If you kind of liked Casper Darling... Control Resonant might change that.
Obviously, Darling's role in Dylan's "training" in the Prime Candidate Program always carried with it his complicity in the ethical abyss that was taking a 10-year-old orphan and locking him up in a government facility and robbing him of any semblance of a normal life. But in the first game, Darling feels in a lot of ways like the good cop to Trench's bad cop, and his efforts to prepare for the Hiss invasion give him something of a heroic characterization.
But good cop or bad, we must remember that all cops are bastards.
Let's get into spoiler territory:
Detecting Patterning within the Oldest House, Dylan returns to the building he spent most of his life within and returns to the Prime Candidate Training wing, where the abject horror of what he was subjected to is laid out bare. Extensive training with no breaks, deliberate emotional distressing (to draw out theoretical paranatural abilities) and eventually a security guard, Roberts, assigned directly to him who, through transcripts, we find was almost certainly physically abusive. (Upon reading that, I found myself hoping that Dylan killed him, and, well, yes. Not a fair thing for a teenager to have to remember doing, but you know what, fuck Roberts).
Darling's role in all of this was not naive or ignorant - we see him get truly agitated that Dylan wants any sort of accommodation or even that any of his staff want to cut the kid some slack. We find records from Andrew Laine, a researcher on the team, who tries to act as whistleblower on Darling's actions, but Darling has him removed from the project and even orders a campaign to discredit him. Darling was a straight up villain, obsessed with getting his results and preparing for Trench's eventual downfall (evidently he was already starting to mutter parts of the Hiss incantation years before the invasion). Perhaps the one, singular saving grace we might afford Darling is that he felt forced into dehumanizing Dylan for the sake of safeguarding the FBC and the world, but obviously that didn't really work out, now, did it. The relatively free and at least less-traumatized Jesse wound up taking on the role while Dylan gave no resistance to the Hiss as essentially a means of suicide.
But Darling is not the only one who is given a villainous recharacterization: as I had predicted, the Patterning is not actually new: it's Hedron. Or rather, it's a Hedron, as we learn that this being was one of a "species" of resonance entities. It turns out that the Hedron whom Darling had found and which died near the end of the first game was actually the same one Jesse and Dylan met as children, recovered from the Ordinary AWE site and brought to the Oldest House. While this one was dying and weak, the one that now seeks to take over our reality is at full strength.
And it seems that the Hedrons and the Hiss were already at war - the conflict in our reality is just one battlefront in a war across many realities. The Slidescape where Jesse and Dylan met Polaris was likely one of their many battlefields. The Hedrons appear to be far more powerful, though the Hiss presumably are hard to eliminate because of their rapid infectious nature.
And lo and behold! It turns out that there is a third enemy faction, as we now fight Hedron enemies (the usual "enemies respawning" animation after fighting a boss while trying to sever the link between Hedron and the Oldest House now includes Hedron entities respawning). I'm curious to see what this means for the other zones.
Things have gotten dire enough that this feels much more like a plot point two than a midpoint shift moment for the game's story, but it's also kind of crazy to introduce a whole new monster faction this late in the game. (Assuming I'm right about where I am in the game.)
Also, the degree to which people are pretty sure Jesse is dead despite there being a lot more left in the game makes me more confident we'll find a way to save her (though again, I think the Board's "Final Boss" comment at the start is a bit foreboding).
Oh, also, the Board!
It's confirmed that the Board isn't the big black pyramid - we don't see that at all in this game, with the Board instead speaking to us via the giant Aberrant in the Gap, and at one point the Board confirms that they lost that asset/office.
I'm feeling less confident we'll get much resolution with the Blessed Organization. Perhaps this is just meant to be an interesting background thing, but it does feel like something we ought to get at least some development on. Perhaps if they make a third RCU series, they'll play a more prominent role, something that can afford to be a bit more human-level than Control.
Show me what Barry Wheeler is up to! It's been 16 years, guys!
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