trust me, huh?
  John: Just you and the rest of the human race.
  • On the other hand, his father, Ben Wilson, just about puts John to shame. Flashbacks of John's childhood show him ripping an entire phone line out of the wall and proceeding to ban them from the house entirely when his wife mentions having heard it clicking, and a significant portion of him, John, and Hailey's first breakfast together is taken up by him telling Hailey to her face that she's a security risk and an unknown variable, and that John should have just killed her already and saved them all the potential harm to their plan.
• Parents as People: John is more traditional case of this, freely admitting to Hailey that with all his neuroses and problems that he really wasn't fit to raise a kid in any form (it's pretty heavily implied that his wife and him agreed to her having either primary or complete custody of their son after their divorce), though he does try his best to still be there for his son whenever he can and clearly cares about him immensely. A more nontraditional example of this would probably be John's father himself, Dr. Ben Wilson, who in the flashbacks we see of him seems to care about John greatly even at his most (almost-abusively) paranoid, and faked his death just to keep John safe from the work he was doing. However, it is immensely clear that Ben's behavior really damaged John, that his faked death damaged him even more so, and that his showing back up in John's life thirty-five years later only served to exacerbate John's preexisting issues and put both him and the people he loves at great risk of legitimate harm. This is the root of many of Hailey's issues with Ben once they meet in turn, seeing his frequently cruel and manipulative behavior and lack of empathy for John and other people as simply not being worth Ben's intentions behind seeking him out again and recruiting him, conspiracy that could topple the world as we know it or not.
• Rage Breaking Point: For being a person who is otherwise fairly difficult to get much of any particularly intense emotion out of, John manages to hit this point just about twice throughout the series, and both times thanks to his dad. The first time happens when his dad reveals the truth about his faked suicide by showing up in John's apartment completely out of the blue, which actually manages to spark a legitimate breakdown on John's part when the rage fades, and the second time comes with the realization that his dad was the last person to call Valence before his death, along with being told that the reason for said call involved the deaths of John's entire original team, whom he'd been trying to get in contact with for the entire episode.
• 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.
• Shout-Out: A number of the posts crawled by Crowley in the opening of the first season finale actually originate from material written on the Fandom wiki for 24, the series for which show star Kiefer Sutherland is perhaps most famous. Specifically, all of the posts seem to originate from the article Los Angeles nuclear attack conspiracy, an event from the second season of 24.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Despite the show's overall fairly realistic and gritty setting, along with the Dysfunction Junction main cast and Ben's oft-repeated "trust no one, everyone is only out for themselves" way of life, the first season basically ends with him being almost completely proven wrong in that regard, with many parts of the plan only able to go the way that they did because they all decided to trust in other people against the odds. Miles killed himself in order to keep John safe from Crowley, always loved him, and never betrayed him, Hailey was never manipulating John, and winds up pursuing a relationship with him despite the personality traits that he views as making him virtually unlovable, and Homm risks his own safety and goes on live TV in order to ensure that Crowley's machinations wind up revealed to the public. Even the Intern, who is repeatedly demonstrated to have little to no sense of morality and is responsible for many deaths throughout the series, willingly decides not to kill Homm once Crowley's been eliminated, leaving with a smile despite being fully capable of still carrying out the hit, with it implied that he appreciated John's good treatment of him while working under him as an intern at the start of the series.
• Sinister Surveillance: Crowley and co.'s favorite method of keeping tabs on those they consider both as threats or as potential pawns. It's part of the reason why John's breakdown in "Gilgamesh" is so terrifying for both the viewer and the rest of the team; he ventures out into the city, where there's cameras available to track his every move, and uses unprotected technology that can easily be viewed or accessed by the other side, leaving himself horrifically vulnerable to getting potentially kidnapped or killed by Crowley's forces.
• Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Agent Josephine Madi is one of these to a T, and for all intents and purposes her and John seem to actually have a fairly friendly relationship when it all comes down to it (for instance, she's perfectly comfortable with him knowing things about her personal life, or having her daughter in the car while she steps out to talk with him). That doesn't mean she's any less determined to take him down, however, or that John actually trusts her in any way, shape, or form.
• 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.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: In a reflection of John's steadily declining mental state, multiple parts of episode 7 repeat several times with different discussions and outcomes before finally revealing what actually went on, to the point that John is unable on more than one occasion to distinguish the false scenario from what's actually happening. This, along with Crowley's manipulations, nearly results in John having a complete breakdown and killing Ben, as the supposed "true" mastermind.
• 20% More Awesome: In "Tom," John asks Hailey if he's just supposed to trust her now, that he doesn't understand how anyone does that when they only have someone's word. She suggests he just try to trust him 90% more. He gripes that 75% is high and she complains that she deserves at least 80%. He agrees to 80%.
• Wham Line:
  • Season One, Episode Two: Weir is interrogating a man in the bathroom who worked with Miles, attempting to find a way to get into his comms, and drops this line, which both explains why Homm is in the basement of his house and manages to muddy the waters of his framing even further.
  Weir: I did everything I was hired to do. Valence paid me to keep my team in the dark, I did it. When he paid me to kill Homm, I did it.
  • Also from episode 2, Weir and Hailey have just arrived home from finding Valence's algorithm key, only to find Homm quaking in fear as a man walks into the room and begins to criticize John for his handling of the situation. Not only is that startling enough, given that we've never seen him before, but John's response manages to completely redefine a significant portion of the episode's flashbacked events.
  John, sighing: Nice to see you too, Dad.
  • Season One, Episode Four: While attempting to figure out what the NFT transaction receipts in Valence's email mean (he didn't like art, and according to John was never interested in newer economy concepts), a shouted response from Homm through the vents cracks the entire thing wide open, and shines a rather sinister light on the crypto receipts we've also seen previously in Hailey's email account.
  Homm: It's how he was getting paid!
  • Season One, Episode Eight: "You see, 'cause the woman that you've got... isn't my ex-wife. She's the person I sent in to get her. The badass. So good luck with that, motherfucker."
• Wham Shot:
  • Season One, Episode Three: Having spent the majority of the episode trying to use John's attempts at accessing the Arda servers and failing miserably in the attempt, the interim CEO of Arda, Xander, takes a phone call from Crowley and admits his failure, agreeing to do something that the viewer does not hear. He completely ignores Agent Madi's attempts to speak with him, and as she steps outside to take a call with her superiors at the office, insisting that something is off about Arda, the CEO plummits to the ground behind her, having committed suicide in the exact same way Miles did two episodes prior.
    • For the same event, Season One, Episode Four, which starts with a scene that reveals that Xander did not, in fact, willingly commit suicide, but was instead killed by the Intern, seemingly under the orders of Crowley himself.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The series could be considered one to Mr. Robot, both shows centering around a mentally-ill hacker working to take down a nebulous organization that poses a threat to the very concept of democracy itself. Rabbit Hole, however, seems to fall on the much more idealistic side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, while Mr. Robot seems to maintain a much more cynical view of the world and the people in it.
  • Both John and Elliot also specialize in computer security at some point in their careers, lose their fathers at a very young age, and struggle with mental illness that often manifests itself in delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. Both also wind up working in tandem with said fathers, Elliot's being one of his alters created in that form to help him deal with his trauma, and John's having faked his death before coming back into his life a few years before the series' start.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Crowley's modus operandi when dealing with just about anyone that could prove a threat to his plan with their knowledge, up to and including members of his own team. It seems to be a trait passed onto his inner circle too, given that the Intern quickly kills his girlfriend Elena once she's fulfilled her role as a patsy for the assassination of Senator Evans.