Periodically, I re-watch (or at least re-listen to while playing computer games) Monty Zander's mind-blowingly elaborate "Beyond the Lake," a 5+ hour review and critique of Alan Wake II - a video essay that embraces the game's collaborative and mixed-media approach by itself integrating multiple original songs, animations, and even an interpretive dance routine. Much like the game itself, it's one of those works that does more than you thought the medium was capable of.
I haven't actually re-played Alan Wake II since beating its Final Draft new game plus mode in I think early 2024 (whenever it came out,) but the game lives rent free in my mind, as the saying goes. Distance in time from actually playing it has given my brain less fuel to speculate upon its deeper lore, but periodically I remember the feverish, corkboard-and-red-yarn theorizing that the game is built to inspire, and I feel a desire to dive back into it, if not in actually booting it up again and playing through once more, then in getting into that tin-foil-hat mode.
In Control, mention is made of Thomas Zane being a Finnish filmmaker, not the (presumably American) poet that we first met in Alan Wake 1. Jesse insists to her therapist that she knows him as a poet, even quoting the poem that Emile Hartman seemingly misinterpreted to inspire his work, but in her adulthood, Jesse knows him as the filmmaker.
Filmmaker Tom is perhaps the great enigma of Alan Wake II. While Mr. Door oozes mystery, in a sense, the mysteriousness is front-and-center, and seems to be something that he acknowledges. Tom, though, gaslights us. What the actual hell is this guy?
On a meta-level, it's disconcerting that he's sort of a more "real" person than Alan. Alan is of course played by two different actors, with Ilkka Villi providing the physical performance and Matthew Poretta providing the voice. The recording of Tom Zane and Casper Darling's meeting found in the Final Draft introduces this troubling implication that Alan might actually be a creation of these two - played by Villi and Poretta respectively, and in each case, the actor is the only one playing the part.
In meeting Tom, though, the guy cannot stop reciting poetry. He claims that he's just play-acting as the character he played in his most popular film, Tom the Poet. But it just does not seem trustworthy. Among the poems he quotes, some are found only on the This House of Dreams blog, a little ARG project I think possibly just created by Sam Lake alone, but which, if canonical, would have some grand implications.
My favorite theory regarding Tom Zane is that he's some kind of parasite - whether he's a real human person or some kind of Dark Place monster, I think that he's appropriated the identity of Tom Zane for his own purposes, and he seems to be moving on to Alan, casting himself as Alan in the film Yoton Yo.
If we are to assume that the Thomas Zane from the first game was a benevolent presence (something that is admittedly dubious given that he's the one who introduces us to Mr. Scratch in a manner that seems to imply he doesn't worry much about the harm Scratch can cause) it leaves poetry itself an ambiguous signifier.
When Alan visits the murder sites in the three primary locations in the Dark Place, we see poetry scrawled on the walls near the bodies or body-facsimiles of the "boss Taken" that Saga faces. Each death in the Dark Place is similar but distinct from the fates of these people in Bright Falls. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find clear screenshots of these poems on the walls of the Dark Place, and I genuinely don't remember if these are the same words as the Dark Poem that we find in the Final Draft.
The Dark Poem, or perhaps the three dark poems, are found only in the Final Draft. In Monty Zander's video, he has frequent collaborator Marina Ryan perform the three Dark Poems as verses in a song. which is now the way that I will inevitably always hear these words.
The author of these poems is up for debate: is the real Thomas Zane, still the poet, sending these out? Is this probably-fake Tom Zane, whose agenda remains so mysterious through the end of the game, the author? What are these poems or this poem trying to tell us?
Let's go line by line and read them to see if we can come up with some theories.
Dark Poem 1:
The writer of the first word
Not the writer of the last
with the terror of the light
and the shadow cast
Ok, so right away we've got an interesting question to consider: who is the writer of the first word? There's of course the Biblical idea that "In the beginning there was the Word," from one of the Gospels, which implies God is the ultimate author of reality (and ties into my fantasy/sci-fi philosophical idea about a world of words versus a world of numbers, but that's a tangent). In the most basic sense, though, as the story develops, Alan comes to realize that he needs to collaborate, and to let others into his creative process, in order to escape the cycle. His Dark Place trilogy began as a lonely, frankly solipsistic endeavor, but allowing Saga to become part of his process (not to mention all the other collaborators) allows him to ultimately emerge victorious in the end. That said, in a more sinister reading, if we link this to "parasite Tom," we have the idea of a new author taking over a project someone else began.
The second part of this verse does draw an interesting parallel with the Herald of Darkness song, which is that the brightness of the light is what allows shadows to be cast. As that song is warning us that Alan carries Scratch within him, being both Champion of Light and Herald of Darkness, that causal relationship between the two sides is a source of terror.
The third eye now opened
to project the night
This is the moment
to write
Well, we certainly get some third-eye imagery in the end of the game: Alan is shot with the bullet of light once he allows the Dark Presence to enter his head, and its glow appears similar to a third eye, a symbol often associated with wisdom and enlightenment, a kind of spiritual awareness.
But Alan's third eye projects light. Here, the third eye is opened to project the night. Is this the same ironic conflation of opposites, where that light allows him to project shadows?
I think we should also consider the following: film is a medium based on the projection of light, using the film itself to filter out some of that light in the form of colorful shadows that form images. The interplay of light and shadow is the very essence of film, which Parasite Tom is so firmly tied to. However, film is derived from photography, and that very same relationship between light and shadow is also the domain of Alice Wake.
Of course, Alan tried to just give up, to stop writing at one point in the hopes that at least he wouldn't harm anyone else. Ultimately, that decision was untenable - the story would be told one way or another.
This is the ritual
to lead you on
Your friends will meet him
when you are gone.
The latter half of this, of course, is the deeply cryptic and worrying words of diver Thomas Zane when he introduces Mr. Scratch at the end of the first game. Zane's "don't mind him" comment is worrying because Mr. Scratch's clearly sinister vibe doesn't seem like something a benevolent supernatural force should be so quick to dismiss.
This whole chorus is what we hear echoes of the Cult of the Word chanting, but it's never 100% clear to me to what extent the echoes that Alan experiences in the Dark Place are actual, real crimes that the real Alex Casey investigated, or if they're closer to the novels that Alan wrote, or if they're neither, and are instead "rough drafts" of the crises Saga will encounter in Return. With the Cult of the Word, there's a sense that this is an occult ritual to lead a victim (Casey maybe? Alan maybe?) to their doom, but simultaneously, we know that Alice is working behind the scenes to try to lead Alan through this confrontation with the darkest parts of his nature to bring him to enlightenment. (Crazy thought, is the "him" that his friends will meet actually the evolved, enlightened Alan, and "you" his current, struggling self? Was this never about Scratch, actually?)
Dark Poem 2:
Lost on the shore
between the forest and the ocean,
the owl and the deer
reflected in motion.
The game is all about dualities, and here we create a duality between the Forest - Bright Falls and its environs - and the Ocean - the Dark Place - the two places where the game takes place. Both are types of places that have a grand and mythic significance in the collective unconscious, both of which can be mysterious, but in different ways. Here, the forest represents familiar, mundane reality, while the ocean is this realm of imagination. Likewise, the owl and the deer are, of course, symbols representing Alan and Saga, respectively. Alan's writers' room has a taxidermied owl, and Saga's field office (and Mind Place) has a mounted deer's head. Creatures of day and night, a predator and an herbivore. Now, I don't totally get what "reflected in motion" means, though perhaps this is simply talking about how the two reflect one another as the co-authors of this story.
In his room, he will hurt her
In hers he is caught
His story ends
Her story does not
Boy, this feels freaking potent, but it's not easy to interpret. If this is still referring to Alan and Saga, the two rooms could represent their mental rooms: when we play as Alan, we can always flash back to the Writer's Room, and the implication is that this is actually the "real" Alan who is writing the story of the one that's traversing the Dark Place. With Saga, we can transfer to the Mind Place, which takes the form of her field office at the Bright Falls lodge.
By writing her into the story, and creating this narrative where Saga is broken by the loss of her daughter, he has done a whole lot to hurt her. But does she "catch" him in her Mind Place? That I can't really say so definitively.
In a weird way, the idea of whose story ends reflects the non-Final Draft ending - in that, Alan is dead while Saga waits as her phone rings to find out if Logan is alive, and so we get an ending and a non-ending. But the Final Draft kind of inverts this: Alan awakens from this seeming death, now the Master of Many Worlds, while Saga gets a clear answer that yes, Logan is alive and well and they should be able to reunite.
On a meta level, though, I could also see this as telling us that Alan's story has reached its conclusion: I honestly think it would be fine if there's no Alan Wake III, because he can continue to be a character in future Remedy Connected Universe titles. Saga, however, has only had her first brush with the Weird, and whether she goes to work for the FBC or just continues to explore her parautilitarian powers, I could imagine she's got more story to tell (like exploring her relationship with her father, Mr. Door).
This is the ritual
to lead you on
Your friends will meet him
when you are gone.
Again, the chorus is the same, its second half being the words that Thomas Zane (poet/diver) left Alan with at the end of the first game.
Dark Poem 3:
A pale balloon in the sky
float and sink deeper.
Night springs when bright
falls for this sleeper.
The surface disturbed
the reflection now a traitor
in the cavity of the skull
turned to a crater.
This is the ritual
to lead you on.
Your friends will meet him
when you are gone.
The "pale balloon in the sky" is a big question mark for me. It could be a description of the moon, but what significance that would have is not something I can think of. I do find it interesting that we see kind of inversion here: float and sink deeper, which mirrors the Herald of Darkness chorus line "diving deep to the surface." In the song, we have a word associated with descent but a destination above us, while here, we have a word associated with ascent and a destination (deeper) suggesting downward movement. Filmmaker Tom does quote one of the shoebox poems from This House of Dreams when we first meet him that describes "a window in the floor and a door in the ceiling," and this idea of disorientation is a big motif throughout the game, especially Alan's half of it.
Night springs when bright falls of course both references the TV show that Alan worked on and the town that both games take place within. And, as one could have thought since the first game, the names of both seem to mirror or complement each other. Brightness falling and night springing up are the twin elements of a cycle where day turns to night. Perhaps this also refers to the dark side of Alan taking over, as we later see it does when he becomes Scratch - if he's the "sleeper" named here.
Now, the notion of a surface being disturbed, revealing a reflection as a traitor, is really, really interesting. Tom, of course, looks just like Alan, despite clearly being a different person (I'm not willing to commit to the notion that they're multiversal doppelgangers, as suggested in Time Breaker). Of course, when we look into a still body of water, we can see our own reflection as clear as a mirror. But if that water is disturbed, the reflection is broken. This will ruin the mirror effect, but might it also allow us to see past the surface of the water and look past to what is actually under the water? Whether literal or not, that's a really, really potent image.
The idea of a "skull turned to a crater" feels very much tied to Alan's fate to be shot in the head - which actually happens to him twice (at least,) the first time by himself, each version thinking the other is Scratch, and the second time by Saga with the bullet of light. Both moments are tied to his taking in the Dark Presence, first unwillingly, and next as part of a sacrificial ploy. (I was about to reference something about "her heart is a crater and we have filled it" only to remember that's a World of Warcraft thing.)
And we end once again with the usual refrain.
Ultimately, this kind of cryptic poetry is designed to drive fans like me insane trying to piece it all together. Alan Wake's story does certainly have a lot of mystery box elements, though I hope that there's some intentionality to it all. We may never actually know the true nature of Thomas Zane, though I really think the recurring poetry within Alan Wake II continues to cast doubt on the notion that Tom the Filmmaker is telling the truth about Tom the Poet.
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