And brothers and sisters, it ain’t pretty.
Ordinarily I am on the “Cortana should never return in any form” bandwagon. I have my reasons for this, I want her to stay dead and have her death actually mean something. I’m all for finality. However, looking at some of the things 343 Industries have put out over the past year, I’ve found a way I’d appreciate Cortana coming back and am convinced that this is how it is going to go down and why it will go down.
I believe that whatever events transpire in the next Halo game set after Halo 4, Chief will see Cortana pop up. Not only this, but I believe that she will still actively guide him towards his goals. She might even have a logical explanation as to why Chief is able to see her and hear her. Perhaps she is on a mission from the Librarian to ensure the safety of the Janus Key. Perhaps she is guiding Chief on the path to fully resurrect her. Either way, Chief will believe it and yet it may out him at odds with the UNSC. After all, if your top solider is saying he sees a dead AI and that said AI is telling him what to do, that may raise a few red flags.
However, there comes a moment towards the end of the game where it looks like Chief and Cortana will reunite for good. Just as they touch or just as Chief does what he needs to do to bring her back…343 Industries delivers a -Yoink- slap that crushes every notion you’ve had about what was real throughout the entire game.
Because as it turns out, Cortana was never truly there. Instead, it is an otherworldly apparition conjured by the evil, Lovecraftian terror of the Gravemind. Chief has been a pawn to the Flood the entire time. What happens next, I can’t say as I have no clue.
So how did I come to this conclusion? For one thing, 343 Industries has been redefining what the Flood is and what it is capable of with the Forerunner Saga and Spartan Assaults new co-op Flood mode and Flood gametype in Halo 4 show the UNSC is preparing for the Flood to return. Ultimately, they are far more horrifying than we can possibly know and one event at the end of Halo: Silentium shows just how dedicated they are at telling us how futile our efforts are. As the Librarian returns to Earth to secure the portal to the Lesser Ark, she encounters the ghastly specters of the ancient human Lord of Admirals, the deceased Gamelpar character from Primordium and other humans who no longer live, yet they are speaking to her. Where did they come from? The Gravemind produced them to deliver the news that the Domain, the collected knowledge of the Forerunners, was a Precursor creation and that the Halos would destroy it as all Precursor technology is when faced against the Halos.
Think about that. The Halos are on the verge of firing, all sentient life and Flood is about to be eradicated and what does the Gravemind do? It mocks the Librarian and tells her that the mythical Organon has been before the Forerunners this whole time and that they are going to destroy it. This establishes that the Gravemind is capable of creating convincing illusions across vast channels of space and time, illusions that can interact with the living.
Is it far-fetched to assume the Gravemind would attack John emotionally at his most vulnerable point with the image of the one he cared for and failed to protect? Of -Yoinking!- course it would, that is the name of the Gravemond’s game. The Flood takes your body, your memories, the very essence of yourself and uses it against you. Your body is tormented physically and your memories fade as you struggle to remember. The suffering makes it all the more sweeter for the Flood. Need proof? Look what happened to Captain Keyes.
Something similar happened to Cortana during the events between Halo 2 and Halo 3. The Gravemind poked and prodded Cortana’s weakpoints and used her affection for John against her, mocking her for using his real name and tormenting her with the fact she will eventually die and, perhaps, be replaced. Luckily, she survived and was saved by Chief, but it was a harrowing experience that showed the true nature of the Gravemind. Others haven’t been so lucky with their contact with the Gravemind, for example, the Ur-Didact. His contact with the beast drove him insane and intensified his inner prejudice against humanity, ultimately culminating in his use of the Composer on humanity to bolster the numbers of his Promethean Knights.
And now that Chief seems to share some sort of link with the Didact and the Didact was corrupted by the Flood, is it possible that link will be the catalyst for Cortana’s sudden reappearance in Chief’s head? Could this be a way for the Gravemind to learn Cortana’s demise, ie Chief knows Cortana dies thus the Didact knows thus the Gravemind knows, and exploit it for all its worth while having the Chief do its bidding? I certainly believe so.
But why do this at all? Why put the Chief, and by association the player, through this? Well, 343 Industries have said that Halo 5, or whatever it is eventually called, will be the darkest Halo game yet. They are certainly aware of how much the fans love Cortana and demand to see her return. They craft theories on how she’ll come back and, for an instant, anything seems possible. It also stands to reason that Chief would feel the same way within the story. So what better way to set the tone of the story than by offering the glimpse of hope that Cortana can come back and that she is helping you even in death only for it to be ripped away at the last minute.
The Chief and player WILL feel violated by what the Gravemind did. It used both of your deep emotional feelings and connection to Cortana to drive the story to its own ends. And in the end it takes away the one thing that has defined what the community has idealized in trying to find a way to bring Cortana back and Chief’s motivation to try to bring her back: hope. What is darker than having your hope crushed? Little.
The reasoning, as I see it, is twofold. One, it re-establishes the Flood as more of a threat than the generic space zombies they have been. They have changed and creep further into the unknown. How you will conquer such evil is a mystery. Second, it allows both the community and Chief to move on. The Kübler-Ross model details the stages of grief. We deny, we get angry, we bargain, we become depressed and we then move on. Obviously the players and Chief are at the bargaining stage, the worst has yet to come with the depression stage. Once the cat is out of the bag and we learn Cortana’s reappearance was a ruse, the Chief may go insane and finally break. Yet when broken, you must take the pieces and build back up. Once he has accepted what has happened, Chief will become stronger and can face the Flood. I’d like to think the community can follow his lead.
I have no absolute proof though, so I might be wrong. Have a nice day/evening and thanks for reading.
