Cancel X. Topic Archived. Sign Up for free or Log In if you already have an account to be able to post messages, change how messages are displayed, and view media in posts. Comstock was telling him some of his past life events that they shared Same thing happens with Comstock rambling on about Elizabeth's finger. Booker knows, but doesn't remember, so his brain is forcefully making new memories, or sense of the matter, with nothing to go on, so User Info: jasomramirez I think it was just that time of the month for him Now we'll try to stay blind to the hope and fear outside.
Hey child, stay wilder than the wind and blow me in to cry. The nosebleeds happen whenever a memory is rewritten or your brain is trying to make sense of 2 different versions of yourself.
For example - the soldiers who 'know they're dead' noses bleed as their memories become tainted from the other universe. I discuss this a bit during that section of the game during my bioshock explained walkthrough. Its interesting that this is really the only time where we directly interact with comstock until the end. This time Columbia is a much more pessimistic view of the American dream and the American past, which includes a moment where characters dressed in a way that heavily resembles the Ku Klux Klan shooting "Crows" at Booker.
However, both of these views are essentially caricature, and neither of them are entirely true or false, from a certain point of view. They are both two sides of the same coin. BioShock Infinite, then, reveals itself to be about perception and self image, and uses other thematic elements as a framing reference to approach this central theme.
Initially, the game looks at war and heroism. Booker's assault on Comstock examines how we might might dress up or distort our own pasts to cope with our misdeeds or failures. The motorized patriots are a symbol for the false effigies of past idols we create and use to justify our actions and beliefs.
Infinite goes on to frame it's discussion on perception using themes of class warfare, first exaggerating the atrocities perpetuated on the working class, and then revealing their hypocracies. At no point does the game exempt Booker, and therefore the player, from anything he or she sees. Because Booker worked for the Pinkertons, he is, in a way, guilty of creating the state of places like Finkton.
Because, in one reality, Booker is a hero to the Vox Populi, he is guilty of their crimes as well. Because Booker, in one reality, is also Comstock, he also bears his crimes. BioShock places the burden of responsibility for the entire state of the world on its players and then, in its ending, it explains why this is. Elizabeth and the Luteces explain that reality isn't objective at all, as Rand so strongly asserted. According to BioShock Infinite, there are countless perspectives and views of the same thing and each one is just as real to it's own believer or creator.
Booker was a divided man. He wrestled with the guilt of his past and pondered whether he could ever be cleansed of his sins. The Booker that became Comstock believed that, indeed, we can all be forgiven for what we have done, and forget what came before us. The Booker that fought Comstock rejected that notion, believing that we have to live with our sins for the rest our lives.
Then in the final moments of the game, Booker ends his life drowning in waters in Baptism, finding the space between redemption and damnation. Maybe, the game is asking us to look at both sides of every coin. When Booker DeWitt enters the tear offered by the Luteces, he suffers from a significant trauma - damaging his memory of past events the preceding 20 years of misery, seeing Comstock take his daughter, seeing the Luteces through the unstable rift, etc.
Within a few minutes of this event, Booker's mind has re-aligned to become the 'blank' action hero we need him to be to build our player narrative on top of. Further rift travel effects the mind less and less - possibly the damage is done.
We know how the next part plays out - but one thing may have escaped your notice. Without fail. If Booker is pushed beneath the surface, events conspire to kill him. When you are baptised on first arrival in Columbia, the priest sees you for who you are and drowns you.
Another iteration of Booker avoids that, and we pick up where we left off. When you are escaping from Songbird for the first time and fall into the bay, you die. Again, a new iteration of Booker takes up the story. When we push Comstock's head into the font on his ship, dead. Somewhere, another Comstock doesn't get drowned there - we never see that story, but I wouldn't fall asleep in the bath if I were that guy. What she can do is reflexively move to the nearest, living Booker to continue her at this point unconscious mission.
In the final scenes, where the Annas come together to drown the successful DeWitt, I see two possible resolutions. Either this represents a group of deities trying to explain to a monotemporal being what they are doing - all the DeWitts who enter the waters will die; or that is where all the successful DeWitts go when their mission is complete.
Comstock must be eliminated, and any DeWitt who has crossed path with Comstock must sadly perish; this would indicate that there are considerably fewer Comstock actors than DeWitt actors - considering the vast amount of effort, chance and energy required to engineer the Comstock future this seems likely.
The DeWitt we see at the end is the DeWitt the Annas have been working towards - in his life, he did not get baptised. None of the Comstock universes ever invaded his to steal his Anna remember, considerably fewer Comstock universes and he was not required to complete the Comstock elimination event chain. No Rapture, no Columbia. They happened. Killing the Booker who lives in an alternate universe 20 years after the baptism won't do a thing to the Comstock would-be at the baptism.
But since all almost all? Some effect did take place. This idea also gives reason to Booker waking up at the end of credit. Another question that bugged me was: "What happened when Booker crossed the tear for the first time when the Luteces came to pick him up in their raincoats? Back to topic, when Booker first crossed a tear for the "first time", he fainted and fell down on the floor I personally cannot determine whether he did cross the tear.
But that is again off-topic. To make some sense of this we have to answer one more question. He opens the door and back into the game he goes. Similar mechanism with more emotional contents was displayed a few times in the game as plot, like at beginning of the game when Booker was "drowned" by the preacher before he enters Columbia. I came up with one idea to help myself understand this:.
Every time Booker crosses to a different universe, his consciousness enters the body of the Booker in that world. If there is a conflict, he creates a new body. The real physical body of his is back in his PI office because it was not able to cross the tear Robert Letece's body was ok with the crossing, apparently. If the Booker in another universe is killed, his consciousness slips back to his original body, ready to cross again.
Being able to do this is what Booker got for crossing the tear. The same rule can also hold true for Comstock, no contradiction was found so far. In the Chen Lin chapter there is one universe where Booker is a martyr and no living body was in existence thus I added in the creating body idea. Later I realized I also have to reconcile the fact that his consciousness did not enter Comstock's body duh so I used the word "conflict.
Booker does not identify with Comstock in both thought and body. I have not yet determined which is the reason his consciousness did not enter Comstock as it entered the Comstock would-be from 20 years ago. Alright here's the deal. This is quantum mechanics, and it's what makes possible multiple realities simultaneously. Each reality has it's own set of events based on events and decisions made. This part in itself is fine, as events are self-consistent within the chain.
Thus, Booker never solely accepts or rejects the baptism, it's always both. I know of no means by which it is possible to have only one outcome due to quantum entanglement see below , which is why the ending is impossible. The next issue that arises from this is Quantum Entanglement Einstein called it 'spooky' action at a distance, it is quite spooky.
Entanglement occurs when two objects are non-locally connected and transfer information instantaneously. Thus, if you have a quantum coin that is both heads and tails, connected to a like-wise coin across any given distance. Einstein was right to call it spooky, because it appears to violate relativity if information is traveling at higher than relativistic speeds.
However, what is actually happening is that two realities are co-occuring simultaneously, just like Schrodinger's cat being both alive and dead at the same time. Thus, when the Elizabeths make the choice to drown Booker, they are quantumly entangled with other Elizabeths, and their choice just like the coin , will result in a binary opposite choice, again via quantum entanglement.
Thus, by choosing one outcome Booker dies , they are determining simultaneously that an alternate outcome of Booker lives occurs. This makes it impossible for them to ever be rid of Booker, by their own choice no less.
It seems paradoxical, but it's actually kind of funny. What's more complicated, and this I cannot give any answers to, is that the laws of quantum mechanics are held up so long as they're self-consistent within their own reality set of events. However, we see multi-chain events interacting, with the issue of quantum entanglement. This makes it no longer self-consistent, albeit theoretically it can probably be dealt with, but no further at this point.
Quantum Entanglement is hard enough in one universe, let alone applying to multiple co-occuring realities. For anyone concerned with resolving infinite sets of universes, this issue of infinity can be resolved by number, and more specifically set theory in mathematics.
I don't expect the Bioshock team to know about things like Quantum Entanglement, set theory, etc. This is a fictional video game. Further, there is "suspension of disbelief," where you put the real world aside in order to enjoy the fictional one you're presented with.
This really only works with a good story, and Bioshock Infinite delivered for me anyway. Quantum entanglement literally makes the ending impossible. Infinite universes can be resolved by using number, and primarily set theory. The game simplifies the many worlds theories from physics a bit, but it also does this a little inconsistently, some aspects use a simplified model, others don't.
As a side note, many worlds theory was popularized by a guy called Bryce DeWitt The game argues that after the baptism, Booker will either remain Booker or become Comstock. So by ending his life before the choice is made and Elizabeth does say this, it must be done "[ Killing Booker at this time will also remove all non-baptized Bookers from the following timelines meaning Elizabeth will never be born.
The key aspect here is the subsequent timelines are affected. But then what about the final scene? And what about the last Elizabeth that doesn't disappear before fading to black? Well here is where the simplification sort of comes in, there aren't many possibly any constants in the world.
Also, the many worlds theory prevents paradoxes since every event creates a new universe and no universes are destoryed. If i go back in time and kill my grandfather, that event created a new universe. I'm not killing my grandfather, i'm creating a new universe that would had a duplicate version of me, had i not killed that duplicates grandfather.
This is one reason why this theory is useful in quantum mechanics. Infinities are a little funny. You can split an infinity in an infinite number of bits or sets and each set could have any number of elements, including an infinite amount. This also means that in an infinite set of outcomes, even the tiniest possibility will be guaranteed to actually occur, no matter how unlikely it is.
So in the game, some universes had the original baptism and some didn't, but how many exacly? Infact there are a basically infinite number of universes with both alternatives since an infinite set can have an infinite number of subsets, each with infinite elements this means that there would likely be a very large number of omnipotent Elizabeths that would all show up at the final scene.
That would probably overload my gpu though, so there is only a couple :. Now given that there are an infinite number of universes, and that all events, not only the baptism, spawn "new" universes, its entirely plausible that there is one or infact infinite universe s where Booker doesn't gamble, or doesn't make a deal to sell Anna, or by some other means enables the final scene.
This is the slightly inconsistent bit. The game portrays the baptism as a constant, but there really isn't basis for that, there might be any number of universes where Booker never went there or didn't even do the bad things that caused him to consider the baptism in the first place. The game does establish that Booker can have dreams from "other" universes with the burning New York, so the Booker in the "final scene" universe could have dreamt of the events in the "player" universe.
Though both of these would be equally "real". The final non disappearing Elizabeth at least if we argue she doesn't disappear could come from such a universe, she is arguably not the same Elizabeth we've seen all game as she is missing the pendant.
The disapearing Elizabeths are also a little inconsistent with the many worlds theory, since they would not be destroying the future universes as much as they would create new ones where the events of the game never happened. The Elizabeths however would still originate from universes where the events did happen, so they would remain. That would be a very bleak ending though since they would never be able to prevent the games events no matter what they did.
They'd only create new universes without those events. Is this what Mr Levine had in mind when he wrote this? I dunno, but it is a viable logical solution to what we see at least :. Now, whats really interesting is the last couple of voxophones, such as "the ultimatum" where Rosalind talks about Robert and how he wants to reverse what they have done. Rosalind notes that she result is going to be sad but that she will go along with it.
From this it would seem that Robert and Rosalind pull Booker in to the or should I say one of the Comstock realities and actually set the events of the game in motion because Robert feels remorse about the baby buying thing.
But then why didnt they just go back and not buy the baby in the first place instead of going from universe to universe looking for the one where Booker is able to defeat Comstock? Who knows :.
Because of the "constants and variables" idea almost any ending you conceive has happened, is happening, will happen.
If you look at it this way, we are all right. The scene is actually quite easy to explain, although Booker dies at the baptism, this only prevents all versions of Comstock being born, not all versions of Booker, it should be noted though that the Booker that you play as does indeed die, but the alternate versions of Booker are still alive, and since Comstock never existed, Anna is never taken, meaning it's very likely that she is in the crib.
To conclude, in the post credits scene, you play as an alternate universe version of Booker in which Comstock never existed, therefore Anna is not taken, and this Booker and Anna live together, whether or not Booker still gambles among other things is unknown though. As there can be many incremental differences between universes.
A fair number of the arguments presented here have already been mentioned in one form or another. I am however surprised that this has not appeared so far, so this theory is supposed to be a concise unified final solution. The term "infinite alternate realities" is thrown around quite often not just in reference to Bioshock , but it seems to me that the background and true implications of the Many Worlds Interpretation [MWI] generally fail to be acknowledged.
To put matters into perspective, think about the following:. In reality, the 'entire' universe may be much bigger or in fact infinite in size, however our observable universe is very much finite 91 billion light years across. This is crucial, because everything outside of the cosmological horizon is fundamentally inaccessible to us, i. Naturally, any finite system only has a finite number of non-redundant configurations.
Moreover, since the vast majority of the universe is practically irrelevant to events that take place on earth after all, the number of grains of sand on a planet in another galaxy does not affect earth's history in the slightest , we really only need to look at alternate universes in which something on earth is different.
The number of those is actually very easy to calculate. This is one of the earliest hints that Booker came from another reality. Whenever he learns something that conflicts with how he remembers things ex. Booker is a walking time paradox, and his bleeding nose was just one of the many sure signs of this.
The rite is required upon entry, and baptismal bowls are commonplace. Additionally, Comstock always mentions the sacrament in sermons and rants. Instead of starting a new virtuous life, Comstock believed himself anointed by a higher power and set out to impose his will on the world. Despite them never meeting beforehand, Comstock knows way too much about Booker.
The only reason why Comstock knew what buttons to press was because he and Booker are literally the same person. The same goes for Booker, who berates Comstock for being a terrible person and father, charges he too is guilty of. When Booker first meets Rosalind and Robert Lutece, they claim to be identical twins. That said, they were a bit too close for comfort.
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