It’s 3 AM on a Monday Morning: Let’s Talk About Pharma
I cannot emphasise enough how Pharma was possessed/resurrected by literal space gods and the very first thing he did, leading up to the panels above, was to monitor his ex-not-boyfriend via security cameras– presumably at least in part to ascertain if Ratchet had a new boyfriend or not– solely in order to overpower the space god possessing his frame so that he could enact “revenge” and kill the shit out of his ex-not-boyfriend’s new boyfriend immediately.
The very first thing Possessed Pharma actually does is have Drift shot as close to the spark as possible via targeted and clustered minion open fire.
Just prior to these panels, Pharma watches the security cameras for at least a brief period of time and immediately singles out Ratchet (and whoever appears to be closest to Ratchet) to ensure that his initial shots upon entering the deck are guaranteed as possible to destroy Ratchet’s new boyfriend and ONLY Ratchet’s new boyfriend (most of the other minion shots go wide/miss most of the others/don’t give as much damage to other bots present).
There is no indication that Possessed Pharma would have given that much of a shit about any of what was going on, had it not been for Pharma’s deep seated obsession with Ratchet immediately kicking in the second he realised Ratchet was actually on board.
It completely derails whatever the original plan might have been to address the loss of the God Gun. He 100% pivots towards getting the fuck down there with two new core objectives: 1) Obtain Ratchet and 2) Destroy Bot Most Likely to Be Ratchet’s Boyfriend
Essentially: Pharma is so petty and so invested in Ratchet that it overpowers the influence of a literal god on his spark, processor, and frame– Total possession, totally overridden by his instinctual petty needs.
(There is quite possibly also a further motive in the form of wanting to just generally isolate Ratchet the way Pharma felt isolated; Aiming at Ratchet’s closest friends and colleagues has a lot of intent behind it…
We see most medic characters tend to be social or actively at their best and most comfortable when with other people. First Aid is even part of a gestalt. We know Pharma did reasonably well in the past, right up until being stationed as a sole medical lead in an isolated location.
There’s nothing in canon that explicitly states that medic type bots might do better in groups, but it does make sense for the nature of the work, and we tend to see medic characters that have fairly social personalities or tendencies. So this is just my conjecture, but I have a whole too-long-post planned about Cybertronian class/caste and social behaviours in the works anyway…!)
I know that we all already know all of this, but I feel like the sheer level of both pettiness and genuine obsession is core to what makes Pharma an effective and frightening villain.
We’ve all seen a million “unhinged doctor” type enemies in all kinds of media before, but Pharma is somewhat unique among them in terms of how he got to this point, and how his obsession realistically developed.
He knows what– and who–he wants.
It creates a far more effective unsettling vibe to Pharma overall; He’s not just dangerous due to medical knowledge and skills, but we know that he’s going to inevitably make unpredictable mistakes because his sheer obsessive focus on his points of interest have potential to fuck up his higher reasoning.
It’s not just Ratchet he’s obsessed with, either.
Pharma at Delphi: Loneliness Under Duress and the DJD
He was obsessed enough with running his clinic effectively enough under difficult conditions to provide care to an isolated and vulnerable population, at the very least to the degree that it’s hinted that he had such a focus on keeping the doors open and continuing to service those in need that when the DJD initially approached him. (Keeping in mind, of course, that a visit from the DJD is very much in the overwhelming majority of cases a brutal and horrific death for all on site.)
We can assume that in engaging with Tarn, even though Tarn approached him first and specifically sought him out, that Pharma did his best to negotiate not just a reasonable “way out” of death for himself– But for his patients and staff as well. The end deal was X number of t-cogs at X intervals, and you leave me, my staff, and the rest of my patients alone.
It’s an unwinnable situation: Any deal with the DJD in such a situation essentially boils down to “Commit atrocities, or we will commit worse ones”.
He clearly felt the need to continue his deal with Tarn despite the spark-crushing, processor-warping level of moral injury it caused him to do, so out of an effort to continue providing medical services as needed– For those who wouldn’t be effectively harvested for their t-cogs, at least.
He viewed it, most likely, as a sacrifice of few so that the many could still receive treatment.
His mindset on this may have been warped by his service as a medic during the war, although we have very little to no canonical information on what Pharma was really up to during the war for the most part, so it’s hard to say– We do know that he worked with the New Institute, so who knows.
But obviously, in the past, Pharma was well-adjusted; Even when working at the New Institute, which is when the panel below takes place.
He was intensely devoted to his patients, took pride in his job. He was a good doctor, as far as we ever see him working in the past, and we do get to see a few glimpses of him administering what appears to be compassionate care.
It’s unclear at what point various traumas from war etc. may have started to derail him, thus priming him as an ideal victim for Tarn to manipulate, and that’s something that needs to be remembered:
Pharma is a victim of the DJD.
He’s not a bad guy for evil’s sake; He set out to do good, or as good as possible given the circumstances that gradually developed. He wanted to make the best of an impossible situation for the sake of those he might still be able to save.
It’s suggested that Pharma created the rust plague as a way to justify the closing of the Delphi site– Which in and of itself suggests a serious level of desperation; It may have been during the creation of the rust plague that Pharma genuinely suffered a mental break of some kind. It’s a sign that he saw no way out, the situation was becoming unbearable/untenable, and he realised that Delphi needed to close somehow before it purely became a harvesting factory for Tarn’s t-cog demands.
It’s a sign that he felt so isolated, even from his own staff, that he did not feel able to reach out for assistance.
Left as the sole authority under such severe pressure, with all the typical pressure that comes with being in charge of the wellbeing and care of others also bearing down on him in a remote location with supply concerns etc., it’s very easy to see why Pharma eventually folded– It was inevitable.
He was under duress for an indeterminate amount of time, with very little outside assistance if any, with a limited number of staff who he evidently did not feel he could reach out to– Either because of medical hierarchy nonsense (which is unfortunately a very real issue in actual real life medical systems) or out of a desire to prevent his other staff members, most of whom are junior medics, from potentially getting looped into the deal with Tarn and the DJD themselves.
Pharma is uniquely effective as what would otherwise be a very stereotypical “mad doctor” type villain, because he is genuinely unwell, and we can understand fairly clearly how that happened– Even with a lack of much background elaboration on Pharma’s past, and without having all the details of the lead up to where we pick up the Delphi situation.
Pharma had a mental breakdown under sustained duress which spiralled into far more unhinged actions, but those actions–while not excusable–are at least understandable.
Because what do you do when you’re all alone, you have vulnerable patients at risk, you only have junior medical staff who are part of a terrifyingly small number of available/still alive medics post-war (which must also be taken into consideration when potentially sharing information with them which could place them at greater risk themselves), and the DJD– a group of people that will kill everyone in the vicinity regardless of anything if their demands are not met– is knocking on your door?
It’s likely Pharma fixated on Ratchet because not only is Ratchet an exemplary medic, but because Ratchet seems to be one of the few colleagues Pharma was ever particularly close with in the past.
In isolation, particularly in prolonged periods of isolation (famously, a few case studies exist involving prisoners held in solitary confinement for at least 12 continuous months, although I won’t link those reports here as they may be genuinely disturbing for some people), it is known that there is often a tendency for people at an intermediate stage of cognitive degradation caused by extreme isolation to mentally fixate on family members, close friends, colleagues, or any person or people they can more easily bring to mind– People that they have formative or significant memories about, for example.
(Part of this is simply because it is easier to imagine these better-remembered people in greater detail, which helps provide a slightly greater degree of mental stimulation while in total isolation. Among other reasons, but anyway!)
Ratchet fits that description for Pharma.
A more mild version of this has also been reported to some degree by several adventurers/explorers, such as those who go on long term expeditions to isolated areas such as high elevation mountain caps— An apt comparison, given the icy and isolated location Delphi is located in.
Many explorers who survive gruelling expeditions mention fixating on a photograph of a loved one, or imagining what advice their friends would give them if they were present, or even talking out loud to their friends as if they were there– Which is also useful for regulating breathing at high altitudes, so this serves multiple physical and mental purposes, for what it’s worth!
But given the way Pharma monologues to Ratchet towards the end of the Delphi rust plague incident, it very much gives me the vibe that Pharma had likely been fixating on Ratchet for some time prior to Ratchet’s arrival at Delphi, and it may even be indicative that Pharma is at a point of mental stress where he may have been monologuing to an imagined Ratchet prior to where we step into the Delphi situation.
Which is just my conjecture, as nothing suggests this in-canon, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this had been the case to at least some degree. Pharma’s ranting to Ratchet is very effectively unsettling and disturbing, especially with the in-universe context that Pharma in the past had been a very calm and effective medic.
Stress and isolation and prolonged duress do things to people. Oftentimes, bad things. What happened with Pharma is overwhelmingly sad, and that lends greater weight to how frightening his behaviour is later on.
This is someone who was unable, for whatever reasons, to get any help dealing with a nightmarish ultimatum under difficult circumstances while in relative isolation, with a lot of responsibility and professional stress bearing down on them throughout. It’s a realistic setup for a brutal downfall.
Pharma undoubtedly had a connection to Ratchet going back a long way, both personally to some degree as well as professionally, but whatever else may have been going on with him between then and the end of the war, it seems the DJD and Tarn specifically may have ultimately been what pushed his tendencies for high independence and self-motivation towards fuel for obsessive behaviours.
It seems to me as though, to some degree, his obsession with Ratchet may have initially manifested as an attempt to cope and stay on top of things– At least for a while. Ratchet was a good colleague, a friend, a great example of the type of CMO to aspire to be.
But the DJD leaves no survivors. Pharma is not an exception; It just took him that much longer to die, and he suffered– particularly mentally– the entire time.
Which doesn’t justify anything he did. But we can understand why he went on to do those things.
And upon being resurrected as a frame-puppet for a space god, that fixation– Ratchet as a sole point of focus, warped from being a coping method under isolation and duress to being a genuine full-blown obsession– continues to drive him through what is, really, a horrendous situation there, too.
It lets us know that the bots possessed by these gods are conscious, to some degree, in their own processors. They are aware to some degree, but their frames are moving beyond their control, their processors are muddled with the thoughts of a cosmic entity.
That has potential to be terrifying– And Pharma is powering through, once again, fixating, raging against impossible circumstances, inevitably failing.
Pharma is, fundamentally, a doctor who fell prey to manipulation under threat of death and suffered severe mental health challenges as a result, and owing to ultimately being unable to cope, committed atrocities, acts of abuse of power, and violence while developing obsessive fixations with periodic episodes of acute manic behaviour.
Things only spiralled out from there; Again, not excusing Pharma’s actions, especially as he does seem to have a reasonable degree of clarity/lucidity while in the process of setting up and/or actively committing several heinous acts even when they are bookended by what might be considered manic episodes (I really wish we had more canonical information on how Cybertronian processors function), but we can absolutely understand how he got to this point.
And it’s rare to see a realistic and understandable “mad doctor” type character, so I appreciate Pharma as being a great example of how to do “mad doctor” correctly.
Also, it’s hard to make such a character be in any way funny, but even though Drift getting shot is not funny, we can still make the connection that Pharma truly is interested in Ratchet to the degree that in his mind, Ratchet’s periphery– friends, colleagues, boyfriend– are targets for him as well. Which is frightening. And also sort of easy fuel for fandom, which is helpful to offset the horror.
It gives us an “out” from the potentially depressing background of Pharma, in that we can acknowledge the realistically serious and disturbing nature of his obsession with Ratchet, and the upsetting nature of his downfall, while also being able to say “lol so gay for Ratchet” and do normal gay fandom shit, which makes some of the extreme violence slightly more bearable for us as audience members/readers. (I love gay Pharma memes; I also cried at the end of the Delphi arc, at least twice. All things in good balance, lmao)
JRO really nailed it with Pharma; This is a character that has been extremely well-written and well presented, especially considering the fairly limited amount that has actually been written for the character! We really only have the Delphi Arc and the somewhat brief later on shenanigans towards the end of Lost Light for any direct content involving Pharma, but we can still piece together this much from that comparatively little. 10/10 Nicely done.
tl;dr it’s fun to talk about how Pharma is so gay for Ratchet that he overpowered a god in order to shoot Ratchet’s new boyfriend, because yes, but also, holy shit I have feelings about Pharma
if you read all this, thank you so much! <3
it genuinely is 3 AM on a Monday morning at the moment, now almost 4 AM LOL, so I have not edited this at all lmao, and I apologise for any errors etc. that there might be. <3
[Source: Lost Light Issue #22, MTMTE Issue #17]
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