Theta Nedra Berwick was a human hunter who spent most of her life tracking and killing Predators across the galaxy, the central figure of Marvel's Predator comics by Ed Brisson. She survived the attack that killed her parents in 2041, grew up alone aboard the research ship Sandpiper and wore armor taken from the hunters she killed, becoming one of the most famous human Predators. Her story ran through Predator: Day of the Hunter, Predator: The Preserve and Predator: The Last Hunt, which ended with her alive in 2068.
Biography
Early Life & Killed Parents
Theta was the daughter of Hugo and Francesca Berwick, who worked for Astar Industries aboard the research ship Sandpiper. In 2041 the family lived at a settlement on the jungle planet Damara, where Theta read every book in the ship's library and gave a frog she found the Latin-style name Damara Lithobates viridis cauda. Her parents scolded her for wandering outside the settlement, but the danger came to them instead. When a Predator attacked from the trees, a plasma bolt struck her father while the crew fired blindly into the jungle, and Theta and her mother watched him fall.
Francesca brought Theta back aboard the Sandpiper and told her to hide while the ship's computer, Sandy, flew on autopilot. The Predator followed them aboard and lifted her mother off the floor by the throat, and Francesca slashed its face and cut away one of its mandibles in a spray of green blood. The wound did not stop the creature, and it killed her in front of her daughter. As she was dying, Francesca told Theta that both of her parents loved her and ordered Sandy to get the girl away, leaving Theta as the only survivor of the crew and the hunter marked by its missing tusk as her lifelong target.
Fifteen Years Of Hunting
For the next 15 years Theta lived aboard the Sandpiper with only Sandy for company, hunting Predators from planet to planet in search of the one that had killed her family. She built armor from the gear of her kills, hung their masks in a trophy room and studied the red, egg-shaped data drives she took from their ships. The drives held the hunters' travel logs, and she learned that when one of them died, another Predator took over its ten-year hunting route within a year. Following those routes let her find new prey, although she had once switched on a drive that drew more hunters straight to her ship.
In 2056 she fought and killed a Predator on the planet XI4432-8, only to find that it still had all four mandibles and was not the killer she wanted. She lost her axe during the fight, and the small purple natives of the planet, who had been attacked by the hunter for days, saw the mask on her belt and fired on her as if she were another Predator. Back aboard the ship she told herself that the universe produced an endless supply of monsters. The Sandpiper was also failing, and six months earlier she had blasted her way out of an Astar junkyard when its workers tried to seize Sandy for a reward.
Stranded On Tusket
With the stabilizers failing and less than eight days of food aboard, Sandy steered her toward Port Medway, an Astar outpost on the ice planet Tusket that was being shut down. The stabilizers gave out on the approach, and Theta, who admitted that she crashed in seven out of every eight landing simulations, brought the ship down hard about 100 miles south of the outpost. She set out on foot across the ice with her armor and weapons, passing ice spires and a huge frozen ribcage, and shot a four-eyed beast for food. That night she dreamed that her mother turned into a Predator and blamed her for the deaths of her parents.
A band of alien scavengers riding a yellow Astar hoverbike ambushed her and shot her in the shoulder, and Theta killed two of them before sparing the last two, one of whom was named Crug. She left them bandages and meat because they had only been trying to survive, then took the hoverbike and reached the outpost far sooner than she could have walked. At Port Medway she found the last two employees gutted and hung, and camera footage showed a Predator carrying the axe she had lost on XI4432-8. The hunter had followed her across space, and it ambushed her in an office while she had no armor on.
Theta escaped through a window while the hunter fired its shoulder cannon at her, and she killed it by triggering an emergency engine burn on a parked craft. She took back her axe, collected the stabilizer cores and solar panels, and loaded food, rations and bottles of Astar drinking spirits onto the hoverbike. Before leaving she placed the murdered workers in a freezer for the arriving Astar crew and destroyed the hunter's ship. Sandy reminded her that she had killed 23 Predators in fifteen years, and the black box showed that the hunters had marked the Sandpiper as an Astar ship and were searching each outpost on Tusket for her.
The Turnstone
Two Predator ships then attacked the repaired Sandpiper, and Theta climbed through the top hatch and destroyed one with a mounted launcher, surprised to see two hunters working together. With her ship badly damaged, she landed to face the second Predator on the ground, even though Sandy warned that her blood alcohol level was 0.05. The hunter tore away her mask and nearly killed her before she stabbed it in the eye, and soldiers from the Astar recon ship Turnstone finished it with gunfire. They nearly shot Theta as well, since her armor made her look like a Predator, and carried her aboard as a prisoner.
Captain Ferrier told her that Astar had lost the Sandpiper on Damara in 2041, and the ship's logs revealed that she was the daughter of the Berwicks. Under the contract her parents had signed, the ship and everything aboard it belonged to the company, including her own knowledge of how she had survived. Theta begged him not to take the only home she had ever known and was locked in cell C-8, where the science officer Paolo Silva brought her food and admitted that Predators had fascinated him for years. When he said he had orders to bring her in, she stabbed him in the face with a fork and took him hostage.
The standoff ended when a Predator boarded the Turnstone and began killing soldiers, and Theta offered to help, correcting Paolo's estimate of her kills to 26. She volunteered as bait in the cargo bay, but the hunter sent a spider-legged drone in her place, and its explosion killed many of the crew. Ferrier blamed her for leading the hunters to his ship and struck her before the Predator returned through the flames and killed him. When it overpowered Theta and removed its mask, she recognized the scarred face of the Predator that had murdered her parents fifteen years earlier.
The Three-Mandibled Predator
Paolo opened fire on the hunter, and Theta drew its attention back to herself, shouting that she was the one who had been killing its kind just to find it. She attacked with plasma fire and blades, telling the creature that she had spent fifteen years following the trail of its dead and the lives its kind destroyed. She finally drove a blade through the body of the three-mandibled Predator, ending the hunt that had shaped her whole life. Covered in green blood, she told Paolo that there were hundreds, thousands or even millions more of them, and promised to kill them all before the two of them walked away on Tusket.
The Game Preserve
By 2062 Paolo had flown with Theta for five years, and she had followed the Predators for nearly twenty. She tracked them to the Game Preserve Planet, a jungle world where hunters released humans taken from Earth, and killed one of them in front of a group of terrified strangers. She told the survivors that they were live prey on a training ground and that she believed the Predators kept a farm of people on ice until they were needed. Her plan was to fly them to a nearby Astar outpost, and she warned that anyone who stayed behind would be on their own.
At the Sandpiper a Predator ambushed the group, and Theta faced it in a duel with her axe, burying the blade in its body before it cut off her arm. She knelt and dared it to finish her, but a swarm of pale River Ghosts dragged the hunter down, and Allen Adkins carried her back to the ship. The soldier Kiyoshi tried to steal the Sandpiper, and once Awja forced him to land, Paolo operated on Theta and gave her a second robotic arm to match the one she already had. Paolo told the others that she had killed 31 Predators in twenty years.
Two of the survivors then seized the ship and switched on a black box, and its signal brought another hunter aboard under its cloak. It killed five of the passengers, including Allen, who had armored himself in gear from Theta's armory to fight beside her. Theta wrestled the creature in her own Predator armor until Awja handed her a rifle, and she emptied it into the hunter's face. Six months later she flew Awja to an Astar base on Tusket, gave her a black box for the OWLF and admitted that her personal vendetta had blinded her to what the rest of the world needed to know.
The Last Hunt
In 2068 Theta was 40 years old and still searching for the place where the Predators kept their prisoners in stasis. On Tantallon she found a beacon that led her and Paolo to a wrecked Predator supply ship on the jungle world Mabou, full of stasis chambers and the skeletons of people who had died in them. Paolo gave her a poison injector, and she decided that if a Predator ever beat her, she would use it on herself so that the hunter lost its trophy. Outside the wreck they met John Schaefer, the brother of Dutch, who led about fifty survivors of the crash.
When the black box pointed to a stasis farm on Glenelg, Theta led John and a crew of volunteers there, only to find tens of thousands of empty chambers. A bomb showed her that the beacon, the tracker and the black box had all been bait, and she later admitted that she had walked her people straight into the trap. A silver-armored Super Predator and its Hell Hounds slaughtered most of the volunteers, and a plasma blast knocked the knife from her hand. She told herself that after 25 years of fighting these creatures she could not go out like this, and then everything went dark.
Duel With The Super Predator
Theta woke in a stasis pod aboard the hunter's ship, surrounded by hundreds of chambers, and realized that the creature had added her to its collection. Her pod opened and she found her armor laid out on a round platform, and she wondered aloud why she was still alive. On an unknown planet she found Paolo and John chained to pillars beside a wall of bio-mask trophies. The Super Predator had healed her wounds in stasis because it wanted a one-on-one fight with the human who hunted its kind, with her friends as the prize.
The hunter stabbed Theta and tore away her prosthetic arm before John broke free and tackled it. Beaten, she used the poison capsule that Paolo had designed for her on the creature instead of herself, and it choked up green blood as the toxin spread. She thought for a moment about leaving it to suffer, but she was no monster, and she took the head of the Super Predator with a single stroke. With the Sandpiper destroyed, she freed Paolo, asked John to fly the Predator ship and set out with her friends to bring hundreds of captives home.
Personality & Traits
Theta was driven, stubborn and obsessed with revenge for most of her life, and she admitted that she had been stuck on a personal vendetta for decades. She was a fearless fighter who faced Predators hand to hand, but she also drank on duty, ignored Sandy's warnings and fought one hunter while half drunk. She took a dark pride in her work, hoping that the hunters woke in a cold sweat from nightmares about her. Her blunt honesty showed in small ways as well, since she admitted to Sandy that she crashed in most of her landing simulations.
Beneath the hardness she still carried the grief of the girl from Damara, and she dreamed of her mother blaming her for her parents' deaths. She spared Crug and his companion because they were only trying to survive, and she put the murdered Port Medway workers in a freezer for their colleagues. Over time her goal moved from vengeance to rescue, and by 2068 she wanted above all to save the people the Predators kept in stasis. She feared ending up as a trophy, yet she refused to torture the Super Predator, choosing to kill it cleanly because she was no monster.
Weapons & Equipment
Predator Armor
Theta wore a suit of gold Predator armor and a mask assembled from the gear of the hunters she had killed, and she kept spare suits in an armory aboard the Sandpiper. The armor protected her in close combat, but it also made her look like a Predator, which led the natives of XI4432-8 and Tantallon and the soldiers of the Turnstone to attack her. Paolo wore a matching silver suit in the later stories, and Allen Adkins armored himself from her collection for the final fight on the Preserve.
The Axe
Her signature weapon was a heavy Predator axe, which she used in close combat alongside blades and plasma weapons. She lost it on XI4432-8 in 2056, and the Port Medway Predator carried it to Tusket before she killed the hunter and took it back. She fought with it again on the Game Preserve Planet, where she buried it in a hunter's body before the creature took her arm. The axe suited her style of fighting, since she preferred to meet the hunters face to face and take their heads as they took the heads of their own prey.
The Sandpiper And Sandy
The Sandpiper was an old Astar Industries research ship, an AR-TX87, that had been meant for a single return trip but became Theta's home for her entire life. It carried her trophy room, her armory and the black boxes she collected, and it could cloak itself on the ground. Its computer, Sandy, flew the ship, kept count of her kills and was the last thing she had left of her parents. The ship was destroyed by the Predators on Glenelg in 2068.
Prosthetic Arms & Poison
Theta lost an arm to a Predator on the Game Preserve Planet in 2062, and Paolo gave her a second robotic arm to match one she already had. The Super Predator tore away one of these prosthetic arms during their duel in 2068, but she still won the fight. Before that duel Paolo had made her a poison injector from a plant found near West River Station, strong enough to kill everything within a kilometer. Theta carried it so that no hunter could ever take her as a trophy, and in the end she turned it on the Super Predator instead of herself.
Behind The Scenes
Writer Ed Brisson created Theta for Marvel's Predator comics, which began with Predator #1 on August 10, 2022. Kev Walker drew Day of the Hunter, Netho Diaz drew The Preserve in 2023 and Francesco Manna drew The Last Hunt in 2024, while Leinil Francis Yu, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Cory Smith drew the main covers of the three series. Before the launch, Brisson told CBR that Theta had been hunting Predators for about fifteen years and was following the routes the hunters used to return to their hunting grounds. Marvel collected the three stories as Predator by Ed Brisson volumes one to three between April 2023 and October 2024.
The kill counts given in the comics changed as the story went on, rising from 23 in 2056 to 26 on the Turnstone, 31 by 2062 and 32 in her final duel. The trilogy also tied her to the films through John Schaefer, the brother of Dutch from the 1987 film, and through the OWLF files mentioned in The Preserve. Her last story closed with the words The End... For Now, leaving her alive with Paolo and John at the controls of a Predator ship.
Famous Quotes
- "There are more of them out there." (Predator: Day of the Hunter)
- "Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe millions. I don't know. But they're out there, and they're still hunting. I'm going to find them." (Predator: Day of the Hunter)
- "I've been stuck on this personal vendetta for decades, ever since one of those things killed my parents, and I haven't stopped to think about what the rest of the world knows about these things." (Predator: The Preserve)
- "Small victories are still victories." (Predator: The Preserve)
- "A death I can live with." (Predator: The Last Hunt)
- "I don't have a choice. Besides, I've killed 32 of them. What's one more?" (Predator: The Last Hunt)
- "I've lost, but I haven't given up." (Predator: The Last Hunt)
- "Hundreds of people. We save them." (Predator: The Last Hunt)
Conclusion
Theta Berwick was the girl who watched a Predator kill her parents on Damara and grew into the hunter its kind learned to fear. She spent fifteen years tracking the three-mandibled killer, then turned her armor, her axe and her ship toward the people the Predators had stolen from Earth. She lost both arms, her home and many allies along the way, yet she survived every trap the hunters set for her. At the end of her story in 2068, she held the head of a Super Predator and set out with Paolo and John to bring the captives home.
Appearances
- Predator: Day of the Hunter (2022 to 2023)
- Predator: The Preserve (2023)
- Predator: The Last Hunt (2024)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
