Jonn Welland: Psychiatrist of the Aegis VII Colony

Jonn Welland was a clinical psychiatrist stationed on the Aegis VII Colony, the Concordance Extraction Corporation mining settlement whose survey teams uncovered Marker 3A in the planet's soil. As the colony slid into an epidemic of insomnia, depression, paranoia, and violence, Welland worked alongside Doctor Tom Sciarello, the settlement's Chief Medical Officer, in a losing effort to treat afflictions that answered to no known medicine. His name reached as far as the orbiting USG Ishimura, where the Chief Science Officer, Doctor Terrence Kyne, noted in his science log that Welland's own analysis of the afflicted had been fruitless. Welland's practice ended where his duty took him, in the colony's medical lab after the planet crack, where he and Sciarello discovered the dormant Necromorphs waiting in the morgue. (Dead Space (comic); Dead Space)

Practice in a colony losing its mind#

Welland held the psychiatric post on Aegis VII during the settlement's final planetcrack operation, and the discovery of Marker 3A turned that post into the busiest and most hopeless office in the colony. Colonists came to the medical staff in growing numbers with depression and sleeplessness that no treatment could touch, and the complaints hardened over time into paranoia, dementia, and open violence. Welland and Sciarello attempted to treat the numerous psychological problems together, a psychiatrist and a physician working the same impossible caseload, and neither man's methods made any lasting difference. Sciarello, a confirmed atheist, came to suspect the Marker itself as the cause of the wave of madness, going so far as to secretly test the artifact for radiation, while his appeals alongside P-Sec Sergeant Abraham Neumann to abandon the mining project were ignored by the colony's manager, Hanford Carthusia. Welland's own discipline fared no better against the sickness than Sciarello's medicine did. (Dead Space (comic))

The clearest record of that failure was the miner Brant Harris, whose exposure to the Marker had left him unable to sleep and prey to vivid hallucinations. With Welland's analysis getting nowhere, Harris ended up aboard the USG Ishimura in orbit, one of the affected colonists brought up for study after the ship's Doctor Challus Mercer urged Kyne to take some aboard. The transfer removed Harris from the colony before the Necromorph outbreak overran it, and delivered him instead into the hands of the Ishimura's doctors, among them the Unitologist Challus Mercer. In the 2023 remake, Mercer's experiments turn Harris into the creature known as the Hunter; the 2008 game only hints at it, with Mercer musing about using "that patient from the colony". (Dead Space (comic); Dead Space; Dead Space (2023))

Welland's report reached the ship's senior science staff. In a science log, Kyne recorded that almost 40 percent of the colonists were suffering a form of dementia, that Welland, the planetside psychiatrist, had found his own analysis fruitless, and that Mercer had advised bringing some of the affected on board. Kyne was wary of relying on Mercer but admitted he needed his expertise. (Dead Space)

The funeral of Katie Evans#

The violence the medical staff could not cure eventually reached into their own ranks. Harris, before his transfer, had taken Sciarello hostage at the clinic, and in the struggle with the P-Sec officers who answered the call he fired a line cutter that missed its targets and cut the nurse Katie Evans in half. Evans had served as Sciarello's personal assistant for five years, and her killing was among the early deaths that showed how far the Marker's influence had already spread. (Dead Space (comic))

Welland was present at her funeral. Sciarello rose to deliver the eulogy, but it was cut short when he was seized by a hallucination of Katie herself, the first of several visitations of the dead nurse that would pursue him to the end of his life. It fell to Welland to step in and apologize to the gathered crowd. The moment placed the psychiatrist in the position he occupied throughout the colony's collapse, standing beside a colleague who was himself beginning to break, smoothing over in public what neither man could repair in private. (Dead Space (comic))

The medical lab and the morgue#

When the planet crack came and the colony fell into pandemonium, Welland did not run. He and Sciarello made for the colony's medical lab to prepare it to receive the wounded, reasoning that the injured would come to the one place they knew to seek help. Welland put the logic plainly to his colleague: the lab was where people would expect the doctors to be, and where the injured would come. On the way the two doctors fell into a heated argument over medical ethics, over what their roles as physicians demanded of them in a crisis that had passed beyond medicine. (Dead Space (comic))

The argument ended in the morgue. The bodies of the Unitologists who had committed suicide in Union Square were missing from their trays, and the two doctors stumbled across the dormant Necromorphs waiting in the room. The creatures, Slashers clinging to the ceiling, ambushed the group that had come to the lab, and one of them killed Sciarello with a blade through the forehead. Welland was presumably killed shortly afterwards, though no account recorded the manner of his death. (Dead Space (comic))