Rolo Haynes is the main antagonist of Black Museum. He is portrayed by Douglas Hodge.
History[]
Rolo worked for TCKR Systems. As part if his work, while attempting to created a technology that allowed knowledge to be passed from one subject to another, he developed a technology that allowed one subject to feel everything another subject was feeling. He tested in humans through Dr. Peter Dawson, a doctor who used it to diagnose his patients more efficiently. This went south when Dawson began feeling pleasure at others' pain and tortured and killed an unhoused person.
Rolo then developed a technology that allowed the consciousness of a dead or dying person to be transferring into the brain of a living person, allowing the dead person to see, hear, and feeling everything the living person was feeling as well as being able to talk, but only to them. He tested this in Carrie Lamasse, transferring her consciousness into her husband, Jack. When Jack struggled with the lack of privacy and Carrie with her lack of agency, Rolo first developed a way for Jack to pause Carrie, so she couldn't see, hear, or feel anything or talk to him, and then, at Jack's request, transferred Carrie's consciousness to a stuffed monkey for their son, Parker, which would still allow her to see, hear, and feel him, but only allowed her extremely limited communication. After Parker abandoned the toy, it came back into Rolo's possession.
Rolo was fired from TCKR over putting Carrie's consciousness in the monkey because it was ruled illegal, so he decided to start the Black Museum, a museum where he collected artifacts of real crimes. As the main attraction, he first wanted to have holograms of celebrities greet people and interact with them, but decided it was too complicated, so instead, he went to Clayton Leigh, who was on death row, and offered him money for his family in exchange for the rights to Clayton's consciousness after his execution. Clayton accepted the deal and when he was executed, Rolo came and extracted his consciousness. He then used it to create a hologram of Clayton, which he allowed museum visitors to electrocute over and over again, creating keychain souvenirs of Clayton eternally suffering. Visits declined when Clayton's wife, Angelica Leigh, led protestors to protest his museum. In order to keep the doors open, Rolo began catering to sadists and perverts, the only people who still wanted to see Clayton. Finally, in a desperate move, he allowed a rich man to pay him a lot of money to electrocute Clayton for longer than the maximum ten seconds. He left the man go for fourteen seconds, which left Clayton unable to speak or interact, which meant the exhibit lost his appeal to the few who were still visiting.
When Nish came to visit the museum, he showed her around and told her Dawson and Carrie's stories. Then he showed her Clayton. At that point, she revealed that she was Clayton's daughter and she'd poisoned the water she gave Rolo. As he died, she extracted his consciousness, which she inserted into the hologram of Clayton, then electrocuted it until Clayton's consciousness was finally freed and Rolo's destroyed. As she left, she set fire to the Black Museum and took the stuffed monkey that contained Carrie's consciousness.
Career[]
He worked for TCKR Systems until he was fired, at which point, he created the Black Museum, which he ran until his death.