In the original Alan Wake, we're introduced to the character of Thomas Zane. Essentially Alan's cautionary tale, Thomas was a poet who came to Bright Falls with his girlfriend, Barbara Jagger, and his friend Emile Hartman, around 1970. After Barbara unexpectedly drowned in the lake, Hartman encouraged Thomas to use the strange powers of the lake to simply bring her back to life. When she came back not as his beloved girlfriend but as a monstrous vessel for the Dark Presence, he cut out her heart - which didn't actually kill her - and then grabbed her and jumped into the lake with her, sacrificing himself to keep the Dark Presence from conquering the world.
Unmarked spoilers ahead, but this is all speculative and questioning here.
That's the story.
Alan encounters Thomas Zane over the course of the first game, and Zane appears as a diver in an old diving suit that radiates light. Zane acts as an enigmatic guide to Alan, helping him along the path to defeating the Dark Presence.
But here's where things start to get weird:
In Control, we hear a recording made by the FBC (which does not believe in a right to privacy when paranatural phenomena are at play) of one of Jesse Faden's therapy sessions, in which she remembers the poetry of Thomas Zane, despite the therapist believing that Zane is a filmmaker, not a poet.
In the remastered version of Alan Wake (the version I played,) there's even a poster of a movie (admittedly in Alan's dream) for Tom the Poet, which has a diver on the cover and stars Thomas Zane and Barbara Jagger, and is supposedly based on a story by Alan Wake.
Also in Control, in the AWE expansion, Jesse glimpses Alan and a double of his that identifies himself as Thomas Zane through the Spiral door (a symbol that takes on more significance in Alan Wake II). That's not to mention the fact that when Alan first meets the Andersons, they call him Tom, as does Ahti.
In Alan Wake II, Alan is getting calls on a payphone in his nightmare of New York from an ally whom he eventually meets in Room 665 of the Oceanview Hotel.
Well, in a film he finds in room 665.
And here, he comes face to face with Thomas Zane, who is actually Thomas Seine, the Finnish filmmaker, and who looks precisely like him (though with a different hairstyle and no beard). Incidentally, it's a lot of fun to see Ilkka Villi get to perform with his own voice instead of just lip-synching, as he does for Alan Wake (though I adore Matthew Poretta's performance, both as Wake and as Control's Dr. Darling).
And this Zane fully commits to the story that "Tom" the poet is just a character he played in his movie, Tom the Poet. But he also claims that he's collaborating with Alan to create the story that will let both of them escape.
But why is Zane identical to Alan?
The implication at the end of the game is that Alex Casey, Alan's hardboiled detective character, was always just his interpretation of the real FBI agent, even before he got to Bright Falls. (Given how time isn't linear in the Dark Place, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that the visions of Noirish Casey we see in Alan's half of the game are actually the real Casey with the character grafted onto him).
As I see it, there are a few explanations for what Tom as we meet him is.
The first is that this is just another supernatural force (a paranatural entity to use FBC terminology) that is taking on a form derived from Alan, which fits into the narrative he's creating. This is consistent with the idea that he's the "Light Presence" that counters the Dark.
The second is that he's an invention of Alan's entirely - using some part of himself as inspiration. This does really raise some questions about the causality of it all - if Zane didn't exist, how did the Dark Presence manifest as Barbara Jagger?
The next potential interpretation is that Alan is, in fact, a creation of Thomas Zane's - that it's really been Zane who has been fighting against the Dark Presence all this time. If Alan is an "author avatar" for him, that would explain why people mistake him for Tom (maybe, as beings outside of the cosmic rewrites, because of their own paranatural natures or abilities). What does that mean for Alice, then? I don't freaking know.
EDIT:
There are more details that I've remembered, and feel relevant.
When Alan comes face-to-face with Thomas Zane the first time during the Room 665 chapter of the game, there are a few things to consider.
First is that Zane initially appears facing away from him, shirtless, before kind of glitching into a more clothed appearance. I believe we're meant to interpret this as being the same Alan-double Zane we saw in Control's AWE expansion, particularly because Zane's room has the same spiral painting found in that room (the spiral seeming to be a symbol of the Dark Place, and of course being very thematically important to the game's overall story).
There's some violent imagery amidst all the drug-taking and navel-gazing artistic brainstorming the two go through. I'm also given to understand that The Happy Song (whose lyrics are basically all "You know that I'm a psycho") were heard in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, scoring a sequence in which Mr. Scratch murders someone. Ultimately, there's a weird point later in the level when Alan goes to see him again and in which Alan seems to shoot Zane in the head, though this is then revealed to have been some kind of fake shot from a film, and that Zane seems fine.
But there's one last detail from the first meeting that I think is potentially very important:
The television in room 665 goes on the fritz, and we see a brief glimpse of first Dr. Darling and then a brief flash of Jesse Faden (both central characters from Control, the latter being both the player character and the current Director of the FBC - a position that goes beyond merely being an important bureaucrat but also involves being essentially a supernatural protector of the universe). And Tom Zane freaks the hell out, crawling away as if trying to avoid being seen from the television screen. Alan describes it in his narration as some kind of paranoid fit.
Why would Zane fear the FBC? Surely, the FBC has its history of acting shady, and he might not realize that in Faden's hands, the bureau is probably becoming more benevolent (though the influence of the Board, not to mention decades of problematic Bureau culture, could be a big hinderance to Jesse's efforts at reform).
One interesting question, though, is when all of this is happening. The timeline is sort of ambiguous, especially because people can enter the Dark Place and seem to be there are different relative times to one another. Toward the end of the game, Tor and Odin Anderson wade into Cauldron Lake to help get Saga out of the Dark Place, but their appearances (as younger versions of themselves) on In Between with Mr. Door would seem to have happened prior to Alan's initial summoning out of the Dark Place (let's also remember that the act of summoning him actually happens after he's already arrived, though unfortunately carrying Mr. Scratch inside of him).
And because time is not linear in the Dark Place, I've seen some speculation that this visitation by Jesse Faden is, in fact, the very same event that we witness when she peers through the Spiral door at the Oceanview Motel and Casino during Control's AWE expansion. Now, of course, those scenes play out differently, so I'm more inclined to believe that what Jesse witnessed was some earlier iteration of Zane's home in the Dark Place, perhaps before the Noir-ish NYC version of it became what Alan was seeing. But it's also clear that perception is extremely subjective in the Dark Place.
It's implied that the Oceanview Hotel where Alan goes in the Dark Place might actually be one and the same as the Oceanview Motel, as there are doors with the same symbols on them (though I think it's also possible that there are just multiple "Oceanview" hubs around the cosmos - I know that the WWII bunker in which you go after Cynthia Weaver is dubbed the Oceanview Hotel by local teenagers, though I don't recall seeing any of those symbols on the doors there. (If memory serves, the record that acts as the "portal key" for Saga to enter the Overlap is found by Alan in the Dark Place Oceanview Hotel, so that might be the main connection).
While it probably warrants its own post, one thing that's left a little unclear is whether the Oldest House is still on lockdown because of The Hiss. We meet Kiran Estevez, an FBC agent who works with Saga in the latter part of the game, who talks about how her work has changed since the "headquarters got locked down," in a way that seems to imply that the FBC is actually cut off from their leadership - and that Jesse hasn't left that building since 2019.
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