John Druitt

Character

Overview

Appearances

Actor

Template:Infocard Character Montague John Druitt is a powerful abnormal and one of the most important people in Helen Magnus' life.

Thanks to the source blood, he possesses the gift of teleportation, but this attracted an energy being that led to insanity, temporarily turning him into a brutal killer. In 19th century England, he became known as "Jack the Ripper".

He was previously involved with Magnus and is the biological father of her daughter Ashley.

Biography

John met Helen as well as three other students (Nigel Griffin, Nikola Tesla and James Watson) at the University of Oxford with whom he would soon become close friends. His friendship with Helen evolved into something more. Together they became collectively known as The Five and researched the abnormal world as well as expanding their knowledge of the world, using even unconventional means for these ends.

John supporting Helen as she became the first of The Five to inject the Source Blood serum during the Spring of 1886.

Things in their lives took a mixed turn when Helen was able to acquire a sample of pure, untainted Vampire blood that was collected before the species was eradicated by the Church. The group's curiosity to learn what humanity had the potential to evolve into led them to each take an injection of a serum Helen derived from the blood. Such a thing had never been done before. Each member survived the injection and acquired their own unique powers from exposure to the blood.

Sometime after Druitt injected the source blood in the Spring of 1886, he became ill on the verge of dying. Helen created a temporary treatment from her own blood to artificially extend his life; this granted him the gift of Helen's longevity. The two were lovers for some time and became engaged to be married.

Unfortunately, while the other four members were able to master and adapt to their new powers, John's ability was thought to have awakened a psychotic nature in him, causing him to go on a murderous rampage that eventually became known as the Jack the Ripper killings. For some time he was able to hide his condition from his friends and fiancé who were oblivious to the fact that their respectable friend and the monster that roamed the London streets were one and the same person.

John doesn't like Helen accusing him of new similar looking murders in 1898.

Eventually in late 1888 however, Magnus, noticing the change in his character and the way the Ripper's profile matched with his abnormal abilities, confronted him and discovered the awful truth; she still held on to some small hope that the old John could be restored. That belief was eventually shattered when he almost killed her when she confronted him again in 1898 for similar murders, forcing her to defend herself and leading him to disappear from his friends lives for a long time.

Due to the coincidental timing of when Druitt initially becomes filled with rage after the injection of the source blood, Helen became convinced that it was the result of her injecting her blood treatment into him that caused his madness. This caused her to bare an enormous amount of guilt and regret for more than a century about not being able to fix his condition.

At some point near the end of their relationship in the late 1880's before their engagement was broken, Helen became pregnant with their daughter Ashley. Due to John's unstable nature of being Jack the Ripper, she chose to freeze the embryo for almost 100 years before bringing her to term when she felt safe that Druitt would never be a part of their child's life.

John's relationship with the other members of the Five was severely damaged when the truth became known. Nigel Griffin apparently turned his back on him, as did Watson, who had been a dear friend at the time and confided and consulted with John during the investigation. He still held a grudge against John up until shortly before his death when they finally made peace. Tesla, who in the past was merely a rival for Helen's affection, became more hostile, especially when it was implied John tried to pin some of his actions on the young scientist when he was still coming to grips with his newly emerged vampirism. The early 2000s allowed the pair to mellow back into being friendly rivals, as they were both able to fight side-by-side together in the battle against the Superabnormals.

Druitt injecting himself with Helen's tainted blood sample.

In the early 21st Century, Druitt begins to die again. He decides to stage his way into the Old City Sanctuary to get around its EM Shield in order to see Helen. Once inside, he endangers Ashley's life in hopes of obtaining another treatment of Helen's blood. Helen eventually agrees and hands Druitt a syringe filled supposedly with a pure centrifuged sample of her blood. A few seconds after Druitt injects himself, he becomes mortally harmed by something in Helen's blood. Because John went rogue from the Five all those years ago, he was unaware of Nigel's death, that Tesla had gone underground after WWII, and that James worked with Helen in running the Sanctuary Network. This is evident by him threatening Helen before he then proceeds to teleport out of the Sanctuary that the rest of the Five would come looking for Helen because of her actions. Seeking immediate help, John goes in search for Nikola Tesla.

Druitt shows Ashley evidence of the electroshock damage Tesla inflicted on him.

While at death's door, Tesla is able to find and revive Druitt after he succumbs to Helen's sabotage and then tells Druitt of his plans to create a vampire army; not only to revive his species, but also as a way to combat the threat of the Cabal's power. Druitt disagrees with Tesla's plans and refuses to aid him. Enraged by this, Tesla attacks the still-weakened John, blasting him in the chest with electricity from his hand. The electrical blast appears to inadvertently correct the imbalance in John's mind, returning him to sanity. Due to John deciding not to help, Nikola then leaves to seek out Helen in hopes that she could help him in making his new vampires more intelligent. With Nikola's show of instability at being denied, Druitt fears for Helen's life and begins to seek out Ashley again, this time in order to know her mother's current location.

Ashley and Druitt searching for Helen somewhere down in the Roman Catacombs.

Druitt goes about getting close to Ashley by duping her into leaving the Sanctuary by having her believe that she was meeting up with Squid, one of the Sanctuary's abnormal contacts. Druitt then darts her unconscious and proceeds to kidnap her (again), teleporting the both of them to a storage room at an unknown location. In order to get Ashley to trust him, he explains the circumstances in which his powers were derived (as well as the brief cliff-notes history of The Five) and gives her the necessary clues to realize that he is in fact her father. Ashley is able to put the pieces together and ultimately guides Druitt to where Helen was giving a lecture in Rome and through the city's nearby underground catacombs, following the trail Helen made out of spent bullet casings from her gun. When Druitt and Ashley finally meet up with Helen, she's out of bullets and standing face-to-face with Nikola with some of his newborn vampires an arm's length away, primed and ready to kill Helen in the blink of an eye. John then decides to teleport right behind Nikola, putting his fist though his abdomen in the process, before teleporting Helen and Ashley away to safety; leaving them on an upper floor of an unknown building located somewhere still in Rome.

Druitt holding the BS3 bio-hazard container of dispersal fragments he collected at Mt. Logan.

The next time Druitt is seen is when he unexpectedly shows up at the Old City Sanctuary's doorstep with a large black rectangular bag to help the team with their current issue of abnormal-on-normal violence stemming from Mt. Logan. Once allowed inside by Bigfoot and taken to Magnus, she leads him down to the Sanctuary's open medical lab despite being skeptical of his current state of helpfulness based on his known history of altruism being just behind that of a scorpion's. Druitt reveals that inside the black bag is a clear rectangular BS3 bio-hazard case containing dispersal fragments from a bio-weapon deployed by the Cabal; John heard news of the outbreak and traced it back to its origins at Mt. Logan, getting frostbite on his fingers during the process of picking up the pieces bare-handed. Ashley, who's also standing in the room alongside Henry and Will, questions Druitt's motives, to which he voices his disdain for the Cabal, citing that he will not stand idly by while they impose their chaos. Due to John being exposed to the pathogen and the threat of possible delayed effects exposing all of the abnormals within the Sanctuary, Helen decides to move John into isolation, asking Henry to prepare a Level 3 residential cell for the introduction of a possible bio-hazard. With Henry not believing that Druitt will honor his word to stay in the room, that he will simply teleport out, Helen backs up those assurances by turning the EM Shield on, deliberately stating bluntly: You teleport, you die.

Magnus, Watson, and Druitt reveal to Will that some Source Blood serum still exists and can be used as a method to counteract the Lazarus virus.

From the fragments provided by Druitt, Henry is able to find a non-detonated dispersal capsule holding a pure sample of the agent. Testing reveals that it's a man-made pathogen similar to prion disease in Mad Cow. With Druitt not seeming to show any sign or symptoms of being affected by the pathogen, Helen releases him from isolation, believing that the source blood is the key to providing immunity factors to the disease. Helen ends up taking blood samples from John, James Watson (who arrived not long ago from London to also help out), Ashley, and herself; failing every single time she tries to create a synthesized anti-toxin from one of them, forcing her to resort to gathering the rest of The Five together (Clara Griffin in Nigel Griffin's stead) to retrieve the hidden away vile of the left over portion of unused Source blood from Bhalasaam in the Indian Himalayas. Due to the imminent threat of another bio-weapon going off, Helen agrees to let Ashley and Henry travel to a Cabal weapons lab just outside of New City to retrieve missile kill codes concurrently with their trip to India.

Druitt and Watson having collected their respective keys.

Druitt, Magnus, Griffin, Watson, and Will all teleport to Bhalasaam. After they find a way inside the ruins, traveling down to the underground labyrinth of tunnels, they stumble upon Tesla who got inside by using another secret passageway. Tesla, being familiar with the place, leads them to a central room where Helen is able to unlock one of her father's puzzles revealing a map of each of The Five's key locations. Druitt ending up being paired with Watson, becomes a little upset with Helen getting paired with Nikola. After Helen reassures him, everyone departs to travel off in their respective directions to their individual test. Druitt and Watson end up performing a Latin phrase test to determine behind which wall lies a key. They choose successfully, which ultimately reveals both keys and they then return to the central hub as the tunnels start to collapse around them due to Clara almost completely failing her test. Once all the keys are retrieved and the Source blood is recovered, James' suit gives way and he dies, rapidly aging him in front of his friends.

Magnus and Druitt realize that Ashley is the culprit behind stealing the Source Blood.

Once the group returns from India, Druitt ends up having to retrieve Ashley and Henry from the Cabal weapons lab using a traced cell-phone signal to guide him. Inexplicably, after reuniting with her mother, Ashley falls backwards unconscious into Druitt's arms; Helen telling him to take her to the Sanctuary's infirmary. Helen isn't able to quickly determine why Ashley is unconscious, needing to run more tests. This visibly upsets Druitt, knowing that the Cabal have done something to his daughter. Druitt then asks Helen if he could stick around for a while so he can keep tabs on Ashley's condition, to which she agrees, allowing Druitt to walk off to wait patiently in one of the reading chairs located in the corner of Helen's office. After a short period of time, Helen and Tesla are working in the lab when a flash appears and the vial of Source blood is stolen. Helen, with gun drawn, storms to her office in anger to accuse Druitt of stealing the vial. It isn't until a few seconds after Druitt growls back that he's been there the entire time that both parents realize the horror that it was actually Ashley who stole the vial; that her dormant genes have been activated.

John and Helen have a personal moment in-between searching for leads to find their daughter.

They realize too late that everything that they have done to combat the Lazarus virus has ultimately been a ploy by the Cabal to get their hands on the Source blood. For the next six weeks, Druitt and Magnus globe trot to find any and all news that they can on what the Cabal are doing with their daughter. It isn't until Ashley steals from a data farm in Montreal that they get any solid lead as to the Cabal's plans. With the help of Kate Freelander, Druitt, Magnus, Tesla, and Will are lead to a warehouse where they find a physically altered superabnormal Ashley waiting for them. With the four of them being unable to either overpower her or stop her in the slightest, Druitt teleports everyone back to the Sanctuary for their safety as he believes that Ashley would have killed all of them had they stayed any longer. Over the course of the next several days, Druitt helps Magnus and the rest of the team try to fight and defend the Sanctuary Network from Ashley and her gang of other superabnormals; a large reason behind this is his regret of passing on his gift (and supposed bloodlust) to Ashley through genetic inheritance.

Druitt standing opposite Magnus (out of frame); not being able to find closure just yet.

After Ashley sacrifices herself to stop the last superabnormal and to stop the Cabal from using her again, John begins targeting the heads of the Cabal and killing them one by one. While still quite sane, a confrontation with Helen reveals he is doing this out of anger for what the Cabal did to Ashley (mostly turning her into the same kind of monster he used to be before Tesla stunned him) and he is frustrated that Magnus has not even mourned Ashley's passing yet. When Magnus does come to terms with Ashley's death, Druitt says he is glad. When Magnus asks him if he will stop hunting the Cabal he says no: while she may have found closure he hasn't just yet. Later at the end of the episode he is seen stalking Dana Whitcomb of the Cabal while wielding his old rapier weapon from his Jack the Ripper days.

Druitt realizes that he is now free of being host to a homicidal electrical abnormal.

It was later revealed that John's homicidal behavior was the result of a previously unknown energy abnormal that came to live in him as a parasite. Helen postulated that since Druitt becomes energy himself when he teleports, it was possible that this being was at a location he arrived at and became integrated with him. Its violent actions upon being released from Druitt when he was fatally stunned and then revived by Helen suggest that it was the source of his psychosis. Unfortunately, to protect his friends and the people of the surrounding city from this creature's murderous rampage, John was forced to reabsorb the being back into himself where it was more comfortable and somewhat restrained by him. John then teleported blindly, stating to Magnus that he had "no particular place in mind".

Helen sleeps next to John during his drug detox blackout; dreaming about her memory of John in 1908 making an attempt to mend their relationship.

Some time later, Magnus learned that Druitt had made contact with Tesla and was hiding in the slums of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. She eventually found him, heavily drugged, and helped him recover. They returned to the Sanctuary, where Druitt revealed that he saved the life of Adam Worth after the latter leapt off a cliff to escape Magnus in 1908. Adam told him about a network of safehouses he had created, and asked him to let him go. Believing him to be as good as dead, Druitt did just that, and used the safehouses to avoid capture for decades. When it is discovered that Magnus suffers from the same radiation poisoning as Adam, Druitt and the others decide to go find a way into Hollow Earth.

John siphons energy away from Adam's protective rift field to grant Helen physical access to travel through Adam's time portal leading back to the year 1898.

Once in Hollow Earth, Druitt was captured by Adam, who had escaped and returned to his hideout beneath the surface. He was eventually able to escape, and made it appear as though he had killed Adam. However, in reality, he had made another deal with him: Adam explained that he wanted to use a device he stole from Praxis to travel back in time and save the life of his daughter, who died over a hundred years ago. John agreed to help him in exchange for the chance to also go back in time and prevent the Five from injecting themselves with the source blood, so that he and Helen could have a happy, yet mortal life without all the hardships that have happened to them. Adam copied the specifications for the device, but then told him he would not go to a point preceding his daughter's birth in fear of removing her from the timeline entirely; Druitt became angry, and Adam vanished, leaving him with no other choice than to seek Magnus' help once again. They made their way back into Hollow Earth, and found the great city of Praxis destroyed. Once they found Adam, Druitt grabbed several power circuits from Adam's machine, allowing the noncorporeal abnormal inside him to feast on the energy while making it possible for Magnus to pass Adam's protective rift field and follow him through his time portal.

Guardian's Timeline

In the alternate timeline created by the Guardian, Druitt commits suicide two weeks after Helen Magnus is killed in an air strike in Buenos Aires: he takes a tactical nuclear warhead and teleports into the middle of the infected in Boston, obliterating himself, the infected, and half the city.

Relationships

Helen Magnus

Love of his life and mother to his child.

Ashley Magnus

Once Druitt discovered that Ashley was his own flesh and blood, he began to seek her out, but without telling her the truth. He was aware that she had inherited a lust for violence from him, and tried to counsel her about it. Once Ashley realized who he was, they had an even more complicated relationship, which was tragically cut short when she was turned into a superabnormal and eventually killed herself by teleporting through an EM shield. Stricken with grief and rage, Druitt hunted down and killed the leaders of the Cabal one by one for what they did to his child.

James Watson

Druitt and Watson were very close during their original time with the Five. When the "Jack the Ripper" murders rocked England, Watson tried to find and capture the illusive criminal, and often discussed the case with Druitt, unaware that he was the one he was looking for. Once the truth was revealed, Watson was deeply hurt by his friend's betrayal; Druitt was more affected by the loss of this friendship than he was willing to admit. Shortly before Watson's death in 2009, they finally reconciled.

Background, Notes, and Trivia

• Druitt is played by Christopher Heyerdahl, the same actor who plays Bigfoot. Whenever the two appear together on screen, Heyerdahl is actually talking to himself, in a way.
• The real Montague John Druitt was originally considered by the law enforcement of the period to be Jack the Ripper. Inspector Frederick Abberline, however, dismissed Druitt as a serious suspect due to the fact that he lived in Kent, far away from the Whitechapel locations of the murders.
• Through Helen and John's long personal tumultuous history together, Druitt has left an indelible mark on Helen's subconscious. In 1x05 "Kush" Helen's mind creates a protective entity out of her memories of Druitt to wake her up on three separate occasions when she dangerously drifts off to sleep with a murderous magoi still on the loose. In 2x03 "Eulogy", with little to no sleep for almost a week, Helen hallucinates a Victorian era Druitt presenting an alive and well Ashley to her in her office. In 3x08 "For King and Country" Helen thinks back to recount times when she and Druitt where together, even during her sleeping next to him when treating his overdose on a concoction of several unknown drugs.
• In 3x19 "Out of The Blue" Helen is attacked by a psych worm that creates a perfect dream world where she and Druitt lived a life in which they were married without children for at least two decades, yet currently separated with Helen seeking divorce. In this world, Druitt is a respectable district attorney/politician who is leaving his current position at the D.A.'s office to go into the private sector (several law firms have already solicited him with employment offers); allowing him to hopefully spend more time away from the office and instead with his wife to help reconcile their issues.
• Even while awake, Helen tends to reminiscently daydream/recall past memories with him, as seen in the Webisodes, remade into 1x01 "Sanctuary For All, Part I" and 1x02 "Sanctuary For All Part, II".

Media Gallery | Photos and Video

References, External Links, and Websites

• Detailed article about John Druitt and the Ripper case on Wikipedia