- « "You do not give me orders! No-one does!" »
- — Oliver Leek shows his true hunger for power.[src]
Oliver Leek was James Lester's former right-hand-man at the Anomaly Research Centre. After unsuccessfully trying to get Lester's attention, Oliver decided to establish a secret organisation along with Helen Cutter, in an attempt to capture and contain the creatures that came through Anomalies, inside a creature prison, so he could later use them to create chaos and gain power.
Biography
Much of Leek's early life is unknown, except that he was always left out as a child, and that this was what shaped his shy-seeming, power-hungry psyche as an adult.
In the new timeline that was created due to the failed second mission through the Forest of Dean Anomaly, Leek worked as James Lester's assistant at the Anomaly Research Centre after the Anomalies were discovered (most likely taking Claudia Brown's place in the new version of events).
At some point, Leek forged a secret alliance with Helen Cutter: she would use her extremely-efficient intelligence and cunning to back Leek and his small army of mercenaries by secretly collecting creatures from the Anomalies (which Leek intended to use for himself as an army with which to gain power through terrorism), and in return Leek would give Helen what she needed for her experimentation with the Anomalies' time-altering capability.
During the second Forest of Dean incursion, while the ARC had an expedition in progress, Leek received a creature report from an intercepted emergency call from the Castle Cross Shopping Mall, where the security guard had screamed something about a "monster". Leek presumably sent his head mercenary to collect creatures.
Episode 2.1
- « "Who the hell are you?" »
- — Nick Cutter first meets Leek
When Lester and the field team returned to the ARC building following the failed mission into the Permian, Leek informed Lester and the team of a creature report. He then told the original timeline version of Nick Cutter that he was glad the latter was back safely and figured Helen wasn't back with them. However Cutter didn't know who he was, confusing Leek before Cutter pretended to recognise him and cover it up as a small case of memory loss.
The same night, while the ARC team were off containing a Raptor incursion at the Mall, Leek informed Lester of the Minister's requests that the ARC hire a Public Relations manager to cover up the Anomaly incursions. Lester first rejected the idea, then when struggling to think how to cover up the shopping mall incursion, settled that it wouldn't be such a bad idea. Leek was present with Lester and the team when the new PR guru, Jenny Lewis, arrived at the ARC.
Episode 2.2
When Cutter started declaring that Jenny was really a woman called Claudia, Leek asked him whether he was okay. Later he, Lester and Cutter (who had calmed down) informed Jenny bout the ARC's line of work and afterwards Leek took Jenny down to the human resources department.
At some point, Leek secretly hired Caroline Steel to spy on Connor and Abby for information, infiltrating their lives by picking Connor up and becoming his girlfriend.
When Cutter proposed the idea of making an Anomaly Detection Device to detect Anomalies via their radio interference, Leek was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, while Lester didn't appreciate Leek arguing the obvious with him. Lester gave Cutter and Connor the budget on the condition that Connor reported to Leek while making the device.
Leek later informed Lester, Jenny and Cutter of a new Anomaly incursion based on reports of an alleged fire at an office block. Later, when Abby and Connor came to the ARC to get devices for clearing fog, Leek showed them the armoury's weapons arsenal, but Leek left the pair to find equipment themselves when they declared the weapons were all useless for clearing the Precambrian fumes.
Episode 2.3
Leek was present when Connor unveiled the completed new ADD at the ARC. Leek first congratulated Connor and joked on the device's resemblance to an oversized sat-nav; then he received a message of a creature attack at Blue Sky Park and immediately doubted the ADD's reliability. While the team were at the park investigating and hunting the creature (a Smilodon), Leek was called over when they discovered the corpse of a previous victim, which confirmed that the Smilodon had come through a while ago and that there was nothing wrong with the ADD after all.
After the Smilodon was caught and being transported back to the ARC, Leek apparently had the creature secretly smuggled to his Creature Prison bunker (Episode 2.6, 2.7). He covered up the creature's disappearance to Cutter, by claiming that it had died during transport and its body had been destroyed as a health and safety protocol. Leek later met with Caroline at a secluded car park to pay her for her work and get an information update on Connor and Abby.
Episode 2.4
Leek rushed to the ADD when it detected a new Anomaly on the Isle of Dogs, but was subsequently frustrated when the Anomaly closed before the detector could get its exact location, forcing the ARC team to try and track the Mer Creatures that had come through the Anomaly by their activity.
A few days later, when Abby was taken into the canal by a Mer Creature and presumed deceased, while she, Connor and Cutter were scouring there without backup on Cutter's hunch, Leek arrived there with Lester and Jenny. This was because the Special Forces failed to find Abby, and Lester fired Cutter for getting Abby allegedly killed and put Stephen in charge of the search.
After Cutter and Connor located the Mer's lair at a flooded warehouse and rescued Abby and Lucien Hope alive, Lester, before re-hiring Cutter, had Leek speak to the site contractors to seal the warehouse with concrete (since the Anomaly inside had reopened).
The following night, Leek, seemingly alone in his car, spoke with his head mercenary, the Cleaner, over a communications feed to warn him against being seen again by Cutter as he had been during the Mer incursion, since it could jeopardise Leek's entire operation. After the Cleaner cut the communication, Helen leant forward and warned Leek that she wouldn't tolerate any mistakes, and a shaken Leek apologised before Helen left.
Episode 2.5
When the ADD detected a new Anomaly in Hackney, Leek hacked into the Detector from his car using spyware, stealing the Anomaly's location. While the ARC team were two hours behind rebooting the ADD to regain the Anomaly's location, Leek travelled to the Anomaly site with the Cleaner and two other mercenaries, whom he sent through the Anomaly with the purpose of bringing back creatures for Leek's creature army. However, while Leek waited at the Anomaly site for the mercenaries' return, when Cutter and Jenny located the Anomaly and arrived, Leek called Helen about the mercenaries' disappearance, then fled the Anomaly site before he could be seen.
Cutter and Stephen would subsequently go through the Anomaly to rescue a girl stranded on the other side, then get marooned in the Silurian when the Anomaly closed before they could get back through. However, the trio eventually managed to get back to the present when another Anomaly, linking the exact same two time periods, opened up at the Lost World Adventure Park. After Cutter - who, with the rest of the field team was now aware that there was a traitor within the ARC - had secretly brought one of the mercenaries' night-vision goggles back with him to analyse, Leek stole the goggles from Cutter's office while the latter was getting a coffee.
Episode 2.6
- « "They're all gone, James. Either off on Cutter's wild goose chase, or, dead. Now... I'm going to hunt you!" »
- — Leek sets his revenge on Lester
Leek went on alert with Lester and the rest of the ARC when a Columbian Mammoth rampaged on the M25. Leek ending up annoying Lester when he pointed out that the Columbian Mammoth was hairless species.
Later, after the team captured the Mammoth and brought it back to the ARC, Leek overheard the argument between Cutter and Stephen over the latter's involvement with Helen. Leek also spied Cutter and Connor as they secretly planted a virus in the ADD as part of a plan against the traitor in the ARC. Knowing that Cutter was about to spring his trap to find the traitor, Leek sent Jenny in his place (instructing her to go contain the alleged high-priority Anomaly alert that had been faked by Cutter as bait), and had a Neural Clamped Future Predator smuggled into the ARC inside a van by his men. He also set up a bomb as a booby-trap that would threaten to destroy the entire ARC if his personal files were accessed.
With his booby-traps and contingencies to avoid being found, Leek quickly left the ARC to go into hiding at his Creature Prison with his mercenary army. He also met up with Caroline to pay her for capturing Rex for him, and with her curiosity in what he was doing growing, Leek offered to take her to his bunker and show her.
While a significant number of the ARC staff were gone with Jenny heading for Cutter's trap, Leek had the Neural Clamped Future Predator, which he was directly remote-controlling, kill the remaining staff at the building until only Lester was left. When Lester investigated where all the ARC staff had gone, Leek hacked into the ADD to communicate with him, intending to make Lester suffer as revenge for how Leek had been "the little man looking up at the big boss," and used the Future Predator to hunt Lester through the ARC. However, Lester, after fending off the Predator's attacks, refused to beg for his life and demanded that Leek finish it, before giving Leek a last taunt as being a "tiresome little man." Leek then had the Future Predator go to launch its deathblow, but Lester was saved at the last second when the Predator was killed mid-attack by the captured Mammoth.
Following Leek's exposure as the traitor and his disappearance into hiding, Lester tried to follow the signal that had been transmitted to the Future Predator's neural clamp, but Leek had anticipated this, and the source of the signal was a diversion. Cutter and his team, at the same time, traced Caroline's phone in search of Rex, and in doing so wound up at the Creature Prison; where Leek had his mercenaries immediately take them captive. Leek and Helen, once Cutter realised their alliance, proceeded to show him and the team the creature army that Leek had locked up in the bunker.
Episode 2.7
After capturing them, Leek had the ARC team kept locked up in separate cells in his bunker. Leek observed their conversation over the cells' CCTV with Helen, and was angered to hear Cutter still have low thoughts of him after seeing what he had and what he was capable of. When Caroline wanted to leave, Leek had her locked up with Connor, Jenny and Abby, and he later gave Caroline that answers that she'd wanted about the creatures by showing her and the other three his creature army as they were being fed. Leek also had a Silurian Scorpion transported in a truck and released onto a populated beach to wreak havoc. He then contacted Lester, and threaten to release another twelve creatures in other locations if Lester didn't call off the search for Leek's bunker.
When Helen had Nick brought to the operations room, Leek had Connor, Abby, Jenny and Caroline locked in a sealed room with the Smilodon as 'dinner theatre' and forced Cutter to watch over the CCTV. Helen ordered Leek to stand down at Cutter's demand, but Leek disobeyed, declaring that no-one gave him orders. Cutter subsequently short-circuited the op room's computer, prompting Leek to hook his laptop up to the mainframe to regain control, but in doing so, he unwittingly uploaded Cutter and Connor's virus from the ADD into his own bunker's mainframe. The virus proceeded to paralyse the bunker's systems, disabling the security and unleashing all the creatures into the bunker. As chaos immediately began to take hold over the bunker, Leek slipped away while Cutter was distracted.
Leek at once sent one of his neural clamped Future Predators to stalk Cutter through the bunker. Cutter evaded a couple attacks by the Predator as it closed in, before it finally closed in on him, at which point he was able to kill the Predator by ripping its neural clamp from its skull. Leek then arrived, with his army of other neural clamped Future Predators hanging in the ceiling above his and Cutter's heads, taking Cutter hostage.
Lester subsequently contacted Leek to inform him that the ARC now has his location and other vital data (thanks to the virus sending Leek's hard disk's contents to the ADD) and their men are coming from him. In a last bid, Leek threatened to have his Future Predators rip Cutter apart if Lester didn't call his men off within the next ten seconds. However, while Leek was distracted counting down to Lester, Cutter managed to short-circuit the neural clamp he'd torn from the first Predator, disabling all the other Predators' clamps. While Cutter immediately got away, the Future Predators, freed from Leek's control, quickly descended upon and surrounded him, before brutally ripping him apart screaming.
Legacy
While Leek himself wasn't remembered much by anyone, the ramifications of his organisation's terror and actions had several repercussions on Helen, Anomaly Research Centre. Stephen Hart died when he contained the escaped creature army, Cutter spent the next 1-2 years grieving over Stephen and Helen possibly tried to undo his death by altering the timeline or cloning him unsuccessfully before becoming more unstable in personality. Captain Becker was hired by the ARC to protect the team. (Episode 2.7, 3.1, 3.3)
Other References
Episode 2.1
When Nick Cutter returned from the Forest of Dean Permian Anomaly and found Claudia Brown was not there, Lester informed him that Oliver Leek was now in charge of the day-to-day runnings of the Anomaly operation and that Cutter (the new timeline version) had seen Leek only that morning. Cutter later mentioned to Stephen that there were a whole bunch of people at the ARC that he had never met before (including Leek).
Episode 2.3
Caroline sent picture of Rex to Leek (or Leek's organisation) by phone message.
Episode 2.5
When the ADD crashed, Connor did a diagnostics test and found Leek's spyware, he then theorised to Cutter that someone (Leek) was downloading the Anomalies' locations directly to their laptop.
Episode 2.6
Nick and the field team had a meeting in the ARC gym to discuss how to find the traitor in the ARC but they were interrupted by an Anomaly alert. Later, Jenny revealed that Leek was the one that sent her to the false Anomaly alert at the church, proving that Leek was the traitor. Later, Helen got a phone call from Leek, telling her about how he had placed a bomb in the ARC. Helen was not impressed and scolded him, threatening to leave the organisation.
Episode 2.7
At the ARC, Lester was cross because he knew Leek was planning something and wanted to know what it was.
Personality
To the rest of the ARC, Leek appeared as a very shy and slightly slimy little man who constantly strove unsuccessfully to be more recognised. However, underneath Leek's shy demeanour, he was in fact very ruthless, power-hungry and ambitious from having been left out and been "the little man looking up at the big boss" all his life. Leek was obsessed with gaining strength and power for himself over as many others, whom he saw as barely noticing "the little man" like him, as he could, no matter how many deaths and how much chaos he had to orchestrate to do so. Leek's power-hungry ambition and his inferiority complex also meant that while he was willing to forge alliances and hire others to help him succeed in his schemes, he would not tolerate any form of an order from anyone else.
As well as his thirst for power and proving to others around him how powerful and capable he was, Leek also had a cruel streak and a rather sadistic sense of humour, which especially showed after the whole ARC learned of his true colours - he once sadistically put Connor, Abby, Jenny and Caroline in an arena room with a Smilodon as "dinner theatre" and made Cutter watch on the security cameras, (Episode 2.7) and he used a Neural Clamped Future Predator to stalk and hunt Lester through the ARC to try and make Lester feel as controlled and powerless as Leek had. He also had little to no regard for the value of life, releasing a Silurian Scorpion into a well-known holiday resort and threatening to release another 12 creatures in highly-populated areas knowing full-well that many innocent lives would be lost. (Episode 2.6)
Though power-hungry and cruel, Leek was also a very intelligent and cunning leader and fugitive; able to hire a small army of mercenaries to his operation, and able to outsmart many of the ARC's efforts to track him or predict his moves several times. He was successfully able to install spyware in the ADD to get access to new Anomaly locations before the ARC.
Relationships
Caroline Steel
Leek and Caroline generally had a strictly-business and slightly frictional and distrustful relationship as a payer and a spy respectively. As Caroline grew more curious about what Leek wanted with the creatures, Leek grew slightly annoyed at it but nevertheless intended to show Caroline. When Caroline's curiosity turned to aversion, Leek took her captive with the ARC team, and gave her the answers she'd wanted in a twisted way by showing her along with the team his creature army.
The Cleaner
Leek was very serious with the Cleaner, who acted as one of his lead mercenaries and as a spy within the ARC, about doing his job right and making sure that no suspicion was raised. Leek warned the Cleaner to not let Cutter see him again after Cutter had caught him during the Mer incursion, and Leek still hadn't let this mistake go by the time of the Cleaner's mission into the Silurian.
Connor Temple
When conspiring against the ARC with Helen, Leek paid Caroline to spy on Connor for him by getting close to Connor as his new girlfriend. Leek and Connor rarely interacted before Leek's treachery was exposed, although Leek did seem to be slightly unimpressed and enjoy rubbing it in whenever one of Connor's inventions seemingly dramatically failed; seen when Leek received a report of a Smilodon attack just as the new ADD came online. Leek revealed after capturing Connor with the rest of the team that he saw Connor as a "shambling, adolescent mess" unworthy of a girlfriend like Caroline. But Leek also felt that he and Connor had something in common in that respect, sympathising with Connor about them being "nerds," "losers" and "the uncool" who never got the "pretty girls."
Helen Cutter
Leek and Helen had forged an alliance so that Helen could conduct her research with how tampering with the Anomalies could alter the world. Initially, Leek seemed highly intimidated by Helen and apparently was considered to be the one who was at risk and beneath Helen in their partnership. Helen apparently also, despite having put her faith in Oliver, had a low opinion of his goals of proving his power and openly thought to his face that he was "too good at being insignificant." However, as Leek's ambitious, ruthless and insane true colours began to surface after he was outed as a traitor to the ARC, Helen's control over him began to falter.
James Lester
Acting as Lester's right-hand man but barely being acknowledged, Leek had constantly tried to catch Lester's attention and get properly noticed by him, often by mimicking Lester's mannerisms and fashion sense, but never seemed to succeed. At the time when he was discovered as the traitor within the ARC, Leek showed himself to have a deep and bitter grudge with Lester over being "the little man looking up at the big boss," and he attacked and hunted Lester with a Future Predator to try and make Lester feel as helpless and inferior to Leek as Leek had under him. He later teased Lester when releasing creatures into public areas and when threatening to kill Cutter.
Nick Cutter
Leek and Nick apparently weren't close and rarely interacted before Leek was outed as the traitor in the ARC. After the team learned that Leek was the traitor, when they were captured by Leek's organisation, Leek seemed to be determined to prove his power and ruthlessness just as much to Cutter as to Lester - showing off his Creature Prison, his praetorian guard of Predators and all the power he had to Cutter, and becoming irate when none of this changed Cutter's low opinion of him. Leek had no qualms against holding Cutter hostage or with the threat to have his Future Predators gruesomely kill the Professor if it meant preserving his own power, and he also displayed cruel enjoyment in forcing Cutter to watch him put the ARC team in a situation of great danger.
Appearances
Canonical
- Episode 2.1 (first appearance)
- Episode 2.2
- Episode 2.3
- Episode 2.4
- Episode 2.5
- Episode 2.6
- Episode 2.7 (death)
- Fire and Water (mentioned)
- Episode 4.1 (flashback)
Non-canonical
Trivia
- It was never specified when Leek struck his alliance with Helen, although the fact that his organisation was confirmed to be active at the Castle Cross Shopping Mall Raptor incursion would indicate that it was at some point a while before the almost-immediately-preceding Permian mission that had created the new timeline. Fans have suggested that Helen may have travelled through the Anomalies to the near-past after becoming aware of the timeline change, or that it may have been the new timeline's version of Helen whom Leek had originally struck an alliance with, before the original timeline's Helen continued the deal after she and Nick entered the new timeline.
- Leek did not appear in, nor was mentioned in Shadow of the Jaguar and The Lost Island for unknown reasons even though he was working at the ARC during that time (between Episode 2.3 and 2.4). Oliver was also not mentioned by Matt Anderson during his speech in Webisode 4 about the people whom the ARC has lost over the years, probably because of Leek's treachery and his actions against the ARC, the team and the public.
- Lester mentioned that Leek's mother's maiden name was Murphy in Episode 2.6.
- One ITV website profile of Leek says that he found Lester's tailor so he could buy similar suits to his boss.
Nick Cutter • Stephen Hart • Connor Temple • Abby Maitland • Jenny Lewis • James Lester • Helen Cutter • Oliver Leek • Caroline Steel • The Cleaner