New Bioshock: Infinite - Page 23

After the baptism and he enters Columbia, Booker says something about how the dude needs to learn the difference between baptizing someone and drowning them. I love how there are tons of neat little moments like that that seem insignificant but really turn out to be foreshadowing/plays a neat role. There's an interview with Ken Levine out there about how in movies, every little shot has to mean something, and although he says in that interview that games are an interesting medium because you can have some unimportant things like the little movies, I just though of how everything in the main story ties together and is important.

It ties up nicely only in the sense that its foreshadowed very well, but I can't really make sense of it. I mean, You're hopping backwards and forwards through time, or across realities or both...and you make this decision at the end that doesn't seem to really account for any of that. It seems entirely futile. This "future" you are trying to prevent has already happened, or is happening or will happen somewhere. Why is this version of Booker culpable for a choice another Booker in another world made anymore so than, say Elizabeth is culpable for future New York burning at her alternate hand? To me its seems Prophet made a choice. He was baptised a new man, but he had not truly paid penance for his past sins. Simultaneously Booker rejected this false repentance, he suffers with his past until he is given an opportunity to "wipe away the debt" by retrieving the girl and yet it seems he is still not absolved because he too suffers the same fate as Prophet. Why? Can some sins truly not be forgiven? :D - Honestly it felt like a gutpunch ending just for the sake of shock, because as far as I can tell it doesn't really tie up anything.

Elizabeth takes you to the place just before the Baptism, the place where you either become Comstock or remain as Booker. Every single Booker that exists in every universe undergoes the Baptism at that moment and is a "constant" as Elizabeth says in the ending, just like it always starts with a lighthouse in every universe and this is when the disconnect happens and infinitely different universes spring from the choice of receiving that Baptism (Comstock) or refusing and remaining as Booker. In order to eliminate the cycle of these universes where in the end, everything ends up the same, Booker has to die before choosing whether to be baptized or not.

many worlds/everett quantum theme

I feel like the whole drowning thing is only meant to 'fix' things for a few realities. The version of his baptism/lack of Elizabeth takes you to when she drowns you is the specific version of this scene that leads to the future you+her (these specific versions of yourselves) are affected by. Basically, there will be many different versions of Booker post Wounded Knee that decides to get baptised - other decisions/events earlier in life may shape Booker slightly but in the end he still arrives at the baptism. He will just be a slightly different person when he arrives there, which will then shape what he does afterwards. (There will also be many versions of Booker that never even go the baptism at all, or fight in Wounded Knee or do almost anything our version of Booker did, but theyre not important to us. We just care about the essentially infinite variations of Booker that ended up accepting the baptism.)

So this specific world Elizabeth takes you to (to drown you) is the world inhabited by the precise version of Booker that becomes the version of Comstock youve been fighting throughout the game. You take his place somehow (this is the only bit that im a bit stuck on, generally what we've seen in the game is multiple versions of people being possible in one universe. Maybe Elizabeth has developed some new tearing powers post siphon destruction that lets her control them better, shrug), and die AS HIM in this universe.

The version of Booker that would become our-Comstock dissapears (this specific Booker that would become Comstock, many more still exist), this Comstock thus never orders Lutece to steal Elizabeth/Anna from your-version-of-Bookers universe and so your-Bookers universe is also completely changed. You wake up post credits to presumably about the point where male-Lutece would come to buy Anna from you, except now he never comes because the Universe that is ordering this to happen doesnt exist. You wake up because time gets erased as the loop/chain has been broken by Comstock in the second Universe never existing, thus basically the entire events of the game never happened, putting you back to just before any interaction with events inspired by the second Universe. Youre not dead because all the events leading to it nolonger happen, and as we've seen at many points in the game people can be brought back to life by shifting tears and they can be kinda mindfucked because they remember their death.

The other Elizabeths shown during the drowning scene are other Elizabeths that tangentially become a reality due to events after this specific baptism scene. For example this one instance of the baptism occurs, Booker gets baptised and becomes Comstock but makes different decisions in the future leading to different universes, each of which feature a version of Elizabeth. They all still originated from this specific version of Booker at Wounded Knee however, so their history also gets erased and they get 'saved' along with 'our' Elizabeth/Anna.

Any versions of Elizabeth that got sold to a Comstock that was a different person (different past events/tangents) when he got baptised is fucked however. The whole idea can be extended to include them too however by just saying that 'our' Elizabeth opened a 'MULTITEAR' of all universes where Booker got baptised and your player-character took the place of and thus ended the future of all possible Comstock-becoming Bookers.


QUESTIONS: So what are your takes on the actual event of our player character being drowned - its probably the most confusing element of the whole ending to me - how we, a version of Booker that did not become Comstock and have been through a completely seperate set of events post-lack of baptism have the ability to end other Bookers futures by dying ourselves. As has been seen by the very fact that we+Comstock were able to inhabit the same Universe for almost the entire game, why do we 'become' a Comstock-becoming Booker in the drowning scene.

The lucky (or more likely, intentional) thing about such an out-there quantum based multi-verse exposition is that it can allow you to pretty much fill in the gaps however you like and it could still make some theoretical sense. Admittedly kind of a cop out, which was disappointing, but at the same time it was still a good way to provoke players to interpret the story in their own ways, taking meaning and resolution wherever they can find it themselves.

For your specific question, your own conclusion may be as apt an answer as any other, they may just be trying to say that some sins truly can't be forgiven. If he was truly resolved to make the man that caused Elizabeth's imprisonment, Columbia's fall, and even the potential future destruction of New York pay for his crimes, then he needs to destroy not only his Comstock-iteration, but his own as well. After all, the suffering Booker DeWitt was just as culpable for the key piece in the puzzle that leads to every other sin, Elizabeth's universe transfer. It doesn't matter if he regretted it or tried to make up for it, that is the kind of mistake you only need to make once to be forever ruined. If Comstock's only atonement could come through death, then who's to say Booker DeWitt didn't fall in the same boat, at least in his own and Elizabeth's eyes.

Or, you could interpret it a completely different way. Maybe that death sequence was merely a symbolic one set up by Elizabeth to help Booker come to terms with his own failings before being reborn again with a second chance in yet another alternate universe. This type of explanation allows the post-credits scene to not just be a red herring.

Better still, if taking into account the post-credits scene, maybe it was a literal death, some kind of convergent one set up by Elizabeth that kills all iterations of Booker DeWitt post-baptism. His salvation instead comes instead THROUGH his death, forcing it so that the only in tact iterations are where Booker never gave himself a false dichotomy of religious salvation vs forsaken morality in the first place, and was able to come to terms with his sins in his own way. It might be a bit too charitable for player-Booker to think of it this way at his death, but it could be his salvation either way.

Who really knows. There seems to be so few well understood rules with REAL quantum mechanics and popular multiverse theory, much less a dramatically fictionalized one. I wonder if Levine had intended for the ending to be as vague as it was in this sense, or if we'll eventually see an intended explanation pop out somewhere.

Assuming that the ending was the scissors that cut off all possible futures involving DeWitt, Comstock and Columbia as a whole, then that in itself creates a new paradox. The entire baptism scene was, I believe, brought on by a fairly massive depression cycle caused by the guilt of selling his daughter away. Assuming there was never a Comstock to sell his daughter too, creates a paradox where there's no reason for him to spiral into depression and thus no reason to undergo baptism (well, no reason to sell Anna anyways, there may still not be a 'happy' future, but regardless).

It becomes it's own self-contained universe, completely isolated from the DeWitt/Comstock multi-verse. Granted, there's more than a bit of egg and chicken paradox in any case, as how did the entire Columbia Multi-verse begin if it requires the input of a Columbia verse to start, which is only possible because a Columbia verse exists. It's a logical impossibility, but then again, we are talking about multi-verse and quantum mechanics.

Effect before Cause, because the Effect exists, because the Effect exists. And no, that doesn't even make that much sense to me, but there really aren't good words to describe the timey-wimey bits that could generate this causality chain.

Thus, the after-credits scene is the newly formed multiverse that never allowed Comstock to develop, which never allowed Anna/Elizabeth to develop her powers, which prevents any mucking about with a Multi-verse. Unless the crazy twins still function, but even if they do... they seemed more passive than active with regards to causing events.

If I'm understanding your theory correctly, then you should realise that the baptism scene happened just after the battle of Wounded Knee, and long before Anna/Elizabeth was born. The sins he was trying to rid himself of were the sins he committed at Wounded Knee rather than the sins of giving Emma up.

The baptism was after Wounded Knee, long before he sold his daughter. If he got baptised, he became Comstock and never met his wife/had Anna. If he didnt get baptised he met his wife, had Anna, wife died in childbirth and he sold Anna to an alternate reality Comstock. :o)

Hmm... I guess that does solve the chicken and egg problem, though in the end, it defeats any theories I had regarding the post-credits scene.

Honestly, it's fairly depressing just how little 'choice' mattered in this game, in the end. Destiny, karma, predetermination, or prophecy... it doesn't really matter how you define it, but it tends to leave a sour taste for those caught in it's grasp, or me, taking the roll of DeWitt anyways.