Talk:Brendan (Ascension of the Cybermen)

Name

We know his first name is Brendan, but other than that his middle and last names only appear in a newspaper. The middle name, we only see the first half of, however we see the full last name, if a little blurry. --DCLM ☎ 12:06, March 17, 2020 (UTC)

Here is a photo of the bit:

. --DCLM ☎ 12:14, March 17, 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I think it's more likely that the "Fla-" visible in the first line here is the beginning of Brendan's surname. It seems unusual that a local-interest article would include the subject's middle name rather than simply his first and last. There are some very common Irish surnames beginning with "Fla-", such as Flaherty, Flannery, and Flanagan, but very few first/middle names - "Flannan" is extremely rare, and "Flannery" is a woman's name. I think it's safe to say that the character's full name is Brendan Flaherty, Brendan Flannery, or Brendan Flanagan (though, of course, we have no way of knowing for sure), and that Patrick and Meg share whichever surname it is.

"Bildbriain" is not an Irish name, but seems to be an odd mixture of Irish and German. In fact, it's not any kind of name at all - all references to "Bildbriain" returned by a Google search are extremely recent, and seem to originate with this very wiki article. There is no official source using the name "Bildbriain". Moreover, we can deduce that the word below "Brendan Fla-" is definitely not the character's surname: for one thing, it's right-aligned, which means that there are at least a couple of words between the "Fla-" surname and the word. This can be seem more clearly a moment before the screenshot above was taken, though unfortunately it's too blurry to make out the words themselves. If you look closely, you can also see that the word in question is nine letters long - not ten, like "Bildbriain". I think the "B"-like letter at the beginning is actually a "K", and that the word is "Kilbriain" - which is not only correct Irish, but a real location near Dungarvan in rural County Waterford, Ireland. It seems pretty certain to me that this is where the Matrix sequences are set. Although they were shot in Wales, a quick look at footage from Kilbrien demonstrates a pretty credible resemblance to the location used. The real Kilbriain is also only a few miles away from the Waterford coast, whose cliffs are a credible match for the sequence where Brendan dies. The place name is more usually spelled "Kilbrien" or "Kilbryan", but this sort of spelling variation is very common in Ireland, where native names were forcibly anglicised by the British occupiers, generally inexpertly and with uneven success.

In summary, I'm pretty certain that the newspaper actually begins something like "Officer Brendan Flannery, of Kilbriain, Waterford, suffered a fall..."

I'm not sure how much of this can be stated with certainty in the article, but I think it should at least be mentioned (maybe in a "Behind the scenes" section?) that Brendan's second name (we don't know whether it's a middle name or a surname, granted) begins with the letters "Fla-", and that the newspaper article on his fall mentions Kilbriain, which is a real place in Waterford. Gowlbag ☎ 09:16, March 18, 2020 (UTC)