The Dark Place and Time

 If you squint, you can start to put together a timeline for the events of Alan Wake II.

I hadn't really caught this on my first go-around, nor even when playing through the Final Draft. But there's a chain of causality that connects the live-action scenes following each of Alan's journeys through the Dark Place version of his and Alice's apartment and subsequent horror within the Writer's Room.

But maybe we need to talk about layers first.

The Dark Place is a realm in which the line between fiction and reality blurs. And while I think those of us in the real world can step away from the story and feel confident that this is all just a video game made by a Finnish studio, I also think the nested realities of Alan Wake II actually kind of have to start with us, here, in the real world.

Is this the real world?

Philosophically, of course, there are people who argue that it isn't. The Gnostic worldview is one in which the true reality and the true God are hidden from us because the so-called physical, material universe was created by a false god known as the demiurge whose act trapped our souls in these flawed, mortal bodies. The demiurge in this cosmology is often presented as malevolent, but in some interpretations, this false creator is actually just clueless and thinks that they are the capital-G God, and might privately wonder why their creation is so broken.

Generally, this Gnostic conception of reality assumes that if we were able to access the true universe beyond our flawed false one, that we'd all be a lot better off. What form that takes, though, is kind of beyond comprehension.

    In fact, if you ever played the Elder Scrolls games, you might see how this worldview can play out in a fictional setting. By the time of Skyrim, the high elves of the Aldmeri Dominion believe that the god Talos is a false one, not only because he's a former mortal, but because they think that worship of him is keeping peoples' souls trapped in the physical world. They waged war upon the empire and forced the humans into a treaty that would outlaw worshipping Talos. To the Nords of Skyrim, though, Talos is a very important god because he is said to have been one of their people before his apotheosis. And they, and humans in general in that setting, think that the world existing is actually a good thing.

But we're already down a pretty deep rabbit hole that is a prelude to an introductory idea. Let's get back on track.

Within the game itself, at least in the sections that take place in the Dark Place, there's an argument to be made that nothing that happens outside of Alan's pause-menu-like Writer's Room is, technically, fiction. The events of his half of the game are the text of the novel Initiation, which he needs to write before he can move on to Return and thus accomplish his goal of leaving the Dark Place.

But the text of Return is the central McGuffin of Initiation. He's not supposed to have written it yet, right? But in the story of Initiation, he discovers a page from it, and comes to believe that Mr. Scratch found it and edited it.

The tragedy here is that, ultimately, those edits are actually Alan from a different cycle in his Dark Place experience. And the Alan that finds that second Alan and shoots him, believing him to be Scratch (just as the second Alan believes the third to be Scratch) is from a further cycle still.

The timing of this is all over the place.

In Saga's half of the game, we get a more linear experience that is more similar to how we generally experience life and time and causality. But her interactions with Alan - her overlaps with him - are also not in the same sequence.

In Alan's half of the game, we have three main passes through the cycle. These center around his investigations into, in the following order, Caldera Street Station, the Oceanview Hotel, and the Poet's Theatre. Each is preceded by a visit to the talk show In Between with Mr. Door, but these three locations are the main "chunks" of his story, corresponding with the chapters Casey, Room 665, and Zane's Film.

For our purposes, we'll call these cycles 1, 2, and 3.

Now, still sticking with Alan's personal experience, each visit to these murder sites unlocks a chance to go to Parliament Tower, the building where he lived with his wife, Alice.

And, I believe, the states of the apartment in these three sequences also seem to follow a sensible order - Alice is planning her big art installation, then the exhibit has fully taken over her living space, and then finally, the apartment is packed up after her apparent suicide (the few remaining moving boxes labeled "Blessed").

In each of these apartment scenes, the projected title screen of her exhibit gives Alan a passage into the Writer's Room.

But, we should draw a distinction here: the writer's room scenes are part of the plot of Initiation. I believe we can assume that there is another Alan at least one layer "up" who is writing all of this as it happens.

Now, here's the first instance where the sequence gets mixed up.

The Alan who has just gone to the Oceanview arrives in the Writer's Room and finds a manuscript for Return, all written and finished and horrible. Believing that this was written by Mr. Scratch, he furiously and feverishly and desperately begins making edits - edits that we'll later see when Saga finds pages of it.

Next, Alan 3 arrives, enraged and destroyed thinking that Scratch drove his wife to suicide, and sees "his doppelganger" making edits to the manuscript. He's already shot one doppelganger in the head (in this case Tom Zane, though Zane seems none the worse for wear, thanks to his control over his live-action medium) and so he doesn't hesitate to shoot what he thinks is Scratch.

However, upon realizing that he's seen this scene before, 3 clutches a page from the manuscript and collapses - moments before he comes to on the beach of Cauldron Lake, where Saga and Casey find him. We'll get to that.

It's only after this, with 2 in his chair, bullet hole in his forehead, that 1 comes in and sees the aftermath of the tragedy he is only just beginning his journey to experiencing.

So, 1, 2, 3 becomes 2, 3, 1.

Our experience of the story, of course, begins with Saga. It begins with Return. It begins with the very story that was birthed within the fiction of Initiation.

And this is where the layers get complicated.

Because in a certain way, Saga's journey through the story of Return is contained within the Matryoshka layers. Arguably, it sits at the very center of them. But in another way, she exists in "reality," (at least where the game is concerned). That raises a rather dreadful question, but one we'll touch on later.

Saga goes through her own journey, but over the course of it, she interacts with Alan through the "overlaps." There's some intentional confusion: the Alan we see her and Casey find on the beach is hinted to secretly be Mr. Scratch instead, and that Alan is actually still stuck in the Dark Place.

But as we've seen, time doesn't work the same way. As we discover later, he's Mr. Scratch only in the sense that Alan was always Mr. Scratch - the darkness that he carried within him given a name and externalized as something to defeat.

So she is speaking to an Alan whom the one she found would think of as someone in the past.

And the sequence is not the same.

Saga's confrontations with the "elite taken" for lack of a better word - Robert Nightingale, Officers Thornton and Mulligan, and Cynthia Weaver, follow their own logic in her story - the story of Return. But their Dark Place versions - the eerie echoes of the real cases (and don't get me started on how real the Cult of the Word actually was in the real world, and whether the real Alex Casey actually investigated them) happen in a different sequence.

When Saga investigates them, she's following the journeys of Alans 1, 3, and then 2.

1 2 3

2 3 1

1 3 2

    You'd almost want the pattern to feel balanced somehow, like if there was a perfect rotation. But no, it's all just a little twisted.

The thing is, we also see how time gets bent for others. Tor and Odin Anderson delve into Cauldron Lake after Saga falls down, and after Alan briefly escapes. But from the very beginning of Alan's story, The Old Gods of Asgard are playing Mr. Door's show.

There's also something very strange about the Old Gods' appearance in the Dark Place. While in the Final Draft, Saga has a last talk with Tor and Odin, in which her grandfather and great-uncle say that they've patched things up with Mr. Door (though never stating what is very heavily implied, though I guess not ever fully confirmed, that Warlin Door is Saga's father,) and in which Tor and Odin are the same old codgers, when we actually see them on the talk show, they are younger (Odin is played by Marko Saaresto, who was 52 when the game came out, compared with Harry Ditson, whose age I can't find on IMDB, but who appears to be in his 70s).

    There's obviously a meta reason for this - the real rock band Poets of the Fall stand in for the Old Gods of Asgard, writing and performing the music of the Old Gods. Marko Saaresto is an old friend of Remedy creative director Sam Lake's, hence their ongoing collaborations. This was the first time in which the band members from Poets of the Fall appeared in a Remedy game.

But, while we can't ignore the meta story given the nature of the game's subject matter, if we step one layer deeper into the fiction, it does create some interesting questions. The Anderson Brothers are the two remaining members of the band, while "Fat" Bob Balder apparently died years ago, and no one seems to know what became of Loki Darkens. But on In Between with Mr. Show, Bob appears as part of the band, raising the question of just how he is there.

So, where do we go with all of this?

Alan Wake II is a work of art, and as such, it's the product of a great deal of revision and recreation. Things get shuffled around, and the artists don't work on it in a linear fashion.

It's honestly one of the difficult things of creating narrative art - at least from my perspective as a writer - because the finished product that inspires us to make our own art usually appears like an elegant, singular piece from start to finish. In fact, it's often a jumbled mess. I'm reminded of how the movie Die Hard, arguably one of the tightest, most narratively satisfying and well-plotted classics of the action genre, was actually a total hodgepodge when they were shooting it, with extensive rewrites, and that the product that came out in 1988 was only possible through brilliant editing.

Before the Final Draft, Alan ends the game with a revelation: "It's not a loop, it's a spiral." He's terrified that he's caught in an endless cycle of terror and suffering. And that relates to the creative process - I can tell you, as someone who has been working on a novel for years now, it can be horrible just thinking about all the changes you need to make, and then all the changes you need to make to fix the problems that those first changes made, and so on and so forth.

But the weird thing is that he's also crafting a story that touches these dark, frustrating feelings. The Alans 1, 2, and 3 are all characters in the story of Initiation. Their causal relationships with one another don't have to respect the linearity of time because, on a fundamental level, the true Alan - or a true Alan - is actually writing all of them into existence. He might also be experiencing things through their eyes,  getting caught up in the narrative and feeling as if he is existing in those layers of reality. But...

Isn't that kind of what fiction is all about?

When you die in the game on Alan's side of things, there's a horrible, flashing scene of a bloody Alan bleeding out, but then a cutscene plays: Alan gasping, jumping back from his typewriter. He got caught in the scene. He wrote something he didn't mean to, or at least didn't expect to. It won't work for the story. He's got to try again.

One of the simplest tricks that they taught us in screenwriting school was the fact that you could write a pay-off before you wrote the set-up. To explain:

There's something deep in the human psyche that likes to see something brought up, introduced, and noted, and then to have that element fade into the background, not truly forgotten but pushed outside of one's active consciousness, and then to see it brought back and resolved in a way that is simultaneously unexpected but also totally logical.

But the thing is, it's the cheapest trick in the book. When you're writing a story - be it a screenplay, a novel, or any other narrative - you have the opportunity to travel through time. If the climax of my story requires, for example, that my protagonist be able to identify someone they know by some telltale sign, perhaps they notice a limp or a scar or something like that. I don't need to have set that up, though: I can put it in as I'm writing the climax, and then in revisions and rewrites, I find the place earlier in the narrative where I can make the existence of that identifier, even really luxuriate over it as a seemingly throwaway detail. Perhaps when the reader or audience experiences the story, they'll get that rush of euphoria and satisfaction in seeing that set-up paid off, but as the author, it's not about plotting it all out in advance: it's about knowing how to connect the parts of the story.

Now, this isn't something you can do in a series. If you've released an earlier entry - say, 13 years ago - you're going to need to live with the state of that released piece of work as it stands (or, if you're George Lucas, you can somehow wipe the existence of the earlier versions of the story to replace with the version you currently prefer).

And that, I think, is where the convoluted, looping time of Alan Wake's universe hits a complication: Thomas Zane.

In Alan Wake II, Tom Zane (the name he seems to prefer) sounds nothing like the one we found in the first game. And the fact that Zane looks just like Alan (minus the beard, but that's relatively simple to accomplish) raises a lot of questions. It's possible that every character we meet in the Dark Place that looks like Ilkka Villi is some iteration of Alan - indeed, as some have pointed out, the "Restless Shadows" that Alan fights in the Dark Place, usually obscured through Remedy's beloved blurring effects (previously seen with the Hiss in Control,) are, when seen clearly, actually also versions of Alan. Are these time-displaced versions of him? Or is that even how we should think about our Alans 1, 2, and 3?

What is Tom Zane? Is he some later version of Alan, paradoxically guiding his older self? That's a theory some have put forth, but it also seems that our 1, 2, and 3 iterations of Alan aren't strictly sequential - they seem to be kind of simultaneous, or rather, woven into the overall narrative of Initiation as Alan revises and rewrites the story.

In a manner that might be genius, the folks at Remedy have kind of given themselves full license to retcon and contradict themselves, but it all seems intentional enough to be brilliant rather than frustrating.