The Blessed Organization in Alan Wake II

 The Blessed Organization is not central to the plot of Control. It's something you can discover only by delving into the various heavily-redacted files, recordings, and other media around the Oldest House. But it's heavily implied that the organization was founded by a figure named Chester Bless, who has some connection with the FBC's Board - the otherworldly entity (or entities) that choose its director and seem to control the use of Objects of Power.

Bless is a Southern Californian hippie-like figure, with ties to Hollywood, but acting more as a kind of motivational speaker and... well, a cult leader. He has a surfboard that seems to be an altered item at least, if not a full-on OoP, and he talks about helping people with the "power of the board," which surely seems to call out to an important element in the Remedy cosmos.

Various companies and organizations that involve the word "Bless" have been targeting the FBC - in one case, an altered item in the form of a Fondue kit was mailed to a radio show secretly run by the FBC, and it reduced a producer of the show to ash when she opened the package. It's clear that the Blessed organization is willing to kill to further its goals, so it needs to be taken seriously as a major Paracriminal organization.

Spoilers Ahead:

So, having played Control, I was primed to notice any time the word "Bless" was found in Alan Wake II.

And indeed, we do see it a few times, mostly surrounding Alan's loved ones.

The first instance I saw was an email from Barry to Alice that we find in her apartment (or the facsimile of her apartment) in the Dark Place. Barry has been tasked with managing Alan's estate, given that the world believes he simply drowned in Cauldron Lake back in 2010. And with his death, the popularity of his Alex Casey novels only grew, so Hollywood naturally came calling with offers to make movie adaptations. Barry, being the good friend he is, on top of being Alan's agent, has signed on as an executive producer on these movies to try to protect Alan's work from studio meddling.

And in the midst of this, he meets a guy named Chester Bless. He emails Alice (while the two didn't get along before Alan disappeared, they seem to have bonded over their shared grief) to let her know that he's (he says this jokingly) "joined a cult." In fact, he's joined the Blessed Wellness Center, which he says is an opportunity to network with various Hollywood types and get a foothold in town. He's met Chester, who he describes as a friendly guy.

Later in the game, near the end, Alan enters the Parliament Tower a final time and discovers that his and Alice's apartment has been packed up - everything cleared out. The few cardboard boxes remaining that things have been packed up in? They have the word "Blessed" on them.

We're lead to believe in that final visit to the apartment that Alice ended her "Dark Place" photography exhibition with a series of shots of her jumping into Cauldron Lake, seemingly to her death. The video even says she "took her own life." But we see in the mid-credits clip that while Alice did jump into the lake, she did not do so to commit suicide. That's certainly a new ray of hope, but she says that the way she recovered her memories of her first visit to the Dark Place - what took place during the events of the original game - with the help of an "Organization."

I think we're initially meant to believe that it was the FBC that helped her recover these memories and make sense of her visitations by Mr. Scratch. But the use of that word: Organization... that fills me with some concern.

The most common way the Blessed group is referred to is as the Blessed Organization, and given Barry's connection to it, it would not surprise me to find that they are the ones who reached out to Alice, and they are the ones that set her on this path.

Now, what are the goals of the Blessed Organization? That remains very ambiguous. Hostility toward the FBC is not exactly proof of evil intent (though the murder doesn't look great). After all, as we discover over the course of Alan Wake II, the Cult of the Tree is actually well-intentioned, even if they make the mistake of recruiting corrupt (and thus vulnerable to the Dark Presence) individuals like the Deputies Thornton and Mulligan. What appears to be a group of serial killings is actually more like exorcising people the Dark Presence had raised from the dead.

Is it possible that the Blessed Organization's goals are not actually sinister, but that they believe that the FBC is the dangerous threat that must be defeated?