Early versions of Team Galactic
The teraleak revealed fascinating information about the early planning of Team Galactic, Cyrus, and the general direction of generation 4. The documents showed that some aspects of the games, such as an emphasis on matter and spirit, were settled quite early. Others, such as the goal of Team Galactic, appear to have undergone significant fluctuation. Let’s look at how Team Galactic and Cyrus changed based on the early document.
There are several central documents, all apparently written by Junichi Masuda in Autumn of 2005. For context, the DS Pokemon games were announced on October 7 2004, but by July 15 2005, they had been delayed. The games were released in Japan on September 28, 2006.
There are several documents in the folder DP/DP仕様/シナリオ (DP/DP Specifications/Scenario), but the most important are these three. プロットベース051020 (Plot Base) is a vision document summarizing the central themes of D/P, which are the balance between spirit and matter プロット関連設定 (Plot Settings) has short descriptions for Cyrus, Team Galactic, Dialga, Palkia, and Diamond and Pearl items. ギンガ団アカギ051027 (Team Galactic Cyrus) has an extended backstory for Cyrus as well as the current state of the plot. It has the title “Team Galactic “Cyrus” Central Plot Ver. 2.05.” There is a version 2.50 of the Cyrus document that is basically identical to the 2.05 version, with the only differences being minor grammar changes and the removal of a few words.
The first document we will look at was from October 27, 2005. This was written by Masuda, and the file name is プロットベース051020, or “Plot Base”. In a way, we can view this as a “Vision Document” covering the themes in D/P, the role of the legendaries, and the main actors. Let’s look at a few quotes from this document:
“Gods who create and protect the material world: Dialga, Palkia.
Gods who create and protect the spiritual world: Uxie, Mesprit, Azelf.
In the material world—primarily the scientific world—human thoughts are functions of the organ called the brain, and even the mind is produced by electrical signals. If one dies, one ceases to exist. Everything becomes nothing. Since death leads to nothingness anyway, it doesn’t matter what you do. Nothing changes. No matter what you do, it is all the same as the behavior of matter in the end. (Nihilism)
However, in the spiritual world, there arise things that complement this: meaning in life, imagination, philosophy, religion. Humans are not merely material beings, but beings with consciousness, capable of experiencing various textures and qualities within that awareness. And it is only with both the material world and the spiritual world that humans can truly live.
In Diamond and Pearl, when the balance collapses between Rei, Ai, and Hai—who protect Sinnoh’s spiritual world—and Ia and Ea—who protect the material world— abnormalities occur in the world.
Originally, in the Pokémon world, the spiritual world is the stronger side of the balance. However, a material world that skillfully utilizes the spiritual world also exists. For example, the Poké Ball:
when Pokémon are inside, they feel comfortable and at ease. If it were uncomfortable, it would just be a machine. That is to say, when the material world becomes dominant, emotion, knowledge, and will disappear. The material world expands.
※ The Pokémon world is positioned slightly closer to a spiritual civilization than the real world, which leans more toward materialism and science. This can be seen simply from how Pokémon are cherished, and from the fact that they possess feelings no different from humans.
(1) First Stage
Spiritual World ─────────────────────────── Material World
Religion ……… ◎ ……… + ………………… Science
↑ The Pokémon world
(2) Second Stage
As the gods who protect the spiritual world are released, the world begins to shift toward the material side.
Spiritual World ─────────────────────────── Material World
Religion ……… ◎ >>>>> + ● ………… Science
↑ The Pokémon world
↑ Gradually, abnormalities begin to occur.
(3) Third Stage
Spiritual World ─────────────────────────── Material World
Religion ……… ◎ >>>>> + >>>>>>>>> ● Science
↑ The Pokémon world
↑ Eventually, the abnormalities progress to around this point.
Some interesting things can be seen from this document:
First is that the central tension of the game is explicitly stated to be the balance between “spirit” and “matter,” crudely narrated as “religion” vs “science.”
Second, Dialga and Palkia (Ia and Ea) are the gods of the material world and the lake spirits (Rei, Ai, Hai) are the gods of the spirit world. While we already knew that the lake spirits were composed of the human spirit, it is interesting to know that this division of labor was set in place so early.
Third, the Pokemon world is supposed to be more spirit-leaning than our world, and implied to be more balanced than ours.
Fourth, they explicitly state that focusing solely on mechanistic explanation of the world leads to nihilism, which regards the human experience as unimportant: “when a person dies, that is merely the death of cellular matter; there is no sadness or loneliness there.”
One interesting angle brought up in “Plot Base” and “Plot Settings” is that focusing too much on matter can justify exploitation. The “Base” document gives a story about how places with “rules and order” harvest Sharpedo respectfully: Sharpedo are killed individually, every part of them is eaten, and even their bones are handled carefully. However, “in the current barbaric world of advanced capitalism,” huge industrial ships are used to capture Sharpedo, cut the fins, and then throw them back into the ocean. (This is a reference to the real life practice of shark finning.) Although this method captures more sharks than necessary, only gets fins, and leaves the sharks to die finless, it lets you get more fins (the most profitable part of the shark). The document explicitly ties this to performance-based thinking: “what is wrong with the strong killing the weak?” The document seems to suggest that if there is no spirit, then the suffering of sharks or Sharpedo is just irrelevant biological noise.
Team Galactic is explicitly associated with this ideology: “Team Galactic holds the latter set of values. In other words, it is the same as elements of the real world that have gone too far, become excessive.” The “Plot Settings” document elaborates on this:
◎ Team Galactic
A results-driven organization. Emotions are ignored.
Because of this, they act forcibly.
If something can be sold at a high price, they will take large quantities in a barbaric and meaningless way. They seize and plunder.
They discard things easily. They treat Pokémon like garbage.
There are also corporate-style rewards, and members are motivated by money and desire for power.
This feels different from the Galactic we got in the end. The Team Galactic we see is breathlessly preoccupied with the vague idea of a ‘new world’, which doesn’t show up here at all. Instead, focus is put on stealing: stealing large quantities of things, selling them at the highest price, abusing Pokemon, and overall desiring earthly goods like money and power. The final version of Team Galactic still steals Pokemon, but it’s not central to their project.
Now that we’ve got these bios, let’s return to the “Plot Base” document:
Team Galactic plants bombs at the entrance to the lake. They plan to blow up Lake Rei and capture large numbers of Pokémon such as Konkink and Tosakinto. By detonating it, they intend to drain all the water from the lake. In doing so, Team Galactic even wounds Uxie.
Because of this, the balance begins to collapse. The protagonist ends up capturing Uxie. If Mesprit and Azelf are also injured, the three pillars of the spiritual world will be lost, and the material world will take form. That would be a world of science alone—a world where everything is regarded as matter, where even humans and even memory are treated as material.
When a person dies, it is merely that cellular matter has ceased to function; there is no sadness, no loneliness there. And thus emerges a world where everything is governed by time (and space).
This is quite important - here the bombing at the lake is not to capture Azelf in order to chain Dialga/Palkia to create a new world, but just to capture large quantities of Pokemon. This feels like a plot Team Rocket would pull off, like an escalation of forcing Magikarp to evolve at the Lake of Rage.
Combined with the other vision document, the original idea for Team Galactic comes into play:
Team Galactic was meant to be a critique of exploitative capitalism, which was presumably motivated by disenchantment and a lack of grounding in morality or religion. Because they lost connection with spirit, they become exploitative and cruel.
Cyrus also gets a short bio in “Plot Settings”:
Akagi (Cyrus)
Currently 27 years old.
He has a reasonable amount of muscle, and does not come across as someone who is obsessed with very self-enclosed scientific machinery.
※ Image reference: Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys
Already we are seeing a difference to the final Cyrus we see, whose body is so obscured that whether or not he has a ‘reasonable amount of muscle’ is unknown to us. Additionally, this Cyrus is described as not seeming like the kind of guy who would be into scientific machines, yet the final Cyrus absolutely looks like that type of guy. The reference to Brad Pitt’s character in 12 Monkeys, an erratic twitchy guy, suggests that the original vision for Cyrus was quite different - more openly chaotic:
That being said, there are still continuities. For one, it seems his being 27 was decided upon quite early and this remained in Platinum. The idea that he has a fixation on “scientific machines” in particular also clarifies something interesting about Cyrus. In the games, the Pastoria Grunt who delivers the bomb says that Cyrus designed it and he must be a “scientific mechanical genius.” This always sounded really weird to me, until I read this draft. It sounds like what they meant to say was that Cyrus was a genius at scientific machines. In other words, not just run of the mill tinkering, but machines that would be suitable for a scientific enterprise.
Let’s take a look then at the final document, “Team Galactic Cyrus”, which has a v2.05 and 2.50 revision. These are quite long and feature a very different sequence of events during the actual D/P story, but the most relevant part is the backstory. It’s quite fleshed out, reading like a clinical case study.
We get a glimpse into his home life: he was born into a wealthy family, but he was not emotionally taken care of. His parents fought often with each other. They expected perfection from him, a goal he could not reach but would come to internalize and judge others by. He could not predict when his parents would scold him, and he hated that this instability seemed to be permanent. Because he could not connect with his parents, he found refuge in machines (curiously they also specify scientific machines here, even as a kid!) and became emotionally disconnected. He was exceptionally intelligent but struggled to make friends, and an unspecified humiliating experience at age 10 made him so angry he decided to route all his energy into ambition and domination. He founded the performance-focused Team galactic as a teenager - the name is a reference to the only time his parents smiled at him, which is when he said he wanted to be an astronaut. His goal is to become a ruler of machines, and make the world revolve around him. At the game’s climax, he takes the power of Dialga/Palkia and becomes powerful, but seeing the bonds between the player and the rival causes him to drop his emotionless mask.
We’ll discuss the differences more later, but I also want to focus on the similarities. The idea of Galactic as a corporation whose ladder you can climb does survive in the final game, with many members talking about raises and promotions. The Pokemon stealing angle is kept. And there is an incident where a Pokemon dies due to Team Galactic, though it’s not clear if this was on purpose or as an unintended consequence of trying to steal someone’s Pokemon. Cyrus’s volatile home life is not touched on in D/P but is mentioned in Platinum, and an astute reader can pick up on the disturbances from his repeated emphasis on “strife” and “conflict”.
This document also provides clues about other Team Galactic artifacts, those being alternate outfits found for them in other folders. For Cyrus, there is an alternate outfit of him in a suit and him in a suit with an open collar and a choker (labeled, “A little ‘bad boy’”). For the commanders, there are versions of their outfits that have bare arms and exposed legs. Final Cyrus looks like he’s read 20 books on philosophy and cosmology; draft Cyrus looks like he’d sell you ketamine in the bathroom of a sleazy club.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any dates attached to these alternate images (the Cyrus ones are just dated 2014) nor do we have any explanation of what they were meant for. The Cyrus ones are curiously drawn ON TOP of his final design (you can see the pant leg peeking through), which means that his final design was finalized and then these two other concepts were explored. Perhaps the idea of Cyrus as an amoral businessman, if rejected for the games, ended up being used in the anime. The light blue dress shirt with a dark blue tie and narrow collar design does get reused in the anime. We don’t see sleazy “bad boy” Cyrus in the anime, though, nor do we see sexy commanders.
Now that we’ve taken a look at the documents, let’s tally what’s changed and what hasn’t. As we’ve seen, a substantial amount has stayed the same. Draft Cyrus:
is emotionally distant,
hides his true intentions from Team Galactic,
identifies with matter over spirit,
has an affinity for scientific machinery and the stars,
has a troubled home life where his parents expected him to be perfect
wants to use Dialga/Palkia to achieve his dream
has Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter as commanders
after being defeated, claims he won’t give up
after defeat, asks you “what is the ultimate”
At the same time, the changes are highly revealing.
The first most noticeable change, which we alluded to earlier, was that Team Galactic stopped being a simple allegory for capitalism unchained. There are aspects of corporate life at Team Galactic, but the final version also has a strong cultish undertone. The members are enthralled by Cyrus’s vision of a new world, vague and underspecified as it is: “Our objectives are incredible! Too incredible for me to understand! I’ll fight blindly to defend them, and your intrusion won’t be forgiven!” A Team Galactic scientist says “Our mission is to implement our operations without question. It is all for the new world order that our boss will lead! […] I’m willing to do anything to get ahead in Team Galactic. One day you’ll see what we are all about. It’s wonder, compassion, splendor, humor, power, awe, and tragedy!” Cyrus himself presents Team Galactic’s aims in humanitarian language in Platinum:
“This world of ours is a crude one. In a word, it is incomplete. It has been, and always will be, a struggle to survive in this world. We humans and Pokémon are likewise incomplete. Because we are all so lacking, we fight, we maim… It is ugly. I hate the incompleteness. That we are all incomplete, I hate it with my entire body and being. The world should be complete. The world must change.”
This leads into another major change - Cyrus’s ultimate goal. None of the draft documents mention the idea of eliminating spirit or creating a new world. Draft Cyrus seems to think that spirit is something unimportant or not even real. Final Cyrus is obsessed with removing it from the world. Both have a grandiose fantasy of becoming gods, but Draft Cyrus seems to want power to make the world revolve around him, the ultimate revenge for someone ignored and unappreciated by his parents. Final Cyrus is in a metaphysical revolt against the very conditions of existence itself.
Another change is Cyrus’s personality and general conception. We have no way of knowing whether Final Cyrus has “a reasonable amount of muscle” (unless Masters Ex ends up taking an unusual direction), but I certainly would not describe him as being anything like Brad Pitt’s character in 12 Monkeys. You can barely imagine Final Cyrus showing teeth in a smile, let alone grinning maniacally. Draft Cyrus is also primarily characterized as being angry. Final Cyrus is icier and more detached, with his moments of anger coming as breaks in composure.
The idea that Team Galactic is “meritocratic” doesn’t appear explicitly in the final version, but there are remnants. Messing up causes you to get demoted and lose your Pokemon. After defeat, one grunt laments: “We couldn’t stop you... We’ll be discarded as useless... Our boss is ruthless that way…” It seems that the internal work culture, nap rooms aside, is unforgiving. Much like the ‘scientific machine’ bit, this is a detail that has become downplayed in the final version but survives as a remnant.
Despite this, the documents don’t seem totally irrelevant to the final story. Cyrus does represent an overidentification with matter over spirit. Team Galactic does want to subjugate the Lake Spirits and use the power of the matter-identified creation duo. Draft Cyrus’s background in particular seems like it could apply to final Cyrus easily with minor modifications. And ultimately, Cyrus remains confused and tormented by the concept of bonds between people, especially in Platinum. This leads to my next question:
Why did they change this version of Cyrus and Galactic?
To me, the obvious answer is that they were too close to what had been done with Team Rocket. This early version of Team Galactic feels like Team Rocket with a coat of nihilistic paint on it. Blowing up a lake to steal Pokemon feels like a stone’s skip from using radio waves to force Magikarp to evolve at the Lake of Rage. It also made the space imagery feel kind of pointless. In the docs, the reason it’s called Team Galactic is because boy Cyrus loved the stars, felt comforted by the vastness of space, and his parents only ever smiled at him when he expressed the wish to become an astronaut. Cyrus as a yakuza-CEO princeling who is secretly obsessed with scientific machinery would certainly be a fascinating concept, but it feels derivative of what was done before - Giovanni but with space dragons.
The final version of Cyrus, you like him or not, is distinct. He wants to destroy the human spirit because it’s imperfect. Team Galactic exists not to make money, but to secretly further his own goals. He even looks down on the members of Team Galactic as buffoons. There is an idealistic tone to him - he speaks of justice, eliminating strife and conflict, of hating this imperfect world with his entire being. He does still want to be the god, but he thinks he’s doing this to eliminate suffering. Draft Cyrus doesn’t think suffering matters. Final Cyrus is clearly deeply affected by it. Both claim to be emotionless, but that emotionlessness is directed to different goals: sheer power on the one hand, and cosmic recreation on the other.
In my own opinion, this final revision was worth it. It jettisons the facile “not having religion and liking science too much makes you bad” angle in favor of a question that forces one to defend the human spirit even when it’s imperfect. The consequence of disenchanted alienation leading to desiring a world freed from the torment of being a feeling creature is much more interesting than disenchanted alienation leading to capitalism (which is just 20th century philosophy writ large :P). It distinguishes Cyrus from previous Pokemon antagonists in seeking something beyond worldly changes. The philosophical tone and cosmic scope serve to deepen his tragedy - the loftier his goal becomes, the more it hurts when you realize that this is a corrective for his childhood shame. The particularity of his vision makes him stand out among Pokemon villains and ties in neatly with his biography. His history, goals, methods to execute said goals, temperament, and aesthetic all mesh organically in the final version.
The changes to Team Galactic also work to distinguish them from Team Rocket. The cluelessness of the grunts is played up in the final draft. Some grunts really are just in it for money and material gains (I mean, Charon is a commander and he thinks it’s a good money making opportunity). Some grunts think that they’re somehow making the world a better place. Some grunts seem completely confused but devoted to Cyrus’s aura. Making him a cult leader/CEO vs a gangster/CEO was an inspired move. And of course, their completely sealed up outfits that barely reveal any skin (Jupiter’s slice of thigh notwithstanding) truly sets them apart from everyone else and rhymes with the idea of a post-spirit society.
All in all, I say the changes were for the better. The only thing I wish they'd kept was more biographical detail. The final versions are far too stingy with details about his past. It's fascinating to see how much changed as they wrote these games.