I had a dog named Becky when I was nine years old. Barely a year after we got her, she ran out of the house and into the street and was hit by a car. She got out through the basement door, which my dad had left open because he was doing some work down there. He hadn't expected her to be able to get into the basement, because the interior door to the stairs down there, in the kitchen, was typically closed. It was no one's fault.
Looking back, I wish we had done a better job disciplining her. She was still pretty young, not yet two years old. Losing her, especially given that I'd lost my first cat Choco, also to a car, when I was three, actually left us too traumatized to get any other pets when I was growing up. Only after I moved in with my current roommates did I live with another pet, a cat, and since then we adopted two stray kittens who were born outside of our building (both of whom are quite big adults now).
Anyway, when we had Becky, we were usually very careful with her and had a system to prevent exactly the sort of thing that ultimately happened to her. In my childhood home, where my Dad still lives after my Mom died, both the front and back doors have what we call "mud rooms," with an inner door leading into the house and and outer door that goes outside. If we weren't taking Becky with us (such as when my sister and I were going off to school) we'd make sure that we sealed the "airlock" by getting into the mud room and closing the inner door, ensuring that Becky was still inside, before we'd open the outer door.
But this is about Control 2.
Spoilers for Control, as well as Alan Wake II (mostly the Lake House expansion)
In the Oceanview Motel and Casino, there are several symbols on the doors. Typically, we only exit via the inverted black triangle door, which returns us to the Oldest House. But there are other symbols, like a series of concentric rectangles, which to me looks like a bunch of doorways aligned with one another. There's a black spiral, which seems to lead into Alan Wake's Writer's Room (or possibly Tom Zane's hotel room? Are they actually the same thing, somehow?) There's a vertical white pyramid, which we don't know much about (though in this very moment I somehow feel like it could be related to the Blessed Organization).
One of these symbols, though, is an odd shape - a kind of pair of concentric Cs with a little tail coming out of the bottom. The C-shapes, or perhaps more accurately just a pair of circles with gaps in them, aren't oriented the same way.
In The Lake House DLC for Alan Wake II, Estevez goes through this door and emerges, apparently in the Panopticon in the Oldest House.
The implications of her visit there - and whether she caused something or merely witnessed it - remain in the utter depths of mystery. This is, after all, something like Alan Wake II's post-credits scene. But it does seem like there's some kind of loss of containment within the Oldest House. We see, from Dylan, flashes of what looks like it could be the Hiss and even the Mold escaping and spreading across New York.
The shape, though, has me thinking: These two gapped rings feel like a very rudimentary way of containing something. You could imagine that if it's something like light, and you had walls in these shapes that were covered by some very matte, light-absorbing material, you could keep things in the center in pitch darkness. There's no direct line from the center to the outside that doesn't hit one of these barriers, but it still allows something that can turn to reach it without impediment.
In other words, this is a symbol that, I think, refers to a kind of containment that doesn't restrict access.
Now, of course, if something doesn't need a direct line to the outside, this will do a piss-poor job of containing it.
Getting specific with what it could all mean is a fool's errand at this point. Many hints from Alan Wake II and the original Control will surely seem more obvious in retrospect.
Anyway, I think the second game is certainly being hinted at being about a loss of containment. While that should mean Jesse can finally get out of the building (what is it with Remedy and trapping their protagonists?) it does seem to imply that there's grave danger for the entire world.
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