Kill 'Em With Kindness

Question 1: Rob is my favorite character from the entire series, so my questions were mostly about him: his family: mom, dad, siblings?

Sagar:

Rob's two parents worked in the petrochemical industry as academics (geoscientists), so he had access to a pretty well-off upbringing. No siblings, just him. That sometimes added a bit of pressure.

But Rob's anchor was a love of nature and ecology that was all his, all an outcome of the stark beauty he saw all around him: especially in the North Sea. He loves his parents and is grateful for his upbringing, but that very love of the natural world left him feeling cold about the more clinical, intellectual, and extractive career path his parents had chosen. Rob wanted to be out communing with the world, in a productive, joyful way.

Growing up, Rob showed serious promise as a swimmer. His parents encouraged him heavily in this area, pressing him into competition after competition. He even made it to Olympic qualifiers for the LA Olympics. But he had a conversation with someone just ahead of the race, one of those random conversations that stuck with him, the phrases turning over and over in his head. He didn't make it to LA itself.

But he had been through a real revelation. He loved swimming, but it all felt so random and meaningless to just try to go faster and faster. What was the point? What happened to swimming for the joy of it, for exploration, to appreciate nature?

When he came back, he decided to break with the pressure he felt from his parents. He moved across the country, to the west coast of Scotland (I can't actually remember the town he settled in, have to check my notes) and began a career as a wreck diver in the Firth of Forth. The east side of Scotland and the North Sea was his original love , but for him it was too associated with his childhood and his sadness at the extractive industries that fueled its economy.

The Firth of Forth has perhaps the very deepest waters in the British isles, and Rob made a name for himself as an explorer and, eventually, saturation diver of focus, precision, and curiosity. He spent years here, making a name for himself and getting to know people in the industry.

Hans got to know him in this context, and Hans knew that the very thing that drew him to Mhairi's mission would likely draw Rob too. It did. Not only would Mhairi's mission let him do his work in a greater wreck than he'd ever seen, and not only was it a rare sat dive operation in the North Sea that wasn't on behalf of an oil company, but it was a chance to go back to the place that gave him a love of nature in the first place, the North Sea, and do some good there. It felt like a match made in heaven.

Rob was nervous when he got ready to do his interview with Mhairi. He wasn't sure what she'd be like and wanted to make a good impression. He wanted the job almost a bit too much.

Well. I think we all know that that interview went swimmingly.

Sadly, it wasn't so easy to put a lot of that backstory into the actual game. But you get a hint of it here and there when Rob has a line where he really wants to know what sort of fish Mhairi can see, or lines where she defers to his longer experience as a sat diver (even though she's leading this expedition), and so on.

I think in the open exploration bit early on you can crawl into an office cube off in the distance that's wedged into the seafloor, see some weird formation, and a discussion can ensue about the fact that coral is unexpected in this area. I can't recall but Rob might say something else in there that references his backstory in there too.

About Rob and Mhairi and their relationship:

Sagar:

Well, we definitely tried to leave a little undercurrent (hah!) of possibility in there about their relationship… Mhairi is very preoccupied over the course of the story, but she so obviously can't do any of this completely alone. She's gathered people around her to believe in her.

And I think it's absolutely reasonable to imagine just how far that camaraderie might have gone and what it could turn into. It is actually something I talked a lot about with Lorn and Lois. That these characters might have come to trust each other so closely that after all this is over, they might start to hope for a closer relationship to blossom… The actors used the idea of that future possibility as a way to fuel their vocal performance. So you're definitely detecting something that's there.

But these are your characters as much as mine: whatever you see in them and wherever you can imagine them going is totally valid.

Question 2: Does Hans have kids and grandchildren?

Sagar:

"Listen. You're going to find a gap. You're going to come out. We'll have two weeks of decompression. And you can force me to listen to Simple Minds on repeat if ye like." "You have to sing all the la-la-las this time." "I promise. Go on. I'll see you at the bell in a minute. Don't you forget about me, yeah?"

And the first thing we hear from Hans is when Mhairi finds the red container with the Newcastle logo on it is, "I love Newcastle!" Like, Mhairi is clearly doing her own thing since no one is diving with her and she can go off on her own if she wants to (which she JUST did very dangerously in chapter one by detaching from the umbilical and barley making it back to the dive bell).