#c.o.i.

We can hear her voice near the end of the film. She tried to encourage Simon to embrace their new home of Eden, even telling him that there is a tree there and that he will like it on Eden. She said, "We have a dream. It'll be just like home." She was trying her best. We can't know why, exactly, they moved to the space station, but we do know that she saved both of their lives leaving Mars and moving to Eden. Had they stayed on that planet, they too would have been raptured away; or maybe they would have become part of the nightmare at the bottom of some other blood ocean on some other terrible moon. Maybe.

I think it is very easy to fall into the trap of judging characters from other time periods and worlds by our own standards, but it leads to analyses that are flat and inaccurate. Yes, Simon was very likely in a cult, and most certainly trained to be a soldier from an early age. But this is not modern life where we have made many strides in lowering childhood mortality rates. This is a brutal world where there is nothing completely recognizable from our own society around to really use as a frame of reference. And, frankly, modern children in our own world are given knives regularly in groups such as the Boy Scouts or clubs that teach them about boating, fishing, hunting, and gardening. We know Eden had soldiers (they are called that in the storyboards that Molly Brown posted on her website), so the knife very likely was specifically for combat, but that is not to say it only had one purpose or was only given to Simon for this reason. 

Nor is there any reason to think that Simon's mother was a bad mother for giving him a knife. If so, then every Boy Scout parent or troop leader is up for worst parent of the year in our own world. And hell, for all we know, the knife was a cherished heirloom. Could it have belonged to a family member like a father, brother, sister, grandfather or the like? Is it so strange to be given something like that? When my mother got to be a certain age, she got a cherished knife from her father after he died. He used it in WWII, and it was well-taken care of. And now I have it, so that is just a thing that can happen even in our world. And it's not unusual to think that it could happen on Eden, too. 

Eden was very likely an agrarian society, or as much of one as could be in the vacuum of space where growing anything was a struggle. Children very likely got practical gifts that some might think of as presents only suitable for adults today–like a knife–but that is us looking at a completely alien society and expecting it to resemble ours. We can't know what life was like for them on Eden–either before or after the Quiet Rapture. We can't know how Simon's mother died. All we can know is that he loves her, believes in her as someone who would protect a precious item, and that he misses her terribly. 

Some of the information we have about her comes from the mad screamings of the blood eel, who is trying to manipulate and control Simon. The things she says can be considered wildly contradictory as well. Quick as a whip she goes from saying that Simon's mother wouldn't even recognize the killer he had become, to asking if death was the only thing she taught him. 

We can guess that she wouldn't recognize the killer he became because she didn't raise him that way. She didn't give him a knife for him to kill with. She probably gave him a knife to protect himself or do regular tasks around Eden. She raised a kind boy, and then society, the Father, the cult, the death of the Last Tree, and Eden falling into extremism (perhaps), stamped a lot of that out of him.

And that last statement from the eel about death has intriguing wording. You can interpret "Was death the only thing she taught you?" a couple of ways:

Simon's mother was instrumental in shaping Simon into the soldier and killer he became on Eden. She put the knife in his hands, and put him on a path to eventually becoming The Butcher. 

OR, when Simon's mother died, her death was instrumental in shaping Simon into the soldier and killer he became on Eden. She put the knife in his hands, then died, leaving him alone to fend for himself in a cold, cruel, baffling world. The death of his mother put him on a path to eventually becoming The Butcher.

The eel is trying to shake Simon to get her way. I think it is very likely that Simon's mother died suddenly, and that her death set him on a path very different from what his mother planned. Her death "taught him" alright. It taught him about cruelty and about unfairness and loss. She herself didn't teach him these things, but her death did. In life, she loved him and protected him. We can't just take what the eel says at face value here, especially when what she says is contradictory.

The last thing I want to touch base on in regards to Simon's mother is that people are attributing lines spoken by Ava in the hallucination scene to Simon's mother. The exchange about the seed pendant that begins with "I don't have it" is a line delivered by Ava.

Right before the SM-13 mission, Simon would have asked his captors for his seed pendant back. Ava says "I don't have it" and then goes on to say that the C.O.I. Council Authority confiscates these seed pendants because they plan on making a garden of their own. Simon then says that the "Last Tree is dead." This makes Ava say, "What?" That fragmented conversation ends with Simon saying that the Last Tree is "Eden's Grave." I am not sure why people think this is his mother's voice when she sounds very different from Ava. But if some of the random hate I see for Simon's mother floating around is because of this dialogue, please reconsider what you are hearing. 

The only clear dialogue we have from Simon's mother is her trying to comfort him when they are forced to leave Mars. Again, we do not know why they left Mars. We do know that Simon disagreed with the decision, making his mother ask him not to be like that. He was probably a headstrong kid. In fact, we know that he was unafraid to stand up to authority because he flat out disagrees with the Father, the religious leader that obviously had a lot of sway on Eden. Simon tells him to stop lying about the stars in a flashback scene (timecode 42:40).

("Stop saying they're gone. We can all see them." Simon has the knife in this flashback. He's kept it all this time.)

What kind of mettle do you have to have as a kid to argue with a religious authority like that? He had gumption. Markiplier has said that he himself runs on "fuck you energy." I think Simon is of a similar stripe. I bet he got it from his mother.

She raised a kid who didn't just go along like a sheep. She raised someone who thinks quickly on his feet, tries to survive, is ready to fight when the chips are down, and who picks everyone else's well-being over his own at the end of it all. 

("Please keep this safe, okay, Mom? It's more than me. It's more than me." Simon praying to his mother to help get the black box data to safety.)

Simon's mother was a good mother who loved him. He loved her, too. That is why he asks her to protect the data. He doesn't believe in the teachings of Eden or their god, but he believes in his mother. Markiplier made a movie with effective and gripping visual storytelling. Not everything is spelled out, but he tells you the big thing you need to know with symbols and gestures and beautiful imagery. Believe what your eyes tell you when watching the movie: Simon cherishes that knife sheath because he cherished his mother.

1) They have a sacred tree.  Or...they HAD a sacred tree. It died and is now "Eden's Grave." Before it died, the thing grew on a space station in the harshest of environments. It's a miracle by default. It provided clean oxygen to the people on the space station, and gave them a unified purpose, namely, keeping the Grove healthy and alive. At one point there was a whole grove of these trees. A full-on Sacred Grove, really. It's easy to see how a religion could spring up around this, like worshipping the sun. The Grove became completely intertwined with their belief system.

2) The sacred tree was the Last Tree--capital letters--because it was literally the last tree, presumably anywhere that humans were inhabiting. Eventually, the entire Grove died despite the efforts of the people of Eden.

3) The religion has built into it the idea of rebirth. When a follower dies, their bodies become the soil that will eventually lead to more trees growing and becoming a Grove. Those trees would sustain new life and perpetuate a cycle. Again, I'm going with a "Grove" with a capital letter here: This isn't a grove in the generic sense. This has religious import. This is dogma and scripture.

4) The seeds from the tree carry the message of the religion with them, and followers wear pendants with the seeds preserved like people in our world wear crosses, rosary beads, prayer beads, a Star of David, etc. Simon's pendant was confiscated, leaving behind only the rope it was secured with and a single metal link. The Consolidation of Iron is attempting to create their own grove (lowercase here since it's about survival, not faith), so they take the seeds from those they captured during the attack on Filament Station. 

5) When Simon finds the hidden pendant left behind by the unknown convict who told him to cross the wires, he has an emotional response. He tears up; he puts it on his own wrist where his own pendant would have been. He kisses it and stares at it with the most heartbreaking look on his face. Even though he has rejected a lot of what was taught to him on Eden (when asked if he believes in god, he says that he had enough of that on Eden and doesn't answer the question), he still feels something. In fact, when we hear an exchange between Simon and Ava during Simon's hallucination, he directly quotes words the Father said, that when "we die, our bodies become the soil." He may have rejected their teachings, but many of the lessons of Eden are so engrained in him that he can't help but to express them. 

There are some I am not including here since they get me even more off topic than I usually am. Bear with me here. 

Okay! Let's take all that and go wild with it. Here are some things I am taking HUGE LIBERTIES with from the above information. We can't know these things for sure, but it's not beyond belief:

1) Simon's mother is deceased. She could have died on Eden, or she could have died during the attack on Filament Station. The way he asks her to protect the black box is spoken as if to a ghost or a guardian angel, not someone he left behind. It's said like a prayer. His mother has passed on, and the dead watch over followers of Eden. Ancestor worship makes a lot of sense for Eden since the Last Tree has rebirth built into its entire iconography. People don't cease to be, they become the soil that nourishes the Tree. In essence, they become part of the Tree and then protect others beneath their boughs. 

2) It's also possible Simon's mom died on the trip TO Eden or shortly after arriving since we have just enough dialogue at the end when Simon is hallucinating to know that she moved with Simon to Eden and had to convince him that it was a good thing. She used the existence of the Last Tree as a way to get him to see Eden in a positive light. "They have a tree. It'll be just like home. Simon, don't be like that. You'll love it there," is what we can hear her say. We can guess that they lived on Mars, the planet Eden orbits around, and that Mars had been terraformed to allow for human habitation. If she did not survive the trip to Eden, then there is a good chance that this is how Simon became so entangled with the religion of Eden and the leader of that religion, the Father. If Simon was young, without a parent, and in need of guidance, it could have been an easy step to becoming a member of the Father's flock. 

3) I keep using "religion" to describe what was going on with Eden, but I usually call it a "cult." There are just a few things that make it feel like it's on that extreme. All religions can lead to violence just like any belief humanity holds can lead to violence, so something akin to the attack on Filament Station is not exclusive to just cults. I mean, the Crusades were...what they were. Ahem! However, there are a few things about it that feel cult-like. Simon asking Ava for his pendant back and then spitting scripture at her when she says she doesn't have it just kind of sticks with me when I think about the level of indoctrination this guy had. He's about to be sent into a blood ocean and the only thing on his mind is getting his seed back. I dunno. It's not a hill I'm willing to die on, but I do think a cult setup seems more believable than not. Either way, he certainly still feels the teachings of Eden very deeply and laments the fact that the Last Tree died.

4) All wrapped up into a little bow: the pendant could have meant so much to Simon not because of the Last Tree in and of itself, but because he believes that his mother's soul was a part of that tree. When the Last Tree died, the seeds from it are the only thing followers had left. For Simon, that pendant was as close to home, his mother, his past, all the things that were taken from him during his imprisonment, as he was ever going to get. 

5) Since the dead became part of the Tree, and then it, too, died, one has to wonder what the religion has in place to describe what happens to the "souls" of the dead. Is there another place souls can go, like moving from purgatory to heaven? The stars are dead and dying, so it's not like the people of Eden can look to them as majestic and divine spirits. Do souls just "pass on" in their religion? It's possible the seeds of the Tree just have an even bigger significance than before now, since the burden of being the final resting place of all their dead falls to these seeds. Planting one and having it successfully grow isn't just getting the Tree back, it's getting all their loved ones back. This adds some additional flavor to the end when the tree grows from Simon's body. Let's call it the New Tree. Ahem. It's not just Simon being reborn, it's EVERYONE. If the blood eel is all the souls of everyone taken by the Quiet Rapture, the New Tree is all the souls of Eden--all of Simon's brothers, his mother, everyone--then it's one hell of a rebirth there at the end.

6) Simon asking for his mother to keep the data safe is him asking her divine soul preserved in the (very likely LAST) seed of the Last Tree to look after this data from the SM-8 for the good of humanity, not just him. 

OR! RADICAL CONTRADITION OF EVERYTHING I JUST WROTE! BUCKLE UP!:

1) The Father is strict. The Tree is all you can worship. When you die, you become a part of the collective inside the Tree and there is nothing beyond that. Death means becoming one with the divine and losing all sense of self. Which...well...if you think about the blood eel, this is a scary parallel. Damn! Again with this shit! Gods in this universe are some Human Instrumentality Project mofos and they creep me out.

2) But Simon loses his mother and starts to think of her as a guardian angel, a presence with the ability to guide, protect, and help him. This is heresy to the Father. 

3) Simon is punished for his heresy by being the one selected to unknowingly deliver the explosives to Filament Station. He was opposed to the whole plan from the start, learned about the plan to destroy the station too late to stop it, and took the fall for everyone. 

4) He rejected Eden, their teachings, even the idea of a god after being captured. Now, he only prays to his mother. Now he only asks for her guidance and aid. The pendant represents all that and more: the faith he once embraced, how he feels betrayed by it, his mother who he lost, the home he left behind. 

5) Maybe what the Light sees in Simon--why it chooses him for the task of giving knowledge and resources to humanity--is that his rejection of the teachings of Eden is seen as a just and righteous rejection by the Light: Simon turned away from false prophets and follows his own path to true divinity. Maybe. Just maybe.

Beyond the ability to just dip a cup into the surface ocean and have a look-see under a microscope at what you get, they also have the ability to lower a vessel into the blood ocean and retrieve it. I think they could easily have the means to retrieve samples even from great depths. They are also able to map the terrain of the ocean and navigate it fairly well.

With that in mind, what is the likelihood that they already knew that the blood near the Light (the anomaly) was human blood? They do hide their technology, as the Father said. The C.O.I. seemed perfectly content with sending Simon down without necessary information. They probably do it to protect their resources and data from saboteurs. (Imagine giving a full rundown to a convict, having them do some daring escape act, steal a ship like Finn from Star Wars, get back to Eden, and just tell all your secrets. I'd save the brief until they were welded into a deathtrap, too!)

Certainly the manual had the information Simon would have needed regarding the radiation and safe practices, but what were his chances of being able to read all of it with his oxygen getting lower every second he is down there, and something big and mean treating his sub like a chew toy and sending him smashing into the walls of the sub like a ping pong ball? The C.O.I. definitely hit Simon with, "Do your own research! Buh-bye!" then left him with a chonky manual and hoped he would get the gist of it all before he asphyxiated. Right.

Frankly, an uninformed convict must be easier to deal with. With them unaware of the dangers, it's much simpler to get them in the sub. Give them the manual after it's too late.

Can you imagine the one nerd the C.O.I. sent down, dutifully reading every page of the manual, then one of the oxygen meter lights goes out and a creepy, recorded voice says, "Oxygen"? Can you imagine that nerd just deciding that they had read more than enough, thank you very much! Time to go explore this ocean, doop-de-dooo! Full speed ahead!

I would have been that nerd, by the way. Only, I lose track of time when I read, so I probably would have decided to keep reading as the world started to dim around me and my fingers turned blue. Ahem.

Seeing as how they conceal information like they do, there is a chance the C.O.I. kept things from the scientists on the SM-8 as well.

Since everything in this film is supernatural, it is hard to discredit the lead SM-8 scientist's assertion that only the blood near the Light was human. So let's take it as fact that the human blood was localized to that anomaly.

The rest of the blood in the blood ocean was still blood, right? Again: what kind? The blood near the light could be synthesized into food, but what about all the rest of the blood? AT-5 is special, but not singular. There's definitely more than one of these weird moons out there. What was the blood on the other blood moons made of? There's likely a lot that can be done with this resource, however it is comprised.

Our SM-8 scientists do tell us that food made from the blood makes them sick, but humans can't really digest that much blood on a normal day anyway, gods and blood eels be damned, so I'm not sure how well blood cuisine was ever going to work.

And are there horrible monsters swimming around on the other moons just making snacks out of submarines? If not, and the blood is still useful, let's let this one super dangerous blood moon be for a bit, what do you say?

All of this makes me wonder just how much prep work went into the SM-8 mission. They certainly wrote an entire manual the size of a phone book, printed it out, and put it in binders. They scanned the ocean well enough to have points of interest indicated on a map. This suggests that there was a lot of consideration put into some aspects of this expedition. It took time and planning and a lot of hard work.

(As an aside, even the first page of the manual gives you an idea of just how PARANOID and protective of their information and assets the C.O.I. is. The first page of your manual contains guidelines on the correct way to dispose of the information so other people can't get their hands on it? Well, they have been attacked before. Even paranoid people can have enemies.)

But then Simon's mission was handled in a rush. Wiring was done incorrectly; the welding wasn't airtight since blood is already leaking at the start of the film. Jack, who is so good at his job, did a bad job, perhaps because he was working too quickly to be careful. So why the sudden rush when the SM-8 mission was handled with more consideration? What did they find that required haste to that degree?

I'm guessing with the SM-8, they already had a lot of information from taking samples from various points of interest in the blood ocean. In the lead scientist's log, she says, "You were right. This ocean is different from the rest."

She's addressing Ava in hopes that her log can be recovered one day. But Ava must have told her something--a theory, or possibly an informed opinion based on data she was witholding--before the crew of the SM-8 embarked. That's the only reason the scientist would say that Ava had been right.

Whose to say some new, very interesting data didn't come across the C.O.I.'s desk that necessitated a rushed mission?

By the end of the film, the black box is recovered, and all kinds of new information will be in the hands of the C.O.I. but I'm willing to bet that they keep this jealously guarded as well. The next sucker they send down will be in the dark, too.