Dr. Rachel Campbell: Werewolves: The Hunger

Dr. Rachel Campbell: Werewolves: The Hunger Rachel Campbell is the kind of person who makes a werewolf story uncomfortable before the werewolf even gets into her building. We meet her at All Paws Veterinary Clinic. An animal dies during surgery, and she handles the conversation with its owners while her interns watch. Jeff thinks she's impressive. Alison is having a much harder time with how things are going there, and she eventually leaves. Rachel treats that as someone not being cut out for the job. Jeff stays because he needs the credit to graduate, and because he still thinks he's learning from somebody worth learning from. Then she takes him downstairs. Charlotte is there, restrained, after being bitten by the wolf Roman has been hunting. Rachel knows exactly what that bite means. She's been waiting for a subject like this, and the fact that Charlotte is a frightened young woman barely seems to register with her. Jeff keeps bringing that up. Rachel keeps answering as if he's missing the interesting part. Her equipment is called a lunar spectrogram. She says it reproduces the wavelength of moonlight as seen from Earth, and the story shows it forcing Charlotte into a transformation. That doesn't make it real-world werewolf science. It's the mechanism this comic establishes for triggering the curse artificially. Rachel can bring on something that otherwise has its own timing, and she immediately starts using that control to put Charlotte through it again. The silver necklace makes the scene worse. It burns Charlotte, but Rachel won't remove it because it helps keep her under control without killing her. Jeff sees somebody suffering. Rachel sees a useful restraint. She's not unaware of the pain. She's decided the pain is acceptable. I think that's where her character works best. She keeps presenting herself as the objective person in the room, but she's excited. She's proud of the machine. She's dismissive when Jeff objects. There is plenty of emotion involved in her decisions. She just doesn't consider his compassion as valuable as her curiosity. Once the original wolf breaks into the facility, that distance gets a lot harder to maintain. People are dying, Charlotte is loose, and Rachel has to get herself out. For a moment, Jeff even gets to point out that something has finally shaken her. It doesn't change what she does next. She sedates him, drags him close enough for Charlotte to bite his arm, and escapes by helicopter with him strapped to a stretcher. The experiment has fallen apart, so she turns the assistant who kept objecting into her replacement subject. Rachel leaves this miniseries alive. Jeff leaves with her, bitten and restrained, not shown transformed yet. She has what she wanted, and he has finally learned what working for her actually means. That ending bothered me more than another room full of bodies would have. He spent the story asking her to remember that Charlotte was a person. She heard him the whole time. Source: Grimm Fairy Tales Presents Werewolves: The Hunger #1–3.