Gary West

Gary West is a fictional realtor & murder victim and a minor character on the Netflix Studios original series Santa Clarita Diet. Played by actor Nathan Fillion, he made a single appearance as a living character in the pilot episode of the series, "So Then a Bat or a Monkey".

Biography
Gary West was a realtor who originally hailed from Sacramento, California. He relocated to Santa Clarita, where he joined Coby Real Estate as Carl Coby's newest hot-shot realtor. He met a co-worker named Sheila Hammond, whom he instantly became enamored with.

Sheila had a very distressing situation, in which her husband, Joel and she were showing a house when she suddenly began violently projectile vomiting in front of the prospective buyers. The customers had Sheila removed from the listing, and Gary swooped in take up the slack. He went to the Hammonds' home with a bouquet of get-well flowers for Sheila and feigned concern over her predicament. Taking a moment to speak privately to Joel, he told her that Sheila had been removed from the listing. The two argued over the exact volume of vomit that Sheila released at the house. That evening, Gary found Sheila and some of her friends at a club dancing. Gary took the opportunity to put the moves on her, and the two began flirting with each other. Joel came into the club to discuss a serious subject matter with Sheila. When things seemed to get heated, Gary intervened, acting as if Joel was the unwelcome party. The two likely would have come to blows, but Joel was not a violent man, and Gary was clearly a more physically imposing specimen.

Sheila did not return home that night, leaving Joel to fear that she might have slept with Gary. The two did in fact stay out all night, but they did not have sex. Gary arrived at Sheila's house early the following morning. He became very aggressive in his feelings for her, pressing his body against hers in a dominating fashion. He told her that unless she agreed "have some fun" with him, he would tell Joel that they were having an affair. Sheila played along and began licking at Gary's fingers. What Gary would realize all too quickly, was that Sheila's recent condition was a side effect of becoming a zombie. Her licking turned to biting, and she bit off two of Gary's fingers. Gary screamed in pain, exclaiming that she ate his fingers, which Sheila mis-heard as "You hate my fingers", for which she corrected him. With her newfound appetite for human flesh overpowering her, she attacked Gary fully, tearing open his abdomen and eating his intestines. Joel came home to find a blood-soaked Sheila devouring the dead Gary West. Joel and Sheila had to dispose of Gary's remains. They scooped up what was left of him and dumped it into a transparent plastic bin with no lid. They hauled it out into the desert where Joel began digging a hole. They tried sliding the bin towards the hole, but it tipped over, emptying its contents. Just then, Sheila and Joel's teenage daughter, Abby, pulled up along with next door neighbor Eric Bemis. Joel and Sheila had to reveal the truth of her nature to the teens, after which, they finished pushing Gary's remains into the hole and covering it. They decided to bury the bin with him as well, rather than taking it home, washing it out and using it to store tax returns.

Joel then took to covering up all evidence of Gary's presence at their house. He sprayed the lawn with a special chemical solution to bleach out the blood stains. Unfortunately, he missed a severed finger, which was later discovered by their nosy next-door neighbor Dan Palmer, who happened to be a sheriff. He took prints of the finger and was able to identify it as belonging to Gary West. Realizing that West was dead, Palmer used this information to blackmail Joel into committing unlawful deeds for him. This ended when Joel ended up killing Dan with a shovel.

Notes & Trivia



 * Gary West has the distinction of being Sheila Hammond's very first murder victim.


 * Gary West's severed finger made an appearance in episode 1x05, "Man Eat Man".


 * Sheila Hammond confessed to Joel that she ate Gary West's balls, which she admitted were small, but she may have been saying this just to make Joel feel better.


 * It has been quite a while since actor Nathan Fillion played an antagonist on a TV series. The last time he did so was as the loopy preacher, Caleb, on episodes from season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.


 * With season three, there was some re-casting for Gary's head. Actor Nathan Fillion was busy with his new series The Rookie, so the SCD staff decided to let Gary's head rot a bit so as to move away from Fillion's visage. Alan Tudyk was brought in to provide the voice.

Appearances
Season One
 * 1) Santa Clarita Diet: So Then a Bat or a Monkey
 * 2) Santa Clarita Diet: We Can't Kill People!
 * 3) Santa Clarita Diet: Man Eat Man