Dead Space & Conflict — Part Three — Man and God
All stories need conflict. If the Necromorphs could be defeated with headshots and traditional tactics, there would be no Dead Space. Video game narratives, as noted, operate similarly, often necessitated by their design as games: what challenges players between the title screen and the end credits? Sometimes, it’s the literal, exterior forces standing in the way: Slasher Necromorphs, Puker Necromorphs, or Giant-Dragging-Tentacle Necromorphs. Other times, it’s internal: screaming, Marker-induced hallucinations of your dead girlfriend, the constant tear between what you want and what the galaxy needs, seen more and more prevalently as the narrative evolves and changes. Conflict’s primary purpose, no matter the form, is simple: to add uncertainty as to whether a character’s goal will be achieved.
Conflict is what drives the Dead Space (2008–2013) series, in more varied ways than many other series I can consider. It approaches conflict in a number of concrete ways, but begs, with each entry, to frame those same forces a little differently.
In the trilogy’s final entry, Dead Space 3 (2013), players (after a brief prologue) find Isaac in-hiding, trying to avoid the Markers, Unitologists, everything. He is drafted into an operation at the behest of a couple Earth Defense Force operatives, who were sent by Ellie (the same from Dead Space 2) to find him. One final mission: track Ellie in the far reaches of space back to the Marker homeworld, Tau Volantis, find the source of the Necromorph scourge, and stop it once and for all.
Unlike previous entries, Isaac works together with a sizable group of teammates and recurring antagonist throughout, giving way for the narrative to concentrate on the human element as much as the alien. This dovetails beautifully into the traditional Conflict against Man, spiraling throughout the experience into a twisted and terrifying Conflict against God.
Complete story spoilers for Dead Space 3 and its epilogue downloadable story, Awakened, to follow.
Burdened with Glorious Purpose
Dead Space 3 departs from its predecessors by giving Isaac a larger ensemble of human characters to interact with, most notably, the Unitologist paramilitary “Inner Circle.” Therein lies the primary Conflict against Man dynamic: once resigned to zealous corpses and sinister characters on the other side of a blast-proof window, now Isaac has to physically fight through Unitologists to reach his goals.
At this point in the story, three years after Titan Station’s destruction, Unitology has accelerated from evangelizing to crusading: the funds amassed from across their galactic following helped fund their militarization, giving the Circle the ability and resources and actively stand against EarthGov. While the Unitologists of the past were more than happy to await Convergence, and to make themselves ready as it drew near, they see their faith under direct threat. Unitology no longer operates in the background behind societal norms, but are free to engage in the name of their faith, violently releasing the influence of Markers from various testing sites around the galaxy, triggering new Necromorph outbreaks in multiple locations.
We find the Circle at the height of its power, disseminating its message via lunar zeppelin to a Lunar Colony, having completed several campaigns of “liberating” Markers throughout space. As the only noted person to have destroyed Markers in the past, the Circle targets and hunts Isaac as soon as they find him. Though they do so in the name of their faith, the militarized Unitologists are still just people, albeit radicalized. They rush Isaac, they attempt suicide bombings, they stand opposed to his mission. They are people, twisted by promises and beliefs that have long encouraged them to embrace death, with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
On that same vein, at the top of the hierarchy, is Jacob Danik, the leader of the Circle. Though his history from before the Marker attacks leading up to Dead Space 3 is unknown, his actions throughout the game do enough to paint him: as a faith-based leader, he claims to be the mouthpiece of the divine, all while wielding the might of militarized followers. Danik represents the more forceful agenda of Unitology: they will not wait around for Convergence, they will trigger it themselves. They will leave others to be taken, while they live to trigger Convergence elsewhere. His appearances and missives scattered throughout the journey are for the express purposes of emboldening his followers and hindering Isaac: he’s constantly attempting to kill Isaac, undermines their progress with propaganda, coerces Macguffin items away by threat of force, and, in the end, reactivates Convergence on Tau Volantis. All of this in the name of faith, of which he’s too deep in to see the logical ramifications of.
In a series full of horrifying Necromorphs and monsters, I have never wanted a character killed as badly as Danik; testament to the conflict he provides.
Hell is Other People
Even faced with the might of a fully-armed Unitologist following, Isaac’s allies aren’t immune to being a source of conflict.
Most glaring is Robert Norton, a survivor of a recent Marker liberation by the Circle and Ellie’s partner at the time of the story. Initially, he recruits Isaac to the mission at Ellie’s behest, but quickly starts to turn on and antagonize Isaac; Isaac’s siding with Ellie want to stop the source of the Necromorphs, instead of escape, contributes most heavily. Norton continues to see Isaac’s desire to push on as a threat to his relationship with Ellie, believing that Isaac is just trying to side with Ellie (and against Norton) to win her back.
In the end, Norton brings Danik and the Circle to Tau Volantis. In a desperate bid to escape the planet, Norton offers Isaac to the Circle in exchange for safe passage off with the crew, providing the planet’s location to the Circle. Naturally, this blows up in Norton’s face, because Danik and the Unitologists simply don’t care about the wants of people.
In a final standoff, Norton blames Isaac for bringing them to Tau Volantis and attempts to kill him. He ultimately fails, falling to a single shot from Isaac.
Maybe Norton’s behavior was induced by the Markers on the planet. Perhaps it was exacerbated by circumstances, the cementing feeling that this trip was a suicide mission. Maybe it driven by passion, a desire to protect and live out whatever time he has left with a person he loves. No matter the source, Norton’s sense of self-preservation sets him up against Isaac, deterring his and the crew’s efforts every chance he can get. Faced with death, overwhelming opposition, and a chance to escape it, it’s hard to fault him.
Otherwise, there’s John Carver, the “player two” in cooperative play, who remains present and nearby throughout the entire story. Narratively, he struggles, coping with feelings of failure as a partner and a parent after losing his family to a Necromorph outbreak. As a partner character, he’s less of an antagonist, and more of a point of challenge, contention, and perspective for Isaac. A career military operative, Carver tends to put the mission first: progress at any cost. Norton threatened the mission, so it’s acceptable to have killed him. If we didn’t cut the lift as a giant Necromorph was dragging it down inside, it would have dragged cliff down with it, even if there was an ally still in that lift. If we don’t close this door, then we all die, instead of closing this door and only Ellie dying. At each of these points, Isaac seems to stand opposite him: I shouldn’t have killed Norton, I could’ve saved Santos (from the lift), I failed Ellie. Carver challenges Isaac each and every time, justifying what had to be done for the good of the mission, even as it seemed to fail the individual. Carver is the personified “need,” while Isaac embodies “want.”
Closer and closer to the end of the journey, Carver begins to ease up, perhaps as a counterweight to Isaac’s rage at losing Ellie. And at the end of the line, Carver opposes Isaac one more time, now siding with the individual instead of the mission. At this point, Ellie is revealed to still be alive, as Danik holds her hostage at the source of the Macguffin Machine. Given the choice of saving Ellie but losing to Danik, or overcoming Danik at the expense of Ellie, Carver takes matters into his own hands and gives Danik what he wants. From Carver:
“Don’t let it all go dark, Isaac. There’s more than one than one kind of right.”
Perhaps, in that moment, Carver condemned the entire planet, and the galaxy, to death. Logically, one could easily say he made the wrong call. But to stand against the futility of destruction to, even for a moment, give someone a last chance to say goodbye…there are worse forms of conflict you could perpetuate.
Was it an attempt to do right, after years of feeling like he’d done wrong? Was it being around Isaac for that long and seeing the worth in the individual? Was it finally being able to put the mission second? Who’s to say? But in those moments, Carver stood against Isaac as nothing more than a man, not as an obstacle, neither right nor wrong, but as a counterpoint. Sometimes, the mission needs to come first. And sometimes, all you have at the end of the world is someone that you love.
To Gaze Into the Eyes of God
“Then, without warning, the storm lifted and we saw them. They towered like gods with a twisted Olympus rising behind. Before I knew what was happening, I had fallen to my knees and was weeping uncontrollably, overwhelmed by my utter insignificance.”
These are the words left behind by a two-hundred year old datalog, detailing an expedition’s first encounter with (albeit, long-since frozen) alien life. To know that there was life so long before us, so advanced in their existence, only to suddenly cease, is mortally humbling. To learn that the supposed birthplace of the Marker was not the birthplace, but just another fallen civilization, is demoralizing, especially as your race grapples with the same problems. To discover that they chose extinction on their own terms, rather than see the Necromorph scourge perpetuate, was perhaps the only way they saw fit to one-up God.
Giving Danik the MacGuffin device to use in the MacGuffin machine all but reverses the aliens’ efforts, freeing an ancient entity from frozen slumber. You see, the Convergences that Isaac narrowly escapes, stops, and subverts all had one end product in mind: the creation of a Necromorph Moon, a literal moon-sized Necromorph entity, created from the gathered mass of Necromorph and organic material. It is, for all intents and purposes, a cosmic horror.
The Conflict against God is hinted at throughout the latter parts of Dead Space 3, describing this “Brother Moon” as the would-be destroyer of Tau Volantis and its denizens: colossal in size and scale, capable of immense and immediate destructive power, and all but sealing the fates of that species who would awaken it. And so it comes to pass: God has been freed, and their reign of destruction picks up immediately, and the Conflict against God becomes immediately more literal.
What does it mean to awaken a God? When we go looking for something mysterious, at the edge of our world, at the edge of our galaxy, what do we hope to find? What happens when we do find something, and it’s not what we expected or hoped for? What happens when it’s exactly what we expected?
What does it mean to fight a God? To stand against their untold might with nothing but the tools they perpetuated by their very existence? To fight for something as basic as survival, against their utter detachment from you and everything you know? What happens to the world you knew after that? Can you ever see it the same way again?
What does it mean to kill a God? To jam its own iconography into its eyes, to rip its one weakness out from inside, to drag it down into the planet where it will lie, a testament to what humanity is capable of? Where can humanity’s triumphant possibly go from there, if they have ascended that far? Perhaps all that the godkillers can do at that point is die. What else can they do?
These questions fly around the eleventh-hour battle against the Brother Moon as it is awoken, fought, and ultimately killed by the combined power of two species. Conflict against God is a fascinating dynamic, if that only one side of the conflict sees it as an actual battle; the other, a strange inconvenience.
But after the first set of credits roll, unnerving questions remain: what does it mean when that weapon had one shot in the chamber, and this was the youngest, the newest God? What does it mean if this was just part of a pantheon?
Make Us Whole
The Brother Moon is dead on the surface of Tau Volantis. But signals and messages rip through the minds of those who remain, including Isaac and Carver: “We are coming. We are hungry.”
In its brief time alive again, the Brother Moon reached out to its network, the other Brethren Moons scattered throughout the stars. They are coming. They are hungry. Drawn to the Markers of humanity’s own creation, they seek Earth. While the battle against the Brother Moon was on the offensive, the trials against the Brethren Moons is fully defensive: we cannot fight them, we can only prepare for them.
The Brethren Moon indirectly battle against Isaac by inspiring the remnants of Unitology into a fringe cult. Where Unitology was obsessed with preservation and unity, the splinter group gives worship by mutilation and piecemeal sacrifice. Their goal, making the way clear for the Moons, is to fight and slow down Isaac and Carver. They do so. This begs the question, are the Moons threatened by Isaac and Carver? Or are they merely inconvenienced by them?
In the face of conflict and antagonism, it is in our nature to wonder. What’s the reasoning behind the Brethren Moons? How far back do they date? Where did they come from? Why do they do what they do? Is it simply to feed? The Brethren Moons explain:
“From each world we devour, a new brother will rise and be made whole. Our network will grow and we will live forever.”
To look into the eyes of God, and have it look into yours, is one thing. But to have your entire civilization reduced to a footnote in the cosmic playbook of a truly ancient entity is another, far more devastating thing. To finally see the truth in the mantras of the faithful, primal urges made into unifying calls, is horrifying. The wills of Gods, and those we would classify as such, are inscrutable, from divine punishment to their need to feed to the effect they have on our minds. Sometimes, all we know is that their goals, primal they may be, stand against us, and all we can do in the face of that is resist or surrender. We cannot hope to comprehend them. We cannot hope to truly stand against them.
The Brethren Moons are unstoppable. They stall Isaac and Carver long enough to elude them and find Earth. The trilogy ends with the Moons already descending upon our pale, blue dot, another rising to meet Isaac and Carver’s trajectory. They are presumed dead. Everyone is presumed dead. There is no secret ending. There is no sequel. There was only one, final obstacle, impossible to overcome.
In the end, we return to where we started: Conflict against Nature. Nature, old as it is, perpetuated by Gods, that People are ultimately destined to lose. Humanity is made whole.
Roll credits.
Conclusion
All stories need conflict. If humans were truly alone in the galaxy, there would be no Dead Space. Sometimes, it’s the literal, exterior forces standing in the way: Necromorphs, as defined by Nature; humans, as defined by their multifaceted wants and desires; or God, in one form or another. Other times, it’s internal: the self, struggling between wants and needs; our own internalized pain, given form and voice by our regrets.
Conflict’s primary purpose, no matter the form, is simple: to add uncertainty as to whether a character’s goal will be achieved. Across three entries, Dead Space did nothing short of explore as many of those conflicts as it could. They complemented each other, occupying polar ends of the scale to provide a balanced scope of obstacles to overcome. I’ll end this with one final thought, courtesy of the long-dead researcher on Tau Volantis, Dr. Serrano:
“I remember telling my college professor I wanted to study xenoarchaeology. He laughed right in my face. There’s nothing to study, he said. It’s all dead space.”
Dead space. How comforting a notion after so much conflict.
