by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

Happy Memorial Day, everyone in the USA! And Happy Monday, everyone who is everywhere else! Let’s break down what Team 4 decided to drop on us out of the blue.

We’re going to talk about story details first, but I’ve got some speculation about the nature of this place as a map at the end, so stick around.

What did we just see?

Let’s call out some details presented on the live feed image:

• Seven specimens are indicated, while two specimens (Hammond and Winston) are indicated as being “Not Found”. If this is a live feed from the Horizon Colony, Winston not being there makes sense. We’ll talk more about Hammond in a sec.
• Twelve scientists are indicated on the map, while six are specifically named in the messages. Again, if this is a live feed, it’s reasonable to assume that the Colony’s narrative is NOT “the specimens killed errybody and Winston came to earth because the other space gorillas were mean to him.”
• However, names aren’t attached to any of the location indicators, so we don’t know which specimens/scientists are which.

Let’s break down some the key players called out in that blog post:

• Lucheng Interstellar: This is the company headquartered in Lijiang Tower, where we predominately try to take over control points and/or capture flags. They’re clearly invested heavily in the Horizon colony, given all of their promo posters and spacesuits lying around for it.
• The scientists mentioned in the messages are Nevsky, Flores, Nguyen, Yoshida, Zhang, and Winston.
  • Nevsky and Winston seem to be two senior scientists who are at odds about what to do about the gorillas acting out of turn.
  • Nguyen is indicated to have been injured (most likely as a result of the specimens acting out) and is in the infirmary.
  • Flores complains about the sounds coming from the ventilation system.
  • Yoshida is the recipient of a message from Winston, who indicates that he agrees with confining the gorillas (even though the earlier message indicates Nevsky suggested it regarding Simon and the others).
  • Zhang is the one who comments on Hammond being on the loose. Again, we’ll get back to Hammond.
  • As a sidenote, there is a great deal of diversity to the names, with a number of them being Asian (Nguyen = Vietnamese, Zhang = Chinese, Yoshida = Japanese). This loops back to the Horizon colony being something that appears to have been launched by a private space initiative in China rather than a government body.

Let’s also break down the timeline:

Right now, we know precious little about the timeline of what’s going on here. But what’s established in the very first line is this: Horizon went quiet YEARS AGO, and Lucheng is only now revealing some information not only about what’s happening on Horizon in the present, but also what happened that caused communications to go dark in the first place. Most importantly, there’s the live feed image indicating that the gorillas AND the scientists appear to still be active on the Horizon site.

This contradicts a lot of what we’ve been told in Winston’s official origin story: namely, that the gorillas rebelled and killed the human scientists, and that was the catalyst for Winston coming down to Earth. The fact that the scientists appear to be still active would suggest that this was not the case.

Something else that creates some questions in this: the Uprising event that we just experienced was touted as taking place “seven years ago.” We know that while Winston wasn’t an active agent on the mission, he WAS working with Overwatch at the time, given his presence in the accompanying comic. And Recall established that he must have graduated to field agent status sometime after that point, because of his graduation picture with Tracer and a bunch of the alpha team.

So the only timeline we can extrapolate so far is this:

1. Winston is born and raised on the Horizon lunar colony.
2. Some kind of event takes places with the specimens on the colony, causing the colony to lose contact with Earth.
3. Winston “builds a makeshift rocket” and ends up on Earth.
4. Winston joins Overwatch, designing the chronal accelerator that helps give Tracer control of her weird-time condition. He’s there when she attains field agent status just before the King’s Row Uprising, seven years ago.
5. Winston survives the destruction of the Swiss headquarters (possibly by not being there) and takes up residence at the Gibraltar Watchpoint. It’s from there that he constructs and later launches the network that will allow him to recall Overwatch agents to duty. By this point, he’s 29 years old.
6. Lucheng reveals that the colony is still active, and that a number of the specimens and scientists appear to be alive and active. Winston himself and Hammond are specifically called out as specimens who are NOT on the colony.

So what’s the deal with Hammond?

Here’s what we know so far about Hammond:

1. He’s not accounted for on the live feed from the colony, just like Specimen Winston.
2. He’s described as being a smaller test subject, which would suggest that he’s not a gorilla.
3. Hammond and Winston’s specimen numbers are at the opposites extremes of the spectrum we see presented: Hammond is Specimen 8, while Winston is 28.

What we can surmise about Hammond given the information provided is this: it seems likely that if Hammond wasn’t being closely monitored, and he’s smaller than a gorilla, and that someone was complaining about weird noises coming out of the ventilation system, then it stands to reason that Hammond was moving around the colony through the vents, likely up to no good.

While it also might be easy to conclude that Hammond isn’t being accounted for in the live feed because he’s dead (i.e., he’s messing around and accidentally blows open an airlock, killing himself and starting a chain reaction that somehow sequesters the colony), it feels like a lot of effort is being spent on establishing hints about his character. So he’s important, but we just don’t know how.

What do the names MEAN?

I’m pretty confident that the names of the specimens we’ve been presented with all have nested, deliberate meanings. Unpacking what those meanings are could give us an indication of what’s going on up there.

1. Simon is a fairly common boy’s name. Given that Simon is identified as the ringleader of a group of troublemaker specimens, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him portrayed as a villain, which naturally invites comparison to the childrens’ game “Simon Says” or one of the many times we’ve seen it applied by a villain. Jeremy Irons’ performance as Simon Gruber in Die Hard With A Vengeance seems like the most likely inspiration. Enjoy an NSFW example of this (mainly due to harsh language).
2. Dyson is a complicated reference, but bear with me. In a sci-fi context, a concept that made the rounds in some classic sci-fi novels was the notion of a “Dyson sphere,” an artificial structure built around a star with the intent of capturing the vast majority of its energy. It’s also possible that the name Dyson is a reference to the character Isamu Dyson, one of the protagonists of the legendary 90s anime Macross Plus, who was named for the same concept.
3. Calvin could also be a number of different things as a common (if somewhat older) boy’s name. Given some of the other names, it could be a reference to the theologian John Calvin, or the mischievous comic strip character of the same name.
4. Hypatia is a VERY specific reference that I wanted to call out, because there’s really only one person they could be referencing: Hypatia of Alexandria, a Greek philosopher and astronomer who was considered to be remarkably ahead of her time. The 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, suggested that Hypatia knew that Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun, rather than everything circling Earth, something that wouldn’t be confirmed by science for another thousand years after her deah. In addition, there’s a Lunar crater named Hypatia.

I don’t have any suggestions about Susan, Marie, and Ellie that don’t feel like they would be a stretch, and I don’t have anything specific for Hammond either, even though we know Hammond is likely going to be one of the more important elements coming out of all this.

Who cares about all this story stuff, what’s with the MAP?

The live feed image shows what appears to be an overhead map of the Horizon lunar colony. While it doesn’t really look like there’s a lot of room there for a map with objectives, it’s still entirely possible, especially if the place isn’t just hallways. It wouldn’t be unusual for the place to actually be a dome, and the halls we see are just a single floor or just an internal structure.

So while yes, maybe it stretches things to say that we suddenly have a map where we’re on the moon, bear with me: what if it’s a map on the moon that plays with gravity in certain areas? Just like we had the jump pad in Oasis, we could have a weird gravity well map that messes with how we move around.

I admit that could be a bit of a stretch, but it just seems like the most likely option if we’re gonna do a map on the moon. And besides, we’re playing a game with a space gorilla and a girl who jumps through time; I don’t really consider anything to be off the table when it comes to the science of things.

But what if it’s just a new animation, Crow?

Well then who knows? *shrug*

We’ll certainly see this week, so once we know more, so will you. Stay tuned.