[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[Alardem]

What were your first reactions when you saw the Wretch in the children's bed?

"Awwwww, so keeewt!!"

Seriously, though, I've got new thoughts on the ending:

The very last level is a metaphor for destroying the heart powering the machine. Whereas every other segment of the machine, even the tesla towers, had a logical purpose, the final section doesn't make any sense. You teleport to an iron lung, walk across a chasm to a conveyor belt, which leads you to a temple with a chair at the top?

Remember that you end the preceding level by standing right underneath the beating heart. Whose heart is this?

Think back to a note you find in the lab, about drowning someone in Compound X as the 'kindest of deaths'. At one point Mandus says that 'blue water runs through my veins now', which conjures connotations with the giant reservoir of the Compound located beneath the Machine's reactor.

The body you see in the iron lung represents what Mandus did to himself. He immersed his body in the compound, granting himself nigh-immortality (if not strength). This enabled him to rip out his own heart (represented by all those mechanical arms stabbing into Mandus' chest after he ascends the temple) and use it to give the Machine life. Incidentally, this could mean the Engineer himself is contained within this heart. The iron lung also indicates the Machine's vulnerability and link to Mandus' livelihood. His memories fragment after initially sabotaging it, slowly return as he resurrects it, and revert back into incoherence as he prepares to permanently destroy the Machine.

The last level is about a cornered, frightened fragment of Mandus' soul - a tiny, frantic heart - trying desperately to convince him to stop. Seeing visions of his slaughter-machine, hearing the screams of those murdered in the future, remembering the pain that had motivated him to create the machine in the first place, ascending the temple to enact his own sacrifice - all of these thoughts ran through Mandus' head as he grasped the heart in his hands and ripped it out of the machine.

How could the 'dying' Mandus hear what was going on in the surface, miles above? First off, I'd say he did not die. He's undead. He was simply immobilized after destroying his heart, forever entombed underground as atonement. I would also argue that the act of self-sacrifice fulfilled, in its own way, the ritual Oswald had believed necessary to bring about a better future. Having witnessed how his own dream future was even worse than "our" twentieth century, he commits the ultimate sacrifice by condemning himself to obscurity and oblivion.

Self-sacrifice enables Oswald Mandus to witness the future he'd been so afraid of. Hearing the world continue on despite his actions, a paralyzed and undying Mandus is content with his decision. He failed to avert the future, but at least he gets assurance the end-time he'd feared and planned for do not come to pass.

Spoiler below!

While it might seem obvious, remember that this game is made in a relatively young 21st century. Just like the Victorians, we live in a time of great social and technological change, a fact that some embrace and others fear. There will always be doomsday sayers, people fearing a third world war, an apocalypse through environmental destruction and cultural deterioration and holy terrors and world-spanning plagues and nuclear flame and global famine and overpopulation and cosmic explosions. The belief that inevitable human extinction is around the corner may be as old as humanity itself.

Yet we still exist.

The future isn't inherently any worse than the past. I don't doubt some truly horrific things will happen in my lifetime, just as my grandparents lived through the world wars and my parents saw the USA/USSR war, the civil wars in Africa and the genocides in Southeast Asia. But if history has any lesson, it's that the future always has and always will bring hope and horror in equal measure.

That's what I got from the ending.