BioShock (series)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

** That's because Rapture is, in fact, ''fucked up beyond sanity''. Keep in mind the intro to Bioshock 2 shows Delta walking past a dead body, and not twenty feet away there's a formal dinner party going on. Rapture is one of the most dysfunctional societies imaginable.

* Why is there a free clinic near where all the big-shots live, in Apollo?

* Rapture was founded in 1946. Jack arrives in 1960. The war began in 1959. Why does everyone dress like it's 1920?

** They dress like they're from the [[Zeerust|40's]] , because that's when Rapture was built. You can't really know what the new fashions are when you're under the ocean.

** Good point, though. I think the only real-world weapon we ever see in the series is the Luger Sofia Lamb gives Delta to kill himself with in ''Bioshock 2''. I think that the idea was that Ryan, believing Rapture to be a utopia and all that, prohibited the import of firearms, leaving the populace to go all DIY once society began to break down. They're not really Thompsons so much as they are cobbled-together submachine guns that have a drum magazine.

* In the good ending, where Jack escapes Rapture with all the Little sisters he's saved and lives happily ever after? Well, I doubt it would be that simple. For one thing, when he gets to America/Britain/wherever, he has no passport, no documentation of any kind, and not nearly enough money to get by, much less support his new family. When he tries to register the little sisters for school, the authorities are going to have a lot of questions about why exactly is it that [[Pedo Hunt|a single man is living with 20 some little girls that can't possibly be all his daughters.]] This isn't even taking into account the medical and psychological issues. Jack just learned that his whole life was a fake, the little girls where mind raped at a young age, and both them and their new "father" are bound to have PTSD from all the shit they've seen. Medically what are the long term side effects of carrying a parasitic sea slug in your body turning you into an ADAM factory? Or how about Jack's little Big Daddy voice box operation? Or now that he no longer has a steady supply of ADAM, but has still been spliced, won't he start to devolve like everyone else in Rapture did when they ran out of ADAM?

**** Even though Jack may have accumulated thousands of dollars throughout the game, they're Rapture dollars with Ryan's face on them; he might be hard-pressed finding someone who'd accept them as legal tender on the surface.

*** The second game establishes that Tenenbaum left Rapture too and lived on the surface until 1968. She's a successful scientist would have little trouble making money after she explained away her mysterious disappearance. She must've helped Jack get settled and raise the girls. As for the effects of splicing, my theory about how the whole ADAM-causes-insanity thing works explains it. Two IJBMs down, third bullet point. Basically, if Jack's not a mad splicer by the end of the game, he's not going to become one after leaving.

** Rand didn't believe in altruism either - pure objectivism sees it as Ryan does, a way to encourage the poor to never take care of themselves and continue to be a drain on those who succeed. However, while the poorhouses bothered Ryan (especially because Fontaine opened them specifically because he knew Ryan wouldn't), it was mainly Fontaine just being flat out more successful than him. Ryan knew he was a smuggler on top of having the secrets to ADAM, so he kept trying to tie him to smuggling to find some way to legitimately remove his competition.

* Okay, I'm confused. Is it the ADAM alone that made them insane? Or did it just push them over the edge? They make a lot of hints that it's the philosophy, or the war, or the isolation that played a role in it, but nobody ever acknowledges this. They just go "the ADAM did it." So, was this intentional on the designer's part, or am I just seeing subtext where there is none?

*** My theory: Splicers have replaced so much of their genetic code with Plasmids that they eventually encroached on cells that were necessary for the brain to function (instead of healthy cells being replaced with other healthy cells, they were replaced with cells that let you shoot lightning). The "keeping back the tide" phrase refers to using further ADAM to repair those genes and keep your sanity. Sadly, with an increasing variety of other Plasmids to choose from in an already combat-filled environment, the temptation to keep splicing new stuff instead of leveling off or fixing their genes proved too great for many of them. Eventually, Rapture was left only with crazies, because the sane people didn't have enough enhanced abilities to survive.

** Indirectly, we could say the philosophy did cause the destruction, since Ryan explicitly turned down the idea of regulating the plasmid market. Had Ryan not been so insistent on his philosophical purity, the splicing never would have gotten so out of hand.

** It's theft of someone else's work. The idea is that you should be creating your own work and then charging what you believe your work is worth. If you rob a vending machine, you are taking away the work that someone else produced with less effort and without compensating for them. Yes, you work to hack the machine, but you're not doing it because you created something - you're doing it to relieve someone else of fair compensation.

*** One man's "fair compensation" is another man's "price gouger", huh?

* Given his role as [[Strawman Political|Evil Objectivist Strawman]], why the hell was Andrew Ryan so vehemently opposed to smuggling? The very concept of smuggling requires that the government place restrictions on what products can be sold, which is completely contrary to his aims.

** Listening to the audio tapes, it's not hard to imagine Ryan slowly becoming the very thing he was fighting against (power-hungry and overbearing governments). This is seen pretty vividly when he started charging money for oxygen and confiscating Fontaine's business holdings.

** Ryan was convinced that any contact with the outer world would attract the attention of corrupt outer governments and lead to Rapture's destruction. Smuggling was the only crime that lead to contact with the world.

*** Then again, how could Rapture get by without ''any'' contact with the surface? There is no way in hell it could be completely self-sufficient - how would you make enough steel for maintaining the buildings? And surely it could not sustain the infrastructure for making technological advancements on its own? The number of inhabitants is not stated, but it seems unlikely to be more than a few thousand. Some discrete dealings with the surface would be a necessity. And that lighthouse was rather indiscreet anyway.

* What ''was'' Sander Cohen doing to people that was turning them into stone? Was he covering them with concrete or something?

** Yeah, my guess is he just killed them and covered them in plaster of Paris or something.

**** Also, if you strike them they bleed, so yeah, it looks like they're just coated in something. Although, if I recall correctly, you see him use a device that instantly petrifies one of them. I might be wrong though.

** Possibly he has some sort of "cover you in concrete" plasmid, also. I mean, you have a plasmid that ''shoots bees''...

*** I'm pretty sure that's ice. He was freezing everybody.

**** Don't think so - a lot of the statues in the game are under spotlights, which are generally known to be pretty heat-intensive, so surely they'd melt.

****** I believe he covered them with some kind of wax

* What was the purpose of Atlas going to the submarine to look for his family, given that they never existed in the first place? Surely, if Ryan hadn't attacked, the player would have seen through his deception?

*** Except that he was planning a takeover from the beginning. Only thing I can think of is that he wanted his story to be believable, except that should be unnecessary with the whole mind control thing.

**** Even with the mind control thing, it would probably be best not to antagonize Jack. If he did, Jack would go about his mission very reluctantly, and if he lost contact with him (which happened when Sander Cohen took over the radio at one point), or Jack managed to find a way to get rid of the radio, then the whole mission would be lost. And he can't be sure that the mind control is 100% insurmountable, so it's probably best to play it safe.

** The submarine ''could'' have been used to give him direct access to Ryan's throne roo- er- office, seeing as how there's a window open to the water right above the control panel, IIRC. Dock against glass, cut hole, kill Ryan, get Jack to use the key, kill Jack, Fontaine wins.

** I think it was a bit of a Xanatos Gambit. Atlas knew that Ryan would blow up the submarine before you could get to it.

** It's all about the radio. Atlas needed to keep Ryan, who was listening in on the radio the whole time, in the dark about his plan, or else, with said radio access, Ryan could've just hijacked control of Jack. Thus, he had to set up a story that would be convincing to both people and end with him ordering Jack to kill Ryan. The best way of making this convincing was to engineer a situation where Ryan would strike such a heart-wrenching blow as to drive Atlas to advocate bloody revenge--and killing your nonexistent family is pretty much the best way of doing that. Since he gave Ryan plenty of time and directions to figure out where the sub was, it was a safe bet that the thing would be destroyed before it could escape. The real risk was that he'd try to get inside it...

** It was a good way of getting Jack to distrust Andrew Ryan. Think about it, you are trapped in an underwater slaughter house, and only one guy agrees to help you. Add the lucky coincidence of Andrew Ryan trying to kill you by locking you in a room (just before you get into Medical), and it's obvious who the bad guy is. I believe that the reason Atlas didn't simply use the "Would you kindly" command is because Jack would catch on quickly. Asking you to pick up a wrench as a weapon is fairly safe (considering the situation you are in) but saying "Would you kindly murder someone you don't know and have never met before" is a bit of a stretch. Presumably, such a command would not be as efficient as letting Jack do it of his own (ha ha) "free will". Hence the attempt to gain trust.

* What happened to Tennenbaum at the end? I assume that she had to have escaped along with the main character in order to give the ending narrations, but I'm not even sure how she managed to survive Rapture in the first place, unless she's also spliced up with Adam.

** She can narrate from wherever she damn well pleases, it's beyond the fourth wall, so it doesn't matter. As for how she survived, well, she could just be an intelligent, resourceful individual.

** Tenenbaum has plasmids to control Big Daddies, as well as allies in the form of the indestructible Little Sisters. With allies like that, who could touch her? She's also shown in the Little Sisters' cove, hiding behind indestructible glass.

** Besides being able to control Big Daddies, Fontaine does hint that she has some other tricks up her sleeve to have stayed alive this long.

** The videos of the sequel suggest she has continued living in Rapture in the time between the two games, and is still there.

* How does the radio work? Sander Cohen is able to block out everyone's transmissions but his own apparently at will, but Tennenbaum is able to contact you pretty much everywhere (when you free Little Sisters).

** Sander Cohen is the city's biggest artist and an absolute control freak. It's easy to imagine him becoming proficient at radio jamming and control to ensure that his voice is the only one heard on the airwaves.

*** Fontaine has contacts with the outside; he could ''hire'' a ship to carry Jack near Rapture, which would make Jack's lack of papers irrelevant.

*** Except that most of those contacts vanished with Fontaine's fake death. He couldn't very well use Peach Williams' smugglers to set this up, for instance.

*** Actually, why couldn't Fontaine just bypass all need to slap Jack onto a ship, plane, or other vehicles of the outside world? He was able to have an entire personal history implanted into his brain. Couldn't he have just placed Jack knee-deep in the steps up to the bathysphere structure with him thinking to himself, "man, I can't believe I was lucky enough to survive that plane crash and find this oddly located lighthouse!".

*** [[Fridge Brilliance]]: How do you know he didn't?

*** The note's first words are "Would you kindly", but the rest of it is off-screen. Well, maybe you could see it with a model viewer. Someone with the PC version care to have a look at it?

**** You can see it briefly during a flashback when Ryan's has his big twist speech. It's basically "Would you kindly not open this package until such and such coorodinates and use the gun inside to hijack the plane." Essentially, it says exactly what you'd think it says once you hit [[The Reveal]].

** That will most likely be covered in the sequel, if there's going to be one.

* In the good ending we see that the sisters are given a chance to live full lives, and at the end we see an old and wrinkled female hand holding the hand of the presumably dying protagonist in a hospital bed; presumably one of the sisters. Which is nice, except for the age difference. Suchong's recording found right before meeting Ryan mentions that at an age of six months Jack has the body of a 45 year old, or something like that. Even if we assume the accelerated aging was turned off, he's about 30 years older than the sisters. Unless that was Tenenbaum there...

** [[Hand Wave|Maybe the whole mucking about with genetics thing screwed up his aging process?]]

*** Interesting point worth noting is that Fontaine appears to be unaware that Jack can resurrect via the Vita Chambers. I mean, he tries to have Jack killed right off the bat in Hephaestus once the city is in his control, and later he tries to make Jack commit suicide via Big Daddy. Neither of those would ''work'' on Jack permenantly, and Fontaine attempting to kill him wouldn't make sense if he knew he could just resurrect and keep on coming back.

**** Maybe since Fontaine had the genetic key working for him, he planned on turning off the Vita Chambers when Jack was disposed? Of course, he doesn't for some reason, so maybe not. Otherwise, it looks like the mental triggers are active even ''after'' Jack resurrects in the chambers, so if he gives Jack a command to kill himself, he'll likely continue to do it even * after* he's resurrected. Fontaine may have just figured as long as Jack was programmed to keep dying, he wouldn't be a threat.

** Better yet, why doesn't he try to command him to die right away? He already has security bots shooting him, why not just tell him to stand still?

* Just how much did Tenenbaum know about Jack and all the psychological/genetic manipulation that had been done to him, anyway? And why didn't she say anything just a little bit sooner, like, say, when he first ran into her?

*** She also says that she ''knows'' why it doesn't work on adults of either sex; she just doesn't know why it won't work on male children. This implies that she's tried and failed. It may be a chromosome issue.

*** Maybe the hormonal make-up in female children is suitable or even required for successful implantation of the slug.

*** I can imagine that making it ''necessary'' instead of optional to kill a young child was the reason they cut it... although it would have been insanely awesome to have Big Brothers

* Once [[The Reveal]] happened and Jack found out about the whole mind control thing, why didn't he just throw away the radio before Frank could make him do anything else or say "code yellow"? Yes, Tennenbaum managed to remove the "would you kindly" trigger but it wouldn't have required much thought to guess that there might be other triggers.

*** It's certainly a strong possibility. That audio diary still chokes me up. I just wish there was something more definitive since all of the other characters from the audio diaries got their stories tied up (well, you found their corpses anyway...)

*** According to the novel, Sullivan gets drunk after killing Culpepper and makes it pretty clear that he's going to off himself, so it seems confirmed.

** Presumably, the sane people in Rapture were all holed up elsewhere, not walking aorund looting the city and trying to kill strangers in the streets.

** Do we ever see any instructions apart from the ones telling him when to open the package? If not, perhaps there was another note ("Would you kindly hijack and crash the plane, then forget about all this?"), or mental suggestions set much earlier (along the lines of "Code Yellow" and such), that specified that he should forget about all of it after doing it.

** There's also the shock of crashing the plane that could have caused a temporary blackout. Also note that Jack explicitly forgets about everything that happens after he reads the first "would you kindly" note. It's possble that a written "would you kindly" has a different effect than a spoken one.

* How long was Jack down in Rapture for, anyway? Days? A week? I mean he can't have covered that much ground in 24 hrs ....could he?.

** It could potentially have been less than eight hours, as most of the game takes place over real-time. Probably longer though, considering his time in Tenenbaum's care.

** Because of the giant, city-shattering civil war that was going on at the time. Ryan barely has the resources to fight Fontaine/Atlas, let alone maintain Rapture, let alone have dedicated teams going about recovering corpses. By the time Jack arrives, Ryan is stark raving mad and all semblance of civil order has broken down.

* From Dr. Langford's audio diary: "We're paying for oxygen when we've got photosynthesizing trees!" Um, yeah. One, how stupid does one have to be to have not simply figured that out in the city's planning stages; and two, where the hell were they buying oxygen from?

** Also, the trees may be producing oxygen but, like all living things, they also consume resources. They need fresh water, fresh soil, and nutrients to function. And when your community is at the bottom of the ocean with (for the most part) no access to the outside world, those resources don't come cheap.

*** Also, Ryan may not have been sure that the plan to set up a forest in Arcadia would ''work'' at first; the trees wouldn't have started growing yet. He may have set up another source of oxygen (electrolysis?) for the early years, then approved Langford's decision to switch over to relying on the trees, using whatever other method he had as a backup. Remember that Ryan tries to destroy the forest ''before'' he gives up on Rapture entirely; he must have some kind of fallback plan to keep the rest of the city from dying.

** He wasn't looking for the rich and influential, he just wanted anyone who was as fed up as he was with (in his opinion) the parasitical and stifling nature of all the existing governments of the world. Most likely the only people he would've kept out were the "parasites", i.e. charity cases and anyone unwilling to work for a living.

*** This. Bill McDonagh, for instance, is hardly a rich, influential man. He was a ''plumber'' before his ethics and engineering skills were brought to Ryan's attention. Ryan has a great deal of respect for individual members of the lower classes who show talent, willpower, and what he sees as honor, even though he despises the lower class ''as a class''.

** A variety of reasons. Tenenbaum and Ryan both, at that point, had no idea what was going on; to see Jack so blindly follow Atlas' orders would definitely have been further evidence to Jack, Tenenbaum AND Ryan about Fontaine's mind control scheme. Tenenbaum would have recognised the phrase and made an enemy of Fontaine and Jack. At the first meeting, she wouldn't have recognised Jack OR Fontaine, using the phrase so liberally would have clued her in. And Fontaine did not NEED Jack to get the ADAM. It was a suggestion.

** Also keep in mind that even in 1960, nobody knew that Atlas was really Fontaine. For the past two years Fontaine has been dead and Atlas has been a working class hero leaving the rebellion against Ryan. Using the phrase right in front of Tenenbaum would have tipped her off, blown his own cover and probably revealed Jack's true identity to everyone. Fontaine wasn't just lying to Jack, he was lying to everyone.

** Bit of [[Fridge Brilliance]]: Sander Cohen, according to a certain diary, sucks as an artist and composer, and only stayed at the top through Ryan's good graces. It makes sense that even the comic stories he makes don't have any real backstory and have an AFGNCAAP as the hero.

** He probably raided the valuables found in Rapture and got help from Tennenbaum. As for how they managed to re-socialize the girls, dunno.

*** Tennenbaum either brainwashed the Sisters herself or worked closely with the people who did. She had access to all their files and protocols. She freed some Little Sisters some time before the beginning of the game and was working on deprogramming them, probably with some successes. They weren't flying blind. Anyway, while the trauma inflicted by Rapture can't be measured, they did have some socialization. They played with each other like normal girls. Also, I personally think giving Jack the gifts is a positive sign for their mental and emotional health. It would still be really hard, but the girls were already somewhat functional.

** He ''didn't'' know that you could use the Vita Chambers.

*** Yes, he knew. That was exactly why he needed Jack to be Andrew Ryan's son, so that he couldn't die.

*** I always assumed that Jack, y'know, ''called him'' on the radio and told him. You don't hear it because you're supposed to be a [[Heroic Mime]].

*** Fair enough. It still retains the question of how Fontaine knew right away that he lost control over you. Did you call him back and say: "Mr. Fontaine, go fuck yourself, would you kindly?"?

*** That's actually one of the most likely explanations right there.

*** My assumption was that part of the brainwashing included some sort of audio feedback from Jack when given a Arc Phrase command, and part of the programming would be that Jack is completely unaware that he said it, so when he was given that order and didn't reply, he realised that the command would no longer take.

** Even if Jack turned off the radio, I don't think it would help him very much. Fontaine probably had control over the public announcement system. He could also just write the words on the walls in Jack's path.

* Sparing Alexander, and condemning him to be a bloated fetus creature wracked with pain and insanity, is considered a good act. What the ''FUCK''.

*** The Big Daddies don't need to process ADAM, they just need to store it up in a tank and deliver it to the Sisters.

*** The Big Daddies seem barely intelligent enough to follow and protect the Little Sisters. Asking them to actually move through Rapture and find dead bodies on their own might be pushing the limits of their intellect.

* A fairly minor one, but...in Bioshock 2, while you're in Siren Alley, the part where you get locked in the maintenance area and have to defend yourself from a swarm of Spider Splicers? Sinclair sends you some items through the mail tube to help you defend yourself...except he's still trapped in that wrecked train car. How does he have access to a mail tube?

** Turn on radio. Call up [insert Rapture denizen who owes Sinclair a favor here]. Give him/her instructions and a pneumo address. Presto.

** Keep in mind that Fontaine very rarely uses to the trigger phrase on Jack. For the most part, he lets Jack work on his own, giving him advice, etc. He only uses the trigger phrase to help maintain absolute control at mission-critical moments, so Jack doesn't do something silly like stop to question Ryan and negotiate with him instead of killing him.

** "Would you kindly get stepped on by a Big Daddy?" and Code Yellow.

** First, I think the reason he had Jack kill him was to slap home the whole "You're a mindless slave" thing while satisfying his own massive ego and go down on his own terms, not so he wouldn't have to kill Jack. Second, the reason he activated the self-destruct was along the lines of "If I can't be king of Rapture, '''no one''' gets to be king of Rapture!" I don't think he had any idea that Jack knew how to stop the self-destruct sequence.

** A less satisfying answer related to the above: Ryan just ''really hated'' Atlas.

*** Neither the girls nor Tennenbaum were in the airplane passenger roster. I'm not exactly familiar with the check in procedures of the 1950s but I doubt you could bring several dozens minor stowaways aboard. And whether they could fool the rescuers or not, there is still an uncharted lighthouse with some fancy statues and at least a bathysphere bay (if Jack managed to destroy the bathysphere itself). Quite enough to instigate curiosity and make them bring their own bathyspheres.

**** They barely checked if you had a ''gun'' in the fifties the flight registry was probably just a list of names and seats they could just say the kids where children from the flight and say they wanted to adopt them all.

**** Sure, but they would bring them back to the mainland afterwards. Are you telling me that the procedures were ''so'' lax back then that ''nobody'' would bother to establish their identities? I'd buy it, if it was only about Jack and Tennenbaum, since both of them were adults and had at least some past on the surface, but a couple dozen little girls with virtually no backstory? How in the world did they explain them to the authorities? As their own? As a kindergarten or an orphanage on a vacation trip? As children salvaged from a hellish underwater city, where they were submitted to inhuman, mind suppressing experiments? Oh, wait...

** Who said that the naval submarine was used to rescue Jack and the Sisters? Fontaine has access to ships that can reach the surface and transport people to land, he kind of ''has'' to in order for his endgame plot to work (he strongly implied he had such a ship when taunting Jack later on) and he needed something to get Jack to land so he can board a plane in the first place. Jack most likely used that.

* Why didn't Ryan or Tennenbaum ever consider saying "Would you kindly stop doing anything Atlas tells you to when he says 'Would you kindly do this or that?'"

** Ryan appeared to be resigned to his death by the time he figured out who you were; he apparently realized just how utterly fucked-up Rapture was and wanted to destroy it all. Plus, he was insane and irrational. Tennenbaum wanted Ryan dead as much as Fontaine, which is why she waited until after Jack killed him before undoing his conditioning.

* Did Sigma{{spoiler|/Porter}} ever have a Little Sister?

** It started out as thousands, but grew to several tens of thousands eventually. As for maintaining the geothermal plant, this ''is'' a game where you can grow a hive of bees in your forearm. The fact that they were able to build a functional city at the bottom of the sea in the 40's and develop technology more advanced than modern technology indicates that they probably did have the capacity to build a functional geothermal plant.

** I always assumed almost everyone in Rapture ''was'' employed by either Ryan or Fontaine. Rapture always struck me as a company town.

** Because the Little Sisters were the only ones who could open the doors, but would only do so for a Big Daddy due to their intense mental conditioning. The rescued ones were just the ones Tenenbaum had access too, and thus, could send off to aid Jack. Besides, how would he "halfway become a Big Daddy" and still be convincing to the Little Sisters?

** ^I think you're misunderstanding his problem. Why can't Tenenbaum just send one of the rescued girls to open the door for you, since all it nedes is someone small enough to get to the other side? She never says that it has to be an infected one specifically, it would have been much simpler to send a rescued one to open it up for you.

*** The Little Sisters always act like little girls in some sense - their little songs, for instance, and they make those Big Daddy dolls. I always figured they had some downtime(after all, you only get two gathers from Delta's sisters) and played during that, so their actions in Tenenbaum's place are normal Sister behavior.

*** Liberated Little Sisters aren't completely free from mind control. Those that you have to escort still have to follow the instinct of jamming needles into dead bodies, so I assume opening the doors for Big Daddies alone is part of the indoctrination Tennenbaum wasn't able to erase.

 

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[[Category:Headscratchers]]

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