Copyright © 2004 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.
Beyond Good & Evil is a game for Playstation 2. This article is my own notes about it that I've made while playing the game.
I reviewed Beyond Good & Evil in [Sto04].
This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.
Near the beginning of the game, Jade is in her lighthouse. You can hear a new story on the radio. The news announcer gives you the URL for the Hillyan News web site. That URL is http://www.hillyannews.com/uk/news.php. Besides going there directly with this URL, you can reach that site from the official web site.
The Iris network has a web site in the real world: http://irisnetwork.net.
When you save a game, it has an ``Internet code'' attached to it. If you point your browser at http://beyondgoodevil.com/us/main.php & enter the ``darkroom'', you can give the site your Internet code. I guess it ranks you according to your progress in the game. As of 16 January 2004, I have not tried it myself.
Spoiler warning. Major spoiler ahead. Total, absolute, ultimate spoiler ahead. You have been warned.
Near the end of the game, Jade sees the Alpha Sector commander die. He tells Jade two things:
The final boss calls Jade ``Shauni'', which is the code name she uses when she sends her photographs to the Iris group. Immediately before your fight with him, he tells Jade that she was a part of him (or was his child - I'm unclear on that), but other people took her away from him & made her human1 in an attempt to kill him or limit his power. The boss appears to have more to say, but Pay'j interrupts him, & the final battle begins.
After the battle, Jade is illuminated & levetated. The prisoners of the Doms are freed & restored, possibly & apparently by some power released from Jade. Jade appears to be unconscious of this, or maybe she is physically unaware while she is having some type of telepathic or out-of-body experience.
While the credits roll, you see some peaceful images of Jade's lighthouse, still half-destroyed by the Domz & Alpha.2 Then you see a figure huddled against the wall. The figure turns out to be Pay'j. He's okay for a moment, but then he looks at his hand, & a green splotch appears. It's the same kind of splotch that appear'd on H.H.'s neck when Jade returned him to Iris headquarters. Pay'j is infected by the Domz.
That's the end. At face value, the Domz leader's claims tie everything together, but I'm not so sure it's the whole story.
First, let's think about the implications if the Domz boss's claims are true.
If the boss is telling the truth, then hundreds of years ago (according to Alpha sector commander), the Domz boss was in power somewhere. His enemies took a part of him or his child from him in the hopes of reducing his power & maybe killing him. They kept it from him for hundreds of years, possibly travelling to many worlds to do so. We don't know what form it was in or precisely where it was taken.
About twenty-five years ago, they convert the part into a human, call it Jade, & Pay'j takes it to Hyllis. So Jade, as a part of or a child of the Domz boss, existed for hundreds of years in some form other than Jade & doesn't remember it.
Pay'j raises Jade, leading her to believe she's a normal human & an orphan, that he had been friends with her parents.
Shortly before the game begins - maybe a couple of years before or maybe just a few months before, the Domz locate their leader's missing part, which is now the adult human Jade, on Hyllis. They go to war with Hyllis in their attempt to recover their boss's missing part (Jade). They infiltrate the military of Hyllis & create the Alpha sector stocking it with human zombies under control of the Domz. The Alpha sector zombies are kept alive by stealing fluids3 from victims they kidnap from Hyllis.
Pay'j secretly forms the Iris group.
The events of the game happen: Jade temporarily allies with Iris, does some photojournalistic work for them, ends up on the moon where she rescues the prisoners & beats up the Domz boss, which is either a greater whole of herself or is her parent.
If the Domz boss's claims are true, then Pay'j has lied to Jade for her entire human life.
There is some evidence that the Domz boss's story is true.
Jade & H.H. find Pay'j a prisoner of the Domz & apparently dead. A little while later, he's alive. Jade asks him how he could be alive, & some images we see in the game suggest that Jade involuntarily revived him when she touched him to see if he was alive or she could help. Pay'j tells Jade at this time that there is a special power within her, & it is only now awakening.
In part of his dying words, the Alpha sector leader says that the Domz leader has looked for Jade for centuries. This support's the boss's claim, but other parts of the Alpha leader's dying words might contain an inconsistency.
The boss's claims make a pretty cohesive explanation of the whole story. I can't fully refute it, & I don't think it should be refuted. It's a good explanation of the story. It's not incontrovertible, though.
The main problem with the boss's claims is that he refers to Jade as Shauni. ``Shauni'' is Jade's code name when she transmits photographs to the Iris group. When the boss calls her Shauni, it implies that he has intercepted her transmissions to the Iris group (which is plausible because the Domz & Hyllis are at war). If the boss knew of Jade from any other source, especialy if she was part of him or was his child, wouldn't he call her by some other name? (But see Section A.2.)
A minor problem with the boss's claim is in the support it appears to receive from the Alpha leader's last words. As well as saying that the Domz boss has searched for Jade for centuries, the Alpha leader says something like this:
Everyone you loved is dead: the children, the pig.
``The pig'' is Pay'j. When Alpha leader makes his claim, Pay'j has already apparently died & been resurrected.
If Pay'j did die & Jade did resurrect him, then Alpha leader is mistaken (or lying) in at least part of his dying words, so he could be mistaken about the other parts, including his claim that the Domz leader has searched for Jade for centuries.
If Alpha leader is correct that Pay'j died & is still dead, then Pay'j's claim that Jade brought him back to life is wrong. In that case, maybe Pay'j isn't resurrected at all but is reanimated by the Domz. So if Alpha leader's dying words are right, then the Pay'j-related evidence that Jade is more than human is nullified.
So Alpha leader's words conflict with Pay'j's apparent resurrection. They cancel each other, & the boss's claims are left to stand on their own, with no supporting evidence.
In short, there is nothing actually wrong with the boss's claims that Jade is a part of him - it would tie-up the story fine, but there is no support for it, & his usage of ``Shauni'' is suspicious.
We know the Domz boss lies. The entire story is about how Jade discovers & proves that the Alpha sector part of the military is controlled by (probably created by) the Domz. So it would be in character for the Domz boss to lie to Jade in an attempt to win her over or to create enough doubt in her that she hesitates.
If the boss lied, then Jade is just a normal human. Pay'j told the truth when he said in his note to Jade that he was a friend of her parents's & took her to Hyllis when she was young & raised her. It means her life happened as she remembers it.
It means the Domz are at war with Hyllis for the usual reasons for interplanetary war (religion, living space, or someone wants to construct an interstellar by-pass).
The war itself happens pretty much the same in this scenario as if the boss had told the truth. In both cases, the Domz infiltrate the Hyllian government & create (or control) the Alpha sector to appear to combat the Domz but actually to help them.
Also in both scenarios, Pay'j founds the Iris group.
If the Domz boss lied to Jade, then it also means the Alpha leader's final words were all lies. Possibly he was telling the truth as he knew it, but the Domz leader had lied to him. In fact, the previews say that the aliens will control all of us. We know that the Alpha sector soldiers are under control from the Domz in one form or another. Maybe it's mental control, & maybe the Domz made the Alpha leader say his particular last confession as part of a plan to confuse Jade when she confronted the final boss.
If Jade is a normal human, then she didn't resurrect Pay'j. So how is it Pay'j is apparently alive at the end? Maybe he was never dead. He was locked in an alien, mind-control, biomorphing device for three weeks. H.H.'s experience in such a device suggests that sixteen hours, give or take a few minutes, is enough to convert a person into a zombie for the Domz, so what does three weeks in the device do?
Which explanation is the true one?
Either. They work equally well.
If the Domz boss told the truth, then Pay'j told Jade some serious lies for her entire human life. If the Domz boss was telling a big lie to save his skin, then Pay'j told Jade the truth. Either way, someone did some audacious lying in Jade's direction.
This situation fits into the game well. The theme of the game is deception. Someone is lying, & Jade (& the player) are going to learn the truth. (Remember that when Jade agrees to help Iris, she does so tentatively. She even says that she will find out who is telling the truth. So she is open to the possibility that Iris's tale is misinformation.) The theme of the game is that things are not as they appear, so it is perfectly fitting that the ending can be interpreted in multiple ways & that each of those interpretations implies that someone is lying.
Personally, I like the ``boss is lying'' interpretation better. It creates one more reason that the Domz were evil bastards. Also, the ``you are chosen, tied to the malevolence, & that is how you will rise to destroy it'' explanation for a main character's abilities is so common in comics, anime, movies, & games these days that it's become my most expected unexpected ending of all. It's droll & unimaginative. It's more fun to find an ending that suggests that you'll never know the real truth.
See The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a radio play, novel, & short television series by Douglas Adams.
When the Iris group tells Jade they'll need a code-name for her, she thinks for a moment & then says ``Shauni''. From that time, whenever Jade sends a report to Iris, she signs it ``Shauni''.
In my opinion, if the Domz boss calls her Shauni, it's because he has mistaken her code-name for her real name. Such a mistake would be likely if the only information the Domz boss had of Jade was from intercepting her reports to Iris (& possibly from eye-witness reports of her as an intruder in Alpha bases).
A dude named Radim Gelner, apparently from Czechoslovakia, was kind enough to point out two details that explain how ``Shauni'' might have been Jade's name as part of the Domz boss (or a child of the Domz boss). Here's what Radim said, in his own words:
Radim's point #1 is especially good, though I still think the ``boss was lying'' ending is more interesting. That's probably because I prefer conspiratorial explanations to lots of things.
Thanks, Radim!
My own perception of game time was that Pay'j was a prisoner of the Domz for a day, maybe two, but shortly after being rescued by Jade & H.H., Pay'j says he was their prisoner for three weeks.
