Now that I'm back after my winter holiday and have had a couple days of downtime to get back into my playthrough of Alan Wake II's New Game Plus mode, The Final Draft, I've been theorizing. I just finished Zane's Film, which means that I've basically just got the final battle at Cauldron Lake - though I'm still vainly hoping that I can wait for a patch or fix to let Saga collect all of the Cult Stashes and the second inventory upgrade (interestingly, I was able to get the third one in Bright Falls after some update/reset).
The Final Draft has definitely made some additions and changes, even if, for the vast majority of the game, it plays the same. But I wanted to talk about a particular pair of videos that appear in it whose descriptions themselves are somewhat spoilery (though they are teased in the Final Draft trailer).
But let's put this behind a spoiler cut anyway. Spoilers for Alan Wakes 1 & 2 and Control
Possibly my favorite element of Control is the various film strips left behind by FBC Head of Research Casper Darling. Darling only ever appears in live action, and is played by Matthew Poretta, the voice actor for Alan Wake. Indeed, the two central leadership figures of the FBC before Jesse arrives are, in fact, portrayed by actors who provided the voices for previous titular Remedy characters - James McCaffrey played Director Zachariah Trench, who dies moments before Jesse walks into his office at the beginning of Control, and is seen regularly via The Hotline.
Likely before we even arrive at The Oldest House (though possibly mere hours before,) Darling, in an effort to escape the coming onslaught of the Hiss and discover a better way to counter them, exposes himself fully to the resonance of the being he calls Hedron, which seems to be its own sapient, sentient resonance that is related to or another iteration of the being that lives within Jesse, which she calls Polaris.
It's implied that this full exposure caused Darling to transcend our mundane reality, and by the end of Control, it's left ambiguous what exactly happened to him - though I favor the interpretation that his goofy "Dynamite" music video, which Jesse finds in an iteration of the Oceanview Motel and Casino, is truly him, reaching out to her and encouraging her to overcome the Hiss' attempt to take over her mind and to fight back against it.
But Darling makes no appearance in the Foundation or AWE expansions, and the FBC moves on under Director Faden with Emily Pope succeeding Darling as head of Research.
In the "vanilla" version of Alan Wake II, we get two glimpses of Dr. Darling - the first is that Mr. Door appears to be reading a copy of Darling's book: My Interpretations of Many Worlds," which we find in Door's dressing room. Later, when we meet with Tom Zane in "The House of Zane," aka the film version of Room 665 of the Oceanview Hotel (and stick a pin in that,) he appears briefly on the TV before we get a tiny glimpse of Jesse Faden also looking in. (The timing of Jesse's appearance is also an interesting question: in Control's AWE, Jesse does get a glimpse through the spiral door of the Oceanview Motel and Casino that seems to show her a conversation between Alan and Tom, but whether this is just a "newer draft" of that conversation or a separate one is beyond my ability to discern.)
The Final Draft, though, adds two more Darling videos, both found in the Oceanview Hotel, though one is only after you return to the hotel following the confrontation with Tom Zane that begins "Zane's Film."
The first video, found I believe in a room on the second floor (I think you might get some tiny fragment of it in the initial playthrough) has Darling attempting to figure out where he is - it seems clear that he is in the Dark Place, but exactly what part of it is unclear. He's rigged a radio with a coat-hanger antenna to try to zero in on the source of a signal, but what's most fascinating here is that he seems to recognize the New Game Plus as a different iteration of the loop - he says something has changed that has made the signal clearer, allowing him to reach us (Alan) through the TV (though not as a two-way communication) and for him to hear some iteration of Alan's endless narration (remember that everything we're seeing in Alan's half of the game - and arguably Saga's half as well - is really just an interpretation of what Alan is writing in the Writer's Room).
Darling speculates that the realm in which he has found himself is sustained by a figure he refers to as "The Dreamer," and when he finds the frequency to listen to Alan's narration, he speculates that this could be the voice of the Dreamer - and then, in a moment at first merely odd and remarkable and then, potentially very puzzling and even troubling, he notes that the voice sounds a bit like him.
Now, of course, there's a meta joke here: Matthew Poretta is the voice of Alan Wake along with fully portraying Casper Darling. I'm sure his casting in Control, along with James McCaffrey and Courtney Hope (who had appeared in Quantum Break as Beth Wilder) was likely just a normal case of a studio and casting director favoring actors they had had good collaborations with in the past. So this could easily just be a cheeky joke about the fact that, well, of course they'd sound alike - it's the same actor!
But the second video makes this connection perhaps more meaningful and intentional than a simple metatextual joke.
Tom Zane (Tom, rather than Thomas, notably - Thomas Zane, the poet, is said to be a fictional character Tom Zane, the avant-garde filmmaker/actor, portrayed in his most famous movie. Thomas Zane, funnily enough, was voiced by James McCaffrey in the first Alan Wake, but not doing a gruff hardboiled detective) is played by Ilkka Villi, who provides the physical performance for Alan Wake. Villi lip-syncs to Matthew Poretta's voice acting in the live-action segments, but as Tom Zane (actually Seine, but Americanized) he uses his own voice (Villi is a fluent English speaker, but does have a bit of a Finnish accent).
Tom Zane is one of the biggest enigmas in the game (rivaled perhaps only by Mr. Door,) but he is the guest-star in Darling's second video.
In this video, Darling calculates that he's been in the Dark Place (assuming that's actually where he is, even) for 665 days, and has come to the conclusion that, because of the subjective nature of the Dark Place - where the world contorts to confirm his hypotheses - that his scientific, empirical approach to exploring it is failing him. He postulates that what he needs to do is find an artist - someone who can think more intuitively and creatively. Practically in that instant, Tom Zane (whom Alan just shot in the head, but only in a film that Tom already had control over, and was thus unharmed) appears in the black void where we had been seeing Darling.
Just as Darling decided he needed an artist, an artist showed up. Convenient, no? Zane compliments Darling on his figure (which could be a joking reference to the reaction Control players had upon realizing what good shape Matthew Poretta was when he started appearing in his boxers and a tight t-shirt when Darling was shedding his clothing after his Hedron resonance exposure - but I almost wonder if Darling is gay/bi/otherwise attracted to men, and if Zane is trying to appeal to him on a seductive level). In another moment that could just be a joke, though, Darling comments that Zane looks familiar, while Zane comments that Darling sounds familiar.
Again, this could be reading way too much into this, and it could just be a little joke - after all, here we have Matthew Poretta and Ilkka Villi - the two actors who collectively portray Alan Wake.
But if there's one thing that this series, and this game in particular, emphasize, it's that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question about the influence that reality and Alan's writing have on one another.
As a side note, I feel like there's probably some significance to the fact that Saga's and Alan's three main chapters/levels don't sync up in the same order; both begin with Nightingale and the heart, but Alan sends the record to help Saga with the Old Gods chapter second, and sends the deer mask for Local Girl third, even though Saga does Local Girl before Old Gods. I don't know if the only reason here is to emphasize how time doesn't really work the same way in the Dark Place, or if there's something deeper to this.
Given that nonlinearity of the timeline, though, I wonder if there's greater significance to this.
In theory, writing something in the Dark Place to make it real in the real world (or "real world,") you can't just make up new people whole cloth. But how does that work?
Is it possible that Alan is somehow a creation of Tom Zane and Casper Darling? Could he be the product of their art-and-science collaboration in the Dark Place? Is that why he looks like the former and sounds like the latter?
Or is there a kind of synchronicity where these connections occur without a direct line of cause and effect?
Let's consider Alex Casey.
As we know, Alex Casey is the Remedy Verse's version of Max Payne - the rights to which still belong to Rockstar. But Alex Casey is also a fictional creation of Alan's - the hardboiled detective that made Alan a successful writer. But also, as we learn in Alan Wake II, Alex Casey is a real FBI agent.
It's implied that the novels Alan wrote were loosely based on some kind of vision that he was having of the cases that the real Alex Casey was investigating.
In Alan's levels in the game, Alan is following cases being investigated by Alex Casey. But... are these just his fictional novels, with his fictional Casey? Or are these real cases the real Casey investigated? Because I do think that Casey really did investigate a Cult of the Word that was killing people in New York. And yet, it almost seems as if the cases we're looking at in the game can't be quite like what was happening in New York, if for no other reason that it's weird that the people Casey interviews are also people we find in Bright Falls - unless their appearance in Bright Falls was a case of Alan recycling these people...
It's enough to make your head spin.
On top of all of this, the Alex Casey movies that Barry is producing in Los Angeles are, in a sort of odd conceit, using an actor by the name of... Sam Lake to give Casey's visual performance. (The idea that a film series would use a dub-and-lip-sync approach is a bit absurd, but we'll go with it.
Now, you could argue that "Sam Lake" is something of a fictional construct - Sami Jarvi uses that as his professional name as the Creative Director at Remedy Studios (Jarvi is the Finnish word for lake, so it's a direct translation of his name).
Anyway, Alex Casey is a composite like Alan Wake is - with Sam Lake providing the visual and James McCaffrey the voice. But did Alan's writing of those novels conjure the real FBI agent into existence, or did the real FBI agent's existence inspire the creation of the fictional character?
In fact, even Sam Lake gets to fully portray a version of Alex Casey - the Finnish version who appears in Zane's film Yöton Yö. But the... maybe real, maybe fictional FBI agent is shocked to find himself in the film.
I think it's ambiguous if the Casey that confronts us in the Dark Place - dying both times we meet - is purely a fictional construct, or if the real Casey, who goes into the Dark Place toward the end of the game, has become his hardboiled counterpart and is "playing" that version of himself (the fact that he dies multiple times seems like it's not a problem given that this is all happening in drafts of Alan's Initiation manuscript).
Casey's situation is ambiguous - there are four or five "levels" on which the man seems to exist. Alan, himself, is divided against himself in the Dark Place - it's implied that much of his struggle over the course of the game is that he keeps finding other aspects of himself and assuming they're Mr. Scratch, and in lashing out against them, he essentially is becoming Mr. Scratch in those moments.
So, is it possible that, just on one level of reality, Alan Wake is himself a creation of two figures who are working together to escape the Dark Place? But in being created, he is no less a valid and real person himself, the reality of his history no less valid.
In the first game's DLCs, The Signal and The Writer, we discover that different aspects of Alan are embodied separately and can work at cross-purpose. My sense is that this notion became the foundation for Alan's experiences in Alan Wake II.
Tom Zane sure seems kind of sinister in this game (and, somewhat hilariously, seems terrified of cops, as he flees both Jesse - who isn't strictly a cop, per se - and Tim Breaker - who very much is but is unlikely to consider Zane under his jurisdiction). But Darling I'm inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt - while he certainly had some red in his ledger thanks to his terrible failures to bring Dylan Faden up as a well-adjusted person, he does not seem to be someone who ever operates with malice). Should we be worried about Zane's designs on Darling?
Now, I think it's important to note that I suspect that the narrative designers and writers for these games likely don't have concrete answers to all of these questions. Indeed, I think that most art needs to leave some questions open to interpretation. I'm sure that these identity crises grew out of the practical oddities of making video games, and decisions that date back as far as 2001 (the year the first Max Payne game came out).
But I kind of love that by embracing this stuff, Sam Lake and his people have given themselves a lot of fuel to make maybe the biggest mind fuck of a video game I've ever played.
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