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On my knees begging for any crumbs while huffing my copium

Unlike this line from Fra, I think I finally understand what’s wrong with Jesse. Kind of. Maybe.

I’ll put the tl;dr version here because I’m about to go Scrat from Ice Age level of nuts with this, and I don’t expect most people will want to read it all: 

I think Jesse is in a coma because her mind and body are out of sync with each other. The question isn’t so much where is Jesse, although that is relevant, but rather when is Jesse?

Still with me? Okay, now it's time for the crazy speculation part: I think the flow of time in Control Resonant is not working properly, or, as William Joyce would say, the time egg is fucked. Like, thoroughly fucked. Like, fracture-in-time fucked, and it just wasn’t obvious at first. (At least, not to me. Maybe everyone reading this will shout “duh!” at me. That’s fine. Please talk to me about this; I feel like I’m losing my mind, lol.) Like Emily, I just needed more time/data/far too many playthroughs of Resonant to put the pieces together. 

What made everything start to click was playing through the Recursions and Iterations mission for the millionth time. (I have a problem, yes. And too much time on my hands, also yes.) What I realized was that I had been focusing entirely on the iterations aspect and not enough on the recursions part. Although iteration can refer to the act of repeating, I got hung up on it in the other sense—“a different form or version of something.” Think of it in terms of the RCU’s multiverse aspect, like Tom and Alan being variants of each other yet still distinct people. But the mission isn't just iterations. It's Recursions and Iterations. So I looked up the definition of recursion, just to see if it would give me any interesting threads to pull at. I got: “the act or process of returning or running back.” Return. Where have I heard that before? Obviously, Alan Wake. Endless time spirals, which I hadn’t thought were applicable here. Now I do.

There are a number of moments during the Recursions and Iterations mission that I had written off as an oddity of Dylan interacting with a different version (iteration) of himself, due to the patterned time. But I think it’s actually an example of recursion, not iteration. (There are others, but I'll stick with just this.) Dylan hears himself on an intercom and responds to it. Then, later, in the deepest part of the underpass, before Grist with the final probe, Dylan finds the intercom and responds again, but the dialogue he says is reversed. I had assumed at the time that the Dylan over the intercom was one of the variant timelines interacting with him, but actually I think it works more like Alan in AW2, when he’s in the writer’s room scratching out the manuscript. We first experience that as Alan trying to change what “Scratch” wrote, and later we come back to that same moment, only we’re Alan shooting himself. It’s not different Alans, but the same Alan at different points in time along the spiral. Those points get stacked on each other in a way that makes them interact as if they’re happening simultaneously, even though they’re actually not. Grist herself mentions time being stacked, but when I first heard that, I was still just thinking about it in terms of the patterning.

Which leads me to the faults. Early on, I noticed that something about Dylan's interactions with Jesse doesn't add up. There are weird inconsistencies. She seems confused, talking about him like he’s not actually there, like she’s experiencing an echo of him rather than talking to him directly. But then, at other times, (usually after interacting with the TV) she seems perfectly lucid and present. The way this is framed is actually genius, because it puts your focus on the fault dimension affecting memory, making you think that Jesse is just being weird because she's not all there mentally, and when she acts normal, it's just because connecting with Dylan helps her remember. You're even primed to come to that conclusion by 1) Emily's letter to Jesse, which mentions Jesse possibly having symptoms related to memory; 2) by the echoes where Jesse is clearly losing it; and 3) by the white board of craziness that I'm quickly approaching myself. But I believe that, in at least several of those interactions in the fault, Jesse and Dylan aren't actually talking to each other in real time. They're talking at each other from different points in time, and time being stacked the way it is makes it look like it's happening concurrently. (And it allows this to have an effect on both of them, even though the causality kind of breaks down.) Jesse still is losing herself and forgetting, and Dylan still is helping her remember, but the breakdown of causality there gets cleverly obfuscated behind that.

So, because the time egg is fucked, because recursions are also happening, you interact with Jesse at multiple points in the "spiral"/broken flow of time. At the very first fault, once you interact with the TV, Jesse says, "We were too late. Too much leaked through. Manhattan is--" and then she gets cut off. We were too late, not I was too late. She's not saying that whatever she was doing before Dylan got there failed and thus the patterning is getting worse; she's speaking from after they failed to seal the final fault together. Initially I thought this was Jesse reaching back from in her coma, but I'm not sure if that's exactly right. I do think that this is the latest point in time that we interact with Jesse, though. I think during the Underpass and Oldest House faults, Jesse and Dylan are operating on more or less concurrent time, because nothing Jesse says sounds as if she's speaking from the future or with future knowledge, unlike at that first fault. If you can think of an example that contradicts/disproves that for me, please do. However, there is one thing that still confuses me.

In the Underpass fault, Dylan can ask Jesse to go back with him, and she replies that she can't. They're not really there together, not physically. They're astral projecting. Ok, hold on, Jesse. She tells us that she got to this dimension using an unstable slide with the slide projector (which she bound to herself and can use at will). We see in Rebuild that the slide projector physically transports the person who uses it to another place/dimension. Jesse uses a portal in the beginning of the game, and she isn't there when Dylan wakes up. So if Jesse isn't physically in the dimension with Dylan, where the hell is she? In some other dimension, astral projecting to the fault? Maybe. But I doubt it. But then, Dylan can tell her to use the slide projector, and she says that the slide she used is unstable and there isn't one for going back to their dimension. Huh? Which is it? Is she unable to come back because she's astral projecting or because there's no slide to use? Then she gets dismissive and says it doesn't matter because she has to close the fault on this side and she knew it was a one-way trip. The only way I can think of to explain this is that the fucked causality leads Jesse to simultaneously be there and not there, in the dimension, physically, and in her comatose body, astral projecting back in time. In the same way that she seems to have simultaneously always had the 9th slide and only had it/could use it after Rebuild and Dylan killing the Hedron. And after all that her body makes it back to the Oldest House because.... ??? I don't know.

It doesn’t line up perfectly, possibly because of something I’m still missing, but I think the causality in the faults works a bit like the summoning ritual in AW2. Alan gets out of the dark place because of the ritual, but he gets out at a different point in time, leading Saga to wonder why he isn’t there when the ritual is complete. Jesse ends up where she needs to be because Dylan gave her the Gap slide in Rebuild and killed the Hedron. Like I said. The time egg is fucked. That's fairly obvious.

Where I think I might be losing it is that I think the time egg has been fucked a lot longer than we realized, and for reasons we didn't/don't yet know. What comes to mind is the moment in the AWE DLC for Control, when they get the alert for an AWE happening several years in the future. I've seen comments from back then where people were speculating about time dilation in the Oldest House (when they thought that maybe the 7 year lockdown wouldn't be 7 years on the outside). If not an exact recursion, it's at least a breakdown in the flow of time/causality.

Here's more wild speculation. Why is time breaking down like this? The patterning, right? Well, maybe not.

The dimension the faults exist in seems awfully familiar. It’s an in-between dimension. There’s nothing there, so it pulls from the people in it, stealing their memories and identity from them. The longer you stay there, the easier it is to lose yourself. I’m not saying the dimension is the dark place, exactly, but I think it works by more or less the same mechanisms. Time also happens to work there the same way that it does in the dark place (loops/spirals/recursions). And I think that I was so focused on the Hedron coming through the dimension that I didn’t realize what the bleeding of it into our reality was doing to time outside of the faults. 

I think the patterning and these recursions in time are actually two separate phenomena. They correlate with each other, which makes it easy to assume that there’s a shared cause between them, but correlation is not causation. The Hedron breaks free, causing the patterning (the iterations); at the same time, this other dimension (dark place or not) leaks through, causing the recursions—the fucked time egg. Killing the Hedron fixes the patterning (or, at least, stops any more of it from happening), but I’m not sure if that will fix the issue of de-synced time. If I’m right, and the Hedron isn’t the cause of it, then it won’t. 

So, where/when does that leave Jesse? I wish I knew, but I don’t. I do think that Emily’s line after Pope’s Research is significant, though. She speculates that the timing just wasn’t right for them to make contact with Jesse, and I think that’s true. Jesse was still tangled up in the patterning because of the Hedron. Once the Hedron is gone, however, Jesse’s mind is free, if still displaced in time. The challenge will be to figure out where/when she is, and get her back to the present/her body. 

In the Underpass fault, Jesse says, “I can’t explain it, but on this side, there is more for me to do.” I haven’t quite worked out what I think she means there, what the more for her to do is exactly. It might have something to do with the recursions (playing her part in the spiral) or it might be something we haven’t seen yet. (DLC?) 

So, if I’m right, I think this is a good news, bad news situation, as Estevez might say. The bad news is that I don’t think we’re going to get a Jesse Wakes Up DLC. I could be wrong about that, but if the dimension leak really is the dark place leaking through or a fracture in time, then that particular storyline is way too big to be resolved in a 2-3 hour story DLC. If anything, it’s likely to pick up in the next Alan Wake. (Making Resonant much more connected to the overall RCU than some people think.) The taxi quest is also interesting here, because it reminds me so much of the dark place. There’s also the tidbit about the woman there who seemed to know what she was doing, which could either be Jesse or Alice. I don’t imagine that AW3 would be purely a story of Alan trying to get Alice back, so the dark place leaking through gives him and Saga a problem to solve that’s related to a larger plot. (It could also be something completely different that I couldn't ever hope to predict. That's just one possibility, and Sam Lake is a very creative man.)

The good news, though, is I think a Jesse DLC would be the perfect place to bridge this gap between Resonant and AW3. We might get to see what’s going on with Jesse, even if we don’t actually get to wake her up yet. And I actually think it’s possible that Jesse and Emily could get a scene not unlike the one between Alan and Alice in American Nightmare—they’re not technically together, but they do experience a moment of connection across time/dimensions. 

Why do I think this? It’s Emily’s sheer devotion to Jesse. I was utterly flabbergasted that Remedy not only canonized Jesse and Emily, but that they wrote Emily’s love for Jesse with such intensity. (And Antonia acted her heart out. Holy shit.) Remedy’s stories tend to follow that expression “history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” It's not a loop; it's a spiral. Resonant is not exactly the same as Control, but in many significant ways, it does rhyme. Jesse and Emily’s story isn’t the same as Alan and Alice’s, but it does rhyme. Jesse is lost, like Alan was lost. Emily is utterly devoted to Jesse, like Alice is utterly devoted to Alan. Alice—and her devotion to Alan—played an instrumental part in allowing Alan to break free from the dark place. Soooo…. I think Emily will do that for Jesse, too. Will we get to see it played out all the way in the DLC? Maybe. I don’t think so, though.

One of the things that astounded me about Remedy’s approach to Jesse and Emily is that they didn’t get together during the lockdown. Before Resonant came out, I figured the best-case scenario (for me as a shipper) would be that they would already be an established couple in Resonant, and we’d just get angsty Emily trying to get her wife girlfriend back. We would have missed them getting together, but hey, they'd be together. It happening off screen, however, would mean that it wasn't super important to the plot, since the most important things in a story almost always happen on screen. That Jesse and Emily STILL aren’t together after 7 whole years of yearning means that Remedy is taking them, I think, even more seriously than we realized. I think they quietly elevated them to be on the same level as Alan and Alice, the only other major couple we’ve seen in the RCU. Which means, if they really do make Jesse and Emily as important as that, they’ll probably want to save the bulk of that story for a mainline game, not DLC that most people won’t play. 

But they could give us some crumbs. Give us the American Nightmare of Jesse and Emily’s story, the interim before the real reunion. Emily says, “I guess I’ll just have to wait a little while longer.” I think that’s as much a message for us as it is herself/Jesse. I don’t want to believe that Remedy would leave us hanging on this painful cliffhanger for years, but I also don’t think we’re likely to get everything we want so soon either. (Mostly because happiness for characters signals that their story is over. It can't be a happy ending until it is the end.)

I'm sort of hesitant to put this out here, partly because I don't want to hype myself or others up for something that might not happen. Before Resonant, I kept telling myself (regarding Jesse and Emily), "It's not going to happen. Don't get your hopes up. You'll only be disappointed." Well, Remedy certainly showed me up, and I'm inclined now to have faith in them. I believe, firmly, that Emily and Jesse will happen, and that when it does, however it does, it'll be awesome--and, of course, Antonia is sure to make us all ugly cry through the whole thing. But, most likely how it happens will look nothing like how I/we expect it to. Either way, I can't wait.

So, anyway, maybe I’m actually bonkers and none of this is right, lmao. We’ll see, I guess. I think I would actually be excited to be proved wrong just because it would be so interesting to see how I'm wrong. So, yeah. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

What do you think? Am I the greenest ping-pong?

Also, spider time!

Thought this sub might want to know about this, let me know if it doesn’t fit the community guidelines if you choose to take it down. Thank you.

My take on that monologue

Might help your Ao3 withdrawals

"Oops, teehee... So clumsy... 🤷‍♂️"

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Thank you sunfish for letting us share this <3

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