Last time, the Inquiry severed themselves from EROS, but Willis wanted to stick around for one last chat.

For some reason he’s only meeting with these two even though he said he wanted to talk to everyone. I’m not sure what the purpose of this subterfuge is. Anyway, Kara is not impressed with his excuses.

Kara: “But, all these new projects… Surfaces… artificial life… it’s just too much.”
Willis: “Yes, and that is why you were not informed. To keep your mind clear for what mattered to you.”
Kara: “No, I mean that it’s too much you were keeping to yourself. Who knows what else there may be?”

Yes excellent. Is it too much to hope the developer realized Tezkhra’s smarm in the last game’s ending was kind of messed up? This is just such a pointed rejection of that “you can’t handle the truth” elitism. She continues:

Kara: “Since the Shine, we have lived in a world of nothing but mysteries. We should solve them, not make more.”
Willis: “But that is the purpose of science. When every mystery is solved, science will cease to exist.”

I think this might be my favorite line in the game.

I Miss the Sunrise depicts a world where all problems are solved. People are immortal: they do not experience aging or illness or starvation. Medicine has advanced so far that they do not even need to fear accidents and bodily harm, for the most part. Mechanical engineering has become so perfect that people prefer designing environments completely from scratch rather than living on planets, because they can control everything so perfectly. Even the one project we see that tried to address their sole remaining physiological limitation was met with a “big deal, who cares?” Transportation and communication technology seem to have hit an upper limit too, or at least a stage of diminishing returns – logistics never seem to be an issue. Even the grand mysteries of the universe seem largely answered; all that remains is niche trivia of interest only to a select few. This is a post-scarcity society; every mystery is solved, and people want for nothing.

Where do you go from there?

In the modern day, science and engineering are invaluable because they create clear and tangible changes to society, often positive. Many, myself included, would argue there is intrinsic value even in basic research, as it enhances our understanding of the world in which we live, freeing us from superstition and uncertainty. But that is no longer the case. This society has hit a ceiling, and its constituents have nowhere to go anymore. Science has no purpose.

Typelog, and pre-Shine society at large, provides one solution to this ennui: embrace it, kill your emotions, and stop caring about anything. But EROS displays a much more interesting option: crack under the strain. All science fiction (perhaps excluding fantasy masquerading as science fiction) explores, in some capacity, the way technology influences society and how society might change in the future as the result of observed trends. Far future science fiction is the most extreme form of this, often showing a society that has changed beyond recognition. But something that’s easy to forget is that science, and the way we approach science, is a part of society too – so it only makes sense that with strange eons even science itself may be twisted beyond our comprehension. In a truly bold and subversive move, that is what we see here: the very basis of the genre the story rests upon is torn apart and manipulated. Science is no longer a logical process and a tool for enlightenment, but a shallow prop for posturing, competition, and personal gain. All they can do is run on inertia: keep solving mysteries, and when you run out, make your own mysteries to solve. Dig ditches and fill them in just to keep yourself and others busy – because why not, nothing matters anymore! But of course, that leaves their society incapable of mustering the proper response to a true catastrophe like the Shine, because they’ve forgotten the original purpose and methods of science, leaving them unable to think beyond their own egos.

It’s all there! Scope, humanity, the influence of technology, transcendence and regression – for one shining moment, all the game’s themes align perfectly. In this moment you realize what a sick, broken perversion of science EROS is – and also exactly how they got there, how we can fall to those depths too if we do not uphold the integrity and ideals of true science.

How much of this is intended and how much of this is me seeing things that aren’t there? Truthfully, I don’t know. But I still love it.

Kara, sadly, does not call Willis out on his insanity as firmly as I would like, merely dismissing his methods as unethical and ineffective. She fires a parting shot – “I’m joining the Inquiry crew permanently. You question the universe your way, and I’ll do it my way.” – and leaves Tezkhra alone with the doctor, freeing them up for the next topic of conversation. Unsurprisingly, there is another step of the PLSE project Tez didn’t hear about.

Willis: “It is a product of the encephalo-augmentation progress we’ve made. We are calling it the Watcher Project.”

Yep, it’s time to learn the reasoning behind the entire plot of the last game. Willis thinks that having his own researchers monitor the PLSEs is dreadfully boring, so instead he’s going to have the subjects themselves be his observers. Tez asks why he can’t use a computer, and Willis gives an excuse you’re going to be very familiar with by the end of this LP, that machinery breaks down but emitters are magic and make living things last forever. Am I the only one who realizes that emitters are machines? You can’t say you’re going to solve the problem of machines degrading just by using another machine. Or are emitters so magic that they never break down too? There’s also the fact that he just said the watchers are cyborgs, and the one flimsy attempt the story has made to justify the cyborg hate is that cyborgs need maintenance like other tech. Maybe we can assume that the watchers’ weird behavior in The Reconstruction is their brain augments breaking down and driving them crazy because EROS was too lazy to fix their machines.

Willis: “In addition, we still have not found a way to quantify emotion in decision-making, to form data. Using living candidates will have a subtle but important effect on gathering the results of each environment.”

I should hope that you don’t have to be a scientist to know that this is terrible science. The entire point of experiments like these is to ISOLATE variables, not make more. If you just throw every possible idea you have into the pot, you’re just going to end up with a tangled mess where you can’t separate cause and effect. It is particularly idiotic to make your method of observation and detection an experiment as well; if you have no idea how that works, how can you trust any of the data you get for the main experiment? This is not how you science!

However, I’m willing to forgive this on the basis of my theory that EROS is supposed to be terrible science. It’s really amazing how, when you allow characters to be flawed, it becomes much easier to accept them making stupid mistakes. This is totally in-character for someone clinging to the idea of science but who no longer knows what it means: Sure, pollute the experiment with crazy off-the-wall ideas! Design a completely nonsensical detection method at the last minute just because we can! Getting meaningful comprehensible data out of this doesn’t actually matter, because nothing matters! FOR SCIENCE!!1!

I refuse to believe we are supposed to take this at face value. This is just too absurd, too evil, too nonsensical. Surely even the most liberal artsy of people can see this is the face of madness. And now, after one and a half games, it’s finally time to learn the method to that madness:

Willis: “Imagine dozens of generations being exposed to this energy. The changes it would cause to an organic body.”

Okay sorry turns out I need to stop him two sentences in. Why does he even assume it would cause meaningful changes to an organic body? Because you know what other energy causes changes to an organic body? Radiation, but I don’t think those “changes” would be particularly helpful to Dr. Crazypants here, especially since he’s trying to compound it over generations. And the only changes electrical and thermal energy cause are slowly-evolved resistance in low doses and destruction in high doses. Willis is suffering from Author Clairvoyance here, where the author knows what the correct line of thinking is so the characters automatically jump on that track even though there’s no reason for them to. This would make a lot more sense if he had already done small-scale experiments with latent energy (possibly on the colonists) that implied beneficial changes.

“A population is left on a PLSE world with minimal knowledge inputs… basic culture, language, survival…”

And I presume this is meant to justify why Tez can understand the human language in The Reconstruction. I still find it pretty flimsy, since that civilization was around for thousands of years and language can mutate into unrecognizability in a fraction of that time. It also raises the plot hole of why there are so many languages and why they’re all so different when all the inhabitants were presumably given the same one to start with. (And it now occurs to me that Tez probably couldn’t understand anything other than spoken Human, which amuses me greatly. There should totally been a scene of someone trying to shove a sign or book at Tez resulting in him desperately trying to hide the fact it looks like moon runes to him.)

“We feed specific parameters to look out for, and the Watchers process all that observational data at one time. In fact, using past and present observational data, we can even make a future projection based on trends!”

I presume this is meant to explain Donz’ clairvoyance – he’s just a really good guesser. I can accept that, that feels like it should be within the realm of brain augmentation.

“When they find a potentially affected candidate, they signal us and we verify it for ourselves.”

This, however, doesn’t jive at all with how the watchers behave. When their candidates arrived, they didn’t seem to do anything to signal the researchers, and in fact acted like the researchers would be automatically alerted or come on their own. Tezkhra does confirm in the ending that activating the killswitch sends out a signal to make the researchers repopulate the planet (even though the whole point of this is supposedly that they hate maintaining the thing themselves, so that’s another plot hole), but doesn’t say anything about how to alert them to a success state. Is the killswitch their only way to communicate? That seems unbelievably stupid and wasteful, even for EROS.

This also fails to explain the purpose of Fell’s trials. It seems pretty obvious that all Willis is looking for is some reaction to the latent energy, and that describes virtually every person on the planet. What kind of absurdly specific criteria did he tell the watchers to look for that necessitated their bizarre tests? I still don’t see what the tests were supposed to accomplish or what they even had to do with the supposed goal.

Tezkhra: “And what happens when the Surface inhabitants realize their world is artificial? Just like Colony 503b.”

Alright, it’s time for the moment of truth. Is Tez still evil?

Willis: “You are a pragmatist, so I shall keep this between you and I. The inhabitants will only have a certain amount of time to exhibit traits of latent energy exposure. It’s possible that they will make their own technological leaps forward, as our friends in 503b did. We cannot risk exposure of ourselves, or allow them to achieve spaceflight. They must remain pure. So when time runs out, we start over. New input parameters. Slight changes, depending on the Surface.”

Tez has no reaction to any of this. So… yes. Incidentally, I seem to remember him being very troubled by evidence of technological progress long before he entered the watchpost and supposedly got his memories restored, so methinks he did protest too much about his amnesia last game. (Also also, I can’t believe this slipped my mind back then but wow was it ridiculous to have the protagonists go on a world tour during the one plot arc where they’re actually supposed to be on a time limit. IF WE CANNOT STOP THE BARBARIAN HORDES BEFORE THE BREAK OF DAWN ALL IS LOST but you totally have time to sail all the way around the world and back, no biggie.)

What particularly baffles me about this is that, like the watcher program itself, this isn’t even logical. Why does it matter whether or not the subjects know the truth? This isn’t a psychological experiment, it won’t contaminate the results at all! Why would spaceflight and knowledge of the researchers automatically lead to a rebellion? The only thing that would make them angry is this pointless cruelty in the first place! It even endangers the experiment itself – what if the changes take a very long time to manifest, longer than the timespan allotted for each cycle? The entire experiment would fail simply because Dr. Crazypants was too paranoid to give it enough time to work. And, heck, they probably could have used the genetically diverse donors as voluntary subjects to begin with, unless they think emitter radiation would interfere with it. (Which, in fairness, it might, if it stalls growth.) This has nothing to do with science and everything to do with Willis’ megalomania.

So surely, the character whose defining trait so far has been an unflinching dedication to logic and reason would call him out on how absurd this is, right? Haha no why have characters be ideologically consistent when they can be stupid and evil. Tezkhra’s meek acceptance ruins him as a character – he may have been shallow before, but now we cannot even depend on his main personality trait. This scene tells us that his character will bend to the whim of the plot when it’s convenient.

And of course, the fact that this illogical plan is also completely evil also ruins any chance he has at audience sympathy. Seriously, what the heck is going on here? Does the developer honestly expect us to come away from this still thinking Tez is an okay guy? Willis seems so obviously painted as evil, but Tez is still portrayed as a heroic friend of the crew despite supporting all of his evil plans. Is this supposed to be a fair-and-balanced thing where neither side is totally right or some garbage like that? HE’S MURDERING BILLIONS OF PEOPLE FOR NO REASON. HOW IS THAT IN ANY WAY JUSTIFIABLE. Gah!

The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that the developer wrote himself into a corner – Willis has to betray Sorenson’s ideals and therefore has to be evil, but as our EROS representative he also has to be responsible for the PLSE project, and it’s set in stone that Tez has to be on board with that project. Therefore Tez has to be swapped out for a clone with no personality during this scene so he can go along with Dr. Crazypants. But I still think there are a multitude of better ways the game could have handled it – like not telling Tez about the evil killswitch plan, for one.

The morality of these games is just so baffling.

Anyway. Willis offers to show Tez one of the watchers and brings out Fell.

Huh, she looks a lot younger than she does in The Reconstruction. Confirmation that emitters break down?

Tezkhra: “I… ahh… I am Tezkhra. I will be… contributing… life to your, ah, world.”
Watcher: “Are you… as a god too?”

And then they take her back, so that’s the full extent of her interactions with Tez. You may recall that she spoke as if she knew him well in The Reconstruction, and also said that he had a much more active role in designing the parameters of the experiment than we see here. Yay retcons! I think this might be a symptom of the role reversal: In The Reconstruction, the watchers were the knowledgeable and mysterious information dispensers, so it makes sense that they would know things about Tez, to keep the mystery building. If Tez showed up and they were just like “uh the name sounds familiar but idk” that would have been incredibly jarring and completely stalled his subplot. Here, however, we are the mysterious outsiders, and the watchers need to be firmly established as ignorant chumps thanks to Dr. Crazypants’ crazy designs. Once again, I still think there are better ways to handle this that could have been more consistent, like actually giving Tez an active role in the design that would allow him to have a lengthier conversation with Fell. However, The Reconstruction was terrible, so I don’t mind sacrificing bits of it to expedite IMTS’ plot.

But… that’s it. Willis bids Tez farewell and we transition to the next scene. Despite the fact that he has done nothing but whine about seeing his babies this entire section, he never brings it up now and Willis only lets him see a completely different subject. So… what was the point of all the whining? Did the developer just forget about it? It’s incredibly bizarre to have that thread go nowhere. Maybe if he saw a shra we could get a better understanding of his behavior in The Reconstruction, but no.

We cut to the rest of the crew, who have been stood up by Willis. They’re discussing the fallout from the last mission; Typelog apparently recorded and released everything, and for some reason spun a story that they were attacking civilians even though that was obviously one of EROS’ weird experiments and not a normal home. So what, did Willis lie about that too and actually had them attack ordinary people for kicks?

You can see the details in this article afterward. I honestly don’t understand why Typelog slandered them like this; if they were listening in, they knew that the Inquriy was disgusted with EROS and planned to quit immediately after, so all this does is antagonize a neutral superpower without doing much to hurt their real opponent. They could have blown the lid open on EROS if they’ve managed to bypass their secrecy, but instead they focus on taking potshots at an attack dog that’s already slipped its leash? What’s the point of that? If anything they should want to curry the Inquiry’s favor since they parted on much more favorable terms than EROS, but now that’s going to be off the table. This just seems like a really contrived way to make Typelog look evil, probably because the game wants to try really hard to convince us they’re exactly as evil as EROS next episode.

This does, however, make sense for Typelog to do in the version of reality where I kill the colonists, because that’s horrifying and marks the Inquiry as extremely dangerous. It’d make sense for them to want nothing to do with the Inquiry after that, and warning other people of what happened would be morally right. I get the impression here that killing the colonists was assumed as the default branch, and now the plot has to be twisted into pretzels to get in back on track.

Daszk: “S’not fair. We was just doin’ what we’re told. I’ve always followed orders. but now it’s a bad thing?”
Ros: “It’s like Jameson said. They could have done damage to the other colonies. But we didn’t kill anyone.”
Rami: “What d’you guys think will happen to us now? We’re the bad guys.”

Further evidence for this is that everyone sounds incredibly serious and morose (the sad music plays and everything), even though nothing bad actually happened. They should be happy! They stuck to their principles and averted a massacre! But they still have to wring their hands about if what they did was the right thing because that’s what they do in the kill branch, only now it looks morally bankrupt because the only bad thing that happened affected them personally. This comes off as them caring less about what actually happened and more about how it made them look, especially since Willis is still at large and is probably going to carry out more crimes against humanity. I think this choice should have had more significant consequences by avoiding the whole slander plot if you spare the colonists – the crew could still be worried about how they were played for fools and what Willis might do next, but it wouldn’t look so self-motivated.

Mahk also has a crisis of faith over the fact that this was carried out with Sikohlon weapons. Marie just snarks that well gee you’re a weapon crafter what did you expect, but Mahk reveals that apparently their principle was to use weapons for deterrence rather than actual destruction. That actually is reasonable in a world where combat is so cushy and ships always retreat before they can be fatally damaged, I will admit. This does work as a part of the culture shock of transitioning to a more brutal, post-Shine reality.

Mahk: “To turn a weapon against a civilian home? They did not understand what they were doing. It was wrong.”

Uh, what? Was he not listening to their dramatic spiel? They knew exactly what they were doing. True, they probably didn’t know the full consequences of what they were doing, but they knew the researchers were evil, they knew they were causing chaos, and they knew they wanted to rebel. The reason Willis’ suppression was evil wasn’t because these were poor ignorant babies, it was because they knew exactly what they were doing and what they were doing was right. Combined with what we saw in the last game, I think the developer’s biases are showing: We’ve finally evolved past “doing things at all is evil”, but knowingly doing things for a cause is still wrong. If you do things, the only path to innocence is ignorance. If the colonists affirmed that they were fully aware of their actions and still refused to repent, I wonder if Mahk would have a different opinion? Stay in your boxes, little plebians. Rising above your station will not be tolerated.

They decide Willis is never showing up so they should leave – but suddenly, the Lesser in the cage behind them starts sparking and flashing before transforming into…

Yep, turns out he’s a magic energy space ghost who can transfer his soul between host bodies and that’s why dying never seems to faze him. Hard sci-fi, everyone!

Well okay, that’s not entirely fair. We know from The Reconstruction that magic does exist, as do spirits in some form. But I still don’t think this was handled well. You can now see that everything about this subplot has been a red herring. The game has spent a ridiculous amount of time obsessing over Tezkhra’s Typelog records, implying that if only he had access to more memories he’d be able to unravel the mystery – but now that we know bodyhopping and multiple lives are in play, it’s likely that this conflict transcends Typelog’s records, and may even have started in one of Tezkhra’s past lives. That line of questioning was pointless from the beginning. Similarly, the ambiguity of his death in the comm station was pointless and, I think, underhanded – we now know that he did die there and just grabbed a new body in episode 2, so the whole ~oh but you never saw the body so is he really dead~ dance is a waste of time. No, confirm he died so his reappearance in episode 2 actually gives us new information, darn it. (Incidentally, this still doesn’t explain why they couldn’t find the body afterward, so that’s a plot hole.)

It’s poor form to only ever imply mundane solutions to a supernatural mystery. And, while I’m not very familiar with mysteries, I also believe it’s important to narrow down potential avenues of investigation, which doesn’t happen here. If the characters brought up mundane solutions like scouring the Typelog banks which immediately dead-ended, that would tell us that we should be looking in a different direction, which would actually be helpful. If you just throw a ton of potential explanations at the audience, you’re only doing half the work – without clues as to which lead is worth examining, the audience is very justified in being frustrated when you suddenly reveal one of the dozen options was the right one. Ideally, red herrings should help you know if you’re on the right track and lead you down the right way of thinking even if they aren’t answers themselves; just using them to waste the audience’s time is bad writing.

…And of course, that’s actually besides the point because the game never gave us the right avenue to explore in the first place. If we were told about some magical off-the-wall theory for Blacky’s abilities, maybe by some EROS scientists, at least the correct option would be on the table and it would be possible for people to guess right. But instead the game only ever gives us red herrings.

So, I admit that calling for people to post their theories last update was not entirely in good faith. I didn’t expect anyone to even come close to right; I mainly wanted to confirm that the reveal was as unfair as I thought it was. The one person who posted hypothesized Blacky was either a time traveler or a clone of Tezkhra, which I think demonstrates my point exactly: Those are both reasonable theories that operate under the assumption this is a sci-fi story, even if it may be a soft one. But the real answer is so far outside the box that you simply can’t guess right if you’re thinking in those terms.

In other news, huh, that black orb appeared with the transformation. Is that his true form or phylactery or whatever? I wonder if Tez has a blue one. “Stand clear” is also one of Tezkhra’s favorite phrases, which makes me think the story is intentionally drawing a connection between them. Mysteries, mysteries.

Blacky punches the plasmatic bars and…

Yeah, that definitely looks like shattering, but it didn’t seem to release any plasma or electricity. What are these things made of?

Blacky advances ominously and everyone flips out, but Ros is able to deduce that he won’t hurt anyone, based on their previous duel. He confirms that he only cares about killing Tez. Marie takes the lull in hostilities to ask what the heck is going on with him, and he confirms the bodyhopping more explicitly: “When the last one died, I found another. That is how it works.” The characters have remarkably subdued reactions to this revelation, merely sighing at the fact they’ll never be able to kill him. Come on, you’ve just witnessed a magical transformation and possibly even a completely new type of lifeform that has perfect immortality! Why does no one care about that?! Are EROS the only people with any scientific curiosity? Terrible protagonists are terrible. Blacky also says “These tiny brains can only hold so much. They must be discarded frequently,” which I guess is how he deals with the memory storage problem, and also explains why he was trying to kill himself back at the lab.

He then decides this is a good time to reference my Important Choice™.

The Black One: “You. You took pity on me. You wanted me for something. But now is not the time. Let me go.”

Well that was incoherent. So he thinks I saved him both because I pitied him and because I had an ulterior motive? What the heck? This would make more sense if the sentences were connected with something like “Either that, or…”

(I also remember from a previous playthrough that this flows much better if you don’t try to rescue him – he says something like “See, you clearly understand that I have to discard these bodies because you didn’t interfere back there.” Why is the developer using the evil options as the default script???)

Ros says they won’t let him hurt Tez, but he reaffirms that he doesn’t care about that anymore.

The Black One: “The Blue One is no longer of concern. I failed to defeat him. Time is short now. It will all happen sooner than was expected. There is nothing that can be done now. Either it must be stopped, or he must be returned. Either way, I must leave. Unless he realizes his place, all will be lost. He has disturbed… many things already.”

This kind of writing is infuriating. Yes, ramble more at length about how there’s no time to tell me anything, and make sure to spend your precious time using vague pronouns instead of actual details! It also just doesn’t make sense – he’s oscillating between saying there’s nothing that can be done and that he needs to leave to get started on a contingency plan. So… which is it? Is the situation hopeless or not?

Rami does call him out on his vagueness and demands more concrete answers, but Blacky suddenly clams up and says he doesn’t remember the details. Apparently, his bodyhopping is imperfect and he loses some core memories with every jump. I call bullcrap on that – he clearly knew enough to give that rather lengthy spiel, Rami just wants him to translate the jargon. I’m going to assume he’s sick of talking and is just making up an excuse to leave.

The crew idiotically lets him go instead of pressing for details. Even more idiotically, they agree afterward to keep Tez in the dark about this just because Blacky said he wasn’t headhunting anymore. Does it not occur to them that he could be lying?

Daszk: “He smelled… funny. A little like… burnin’ wires. Up close anyways.”

Daszk also says this, though I don’t understand its significance. So… what, is he actually a robot? Is there a mundane explanation for this after all? I’m confused. This never comes up again, so I presume it’s yet another PLAY THE SEQUEL!!!!! hook.

Everyone returns to the Inquiry, and I get to talk to some people before the episode ends. Most people have updated chatter.

Here are probably the most important ones. Sorenson is visibly shaken by events, Mahk continues his obligatory character development, and Kara continues her non-obligatory character development by dropping her aloof facade. Though I am rather disturbed that she seems to care more about Willis keeping secrets than the fact that those secrets were crimes against humanity.

We also learn that Deirdre is on board the Dr. Crazypants train. Sigh. I wonder if she’d feel differently if she knew Purity Point was the result of an EROS experiment?

Meanwhile, Tez cares more about his babies than the fact they’re all going to die horribly because he’s a terrible person. This is yet another thing that would work better if the biogenesis was what actually broke his suppression.

And interestingly, his personality changes: two additional points of imagination and aggression. Presumably this is meant to represent his suppression breaking, but that raises the question of why it only happens now and not before the previous mission. This is my main point of evidence for suppression being a binary state: if it was supposed to be something that could wear off gradually, he should have been getting minor changes all throughout the game, not all at once here.

But enough of that, it’s time for the tank again. Ros’ internal narration has finally stopped speculating they’re going to kill her in her sleep.

So once again we have the outsider being disturbed by the tanks. What is up with this? Nothing ever comes of it and Ros never seems to care. Was there some sinister reveal about the tanks that got dropped?

Sorenson is snappish but manages to get across that he’s been glad to have Ros as a commander. Typelog has officially declared war on EROS, so all the Inquiry can do now is hide from the crossfire. Sorenson doesn’t plan on fighting, so Ros has to get sequestered for now. Sorenson sticks around for a monologue again, but it’s a bit different than normal.

“They don’t understand. They’re not listening. They’re not listening. It will never get better at this rate. Nothing’s going the way I thought. Some of us are moving too fast… some too slow…”
[pause]
“Jameson… was right. If they will not listen to reason, to logic…”

Ooh, that’s a new sprite! I didn’t notice that detail before. That’s a nice touch; originally I thought he was just angry and snapping, but this shows he doesn’t want to have to do this.

So for once we’re getting a really effective cliffhanger. No more new factions, no more vagueness, no more ambiguity: we know that catastrophe is on the horizon, and mission control is breaking down at the reality of the situation. However, I can’t help but feel that Sorenson is a little whiny here. He acts like he’s been making an active effort for peace this whole time, but… what has he done, really? He fumes that “they’re not listening”, but he’s never asserted his own views or even engaged in meaningful dialogue with any of his superiors before this. He’s mindlessly obeyed every order and mission, never asking for any details or stopping to wonder if this organization’s goals actually align with his own. He’s done nothing but play lapdog to Typelog and EROS. If we got to participate in some of his own projects in-between the other missions and saw what he was using all the oh-so-important funding for, we’d have a better idea of his own goals and the tangible good he was doing. Or if he had pushed back against his supervisors and done investigation on his own – the crew does that on their own in this episode, but he just gets pissy about them disobeying orders. Right now this comes across as a spineless chump getting taken advantage of one too many times and finally snapping; while that can work as a character arc, I really don’t think it’s how this is meant to be read. If Sorenson is to be a major player in the plot, he needs to be established as a force in his own right, capable of bringing his own ideas to the table and engaging with the superpowers as an equal, not an emotionless drone who did nothing but convey their orders. As a bonus, that would make the plot much more complex and interesting, if he was giving orders that conflicted with the other organizations’.

But overall… wow, the game just got good. Suddenly plot! Suddenly difficulty! Suddenly sidequests! It’s like all my Christmases have come at once. For once the background organization is actually interesting in its own right and engages really well with the themes; EROS is basically everything I wanted from Fortifel back in the first game. We got advancement on virtually every plot thread, and things are finally promising to heat up! I haven’t covered episode 4 yet, but I think this may end up being my favorite episode. My only objection is that, like “The Encounter”, this shouldn’t have been exceptional. We get so many shocking twists in so little time that they don’t have much room to breathe, and too many of them feel like things we should have gotten earlier. The imploded lab, for instance, could have easily been placed in episode 2 – that would have foreshadowed EROS’ existence, and created an additional shocking twist when we learn the current episode’s organization had something to do with it. We should have learned more about The Black One too, especially since we will later learn that it makes far more sense for him to already feel defeated in episode 2.

The things introduced in this episode are very good plot hooks – beginning points. The most important information they convey is that there’s still so much the protagonists don’t know, so much more work they have to do… but there’s just not enough time left for that to play out reasonably. We’re most of the way through the game now, we should be getting some actual, in-depth answers to our questions. This information should have been encountered earlier, to pave the way for even greater reveals in this episode.

Tez got badly shafted, too. Much like Qualstio in The Reconstruction, I get the feeling that this was intended to be his time to shine, but he ended up getting crowded out by everything else. He could have been so great here, if the game had just taken the time to really examine his emotions! I already mentioned how his suppression break could have been beautiful and meaningful if it had been triggered by creating life, but it could have been taken even further than that. If we accept the idea that he really does love and care about the shra, he should feel like he’s being torn apart here. He got into the project by staying true to dispassionate, scientific logic, then he regains his emotions just in time for Dr. Crazypants to start twirling his mustache. But now he’s in too deep and the emotions are just making his obsession with the energy even worse, so he has to smile and nod through the genocide lecture in the desperate hopes that he’ll still get the data, even though he feels just as betrayed as the rest of the crew, if not moreso. He should be torn between new and old obsessions and struggling with the ethicality of following a mad scientist – and hey, for once the logical choice would be good and the emotional one evil! Play with our expectations a little bit, you know? If Tez truly engaged with the issues before him he could still feel like a heroic character worth rooting for, or at the very least, a tragic and sympathetic villain. The bland, passive character we have here is nothing but a black-hearted monster who deserves what’s coming to him.

So. There’s only one full arc left. Can it do justice to all the plot threads left on its doorstep? Let’s find out.

…After I cover the sidequests, of course.

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