Sean Keyes was a xenobiologist in The Predator, played by Jake Busey, and the son of Peter Keyes, the agent killed by the City Hunter in Predator 2. He followed his father into the OWLF, worked beside Dutch Schaefer for two decades, and became Head of Xenobiology at Project Stargazer after the old office was shut down. In 2018 he welcomed Casey Brackett to the dam lab and showed her the human DNA in the captive hunter, then survived its escape with a gunshot wound that the novelization turned into a far bloodier death.
Biography
Early Life
Sean Keyes was the son of the CIA officer Peter Keyes, who led the government's hunt for the alien hunters after the jungle encounter in Val Verde in 1987. The Predator: Hunters and Hunted describes him as a medical specialist with a serious background in xenobiology and reptilian and arachnid physiology, who had been studying the creatures for as long as he was able. While he was still in school, Roger Elliott broke the rules and let him read the long series of observations his father had written before he died, and Elliott thought Sean looked and moved like Peter, only with slightly less intensity.
The Hunting Grounds recordings give a slightly different start, with Sean already a working agent when he joined his father's office. In his first entry, dated 23 February 1996, he introduced himself as Special Agent Sean Keyes, Regional Director of the Other Worldly Life Form task force, and explained that Director Peter Keyes, his father, had been part of the program when the first contact was made by a special forces team in South America. He summarized the self-destruct blast that ended that hunt, the long interviews with the survivor Dutch Schaefer, and the meager evidence his father's survey team had recovered from the crater.
OWLF And Project Stargazer
Sean spent his first year in the OWLF reading old reports, then helped prepare the infrared-masking suits and nitrogen freezing weapons that his father's team took to Los Angeles in the summer of 1997 to capture the City Hunter alive. He was setting up a mobile lab in the city when a survivor told him that the hunter had killed Peter and most of the team in the slaughterhouse. In Predator: Stalking Shadows he pulled Marine Scott Devlin off a cordon that night to follow a trail of green blood, confessing that the creature had killed his father, and then found Dutch waiting in the alley with the hunter's severed arm.
Under Peter's friend Adam Garber, Sean ran the research side of the office for almost twenty years, keeping Dutch's team off the books, studying the helmet, the arm, and a shoulder cannon, and even joining Dutch on a mission in 2001, unarmed, when a hunter's thrown knife grazed his arm. In 2008 he saved Dutch after the encounter with the huntress later called Cleopatra, using a serum made from hunter blood cells. When funding dried up, the office was abolished in August 2016, and Sean joined its replacement, Project Stargazer, as Head of Xenobiology, partly to keep an eye on the people who had shut his father's work down.
At the Stargazer dam lab in Hunters and Hunted, Sean took delivery of a live hunter, the Florida Hunter, from Erik Tomlin and his Reapers, warned the wounded soldiers to go straight to quarantine, and later, as their doctor, stayed guardedly optimistic about the badly injured Reapers. His later recordings describe a darker program under the Stargazer directors, who used his research on hot zones to provoke conflicts that would draw the hunters to Earth and even proposed selling arms to both sides of a war. Sean began smuggling recordings out under his tongue and copying evidence for the Inspector General just before the alert that announced the crash in Mexico.
The Captive Hunter
In The Predator, Traeger's team brought a live Fugitive Predator back from the crash in Mexico, although Sean's recordings admit he wished he could poison its IV rather than keep it. He greeted evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett at the dam, walked her through decontamination, and showed her on his tablet that the genome sequence, run ten times, contained human DNA. When NORAD reported an anomaly heading toward the base, the ship of the Upgrade Predator pursuing the captive, he ordered the lab locked down, but the hunter woke on its table, broke its restraints, and began killing the guards.
Wounded In The Breakout
Sean was caught in the gunfire and sparks as the guards fought the hunter, and he came through the escape wounded, with blood soaking the waist of his protective suit, while Casey was still trapped in the decontamination chamber. His recording from the road, titled Stargazer Is Down, says he had taken a stray round to the abdomen, sealed it with duct tape, and guessed he had two or three hours to reach a hospital. He told Dutch that an encrypted flash drive taped inside his left shoe held everything needed to take the project down, and joked that if he died, he would tell his father that Dutch said hey.
Apparent Survival
The film leaves Sean alive after the breakout, still on his feet in the red-lit lab and pointing, with blood across the waist of his protective suit. He is not seen again once the hunter leaves the dam, and the film never shows him dying, so his survival rests on that last glimpse of him standing in the wrecked lab. That open ending is what later allowed Predator: Hunting Grounds to bring him back as the voice of its recordings, and it sets the film firmly apart from the novelization, which gives the same breakout a far bloodier outcome for him.
The novelization by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris tells a different version of the breakout. There Casey saw him cowering behind an upturned bench, and the hunter lifted him by the hair, cut off his head with a scalpel, sliced off his right hand, and pressed both to the scanners on the decontamination door while imitating his voice. Casey reflected that the son had continued his father's work and that the family obsession had ended in disaster for both of them, but this death belongs only to the book, not to the film or the later game.
Later Years In The OWLF
The Hunting Grounds recordings continue his story after the dam, in a run of undated messages to Dutch Schaefer. Sean reported that he had recovered, that his deposition to the Inspector General had taken even longer, and that DARPA wanted the incompetence, the bodies, and the alien life kept quiet after failing to save Stargazer by installing Quinn McKenna as director. Using what he knew about the old office as leverage, he pitched reinstating the OWLF on the condition that he became its director, and soon had a skeleton crew working out of Stargazer's old base.
As director he catalogued Stargazer's stored technology, including a prototype gauntlet called the Predator Killer whose power lasted about twenty-four seconds, and joined a direct action coalition with the military project Voodoo as Stargazer carried on selling arms through private contractors. He warned Dutch that the huntress called Cleopatra had been sighted in Sierra Leone and begged him not to go after her alone, and he debriefed Isabelle Nissenbaum after a new satellite caught her hunter craft signaling I am human. When the board was replaced, Sean resigned rather than stay on, telling Dutch that he still wanted in on the fight.
Personality And Traits
In The Predator, Sean Keyes was the friendliest face at the Stargazer dam, a cheerful scientist who greeted Casey Brackett with real excitement and chatted with her easily through decontamination. The novels give him sharper edges. In Hunters and Hunted he admitted he was nervous before meeting a live hunter, babbled about his new equipment, and then promised to test the captive's pain threshold a hundred times, his eyes glittering in a smile that was not kind, because he knew exactly how his father had died.
His own recordings in Predator: Hunting Grounds show a man who began nervous and grew more confident, more profane, and more troubled as the years went on. He called himself a scientist rather than a soldier, admitted that he and Dutch might both be obsessed, and compared himself with Peter Keyes directly, saying they shared a hunger for the big picture but differed in their ethics. That conscience grew stronger at Stargazer, where he opposed bringing home a live specimen and risked his career to expose the directors.
Relation To Peter Keyes
Sean Keyes was written as the son of Peter Keyes, the OWLF leader played by Gary Busey in Predator 2, who died fighting the City Hunter in 1997 after his long duel of wills with Mike Harrigan. The casting mirrored the story, because Sean was played by Gary's real son, Jake Busey, who also voiced him on the Hunting Grounds recordings. The spelling of his first name varies: the film's end credits list him only as Keyes, while he introduces himself as Sean in the dialogue, and Hunters and Hunted, Stalking Shadows, and the Hunting Grounds recordings all spell it Sean, but the novelization of The Predator alone calls him Shawn, with the scanner identity Keyes, Shawn H., the only source for his middle initial.
Famous Quotes
- "Welcome. I'm Sean Keyes. Wow. I heard you basically wrote the book on evolutionary biology."
- "So, how'd they rope you into this?"
- "We ran the genome sequence ten times. This specimen has..."
- "The red wolf is known to be a hybrid between the coyote and the grey wolf..."
Conclusion
Sean Keyes grew up in the shadow of Peter Keyes and followed him into the OWLF, where he lost his father in Los Angeles and spent almost twenty years studying the hunters beside Dutch Schaefer. When the office was shut down he joined Project Stargazer as Head of Xenobiology, greeted Casey Brackett at the dam, and survived the Fugitive's escape with a gunshot wound that the novelization turned into a beheading. The Hunting Grounds recordings carry him on to the Inspector General, the reinstated OWLF with himself as director, and a final resignation that kept him in the fight.
Appearances
- The Predator: Hunters and Hunted by James A. Moore (2018)
- The Predator (2018)
- The Predator novelization by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris (2018), as Shawn H. Keyes
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020), on the OWLF recordings, voiced by Jake Busey
- Predator: Stalking Shadows by James A. Moore and Mark Morris (2020)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
