Bob Brown (The Unit) - Character Overview

Character Overview

When the series begins, Bob is the latest member recruited to The Unit's Alpha Team. He undergoes initial training and interviewing for the job during "Natural Selection" and is gradually introduced into the Unit's secrets and traditions. He is a licensed pilot in both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters and is one of the more skilled marksmen in The Unit, frequently serving as a sharpshooter and sniper. He is competent in Spanish, Pashto and Urdu languages. Before entering the Unit, he served in the Air Cavalry as a sniper and is also Ranger qualified, although as Mack points out, he never actually served in any of the Ranger battalions. He is thus the only member of Alpha Team without any prior special operations experience; Jonas, Hector, and Grey have each served in Special Forces while Mack served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He is also the only college graduate in the Unit and Colonel Tom Ryan has alluded to Brown's possessing three college degrees. He normally uses a Heckler & Koch USP pistol as his sidearm and also a silenced Ruger .22 in the first episode.

During Season 1, upon Brown's first day after Selection and The Unit's Operator Training Course (referred to as "OTC Training"), as Staff Sergeant, Brown assists Sergeant Major Jonas Blane in laying out a new training course for extended deployment with pack animals. On the same day, terrorists hijack an airplane in the fictional city of Wyndham, Idaho. Brown is a part of the operation to reclaim the airplane, doing his part by eliminating terrorist spotters in the nearby woods. After the operation, when the FBI was looking to arrest Blane's team for conducting the operation prematurely, Brown was used as a decoy, as he was never on the captured aircraft. His natural ability to draw attention away from his comrades and play the "collaborator" would prove useful in later missions. During an assassination mission in Spain, he has to escape the country by volunteering to act as cabin boy on the yacht of an elderly gay man. He remains notably reticent about informing his teammates about the details of their voyage.

Brown is responsible for saving the Secretary of State from assassination by radicals in Africa, as well as capturing a U.S. Air Force cryptologist who was selling secrets to the Chinese. He assisted in the capture of a Bosnian war criminal, which came back to haunt him in the Season 1 finale, as the criminal escaped UN custody and tracked The Unit to their headquarters at Fort Griffith, attacking them while they celebrated Colonel Tom Ryan's marriage.

By Season 2, Brown has become more confident in his skills as an operator, instructing trainees in the art of being a sniper, during the Unit's Operator Training Course. He is responsible for helping to eliminate one of the world's foremost arms dealers.

Brown's membership in The Unit has at times strained his marriage, such as when he was late returning from a mission in Spain, when conducting a mission under the guise of taking his wife on a vacation, and when becoming hospitalized during a SERE exercise. However, he is devoted to Kim to a far greater extent than any of the other Unit members are to their wives and is much more domesticated, never hesitating to help Kim around the house with various tasks and being supportive of her work at a local radio station. He also relies on her for career advice, notably when The Unit is shut down and under investigation.

Near the closing of Season 2, Brown is targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency for recruitment. They use the platform of apparent crimes committed by Jonas Blane to try to recruit him, and ironically, Blane signs off on it, saying that the Unit could use a man within the CIA. After returning from a mission in Cyprus, Brown and Alpha Team find that the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division is investigating Alpha Team, and has shut down the 303rd completely. After discovering that the CIA is behind the investigation, Brown is given a choice: join the CIA, or go to prison. His wife, Kim, convinces him to join the Agency. Brown's first assignment: find and take into custody the disappeared Jonas Blane.

At the beginning of Season 3, Brown is in pursuit of Jonas Blane at the behest of the CIA, but later teams up with Jonas and other team members to successfully break the CIA conspiracy. However he develops a relationship with CIA agent Kern, which appears to be genuine and continues after the Unit's reinstatement. Bob respects Kern's spying abilities, something the other Unit members also begin to appreciate after working with him on a mission in China.

During "Five Brothers", Brown is left no choice but to kill a Lebanese teenager to avoid detection. In the episode "Gone Missing", he started to see visions of people whom he killed during previous missions, that boy in particular. Consequently, operational capability becomes questionable, but soon he is able to defeat it by accepting that he likes killing. Afterwards, he seems to lose any hesitation and even kills an unarmed couple in cold blood in front of his wife. It is also revealed he was abused by his father when he was young, a trait he shares with Colonel Tom Ryan; many Special Forces soldiers have notably overcome adversity at a young age. Bob develops an addiction to heroin having been forcibly injected with it during a mission, but with Kim's help he kicks the habit.

During "Side Angle Side", Brown is promoted to the rank of Sergeant First Class. He is possibly the most level-headed member of the team, persuading Mack to consult the team over Tiffy's affair with Colonel Ryan rather than just immediately shooting him.

Although he has never been unfaithful to Kim, Bob's ability to charm women has aided The Unit on multiple occasions. One example occurred during "Binary Explosion," when he charmed a female CID agent into putting her investigation on hold to cooperate with the Unit's mission.

Bob is also the only Unit member to not have the Purple Heart. Although wounded numerous times during the course of the series, members of the Unit are never awarded medals. (His decorations include a Bronze Star from two tours in Iraq with the Air Cavalry). In the course of the series, he kills at least 30 people. According to the writers, if the series continued into a fifth season, the plan was Bob would have been badly injured in a parachute training jump leaving him with a permanent limp. He would have been aided in his recuperation by wheelchair-bound veteran Ron Cheals and Crystal Burn's badly scarred ex-boyfriend Jeremy, allowing the series to tackle the controversy over the army's treatment of injured soldiers. He would eventually leave the army and be recruited by the CIA as an instructor and their official liaison with The Unit, their intention being that he can provide them with inside information on the organization. In fact, he is still working for Colonel Ryan and providing them with disinformation, acting as the Unit's man within the CIA. According to an interview executive producer Shawn Ryan gave to The Futon Critic, " Mamet and I and our writers, we came up with a lot of great stuff", Ryan said about his pitch to CBS executives for a potential fifth season. "It was going to be a whole new show in the sense that we were going to be training some young people, Bob was going to be training some people for a whole new organization."