So, before we begin: a caveat. Control is a work of Weird Science Fiction, the weird label meaning that we're straying into the realm of fantasy and horror and should accept that there are some things that can't be rationally understood. Indeed, as we've seen in the Remedy Connected Universe, the very nature of some of the planes of existence seems to balk at the idea of rationalism - Darling needs an artist to understand the Dark Place because the Dark Place changes based on Darling's theories about how it works.
But there's an interesting question to be asked about how Hedron/Polaris and the Hiss interact.
Here's what we know (as best as I can summarize).
In 2002, when Jesse and Dylan were 11 and 10, respectively, they found an Object of Power called the Slide Projector, and used it to visit a number of other worlds. In one of those worlds, they encountered a being that kind of connected to them in their heads and which they called Polaris (side note, she pronounces it "Po-lahr-is" but I always thought it was "Po-lair-is." Am I crazy? Actually, Odin Anderson/Marko Saaresto pronounces it my way in Take Control, but then again, English isn't Saaresto's first language so maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this is just Courtney Hope's mispronunciation or are both acceptable or... I don't know).
After a being called the Not-Mother warped and corrupted many of the bullies in Ordinary (seriously, Jesse's backstory could straight up just be a Stephen King novel) Jesse burned most of the slides that came with the projector, cutting off the various worlds, with the exception of the one that led to the world where they had found Polaris.
Later, when the FBC took the Slide Projector (along with Dylan,) Director Trench and Dr. Darling went on an expedition to "Slidescape 36" where they found the same entity, but Darling named the thing Hedron (again, pronouncing it sort of strangely - when you're talking about a three-dimensional shape I tend to pronounce it "poly-HEE-dron," rather than "head-ron." Could it be that weird pronunciations are part of the nature of this thing?)
The exact relationship between Polaris and Hedron is not spelled out exactly - are they just the same thing with different names? Or is Polaris specifically the node of resonance inside of Jesse? Because when Jesse finds the Hedron chamber, she speaks and acts as if she has found Polaris - like she's simply had Polaris on the phone all this time but now they're seeing each other for the first time in 17 years.
In the game's "plot point two" before the climactic final act, Jesse finds Hedron but is unable to prevent the Hiss assault from destroying it/them. I wonder, however, if Hedron knows what is coming and knows that things will work out anyway, or if it's truly just a catastrophe - still, either way, Jesse winds up discovering Polaris remains within her, despite the destruction of Hedron. That said, I don't think we hear her address Polaris as some other personality following that moment.
Still, what Hedron and Polaris share (aside from potentially "their entire identity") is that they counter-act the Hiss. Jesse's connection to Polaris makes her immune to the Hiss corruption, which tries to take her over shortly after she exits Trench's office but is rebuffed. The HRAs that Dr. Darling distributes as best as he can to everyone at the bureau (but clearly didn't have enough time to do so, and also came up against resistance from Trench - for reasons we'll touch on below) would act as signal boosters to Hedron, giving each person wearing their HRA the counter-tone to block the Hiss resonance and thus prevent their own corruption.
During the FBC's expedition to Slidescape 36, while they did take Hedron back to the Oldest House, Director Trench was infected by the Hiss. Unlike the fast-acting version we see during the game, the Hiss worked on Trench slowly, and does not appear to have been contagious in the same way (though the words of the Hiss Chant did start to work its way into his vocabulary). This likely went on for years, and gradually preyed upon Trench's paranoia, convincing him that Darling's research with Hedron would lead to disaster.
Fascinatingly, Trench seems to expect that Darling's work with Hedron is going to lead to the exact kind of parasitic, contagious madness that the Hiss is working into him. And it's his paranoia that Darling cannot be trusted that ultimately leads him to using the Slide Projector to open the way through one of the slides Jesse burned, which seems to kick off the Hiss Invasion.
The timeline here is not totally clear, but I'm inclined to believe that it's only shortly before Jesse arrives at the Oldest House that this all goes down - Trench opens the way to the Hiss, FBC agents start getting infected, and Trench makes his way back to his office from the Nostalgia Department before the Board (maybe) forces him to shoot himself - which we know happens seconds before Jesse walks into the office (Trench is alive in the first minutes of the game).
So, a couple questions arise:
Isn't it fascinating that Trench sees Hedron as the big interdimensional invader? It does give the writers a narrative tool - all of Trench's Hotline monologues talking about preparing for an oncoming invasion allow you to spend most of the game thinking he's one of the good guys (or "good" compared with The Hiss). But I also think it's curious when you consider what it means for resonances to cancel each other out.
If we think of HRAs as basically noise-cancelling headphones, this might give us pause about Hedron/Polaris. See, the Hiss is treated as something like a malevolent sound (even the name implies this). And do you know what sound noise-cancelling headphones create to cancel out noise?
The exact same sound.
To be clear, it's the exact same sound but inverted. What our ears and brains interpret as sound is actually pressure waves in the air (or water or whatever medium we're hearing in). Complex sounds have complex wave forms, but at a fundamental level they're just like other waves - ripples in a pond. These waves involve peaks and valleys - high pressure and low pressure, alternating between them to create different sounds. So, to cancel a sound out, you find the wave form of the sound and then you create the inverse - low pressure where the primary sound is high pressure, and high pressure where the primary sound is low pressure. The result is that the net pressure change is zero, just as if it were silent. This, incidentally, is why these headphones are better at cancelling very regular sounds like the drone of a jet engine but will typically not be very good at canceling out something like human speech, which is changing its wave form with each sound in sequence. You need a moment to record a wave cycle in order to create it inverse.
The thing is: if you were to record that inverse sound and play it back independently, you know what it would actually sound like? It would sound exactly like the original source.
That means that, if we assume that Hedron resonance and Hiss resonance cancel one another out in a similar way, then Hedron is literally the same as The Hiss.
Now, narratively that doesn't really seem to be the case, and again I think here we need to consider that the sonic interpretation of The Hiss and Polaris/Hedron is ultimately a metaphor, and one that might not be a perfect analogy.
Because as far as we can tell, Hedron/Polaris does not impose itself on others against their will.
What it does do is that it appears to act as a solid defense against The Hiss.
But what does it do in isolation?
Jesse carries a bit of that resonance with her, which is reinforced after she nearly falls to the Hiss. It's even possible that the vessel that was Hedron was only a vessel, and that its "death" merely meant that the source of that power entered Jesse instead. By the end of the game, Jesse is the source of the resonance that is keeping the rest of the FBC staff from getting taken over by the Hiss (which means no one goes home until the whole labyrinthine building is utterly cleansed, which seems to still be going on as of Alan Wake II - I don't even know if Estevez knows about the new Director yet).
And then there's Darling.
Trench utterly gives himself over to the Hiss, but in a similar way, Darling utterly gives himself over to Hedron. And the results are mysterious to say the very least.
By the time we get to the Oldest House, it seems Darling has vanished from our plane of existence. That is actually not too hard to imagine happening given that the Oldest House is home to many Thresholds to other worlds (oh, did I mention it's probably just the modern form of Yggdrasil?) But my sense is that Darling didn't just walk through some door - instead that he kind of transcended his corporeal form.
And he seems to have wound up in The Dark Place, but that's beyond the purview of this post.
It certainly seems as if we've got a "good" and an "evil" resonance, and from basically all human perspectives I think we can be confident that the Hiss is evil (even if it might not have any real conscious intent). Hedron/Polaris, as a protector, thus seems to be good, but there's a lot of ambiguity as to what that means, precisely.
The other question all of this raises is this:
Did Jesse accidentally create the Hiss?
This one's a long-shot, of course, and there's arguably more evidence that Alan Wake was the one who created the Hiss (as a sort of equivalent to the Dark Presence to set Jesse up as a hero) but while Alan's role in all of this remains unclear, what we do know about Jesse is that she burned the slides from the Slide Projector.
She chose not to burn number 36, presumably because she knew this is where Polaris came from, and either couldn't stand to cut Polaris off or thought that 36 would still be useful in some way.
But let's look at this:
Trench got infected by the Hiss first in Slidescape 36. But it was a subtle thing. Maybe a weak signal? Maybe Hedron was blocking out most of it. Interestingly, Slidescape 36 is said to be a place with no sound. Were Hedron and the Hiss actually both at full volume there, but entirely blocking one another out? Maybe there was a momentary slip that allowed the Hiss to enter Trench?
Still, during the Fadens' explorations of the slide worlds, they never encountered the Hiss - they certainly came across the monstrous Not-Mother. But it was one of the burned slides that Trench used to "let the Hiss in."
How? Why did that work?
Well, let's consider a visual clue: when we die in-game or when the Hiss is shown to be wielding its influence in cutscenes, the image we get is of this chaotic, goopy red, which is often dispelled by the kaleidoscopic green pattern of Polaris, such as when we cleanse a Control Point.
You know what that goopy red stuff looks like to me? It's a bit like melting, burning plastic. It's a bit like... well, a projector slide burning.
See, I wonder if Jesse's burning of the slides somehow corrupted the worlds that they connected to - or at least corrupted the slide's connection to those worlds. Maybe the warping of the slide caused it to connect to a version of the reality it was meant to connect to in which this monstrous warping of minds and reality took place.
There is a big asterisk to this theory, of course: Trench was first infected in Slidescape 36, which was the only slide that hadn't been burned. How did the Hiss get there in the first place if it was created by the burning of the slides?
There's also a big wild card in all of this: Dylan.
Dylan is the only person we know to have been infected by the Hiss but survived being "cleansed" by Jesse. Now, we could chalk this up to a number of things. First off, Dylan seems to be the only one who was knowingly and willingly infected with the Hiss. His resentment of Polaris and Jesse was so strong that he wanted to rebel by taking on this opposing force (the whole Prime Candidate program was utterly fucked on a moral and ethical level - much as I love Dr. Darling, he's got to answer for that). Furthermore, we can probably assume he's on par with Jesse as a parautilitarian, so that might also account for his relative resilience. (Though he was still physically affected by the Hiss - we see that his hair grows out while in a coma following the DLCs, which means that his cueball look was probably Hiss-related, and is actually a pretty good sign that he's truly been cleansed).
Polaris was a constant source of hope and resilience for Jesse, but it appears that it/she was more like a constant reminder of Dylan's feeling of abandonment, being forced to grow up watching Threshold Kids (also, consider that Dylan was 10 when the FBC took him in, meaning that even if Threshold Kids were not utterly terrifyingly creepy, it'd still be a pretty condescending style of show for a kid who would be heading to middle school pretty soon).
Control 2 doesn't have an announced release date, and given how recently we got Alan Wake II, I wouldn't expect to see it until 2025 at the absolute earliest. But I'm curious to see if some of these ideas are explored further. The one piece of concept art seemed to show floating, wrapped bodies on the streets of New York, which could mean the Hiss break out of the Oldest House, but I'm hoping we see the FBC in action against some other challenge.
Also, as a side note, I think at some point Sam Lake talked about how he'd like to make a medieval fantasy game. How cool would it be if you're playing some magic knight fighting dragons and stuff and you pick up some legendary sword and suddenly have a vision of a great inverted black pyramid?
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