#iswm analysis

You encounter old man Mark and his mugs again right before the endings.

For most of the scene he is covering the text with his fingers, so it’s hard to read, but you get a good look after he disappears. It says “I Don’t Want To Be Free”. Throughout the scene Mark reveals that he can feel the end coming, and he’s happy about it. He doesn’t want to be free to hop universe to universe, live life after life. At this point Mark’s lived an unknown number of lives, all with a constant stress and urgency overwhelming him, forcing himself to move forward. He’s happy to stop, to finally be able to remain in place again.

Each ending has their own mugs, but let’s start with if you hold on to Mark.

In this ending, the Invincible has successfully traveled to it’s destination without the warp core. When you wake up the crew is bustling around, complimenting you, preparing for landing. Everyone is happy and everything is amazing. Mark woke up before you and has a mug that says “Wakey Wakey Protocol.” By being a simple "gotta have my coffee” joke, this mug really adds to the mood of serenity. Although Wakey Wakey Protocol hasn’t been a good phrase throughout ISWM 1 nor 2, that’s purely by association. The warp core’s time loop corrupted the phrase to mean failure, but it was originally just a silly name for a wake up procedure. Now that the core has been destroyed, the mug’s label reinstates it as a joke. Everything really is as it would be without the warp core.

In the other ending, when you let Mark go, a woman listed in the credits as “Dorene L. Whitacre” gives you a mug.

It simply says “Buh Bye!” This seems more ironic than anything, as you are not truly saying goodbye to anything in this scene. Dorene is certain she’ll see you again soon, and you’ve just perpetuated a time loop, so you’ll certainly be back.

Dorene also has her own mug, but it is very hard to make out.

My best guess is that it says “Have We Seen You Here Before?” But that’s not all! When talking about the alternate ending earlier, I neglected to mention that you have your own mug. When Dorene sits down, you can briefly see the other side of her mug and..

They’re the same mug! Saying you are Dorene is definitely a stretch, but this implies you and Dorene have a lot in common. It is also very telling that you see only one side of the mug depending on whether you or Dorene are holding it. If the text is “Have We Seen You Here Before”, then Dorene is most likely even more familiar with the timeloop than you, having replayed this specific conversation multiple times already. Combined with her sudden appearance yet complete preparedness, Dorene may be able to control her universe and time travel.

Yancy exists within this story line as a brief look into the Actor’s psyche. Their stories are fairly parallel; they’ve experienced a lot of grief thanks in large part to their own actions and reactions to events, they’ve both got anger issues and violent tendencies, they adore to create for the people around them and they exist as part of a system that operates outside of standard society, with Yancy’s being the prison system and the Actor’s being whatever universal gook he Dark and Will operate in thanks to their time spent in the house.

So if you haven’t watched @eddeha’s video yet, one where have you fucking been but two a fairly significant point he makes in this is that most of the egos that we have seen thus far aren’t actually true egos in the sense that Dark and Wilford are, but rather simply roles that the Actor takes on so he can still act in his projects after his starter role has been displaced. Operating under this logic, Yancy would also be one of those roles the Actor took on after his main role was beat the fuck out of in the prison. Like I said earlier, there are a large number of similarities between the role of Yancy and the backstory of the Actor, and this makes it easier for a little bit of truth to sort of, bleed into Yancy’s role.

We can see based on the choices he makes during heist approximately where his own opinion of himself really lies. He’s aware that he’s hurt the people closest to him, evident with giving Yancy the trait of having murdered his parents. He’s aware that Yancy doing so was a wrong thing, evident by him existing in part of the prison system at all (and that also subtly ties back to a remark made by Damien in his animation in which he refers to acting under, uh, the actor, in this universe as akin to being held prisoner). His refusal of parole is akin to his own believed lack of genuine redemption for his actions. I mean, he’s in a prison that is explicitly stated to having focus on rehabilitation over punishment, and Yancy is actively avoiding applying for parole. He obviously does not believe rehabilitation is possible at this point in time, and that’s why it’s so incredibly significant that he does finally apply during his route in ISWM, especially considering what all happens in the primary plot of Space.

Yancy, in his little clip during ISWM is shown making amends to his role. He’s cleaning up his act, and for reasons outside of personal gain. He’s taking steps to stop causing other people suffering, no matter how habitual that suffering has become. Hell, he’s been stab free since he last saw us, which depending on what time we warped back into his universe in could be three years or ten days, but it’s still a significant amount of time that he expresses his own pride in commitment to, which shows that he’s both capable of and willing to change his actions for the better. He’s still creating while he’s improving his choices as well, which show that he’s starting to better define the lines between who he was and who he wants to be, the parts of himself he enjoys and the parts he wants to change for the better. Most notably, he applies for parole. This character, who previously believed himself completely irredeemable, someone who by definition could not be rehabilitated, has made the choice to apply for parole. Not only does he now want to atone for his mistakes, he believes he can and has actively started to, and this is all incredibly symbolic of the Actor finally changing his ways.

The Actor up to this point has been a very one dimensional character; he’s a narcissistic asshole with a massive ego who hurts those around him. That’s it, that’s his whole role. But we see in this project, that starts to chip away bit by bit, because again, the Engineer is another character that it is really easy for the Actor to empathize with. He’s the main guy in charge of a closed system, he’s got all his friends with him and all of them look up to him to some extent, he’s kept the camaraderie with the same friends and the animosity with the same not-quite-friends-anymore, and out of nowhere shit hits the fan and he’s gotta fix it but is completely unable to. Actually, if you pay close enough attention to the Mark Lives!Wake The Crew route in part one, the script up until the snapshot parallels almost exactly the plot of episode one of Who Killed Markiplier, just viewed through the lens of interstellar catastrophe instead of the lens of a poker night gone wrong, and then the snapshot is just the Viewers perspective from trapped inside the mirror at the end of part four of WKM, so it’s safe to say this role comes really easy to Actor Mark here.

So, just like with Yancy, it serves us well to pay attention to his choices as the head engineer, and how the different hims interact with each other and those around them. We get to talk to different versions of the Engineer at different stages of personal development, some in complete denial of any wrongdoings and others wholly mourning the loss of everything at their own hands, and eventually, come the one and only ending to this project, the Actor owns up to his mistakes, apologizes more than once, and takes action, or rather inaction, to make sure the cycle of pain doesn’t continue. This character who has unwillingly shoehorned him self into the role of the asshole bad guy, who up to this point seemed to be making no steps to change this, suddenly breaks down in front of us and genuinely apologizes. He’s no longer expecting automatic redemption in the eyes of the audience just by simply playing the hero, he’s working for it.

See, it’s really, really hard to get a read on who the Actor genuinely was as a person, as we’ve really only seen him operate as The Actor while under the influence of the Entity. Given that the Entity’s primary function is to manipulate the people around it by planting ideas in their heads that cause them to act in the Entity’s interests, while also convincing the person that they’re manipulating that the ideas are their own and are for their own benefit, you can see how it is hard to grasp what really lies underneath all that smoke. The only real foundations we have for the Actor are “heartbroken idiot who believed the ends justified the means”, which admittedly isn’t a whole lot to work with in terms of personality, but it does set him up perfectly for a redemption arc.

So, Yancy has applied for parole. Awesome, we’re seeing character development for one of the main ego idiots tumblr has been drooling over since his inception in Heist. Yeah there’s a lot of parallels between the two’s roles in heist and space, but how can you be sure that’s what they meant by it all?

It becomes more clear at the end of part two how his time spent in the role of Yancy has shifted his line of reasoning. As the actor, it was impossible for him to be in the wrong, because in his mind if you make mistakes that makes you the bad guy, and it is an impossibility for himself to be the bad guy here so therefore it is an impossibility for him to have done anything wrong. Him having made mistakes is completely in-congruent with his own self concept, so he rejects anything that may have implied such. However, he knows something wrong has happened, and as his internalized role as the Hero that makes it his job to go and fix it. So, he gets to work trying to make it better, but because of this logical fallacy he is looking in all the wrong places, and continuing to hurt those around him and make the problem worse. It is only after playing Yancy, a character who was the irredeemable bad guy who later made choices to redeem himself, a character that it is easy for the actor to empathize with, that he was able to see where his logic was flawed and where the actual error lay.

The speech given as the Engineer really serves to drive home this idea of genuine understanding at his wrongdoings, even outside of ISWM, so let’s dissect it a bit.

Starting with the line that I think broke all of our hearts here, “I, Captain I’m tired. I don’t know the last time I’ve slept was. I don’t know if I’ve slept at all. Have you?” Immediately after being faced with an identity shattering truth, we have the Engineer reciting almost a direct parallel to Celine’s speech in DAMIEN, spoken after she had worked for eons to keep the person she cared for most safe, who had also just faced an identity shattering truth, a line which was used to signify Celine’s own acceptance of what happened and willingness to move on from the grief, and which was accompanied by the same track of music that has followed the evolution and growth of the entire primary cast post the events of WKM, a track of music Mark one claimed he would never use again following the end of DAMIEN but has dug back up due to its significance to the story.

Not only that, he turns the script on us. He doesn’t know the last time he’s slept, if he’s slept at all, because he knows he’s spent lifetimes working to undo and fix this mess, but he is also now aware that we have been doing the same thing, working just as hard across multiple different lives trying to fix the mess that he was continuing to create around us. He recognizes that his actions have had an impact on us, and he apologizes for it.

“I’m really sorry. I thought the only way to stop this was to stop you, stop all this from happening in the first place, but it was me”. He’s allowing this information to sink into his head, because before this point he knew the two main people in charge here were him and us, and according to his previous logic it was impossible for him to do anything wrong, and that just left us to be the bad guys here. However, he’s no longer shying away from the reality that he is flawed, despite how much pain it brings him, because after having spent so much time focused on trying to resolve all the suffering of the people around him, which has taken long enough for that pain to become a solidified and undeniable fact to him, finally having a place to rest the blame that objectively makes sense is enough to override whatever self defense mechanisms might exist to protect his ego.

It also follows that this is applicable to the timeline outside of ISWM, as we can see the Warp Core with us in the Upside Down just before the universe reboot in part one, which works to imply that the Actor was using this project as a sort of medium to fix his reality. The only other times we’ve been pulled into the Upside Down outside of WKM was done by Dark, and it was done against the original plot of the story and to meet a personal agenda. It’s safe to say that if the Actor is bringing us there, it is in tune with his goals for that project and for himself, and since he wanted to leave us there he genuinely did not want us to be able to have an effect on his stories anymore, implying he believed our effect on his stories in the past is what caused all of that suffering in the first place.

Instead of trying to hide from his actions when faced with them, he meets them head on and apologizes for the mistakes made across multiple lives. “All those mistakes, all those lifetimes, all those people”, he’s no longer talking about just ISWM here, he’s talking about way back in WKM, and every project that followed. He’s put so much effort into fixing the mess he’s found himself in, and unknowingly until now been making everything worse. It’s here we see him actually come to terms with the significance of what all he’s done.

Which takes us to the final tear jerker, “I guess I lost hope. But you didn’t, you never did”. He recognizes that he has caused strife. He recognizes that he has made terrible choices, that have cost the people around them their lives. And he recognizes that we have been working just as long as him to fix this mess, and that at no point in our journey to this point in the timeline did we ever fully give up on the idea that things could improve. That he could improve. He had lodged himself into this idea that he was a static good character, and now he realizes that’s not exactly the case. And before he could fully settle into the alternate mindset of static bad, he realizes that we could see that he wasn’t a perfect character, and despite that we still followed him into the fray every time, still chose to believe in him even when he couldn’t believe in himself. He doesn’t see himself as wholly good, but we haven’t given up on him so we must not see him as a wholly bad either, which is the first open door he’s had towards allowing a grey and dynamic morality.

Now, that’s a lot of character development to come across in ten lines, after having been so one dimensional for over half a decade. And it’s a wonderful thing! I applaud this fictional character for taking that final step towards growth. The point I am trying to make here, is that the Actor needed to see that this level of change was possible before he was willing to attempt it for himself. The time in his roles with characters who are unsavory on the surface level, like Yancy, characters he can easily empathize with, were the essential first step towards growth. The Actor has been put through an eternity in a hell of his own creation, and he’s spent lifetimes believing the only two states of being are universally good and universally bad, and that mindset has let him continue to hurt the people he cares for. He was able to see a little of himself in the personality of Yancy, and watched him still start to get his happy ending despite how much shit he’s done wrong, and saw that that only came when he accepted that he’s imperfect and still strove to be better than he was yesterday, and because of that the Actor was able to rationalize in his head that maybe the same would be possible for him, and we see that come through in his apology speech as the engineer.

Lio: This is your ship, correct?

Mark: Oh, yeah! That's my ship, it's my pride and joy, The Invincible.

Mark: I mean it's our ship actually, this is the captain so technically, they [the viewer] are in charge.

Lio: Oh. *to viewer* You're in charge?

*overlapping screams*

Masculine voice: Make way!

Tyler: I don't know what's happening, Captain.

Lio: So this ship is your responsibility.

*overlapping*

Pam: Mark, look at this [too muffled]

*after an explosion shot*

Mark: I swear, if one more thing happens on my ship, I'm gonna lose it!

*Mark screaming as he dies*

Computer: Warning: large object on comission course with ship. Brace for impact.

*Mark screams*

Mark: It's up to the Captain.

*Mark yelps*

Mark: They haven't let us down yet.

*Mark screams*

Mark: Captain, something is very wron-! [glitches out to next dialogue]

Mark: - And we seem to have this situation all under control.

Pam: We have to fix this now or we're all gonna die!

*overlap with Mark's screams*

Mark: *strained* Captain?

Mick: It all comes down...

*overlapping*

Mark: They wouldn't do that.

Mick: To bad leadership.

Mark: *distant yelling* CAPTAAAAAIN!

*Mark yells*

Feminine voice 1: Have you ever considered that there is no right answer?

Feminine voice 2: Have we been here... before?

Lio: Every mistake is costing lives of people who have trusted you!

Mark: Which means that if I'm seeing it, I must be crazy, but I'm not crazy!

Pam?: Everything has to end.

Mark: (indistinguishable) and I go. Then I come back and I always come back!

Pam?: And everything has to begin.