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| “ | We either die in a cage, or we own the world. There is nothing in the middle. | „ |
| ~ Spencer Clay's most famous line. |
Ivan Lupybatko, better known as Spencer Clay, is the main antagonist of the TV series The Man Who Fell to Earth. He is a ruthless CIA agent who attempts to steal a quantum fusion reactor from the title character, an extraterrestrial who has arrived on Earth to build the machine.
He was portrayed by Jimmi Simpson, who also played Liam McPoyle in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Skip Tyler in White House Down, a younger William in Westworld and Dr. Royce Hemlock in Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
Biography[]
Early life[]
Clay was born Ivan Lupybatko in the Soviet Union, raised by his mother Valentina, a terrorist and thief. When he was a child, he witnessed his mother being arrested by the CIA for bombing a federal building in Chicago, and afterward, the CIA took him in and gave him a new identity so Valentina would not be able to find him. He was simultaneously raised and trained as an agent by his handler, Drew Finch, who became the closest thing he had to a mother. Unbeknownst to him, Finch was the one who got Valentina involved in the bombing, as a pretext for arresting her so the CIA could turn him into the perfect agent. He remains obsessed with finding out what happened to his mother for the rest of his life, and his belief that she abandoned him fuels his ruthlessness and inability to care about anyone.
The Man Who Fell to Earth[]
Finch meets with Clay and gives him a top secret file concerning the arrival on Earth of an extraterrestrial calling himself K. Faraday, who is planning to create a quantum fusion reactor with scientist Justin Falls in order to save his planet, Anthea. Clay and Finch have both been looking for the information necessary to create this device for the past eight years. She also tells him that Faraday's appearance is connected to that of another extraterrestrial, Thomas Newton, 45 years earlier. Clay plans to steal the reactor so the CIA can prevent it from destroying the U.S. fossil fuel industry. He goes to Alaska to find Gregory Papel, the former CIA agent who had investigated Newton before disappearing.
Clay finds Papel, who knocks him unconscious and ties him up to interrogate him about why he is looking for him. Papel says that someone has finally answered his message, and mentions a mysterious film before committing suicide right in front of Clay, who realizes that the "message" Papel was talking about was what brought Faraday to Earth. He discovers the film Papel talked about, which shows the CIA experimenting on Newton in an unsuccessful attempt to extract information about the quantum fusion device. Clay takes the film and burns down Papel's house.
Thanks to intelligence gathered from his much-abused subordinate, analyst Lisa Dominguez, Clay learns that Newton had been in a relationship with Mary Lou Prescott at the time of his disappearance. He goes to Brighton, England to talk to Prescott, a recovering alcoholic who runs a substance abuse rehabilitation clinic. She is convinced that Spencer has been sent by God to release her from her self-imposed penance for having an affair with the married Newton and driving him to a mental breakdown. Confused, Clay tells her that he is not looking for Newton, but someone else who is from the same planet; Prescott replies that this other being must be an angel, not an alien, and pleads with Clay to protect him at all costs.
Clay meets with Edie Flood, the CEO of OriGen, the company that owns the patent for the quantum fusion device, and tells her that the patent actually contains classified information that Newton had misappropriated. He tells her that the CIA had installed her late father, Edward, as head of OriGen, paying him a fortune to keep Newton's quantum fusion patent a secret. When Faraday, Falls, and Edie's estranged brother Hatch arrive to acquire the patent, Clay strong-arms her into making the deal so Faraday can build the device, while while forbidding her and Hatch from releasing the patent publicly. Faraday builds the device, but destroys it after Clay attempts to steal it. Clay shoots Faraday in the stomach, but Faraday nevertheless manages to escape with help from Falls.
Meanwhile, Clay discovers that the tornado that transported Faraday to Earth had in fact been engineered by Newton in order to transmit messages to him - the very messages that Papel had told him about. Dominguez traces the message's signal to Cambodia and locates Faraday's underground bunker; she deduces that Faraday and his fellow Antheans need to be in low gravity, high altitude places, where the oxygen levels are especially high, to survive.
Clay requests permission from Finch to go to Cambodia to retrieve Faraday, but she turns him down for fear of causing an international incident. Clay is determined to find Faraday, however, and forges Finch's signature in order to greenlight a CIA mission to extract him. When he and his team infiltrate the bunker, they discover too late that it is full of alien flowers that release toxic vapor; Clay's entire team is killed, while Dominguez saves Clay's life. Enraged, Finch orders Clay to explain himself to a CIA committee in Washington, D.C. Clay double-crosses Finch by showing the committee the forged signature ordering the mission and says that she covered up the recording of Newton being tortured. Finch is reprimanded, while Clay uses her disgrace as an excuse to further pursue Faraday and "clean up" the problem.
Unbeknownst to Clay, however, his superiors at the CIA are on to him thanks to Edie, who conspired with Finch to set him up. The CIA is only allowing him to go after Faraday so they can arrest both of them in one fell swoop. Dominguez tells Clay that it will only be a few hours before the CIA orders her to take him into custody, and demands that he allow the fusion device to be made public and give her an equal share of the profits if he wants to stay out of prison. Clay agrees, and together they trace Faraday to Prescott's clinic, where he is undergoing surgery to repair the bullet wound, which has become septic. Clay and his team charge on the clinic, but are surprised to find that Prescott and her patients are heavily armed; in the ensuing shootout, Prescott shoots Clay in the neck, and Clay shoots her in the back, killing her. He and Dominguez then kidnap Faraday and Falls, and take the fusion device.
They take Faraday and Falls to an isolated farmhouse and torture them in an attempt to get them to reveal the algorithm that will activate the device. Clay threatens to kill Falls unless Faraday talks, so Faraday tells him that there is an Anthean ship somewhere on Earth in order to save her. Clay plays the recording that Faraday took from Newton's effects and demands to know what it is, seeking confirmation of his suspicion that it contains the algorithm. Much to his surprise, however, Faraday reveals that it is in fact an order for the Anthean ship to invade Earth. Faraday says that he does not know when or where the invasion will take place, but nevertheless makes a deal with Clay; if Clay plays Russian Roulette, Faraday will answer one of his questions with every round, and after the fifth round he will tell him what happened to his mother.
Unable to resist resolving his lifelong obsession, Clay agrees to the game, surviving four rounds. When he finally asks about his mother, Faraday says that Sharpe had used and betrayed Valentina so that she and the CIA could control him and make him do their bidding. He also reveals that Newton, not Clay, was the CIA's asset in an operation to create the fusion device and keep it for themselves, and that Sharpe had taken away the one thing that could have reunited him with his mother. With his final question, Clay asks what that one thing was, but realizes that he already knows the answer, his name. Just as Clay is about to execute Faraday, Dominguez, who has secretly been working with the CIA all along to foil Clay's plan to steal the device, shoots him in the face from behind. As Clay chokes on his own blood, Dominguez shoots her hated boss in the head, killing him.