[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[emblemparade]

It seems I have a different understanding of the meaning of the final scene, and the identity of the man in the "iron lung."

In an important sense, there were never two Oswalds: there is only one narrative thread that "really" happened. Most of you figured it out already:

Oswald went to Mexico with his twin children after his wife died, and it's there that the children found the orb (they say this in the voiceover in the cemetary). Once back in England, his depression mixes with the disease he caught in Mexico and he goes mad. The orb's power is over time (more on that later) so it provides Oswald with visions of the future. The 19th Century was already awful, but it seemed that the 20th would be worse. And so he breaks, and begins a project to transform his pig-slaughtering machine into one that slaughters humans. But he, Oswald, is not to die in the coming apocalypse, and neither are his children. He has found a technology to make them immortal (a promise/curse we remember too well from A Dark Descent). He will not have to endure loss again, as he did with his wife, Lily.

And so, minutes before midnight of the last day of the century, he creeps down to machine's heart, taking his children with him.

This is his plan: they are to be transformed first, which means he has to kill them, remove their hearts, drown them in the compound, use electricity, and thus reanimate them. And what about him? Well, he took care of that, too: the machine will do the preparation. That's what that complex chair thing you see in the end is for. On its two sides you can see his children's corpses impaled on their own, smaller chairs. And that "iron lung"? That's where the machine will immerse him in the compound and reanimate him. The machine will take care of the rest, and start a new century of death.

(Some of you thought he already killed the children in Mexico, because the voiceover says he killed them "on the temple steps": but actually it's this last chamber that is the "temple" he's referring to.)

But the orb lies. Even without this infernal machine, the new century would still be one of death, wouldn't it? And in order to make his children immortal, Oswald would have to kill them, wouldn't he? All those promises were lies. As he descends in these last minutes of the 19th Century, Oswald is feeling doubt. And so, in his madness (or is it an inkling of sanity?) he sabatoges the machine he built as he descends. But it was a hurried, half-hearted sabotage. He doesn't know what he wants. He kills his children, but they are not reanimated: the machine has been sabotaged. Regret, again ... regret upon regret. Go back, un-sabotage the machine, "save your children"...

And so we get to the game: Who are we, the player? We are that doubt. We are regret. We are Oswald retracing his own steps down to heart of the machine, rethinking, remembering, wondering if he can change the course of events, go back to his original plan, or perhaps end it all. We fix the sabotage, then break the machine again ... in a constant game of "what if." It's not really amenesia he is experiencing: it's denial. Denial of his culbability. Denial of his wife's death. Denial of humanity's despicable treatment of itself, now and in the future.

So what did Oswald really end up doing? Did he "prepare" his children, as we see them attached to the machine in that last moment? Did he go ahead with his plan to make them all immortal? Did he activate the machine? Or did he climb back up, fix the machine, and go ahead with his original plan?

We do see images of the dead children, staked to the two chairs on his side. And we do see him lying in the tank of compound. We see him activating the machine at the last moment. But we also saw him sabotaging it ... So is this actual history we're seeing and regretting? Or is this a possible future, one that Oswald can stop right now if he chooses?

It's all of these, I think. This is the power of the orb: in normal life, we have daydreams and meandering, dark thoughts. But the orb makes these dreams real, turns our fantastical fears (and hopes) into actual consequences. At this last moment of the 19th Century, 12:00 AM (the time frozen on all the clocks), all timelines become possible, all Oswalds. Immorality, but only for a moment. Immortality, in that you can keep replaying the game as many times as you wish.

And the orb wins either way, lying its way to victory: Oswald and his children would not achieve true immortality, only a shadow existence. And the 20th Century would be one of death, with or without the machine for pigs. (The actual "machines for pigs" that we have built were far more horrible than anything in this story: Auschwitz-Birkenau was only the biggest.) The orb has the last laugh.

But we don't need mystical orbs or video games to know all that, do we? We know our thoughts have consequences, just as much as we know that we can replay history in our mind, as well as we can imagine futures dark or bright. Can we ever redeem ourselves if we make mistakes? Can we redeem the madness and evil of the 20th Century? Perhaps that, gentle readers, is the reason that storytelling exists.