Infinite Raptures

SPOILERS FOR BIOSHOCK 1 AND INFINITE AND MAYBE BIOSHOCK 2 ALSO. YE HAVE BEEN WARNED

A few weeks ago, 2K Games once again showed everyone how it's done with their FPS game Bioshock Infinite. Now I'm of a mind that the original Bioshock has the best story in video games, partially because it was a fascinating exploration of a philosophical ideal made flesh via a new and unique setting and partially because it uses the medium it's in to move the story forward (seriously, the second act plot twist of Bioshock could ONLY be as effective as it was in a video game). Infinite doesn't quite come eye-to-eye with its predecessor, but it makes a very noble effort of it and still comes out with a great story and characters while maintaining solid FPS gameplay and making sure the floating city of Columbia was just as interesting and frightening as the underwater city of Rapture.

Infinite's ending has received a lot of attention. I've come across several articles and videos explaining how the timeline balances out, how Booker and Comstock and Anna and Elizabeth and the Luteces all fit in with one another in this crazy time-travel/alternate reality narrative. This article will not be one of those; you can find rundowns of the ending on YouTube or most gaming websites and you can just go ahead and watch the ending here:

No, rather this article will be about a few thoughts I've had on Infinite, about its ending, the story as a whole, and how it relates to the other games (though mostly just the first one since it's apparently general policy to pretend Bioshock 2 never happened). With all that said, lets get to my opinions, because they matter, apparently.

1) This cover art is bullshit.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is bad cover art. It looks quite nice and epic, showing off our hero, Booker DeWitt, being all badass and whatnot. The artist who put this together should feel very proud of themselves. But do you notice something missing from the artwork? Some person that should be there but isn't for reasons that are deeply depressing?

WHERE. IS. ELIZABETH?

You may not know it by looking, but Elizabeth is the focus of the entire game (except maybe in the last ten minutes, but that's just cause her character arc is complete and she is now acting as a guide to Booker so he can have a last-minute arc). Her attempted exodus from Columbia is the point of the game. It's Booker's mission to free her, it's Comstock's mission to groom her to be his successor, it's Daisy Fitzroy's mission to figure out what she is and how she can be used...and yet she doesn't get to be on the cover? That's some BS.

Now creative director Ken Levine has defended the choice, saying that in focus testing, this was the image that got the best response and the developers figured it would sell the most units. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; 2K and Irrational Games put together a product and they want to sell as much of it as they can, they want to get their work out to as many people as possible. That's all well and good. The problem here is the creeping undercurrent of sexism; that you can't sell an action game with a girl on the cover.

I'm not saying all gamers are sexist or that nobody will buy a game with a woman on the front cover. What I am saying is that a lot of video games have...'issues' with women, a fact that a rather vocal collection of gamers insists is a rumor perpetrated by the feminazis to take away their toys. Here in Infinite we see some great female characters, not only with Elizabeth (in spite of her initial damsel-in-distress status), but with Daisy Fitzroy and Rosalind Lutece, but the box art only plays up the manly man of Booker DeWitt and his manly shotgun. The only thing the developers really did wrong here was play into a culture that has some problems in it. I'm not mad, I'm just kinda disappointed that this utterly generic and ultimately misleading image is the best way to sell a game.

2) On the subject of Songbird

I love Songbird. I really do. Despite technically predating them by fifty years, Songbird is the next stage in evolution from Bioshock's Big Daddies; a partially human, mostly machine creature whose single-minded purpose is to protect his charge, a purpose he adheres to with admirable gusto. Plus he's got a really cool design. Being the big bad dragon to Comstock's evil (but frail and human) king, you'd then expect Songbird to be the final boss of the game. I know I did. But Infinite's smarter than that, and Songbird's demise ends up being one of the more poetic deaths I've ever seen.

After learning to control the bird through musical cues, Booker orders him to destroy the Siphon, a machine that limited Elizabeth's reality-traversing powers. The destruction of the Siphon does unlock Elizabeth's full potential, but also destroy's the music machine that's controlling Songbird. He returns to his original mission of killing Booker and reclaiming Elizabeth. It's then that Elizabeth, now with complete mastery over her powers, calmly sends the three of them to a city underwater (more on that in a bit)...but leaves Songbird outside in the water. The depths of the ocean and the underwater pressure crush the bird, and in his final moments, he shares a quiet goodbye to the charge he loved and protected so much, before his lights go out and he meets his end.

The real poetry of it lies in the fact that it's Elizabeth, not Booker, who kills Songbird. With the Siphon destroyed, she's mastered her powers. She knows all, sees all, and can go anywhere or anywhen she pleases. She's rejected Comstock's ideology and liberated herself from Columbia. She powerful and independent enough that she doesn't need Songbird anymore, and so removes him from the equation. This event marks the completion of her character arc.

There's also the symmetry of Songbird dying underwater and several other characters doing that, but more on that in a bit.

3) Anna DeWitt is Andrew Ryan's mother

Well, maybe not exactly that, but they could be related. This is more of a fan-wank theory than anything, but bear with me here.

Okay, so real quick ending rundown: Elizabeth is revealed to be Anna DeWitt, Booker's daughter whom he sold as an infant to Comstock in order to pay off his debts and ensure that his daughter had a better life than he could provide. However, he had a change of heart and tried to take the girl back shortly before Comstock and the Luteces returned to their own reality (BTW, they were from a different reality. More on that in a bit). As the portal between worlds closes before Booker's eyes, baby Anna reaches out to him, and the portal closes on her hand, severing the pinkie-finger on her right hand. This is their explanation for Elizabeth's powers: because a piece of her is in another world, she can traverse worlds. Makes as much sense as anything else in the franchise. Anyway...

Remember how Songbird died outside of an underwater city? Well, it wasn't Atlantis. It was Rapture, the same city from the first two Bioshock games. Now Booker and Elizabeth/Anna arrive in Rapture presumably during or after the events of the first game. This is believed to be so partially because the welcome center is free of any splicers (I guess Jack already cleared them out), partially because there's a rumor that you can hear Songbird's screams as he dies during a portion of the game, but mostly because the duo pass a sign telling them that the bathyspheres that serve as transportation between the undersea towers are out of service, meaning that Andrew Ryan's lockdown is in effect. And yet the pair hop in the first bathysphere and take back to the surface, to the first lighthouse, and begin their walkabout through reality.

People who played the first game will recall that the bathyspheres were only usable by Ryan himself or by people with similar DNA. This is why Jack could use them; he was secretly (SPOILER ALERT) Andrew Ryan's illegitimate son, artificially aged and manipulated by Frank Fontaine to bring Ryan down. By this logic, the DeWitts can use the bathyspheres because they have similar DNA to Ryan. I originally assumed this was because Anna DeWitt, in a different timeline, grew up, got married and had a kid who would eventually build a city at the bottom of the ocean; however, further research revealed that Andrew Ryan actually had a backstory, involving being born in Russia, witnessing the revolution and having it shape his beliefs, and then changing his name and emigrating to America, all of which makes the possibility of Anna DeWitt being his mother seem unlikely. However, there's still the fact that the DeWitts could use the bathyspheres, so they're related to Ryan somehow. I just don't know how yet.

Or maybe Booker and Elizabeth arrived after Jack's adventure in Bioshock and he left the spheres unlocked when he left Rapture. Who knows?

4) Booker DeWitt can see THE FUTURE!

Plot twist number two for Infinite was that our hero Booker DeWitt and our villain Zachary Hale Comstock were in fact the same person. The explanation given is this: Booker, in his younger days, was a bit of a white supremacist, and when he was accused of having a family tree that 'sheltered a teepee or two', he decided to prove his fellow soldiers wrong by burning a few teepees during the Wounded Knee Massacre. Afterwards, he was wracked with guilt over his violent actions and tried everything to alleviate his guilt, including attending a baptism that would cleanse him of his sins. Booker found he was unable to go through with it, as how could a dip in the water really wash all the blood from his hands? He left the ceremony and began a life of drinking and gambling and also fatherhood somewhere in there. But what if Booker had accepted the baptism? What then?

In another reality, Booker DeWitt went under the water and Zachary Hale Comstock came out. Comstock went on to try and share his vision of the world, his violence and white supremacist beliefs no longer held back by his own guilt. He met Rosalind Lutece, she built a device that could see into the future, they made Columbia, Comstock went sterile, he bought Anna DeWitt, and the rest is very confusing history.

Now Comstock's prophetic visions are attributed to Lutece's machine, that it showed him probable futures and he used them to guide his followers. However, Comstock had a vision before he met Lutece; namely the original vision of the angel Columbia showing him the city above the clouds, the new Eden that would someday lay waste to the Sodom below, for what was the city of Columbia if not another ark for another time and all that. No explanation has been given for who the angel really was and how Comstock saw his city before it was created. This kinda bugged me until I remembered something: Booker DeWitt has a vision too.

Early in the game, Booker has flashback/dream, wherein he opens the door to his office and sees the city of Columbia now below the clouds, raining fire and destruction upon a New York City that is much more modern than it is in the year 1912. This vision comes to pass in a future where Elizabeth accepted Comstock's influence and became his heir and thus the seed of the prophet sat the throne and laid waste the mountains of man and blah blah blah. The point is, Booker and Comstock both saw the future. That says to me that Booker just has that power sometimes. Why? To move the plot forward and to build tension.

It's not a good explanation, but it's an explanation.

5) The Luteces have done this before

Rosalind and Robert Lutece (supposedly twin siblings but actually they're the same person from two different realities and of two different genders) are one of the best parts of the game, an enigmatic pair who help guide Booker on his journey while acting cryptic and weird and actually pretty entertaining, for what little time they have onscreen. Anyway, plot twist number three is that Robert Lutece not only got Booker to sell him Anna, but convinced him to bring her back (presumably because Robert saw what Elizabeth would become under Comstock's guidance and wanted to put a stop to it before she burned America down). Little dialogue choices and actions they take imply that this is not the first time they've sent a Booker DeWitt to Columbia to rescue Elizabeth. The bloody corpse you find in the lighthouse? Possibly an earlier Booker who was killed by the lighthouse keeper? Or just the lighthouse keeper himself whom the Lutece's had to snuff out in order for Booker to proceed? We'll probably never know but it's an interesting thought nonetheless.

6) The Columbians aren't as interesting as the Rapturers

This is one of the places where Infinite falls short of the original Bioshock; the people you meet in Columbia just aren't as good villains as the ones in Rapture. Cornelius Slate is an interesting counterpoint to both the Founders and the Vox Populi, and Daisy Fitzroy is interesting if you've read the expanded material, but other than that they all fall short. We never learn much of Lady Comstock, Jeremiah Fink doesn't do much except be a racist businessman, and...well that's sort of it as far as named characters go. Compare that Bioshock's characters; people like Dr. J.S. Steinman, Peach Wilkins, Brigid Tenenbaum, or Sander Cohen. Those were some interesting faces who really helped flesh out Rapture and make it such an engaging location. Now granted, this is because game one and Infinite had different focuses; in Bioshock, Jack didn't have much personality...or any personality...but that's okay because everyone else in Rapture was just so larger than life. Comparatively, Infinite focuses squarely on Booker and Elizabeth, and because of this, they're the ones that get fleshed out, not as much the world around them. Still, it would've been nice to see the Vox Populi be more interesting, as they're touted as being a major part of the story and then sort of fall flat by the end.

So, those are my thoughts on Infinite and it's place in the general Bioshock pantheon. If you have anything to add or detract, post it somewhere in the comments. Thanks for reading, and would you kindly join me next time?