In which there is a particularly exploitative use of depression and status quo is God.
He’s been trying to keep up a positive attitude in the hope it would make him happier, but it’s just driving him insane. But if he drops it, he feels himself slipping back into despair, so he’s stuck.
“What else can you do?”
“Take it out on something else.”
“So, slip.”
What? Why would you tell him to be depressed again? That’s not going to help! There are no good options so I just pick the first, noncommittal one, even though it’s pretty unhelpful.
Chac: “A wiser man than myself told me that I am not alone. That others have suffered just as I have. He misses the greater problem. That this suffering is my own, and no one else’s. Only I can mitigate it.”
This is an interesting angle to explore. Seeing that you’re not alone in your suffering can help a lot, especially if it’s a general problem like disability or mental illness, but there’s a personal aspect to it as well. Seeing that other people suffered similar tragedies probably isn’t going to help him past a certain point; seeing how they dealt with it might give him better coping strategies, but he still needs to find what works for him personally.
Then things get weird.
Chac: “Please… do not fret over me any longer. I shall find a solution to end this for good. A permanent one. Please, come see me again later.”
Uh.
Um.
Chac: “The only way to put a stop to this aching, this gnawing from the inside. I know what I must do. It is something I should have done a long time ago. But… I do not wish to tell you what it is. I cannot let you see me at my frailest… at my weakest moment. I cannot allow that to happen. I shall have Doctor Ransend assist me. But you… I want you to have no part in it. Understood? Farewell, Commander. I’ll not have to trouble you again with my pining for what once was.”
And I was just thinking that this plot was doing such a decent job of handling depression. So much for that. I can’t articulate exactly why, but there is something very uncomfortable about using “will the depressed guy commit suicide???” as a cliffhanger. It feels exploitative; it is very obviously from an outsider’s perspective, a clinical analysis of how to manufacture drama, rather than something that really engages with the issue and treats it with respect. I wonder if this is another matter of insulation, like with Luke – does the developer not realize just how common and dangerous suicide is, and how painful it could potentially be to bring it up with his audience? I think that simply going PSYCHE after all this would definitely make me feel hurt and betrayed if I had major issues with this.
And yes, PSYCHE is where this leads. When I return to Chac’s location after the next mission, Rami is there instead, and offers to take me to Chac. One fade-to-black transition later…
This is his memory from just after the Shine struck. He is remarkably calm, and manages to have enough control over the simulation to clear up all the explosions. He goes around apologizing and saying goodbye to everyone.
Chac: “And the crew… even with the suppression, I still remember all of your names. Something out of my control deigned it necessary to let me live, and I almost forgot that. A commander always retires wishing he could have done more. Now I see… it is not always possible.”
This I like. It’s a very reasonable way for him to move on: he felt irrationally guilty over this, so being able to accept that it wasn’t his fault and it’s okay he couldn’t do anything is a logical way for him to heal.
But it’s then followed by this. Why do stories always have this obsession with women’s corpses being beautiful? I get the feeling it’s supposed to be a nice thing – it shows that he loves her so much he still thinks well of her even when seeing her at her weakest. But the fact that there are people who literally think corpses are beautiful and also that prettiness is the greatest (or only) value women have conflates it too much, and gives this a lot of unintended and very unfortunate implications.
Chac: “I joined the human fleets to follow you… remember? To escape that Surface world… together.”
So spacefaring was her idea and he just tagged along for the ride? Well I guess it’s an inversion of the “girl gives up her career to live with her husband” trope. I guess we don’t really need the full story here – the implication of a deeper history between them is enough – but it would have been nice to at least get some idea of what planet life was like and why they wanted to escape it. The story keeps intermittently bringing up the topic and it’s important to some characters’ motivations, but we never get any details. It would be nice to compare it to the life they have now; it feels like we missed an important chapter in their society’s history.
Chac then finds himself.
Chac: “You’ll never make it, you know. You may reach the evacuation pod, but you’ll never escape this place… But I don’t hate you. In fact, I forgive you. Seeing just how pathetic you are… what could you do? Things will be right again, some day. You will walk, and feel, and maybe even… love again.”
I think this is poignant. A lot of times when people are consumed by regrets and trauma, they remember things as worse than they were and enter a vicious cycle of despair. Allowing Chac to step back, look at things objectively, and realize he didn’t have to blame himself is a good way of letting him overcome his hangups; and at the same time, it’s not just a magic thing that solves depression in an instant. By having him revisit the moment of his trauma, he shows how far he’s come in the interim. He couldn’t have done this from the start; Ros has been helping him crawl out of the pit throughout the whole story, and now he’s finally able to realize that.
He says he’s finally ready to leave and move on, and wakes up in the stasis chamber room. He exposits a bit about how Rami used some Typelog wizardry to make him relive the moment of the Shine, because he realized he needed to confront his problems head-on. The reason he told Ros to stay out of it is that he thought it would make him look weak, and he didn’t want Ros to see him like that.
Ros: “Good. And here I thought you were gonna kill yourself or something.”
It amazes me how the game can be so tasteful and tasteless at the same time. The entire rest of this plot is such a good depiction of depression and depicts a healthy, non-condescending path to healing, and then right at the end it pulls this awfulness. It’s particularly gross because we can see now just how forced the “cliffhanger” was. This isn’t some clever thing where you can trace it back and see that his drama made perfect sense in an innocuous context. Why does he say this is going to “end it all”? Why can’t he tell Ros what he’s doing? If he’s so certain that he’ll react badly and look weak, why does he phrase it with such definitive finality? His speech was clearly written to evoke a specific audience reaction rather than making consistent sense, and that’s already bad storytelling form even before you use it to make suicide an edgy hook.
But, leaving that aside, I do think that this has been the most effective and poignant of the final scenes so far. It does exactly what it’s supposed to, it’s a happy ending, and it doesn’t introduce any horrible or horribly botched morals for me to complain about.
Chac is also another character who will turn you down if you say you love him. I’m not an expert on this trope so I’m not sure how positive it actually is. My initial reaction is that it’s pretty progressive, because I’ve seen some stories that are very quick to have men with tragically fridged girlfriends move on so they can have a hot new love interest (oh hi FFVI), so it’s nice that Chac is treating the issue with more consideration than that. But as I said last time, romance isn’t my thing, so I could be missing something.
You may recall that last episode he remembered something he shouldn’t have. He tells me a little more, but it’s still frustratingly vague; he just says he’s “got a history with bad things happening” and, though he assures me he’s not dangerous, he has some “urges” he can’t control, presumably separate from his previous hitting on every woman in sight. He says he needs some time to calm down and Ros should come back later.
He’s a bit more coherent now. He says he recovered a bunch of memories from before he joined the crew. Apparently these memories were “feelings” before, so what, they stuck around in some residual instinctual capacity? What does that even mean, and how does it make any sense when no one else shows anything similar? He still refuses to explain any details, but apparently he’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know, so he’s going to run off before the crew can get wrapped up in whatever this is. Okay, bye!
…But unfortunately, I must see this to its conclusion. If you return to Luke’s spot after the next mission, Marie is in his place and asks where he is.
They head to the evacuation chamber, and Mahk is also here for some reason. Marie notices the pod with the green light, and prevents it from launching.
Luke: “Um, hi, Marie!”
Marie: “Your Header-ID came up a bunch of times in some leaked Typelog metadata recently. I don’t suppose that would be related to your current situation, now would it?”
Luke: “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Then Marie turns to the control console.
Luke: “W-what are you doing?”
Marie: “Prepping you for launch.”
Luke: “B-but you disabled the atmo seal! You can’t launch me like this! I’ll get blown apart!”
Marie: “The technical term is, ‘explosive decompression’. Ready to talk?”
FINALLY someone refuses to put up with his crap. This is why I love Marie, she gets stuff done. Because she’s more proactive than our real protagonist, she gets Luke to finally spill the beans: he’s some kind of con man who pretends to work for people and then steals from them or… something. He’s still not very clear. But now that suppression has worn off, he’s grown a conscience and doesn’t want to hurt the crew.
Luke: “I’m a lowlife, Marie. I have been before the Shine. […] When I was suppressed, things were a lot easier to focus on. I’d sneak in, make the steal, and get out. that thrill was the only thing I could really feel.”
He also says this, which just makes no sense at all. Supposedly people didn’t even have a real concept of money before the Shine because everything was so perfect and everyone had what they wanted. If he was unsuppressed like Alicia’s group, I could understand this aberrant behavior, but apparently he was emotionless too? Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing suppression is supposed to prevent? How can he still feel a “thrill” if it’s supposed to make you completely emotionless? Either the suppression drugs themselves were majorly flawed and in need of revision, or he should have stuck out like a sore thumb and been captured immediately.
This is probably a consequence of him being a cameo character. I presume that the story he’s from isn’t set in a post-scarcity society, so he really would need to resort to crime to make ends meet. But that character archetype doesn’t work in a society where people have no physical needs. What was he even stealing? No material wealth would be of any use to him, except maybe craft if he doesn’t have a habitation to call home.
Mahk: “You cannot possibly expect us to buy this ‘I was confused’ sob story, can you? You have lied and deceived to get this far. You just happened to get caught, so, here we are.”
And where does this come from? As much as I hate Luke, this is pretty harsh. He hasn’t actually done anything to them aside from creeping on Marie. If it was revealed that he actually had been stealing from them like Alicia, that would lend weight to Mahk’s accusation – but if he hasn’t actually done anything, then no, he hasn’t really been lying and deceiving.
Luke: “I… I know… Do it, Marie.”
Marie: “Okay! See ya!”
She turns to the console and there’s a long whirring noise! :DDDDDD Goodbye, Luke! Turns out no one had time for your pity party after all.
Marie: “Called my bluff, huh?”
But of course he’s a playable character so he can’t actually die. What a shame. We’ll just have to hope that scared him bad enough to never mess with Marie again.
Luke mopes some more about how he’s so terrible and shouldn’t have been saved by the Breach (why was he selected when Alicia wasn’t? Did he sneak aboard too?) so he should just die, but his sob story convinces Marie that they should still keep him around because she is a wonderful person who is willing to give second chances to worthless scumbags. There’s one last scene where Luke and Ros chat one on one and he mopes some more about How Do You Emotions.
Luke: “I really mean it, you know. I wouldn’t hurt you guys! I just thought… if the truth got out…”
What “truth”? He still hasn’t really told us what he did or why it would hurt us! He did say he scammed Typelog once, so they might be pissed, but the Inquiry is already at war with them! Why would they possibly care about something so insignificant? This seems like it’s more of a hook for Luke’s home universe rather than a complete story in and of itself – we still don’t have any details on what Luke did or why it’s so important and dangerous, so he just sounds like he’s full of hot air.
That said, I am glad that his finale completely dropped his skeeviness. Marie got to give some payback, and he didn’t even hit on her at all! Much more pleasant than I was expecting.
Also, let’s do something really stupid.
Luke: “Um, sorry, but… I can’t just manipulate emotions like that any more. Even if I really meant it. Too many bad memories now. Bad, but… not something I can just Flash away again. You understand.”
Fortunately, Luke really has grown a conscience, making him the third and final character who won’t accept your love. This pleases me because it means he can never ever get in a relationship. Die alone and unloved, you creep.
People look at her weirdly sometimes, because it’s embedded in our DNA to perceive children differently I guess? She rambles a bit and I can respond:
“What are you going on about?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
Wow, Ros can be really dickish in these conversations. I go with the non-gaslighting option, which she appreciates.
She mopes about how she stands out and maybe she’s even more broken than the people at Purity Point (???) so maybe she should stop worrying about her own problems and help them except I thought that’s what she was already doing?
It’s too late, apparently; the doctors say the Purity Point inhabitants are too far gone now. She claims this is because she was too focused on working for the crew that she forgot all about them… except she’s been brought them up in almost every conversation so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I guess I can interpret this as her forgetting them during the timeskip after episode 3, but apparently the crew wasn’t drafted so she should have had a lot of free time to work on this. She says she feels guilty and is sad she’s the only one who got to be saved, but she still has hope that something can be done, so she’s going to grab some doctors and head over there.
Rami says that augments won’t work for some reason.
Rami: “Even if they were willing, the mechanisms wouldn’t take hold.”
What does that mean? That their bodies will spit it out like lacertians do? Why would that happen, if they’re human? I thought the more pressing concern is that their brains are slush so preserving their bodies won’t matter.
Deirdre: “I know… I just don’t know why I was saved but they weren’t. I still hate it…”
Rami: “You’re little. Smaller bones, less mass. Less strain on the augments. That’s why.”
No the reason she was saved was that her brain wasn’t mush. Why is the game suddenly insisting the problem is totally different than the explanation it gave at the start? This is so bizarre!
Then Kara says she thinks EROS is responsible for this.
Kara: “It is built like an EROS control colony. But these people… something is off. They shouldn’t be here.”
A colony isn’t supposed to have people? What? Or maybe the idea is that the original inhabitants were evacuated and these people came later. Apparently the irradiation was due to a meltdown in one of the reactors that powered this place.
Kara: “EROS protocol would be to eliminate a damaged facility and its inhabitants in such an event…”
The inhabitants, too? Why, for the evil points? I’m feeling even less guilty about murdering them now. This does, however, raise the question of why the facility wasn’t eliminated.
Kara suggests a mercy kill option.
Deirdre: “What should I do, Ros? Scientifically, they’re alive. But, really, they might as well not be…”
Ros: “What matters more? What science says, or what your own experiences tell you?”
SCIENCE. ALWAYS SCIENCE. YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE UNRELIABLE. THIS IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF SCIENCE.
Also wow, did Ros seriously just advocate the murder option? Deirdre rather understandably rejects this.
Deirdre: “…there doesn’t need to be a decision. There is always a compromise. Science… is… malleable! I’m going back to my original plan! Let them keep living here. I think I can still save them! Maybe not right now, but… science moves forward! If the tech to save them doesn’t exist yet… I’ll just have to make sure it gets invented eventually! They’ll just have to wait for it!”
Okay, but maybe you could try putting them in stasis so they don’t get worse…? Nope, this ends with her leaving them exactly as they are because status quo is God.
Deirdre: “People think I’m broken, too, don’t they? That’s why they give me those looks. They just don’t know. But, anything can be fixed! You guys didn’t give up on me, and I’m not gonna give up on them!”
She turns to look at the inhabitants.
Deirdre: “It’s hard to look at them, isn’t it? Even though they don’t feel anything or know what’s going on… We think we know for them, though, and we make the decision we think will help, when really… Well I’ve been there, and I don’t wanna go back! I’m gonna fix them, okay? And you’re gonna help!”
Ros: “That’s your decision?”
Deirdre: “I didn’t think I could trust anyone else. I know better, now, but you’re still my first choice.”
Well, that sure was some word salad. And, that’s it. That’s the end of Deirdre’s arc. We cut back to the Inquiry immediately after that last line. What on Earth was the developer even trying to say here? This scene is a complete disaster. The dialogue follows no logical train of thought and touches on a zillion different topics without actually exploring anything or explaining what they mean. We should reasonably expect this finale to explain the mysteries behind Purity Point and tie that into a solid, coherent solution going forward, but instead it raises more questions than it answers. So this was an EROS project, except the current inhabitants weren’t part of the experiment, except maybe they were, but if they weren’t we still don’t know where they came from or why they’re here, and the facility should have been destroyed but it wasn’t, because…? We just get a whole bunch of stuff dumped on us that doesn’t actually explain anything. The note from the abandoned databanks implies there’s something more going on here and the current inhabitants may have been an intentional part of the experiment, but that’s all we’re ever going to get. Like with a lot of subplots in The Reconstruction, I get the impression the developer has a huge brilliant plot for this built up in his head, but he hid all the details so thoroughly that no one can figure it out. If Kara was able to give us more solid information on this, such that together with the databank notes we could piece together the full story, that would work, but instead we get nothing. This feels like the beginning of a story or mystery, not the end.
It also irks me that we don’t actually get any solution to the problem. Deirdre and the Purity Point inhabitants are both still in the exact same place they were before; nothing has changed. She’s still trying to search (probably fruitlessly) for a cure and is optimistic that she’ll find one, which is exactly where she started out at. This isn’t a character arc, it’s a character circle. I also really hate it when stories act like wishes and optimism are enough to fix things, because that’s not how things work in the real world. It’s not enough to hope, you need to put actual work into designing solutions for things. If Deirdre actually put her ideas into practice and eventually came up with a cure, wouldn’t that be – in addition to simply being a better story – so much more inspiring? It would show people that overcoming your problems takes real effort, but there is light at the end of the tunnel if you don’t give up hope. This is only doing half of that, giving out the lazy, feel-good platitudes without showing the hard work that comes with it. I think that’s condescending and, in the end, toxic: people need to understand that they need to put their hopes and dreams into action if they want to fix things, and they need to be shown how to do that instead of being told that treading water at the starting point is enough. A real-life person who sees this and finds themselves in Deirdre’s situation would feel pretty demoralized, I think.
The overall tone of this is also… very, very odd for this game. I know I shouldn’t talk about future events, but I’ll just say that the ending of the main plot is pretty much the antithesis of this happy, optimistic science-will-solve-everything message. I have to wonder if the reason this scene feels so jumbled and wooden is because the developer can’t really empathize with this outlook at all but felt obligated to play devil’s advocate.
Jess is angsting over her position again. She once again claims we’re pretty similar and asks me a rhetorical question because the game can’t come up with new content for her, apparently.
Jessamine: “Me and the Girls had to get by with what we could find. No fancy flyers or weapons for us! So… what’s better? Having all that power right out of th’ gate, or having to make do with what you got?”
“Cunning over cash.”
“What if I have both?”
“Deceit, THEN destruction.”
All of those responses are terrible! 2 is dodging the question and 3 makes no sense at all. I pick 1 because it’s the only real answer, but it’s not what I actually believe. Let me roleplay properly, game!
Then she says she wants to be a commander like Ros because she thinks Ros is really cool etc. etc. didn’t we already do this last episode? She ends by saying she feels lonely since her gang stopped contacting her and she has a “plan” of some kind.
She’s figured out that Typelog must be the reason she’s cut off from the gang, because Typelog has completely blacked out all communications apparently. That seems really stupid of them; their whole thing is that they’re great at monitoring communication, so wouldn’t they want to keep those channels open instead of forcing people to come up with off-the-grid networks they can’t spy on? It won’t even do anything to stop their enemies, since if the Inquiry could whip up their own network this easily I doubt it gave EROS any trouble. (And wasn’t EROS already using their own network since they’re invisible?) This does nothing but invite more ire from fringe groups and create general chaos, with no benefit to Typelog. Why are they doing this? The only people really affected by this are the rogues, so maybe they’ve been more of a threat than Typelog likes to admit – but rogues are still capable of joining in on the superweapon dogpile, so it can’t have hampered them in any meaningful capacity.
We’re told that Typelog’s specialty is subterfuge, so – hm. Maybe they’ve taken a page from EROS’ playbook and inserted spies into the other factions? By destroying the public networks and forcing their enemies to make their own, they give people a false sense of security by making them think they’re off the grid, when in reality the private networks are still bugged by Typelog – and as a bonus, this would promote further fracturing because the different groups can’t communicate with each other. It could even explain Thomas’ stupid ~Typelog is always watching but I won’t say how~ warning in the main story.
Anyway, point is, Jess wants to visit them in person to make sure they’re alright, and she wants to do it right now. Ros says she’ll need an escort and Jess suddenly does some weird hand-wringing over how she’s so impulsive and doesn’t think about protocol. While it does show character growth since she was previously all SCREW THE RULES ANARCHY FOREVER, this is rather sudden.
The girls don’t notice her come in, which convinces her they really have forgotten about her, but as she turns to leave one notices her. They’re all ecstatic over her return. She asks who’s in charge now, and they say she still is – she taught them everything they needed to know to survive on their own, so they’re fine now. Then we get the cliché sappy “We thought you didn’t need us anymore / No I thought you didn’t need me anymore” routine, with the twist that they follow it by saying they don’t need her, technically. Jess decides that if that’s the case, she should stay with the Inquiry for now. They end by saying they love her and they’ll always remember her even if she’s not there, which is sweet I guess. We end with an aesop:
Jessamine: “A real leader doesn’t have to be there to lead, huh? Doesn’t even have to be alive, really.”
That seems pretty firmly contradicted in episode 5 when the Inquiry proves themselves completely incapable without Sorenson’s leadership but sure, the woman gets the aesop about how direct leadership is unnecessary. Still, this is a nice conclusion for Jessamine, I think. It’s a happy ending for her, and she learns an important lesson about leadership like she always wanted. I think it’s also interesting to learn that she really was a good leader in hindsight. When we’re introduced to her she seems totally wild and irresponsible, so it’s reasonable to worry that she didn’t bother to keep things stable and the group would fall apart without her. It’s nice to see that she actually was teaching them good lessons and that they’re able to function independently. Narratively, however, it is pretty weird for a character arc to end with the character essentially realizing they were already perfect and don’t need to change anything. It’d probably have been stronger for her to learn that her reckless leadership style did have bad consequences for the group and that she needs to take what she’s learned from the Inquiry to leave a more stable legacy – but that would probably require her to leave the crew, and status quo is God.
Cassidy is grumbling about how the kids these days haven’t learned anything from the past.
Cassidy: “it’s just… disappointing. What are they trying to accomplish? What do they got to gain this time?”
Ros: “It is a waste.”
Cassidy: “It is from our point of view anyway. Maybe they want somethin’ we can’t see? I dunno, Ros.”
So yes, I think I’m right that the developer sees politics as meaningless incomprehensible conflicts between eldritch abominations. No one is even attempting to understand the issue before writing it off as something that only concerns the Politic Gods.
Cassidy: “We promised… we wouldn’t forget [the first disaster]. Was the first thing we agreed on. And maybe the last!”
And here’s more Couples Hate Eachother comedy for your enjoyment.
Cassidy: “We can bury our heads until it goes away, or we can do something.”
We end here, so this train of thought doesn’t get continued until the next chat…
Cassidy wants to try making a second breach because unlike SOME PEOPLE she doesn’t want to just lie down and die. With emitters and stasis chambers, she figures the people would last long enough to get somewhere.
Cassidy: “We gotta pick a hundred or so souls, first off. The sharpest, nicest, quietest folks we can find.”
Oh, because that worked out so well last time. She’s whining about how no one’s learning from history and then proceeds to repeat the same mistake that got them into this mess. What they should really do is expand the quota so that they don’t need to get their numbers up afterward. That was the problem, that people were born who had no experience of the first disaster and thus didn’t know how to stop it from happening again. And also that people who didn’t make the cut snuck in anyway, because when you say you’re only saving 100 people and leaving everyone else to burn, people aren’t gonna play along with that.
Cassidy: “Sounds silly, I know. But we can still save some scrap of humanity from vaporizing itself over nothing. I think I need another reminder of why we’re still here at all. Come see us again, Ros.”
They’re going back to their home, and Ros is invited to come along.
And she immediately decides to give up on that whole “not sticking our heads in the sand” thing because she’s terrible. She has apparently had enough excitement and wants to go back to her boring hole in the ground where nothing ever changes. You’d think she’d go insane from boredom at some point.
Ros: “What happened to breaching Splice 9 and out of the galaxy?”
Cassidy: “That’s called a metaphor, dear.”
What.
“This is where we really should be.”
Okay fine, that’s all well and good for you, but what about the people who don’t have a place they can hide out in? This is the only home of its kind in existence. If she thinks this is the solution and she really wants to help everyone, not just herself, she needs to start building more of these, pronto. She might just be referring to herself and Cole with that “we”, but then what happened to saving a scrap of humanity? I thought you weren’t a sociopath, Cass.
And then PLOT TWIST Cole talks in complete sentences for the first and only time and delivers a speech about how this is a bad idea, which convinces Cass to stop being a moron and stick with the crew.
Cole: “We already got left behind once. World ain’t gonna wait up for us again. And Ros here… Ros rescued us. Showed us what’s what. Gave us a chance t’ make things right out there. Some day, the ‘verse is gonna coma a-knockin’ again, but it won’t be no one as friendly as her.”
But his only objections are on the practical side of things, so I guess he’d be totally down with leaving the world to burn if they had absolute certainty no one would bother them again. Let this be a lesson: if you don’t pay attention to what your characters are saying, they become horrible people.
Cass relents and says she’ll stay with Ros as long as she’s a commander, but after that she’s retiring for good. Uh, I fail to see how that addresses anything. She’ll still be in the exact same situation unless she’s literally the last person in the universe. I think the game is trying to frame this as her wanting to help out with the war effort and stuff instead of shirking her duties, but that’s not what either of them were talking about.
Cassidy: “We can’t just forget all this exists. It’s where we came from, you know. It’s who we were.”
[pause]
Cassidy: “But it’s not who we could be. And right now, the people out there need a few ‘who’s’ lookin’ out for them.”
This sounds like a sensible conclusion to her plot – she still feels nostalgic but acknowledges she has to move on, at least for a little while – but it’s totally at odds with the rest of the scene. Her attitude hasn’t really changed; she’s still totally planning to say SCREW YOU ALL and go right back to sticking her head in the sand once people can’t conscript her anymore. This is even worse than Deirdre – nothing has changed at all. This isn’t a character arc, it’s a character… point or something! I don’t even know. I think I can vaguely see what the developer was going for here – the cynical old veteran learns to stop wallowing in nostalgia and do some real good in the world – but it’s just not what we got.
I am loathe to break this up even further, but this has gotten crazy long. Who knew I had so many opinions about optional sideplots? The bounty hunts and abandoned databanks will have to go in the next post.