Geoffrey Tolwyn
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Admiral Sir Geoffrey Tolwyn, Bt. is a fictional military officer in the universe of Wing Commander. Frequently he is a direct or nearly direct superior of the viewpoint character, Christopher Blair (and somewhat adversarial as well).
Admiral Tolwyn first appears in Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi. In the full motion video cut scenes beginning in Wing Commander III, Tolwyn is portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, who also voices him in the animated series Wing Commander Academy. In the 1999 Wing Commander movie, Tolwyn is portrayed by David Warner, as McDowell was unavailable.
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Youth and Young Adulthood
Admiral Tolwyn is a relatively young man, forty-three years old as of the beginning of Wing Commander 1. The only son of a British baronet, Admiral Tolwyn grew up from a very young age as part of the last remaining vestige of nobility in the world. He was born in 2612, during an era of relative peace. He attended the Confederation Navy Academy and graduated during a time when many in the Confederation were questioning the very necessity of the armed forces and when Confederation senators were looking to bolster their votes by cutting "wasteful" military programs; all during the slow, steady build of tensions between the Confederation and the Kilrathi Empire. Tolwyn was assigned as a special operations officer straight out of the Academy after a run-in with a Senator over a controversial bill to close the Academy in which Tolwyn brought up ugly personal motives for the senator's blockage of a new starfighter program to replace the aging "Wildcat" medium fighter.
It is stated several times in the novels that Tolwyn is a widower, with two sons who were lost in the course of the war. The name of his wife is still in dispute; End Run gives her name as Elizabeth, while in Fleet Action the same author calls her Clara. To complicate matters further, in Action Stations his fiancee's name is given as Rebecca. However, it is stated in End Run that he met his future wife at a party at the Academy, whereas in Action Stations his engagement was one arranged by his family, so it's possible that that arranged engagement was broken off at some point, paving the way for Elizabeth/Clara. The fact that she met him at the Academy raises the possibility that she may have been a Navy officer as well.
Beginning of the Kilrathi War
During the Battle of McAuliffe, Ensign Geoffrey Tolwyn was a fighter pilot in the cockpit of a Wildcat, with barely five hundred flying hours under his belt. He managed to survive both of his sorties, including a battle against the then-Crown Prince of Kilrah (who committed ritual suicide because of his shame at being defeated by a "mere human"). After that battle, Tolwyn was promoted to Lieutenant and given command of a frigate.
Rise to Flag Rank
From 2639 to 2654, Tolwyn rose, rocket-like, to prominence in the Confederation Navy, rising from Lt. J.G. to Commodore in the 15 years. His driven nature was as much a hindrance as a blessing, however, and he developed as many enemies in the Admiralty as friends; some of whom blocked his ascension to Rear Admiral for a number of years. Finally his chance to prove himself as a force commander came on the Tiger's Claw's cadet cruise of 2653-4, where he commanded the carrier and its battlegroup (and its load of student-pilots) through a number of harrowing engagements with the Kilrathi. After the completion of this task, Tolwyn was promoted to Rear Admiral and command of 14th Fleet.
On the Concordia
In 2661, Tolwyn's flagship, TCS Concordia, a Confederation-Class Dreadnought, was commissioned. Now with a ship, Tolwyn's command was shunted to 3rd Fleet and to the front lines of the war. With his flag in Concordia, Tolwyn spent the next decade plus on the spearhead of the Confederation's war efforts, battling in multiple theatres of the war, in both Vega and Enigma Sectors. In 2664, Tolwyn was reunited with Christopher Blair - this time under much more adversarial circumstances - and they fought together, albeit grudgingly, during the most dangerous campaigns of the war. Tolwyn commanded the fleet during the Battle of Earth, and won the battle which was mankind's most perilous hour. However, the fleet he inherited after the battle was worn and dangerously thinned, and Tolwyn was reduced to sending decades-old light carriers to battle the Kilrathi in engagements that before would have required full fleet carriers. Towlyn was transferred off the Concordia shortly after the battle of Earth to head the Terran Confederation Navy's Weapons Development Program at Jupiter Station. While he was away, the Concordia was fighting a rearguard action in the Vespus system when it took torpedo hits to its engines, causing it to fall out of orbit. The Concordia crashed into the massive ocean of Vespus, taking almost all her crew with her. Colonel Christopher Blair located the wreck and reported to Tolwyn that is was a 'total loss'.
War's End
In 2669, the Behemoth project was tested. Its major weapon, a superconducting particle beam cannon, was perfect and destroyed the target planet (Loki VI). However, a Kilrathi spy in the fleet leaked the weak points in Behemoth's defenses to the enemy, and a massive bomber strike on the weapon destroyed it, and Tolwyn's hopes. Fortunately, General James "Paladin" Taggert's Temblor Bomb program was there to pick up the slack and save the war for humanity. As a result, Paladin was elected to the Confederation senate after the war.
Peacetime Tolwyn, the SRA and the Black Lance Conspiracy
After the end of the Kilrathi War in 2669, Admiral Tolwyn, burning with humiliation from Behemoth's destruction, was assigned to command of the Strategic Readiness Agency and promptly converted the agency into his personal fief. He was brought into the Agency's two-decade-old Black Lance project and found that he had a personal skill for malappropriating funding from other projects to fulfill the Black Lance's agenda. Tolwyn's fanatical personality had found his ultimate fulfillment: the "perfection" of humanity into a fighting force unparallelled in the galaxy. By 2674, the biogenic plague intended to destroy the unworthy was prepared and test runs were made against planets in the Border Worlds, but before the plan could fully unfold (which included war with the Border Worlds), Colonel Christopher Blair - operating with Border Worlds forces - uncovered Tolwyn's plot and revealed it to the Senate in an impromptu but impassioned speech. Tolwyn was arrested and arraigned on charges relating to crimes against humanity.
After being found guilty on all charges stemming from the Black Lance conspiracy, convicted and stripped of rank, Geoffrey Tolwyn committed suicide in his prison cell on the eve of his execution in 2674, believing he had failed humanity. (It has been suggested by some that he allowed himself to be revealed, and thus court-martialed, in order to bring the conspiracy down, an act with is rather more in keeping with Tolwyn as depicted in the novels.)
Summary
Geoffrey Tolwyn considered himself a warrior through and through. Although his passion was for the defense of humanity, in its execution he found his downfall and eventual doom, as wartime losses took their toll on him and stripped away more and more of his sanity; the loss of his wife and children no doubt played a role in driving him over the brink. After the war, the loss of his purpose for living drove him mad and he sought to create new conflicts which would make him useful again. Defeated and cast down at the end, he committed suicide at the age of sixty-two, a broken man. Like Benedict Arnold, Geoffrey Tolwyn is destined to be remembered not for his brilliant actions in defense of freedom, but for his eventual betrayal of his people.