Doctor Monty

Doctor Monty is the reason the Mystery Box is where it is. An omnipotent entity presenting as a chatty English gentleman — voiced by Malcolm McDowell — he claims credit for the perks, the power-ups, the chalk weapon outlines and the GobbleGums: the mode’s entire furniture, installed by his “little nudges”. He narrates most of Black Ops III’s back half as a friend. He is not one.

The friend

The truth arrives in pieces: Monty and the Shadowman were friends corrupted by the Dark Aether together — one by ambition, one desperately trying to save the other. He cleanses Samantha, rebuilds Maxis, hosts the children in the House — and sends Primis to 1299 to fight the Great War, creating the cycle that the story eventually reveals is the only thing keeping him alive.

The reckoning

Alpha Omega shows his true form devouring Maxis mid-sentence; Tag der Toten ends him by subtraction — when Nikolai’s Agarthan Device destroys the Summoning Key, Monty is banished into the Dark Aether with everything else the Aether ever spawned. Whether he was ever really a Keeper is a question the games deliberately left open; his chocolate bars, meanwhile, kept appearing on shelves three games later.