Peter Stillman

Peter Stillman was the bomb disposal expert who helped Raiden and Iroquois Pliskin during the Big Shell Incident. Regarded as the foremost expert on bomb disposal, Stillman had helped to defuse dozens of terrorist bombs during his career. In addition, because of his career and expertise in bomb disposal, he is also given a mention in every textbook relating to bomb disposal.

Later career
Sometime before 2004, Peter Stillman had retired from diffusing bombs for reasons that he eventually forgot and became a lecturer at NAVSCOLEOD (Naval School of Explosive Ordnance Disposal), in Indian Head, Maryland. Stillman also worked as a consultant to the NYPD Bomb Squad. During this time, Stillman met and taught his best student, Fatman. Never having had a son, Stillman thought he saw one in Fatman and taught him everything he knew about bombs (including their construction and demolition). This would prove to be a deadly mistake in the future.

In 2004, Stillman was called out of retirement to defuse a terrorist bomb in a famous church. During the disposal Stillman panicked and fled, leaving the bomb to explode. The church was obliterated along with a nearby playground. Unable to face the public and families of the people who were lost in the explosion, as, due to not having a family or children, his reputation was the only thing he really had and couldn't afford to lose that, he faked being injured by the blast and said he lost a leg in the explosion, making everyone believe his leg was prosthetic.

On April 29th, 2009, Stillman was again coaxed out of retirement to deal with a number of explosives, planted onboard the Big Shell by his former student Fatman, accompanying SEAL Team 10 aboard the facility. After the team was attacked, Stillman took refuge in Strut C, where Raiden and Iroquois Pliskin discovered him (although Raiden initially tried to hold him up, believing that he was a bomber at work). Joining forces with the two operatives, Stillman supplied them both with a coolant spray and a sensor to help detect and defuse Fatman's bombs. He then locked himself in a store room and gave directions to Raiden and Pliskin via Codec.



During the mission to disarm the bombs, Stillman became uneasy at their seemingly amateurish placement, saying that their locations were all wrong if Fatman had intended to destroy the Big Shell. During his spare time, Stillman constructed a sensor to detect any bombs that may lack Fatman's signature scent, just in case the bombs were a decoy. He then asked Pliskin to take a look at the bottom of Shell 2's Strut H in case bombs had been planted there. Pliskin reported back to Stillman that he was correct and that the other bombs were indeed decoys. Stillman was disturbed at this, not because of the use of decoys, but because Fatman had become so out of control as to fully abandoned a long-standing code of his making.

Stillman then decided to head to Strut H and dismantle the last bomb by himself, revealing to Raiden and Pliskin that he had never lost his leg during the bomb accident years before. However, Fatman had surpassed Stillman in his skills and set a trap; it turned out that the decoy C4s were actually "keys" set to activate the real C4s once the decoys had been disarmed. Stillman encountered an unscented proximity, microwave-triggered bomb, which subsequently accelerated the timer countdown. Realizing that he could not escape in time, he warned Raiden and Pliskin of the proximity trigger, which had a 7 foot radius, and encouraged Raiden to dismantle its counterpart in Shell 1. The bomb then detonated, killing Stillman and destroying a large section of Shell 2.

Stillman's corpse was later discovered by Raiden in the first floor basement of the flooded Shell 2 Core, Filtration Chamber No. 1. It was later revealed to Raiden that Stillman's presence at the Big Shell had been engineered, in order to coax Fatman into carrying out the Patriots' agenda, thus providing him with a chance to surpass his former mentor.

Trivia
According to Stillman's dogtags, his blood type was A.

Behind the scenes
Peter Stillman (ピーター・スティルマン) is a character who appears in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. He is voiced by Greg Eagles, who previously provided the voices of Donald Anderson and Gray Fox in Metal Gear Solid. Stillman's dogtags can be collected by the player after defeating Fatman and shaking his body. Peter Stillman's name was a reference to one of the assumed names of the lead character in the New York Trilogy novel City of Glass, and was the only character with a name referencing that novel to make it into the final version. Similarly, according to character designer Yoji Shinkawa, Stillman was originally intended to be an alternate version of Ed from Policenauts.

In director Hideo Kojima's "Grand Game Plan" for Metal Gear Solid 2, Stillman was to have worn a cross around his neck, which is what saves him from Vamp's massacre of the SEALs Bravo Team. He began wearing it after his failure to dismantle the bomb in the church, despite his religion being one that does not revere the cross. It was also intended that the church bombing in Romania, of which Vamp was victim to during his childhood, was the same as that which Stillman failed to prevent, resulting in the former's fear of the cross. In addition, he was also intended to have been a security guard at the Big Shell.